Headline: Eric Adams Flies Air Crypto
Politico Playbook reported Tuesday that when Mayor-elect Eric Adams flew to Puerto Rico for a New York Democratic Party confab this month, he and his longtime partner, Tracey Collins, hitched a ride on the plane of cryptocurrency billionaire Brock Pierce, who has been advising Adams on “all things crypto.”
Adams had said he paid his own way to Puerto Rico, remarking that the trip was “my dollar, my dime, and my time.” But while a spokesperson told Playbook that Adams paid for a seat on the private flight via a travel agent and flew commercial on the return trip, his team did not produce receipts.
The next mayor has already said he wants to get paid in Bitcoin temporarily, though how that might work is a complicated question. And he’s been hanging around with some of the titans of the crypto world — and perhaps not the most savory of them.
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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/eric-adams-flew-on-crypto-billionaire-brock-pierces-jet.html
Is Eric Adams trying to demonstrate his credentials as a Neo-Liberal Hipster with his saying that ‘he wants to get paid in Bitcoin temporarily’. @realaxelfoley, in the rest of his essay points to the ‘character’ of Brock Pierce:
Elder millennials may remember Pierce for his roles in the Mighty Ducks movies and First Kid. But these days he is a leading Bitcoin entrepreneur and evangelist who makes his home in San Juan and has wanted to turn Puerto Rico into a “Burning Man Utopia,” as Playbook notes. He has also been accused of child sexual abuse — allegations he denies — and once lived in the house where director Bryan Singer allegedly abused underage boys. Pierce ran for president last year and is considering a Senate run in Vermont next year.
Associations with possibly shady characters? Opacity around expenses and travel? You can expect a lot more of both over the next four years.
Is Mr. Adams just an aspirant to the mantle of ‘Mike’ Bloomberg, without the billions? The Reader might recall Bret Stephens’ fawning essay, by way of Mr. Stephens gushing over Adams’ new gold earing, on July 20, 2021, in The New York Times:
Headline: Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York
Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York.
For some progressives, the prospect of Adams as mayor (he still has to defeat Republican opponent Curtis Sliwa in November) is a nightmare. He’s been a thorn in the side of every institution he’s ever been part of.
He’s a former cop who crusaded against police brutality, a leading Democrat who was once a registered Republican, a machine politician who casts himself as a foe of city bureaucracy, a self-described progressive who’s friendly to charter schools and real estate developers and, most recently, a champion of law-and-order who refutes the idea that a Black leader must also be on the left.
For the rest of big-city America, not to mention the Democratic Party that usually runs it, he’s a godsend.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/opinion/eric-adams-nyc-mayor.html
The City Journal, the propaganda arm of The Manhattan Institute, home to ‘Broken Windows Policing’, the precursor to ‘Stop and Frisk’, published this on June 7, 2021:
Headline: Is Eric Adams New York’s Best Mayoral Hope?
Sub-headline: Cops, in particular, are wary of the supposed law-and-order candidate.
https://www.city-journal.org/is-eric-adams-new-yorks-best-mayoral-hope
Here is a paragraph that seeks to present an apologetic for the nefarious removal of Judge Shira Scheindlin from the ‘Stop and Frisk’ case.
U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin had a low threshold for crediting anti-NYPD evidence, however. Her opinion, declaring the department guilty of unconstitutional conduct, cited Adams’s testimony to support her finding that NYPD top brass approved of racial profiling. Scheindlin referred to Adams’s testimony again in accusing Kelly of suggesting “that it is permissible to stop racially defined groups just to instill fear in them.”
That argued ‘low threshold for crediting anti-NYPD evidence’ does not explain the why of Scheindlin’s removal. But seeks to mask the ‘perceived sympathy’ of the judge, for the victims of ‘Stop and Frisk’. Which renders her removal seem exactly what it is/was, the product of political expedience. This was/is about the Bloomberg EGO! Here is a selection, from an essay by Dan Wise, in the January 8, 2014 issue of The Nation:
Headline: Removing the Judge Who Ruled ‘Stop and Frisk’ Unconstitutional Is a Blow to Justice
Sub-headline: An appeals court's unprecedented removal of Shira Scheindlin has sent a chilling message to other federal judges.
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Should the panel’s removal order remain on the books, it would set a terrible precedent. The court’s removal of Scheindlin even before it decided the appeal was very likely unprecedented. Moreover, the ruling was so marred by departures from customary practices as to raise questions about the panel’s neutrality.
In a sign of undue haste at a court known for its attention to detail, the unsigned ruling contained a glaring error, which the three judges were forced to correct two weeks later. Further, the panel removed Scheindlin even though the city never sought her removal in the case; the panel then faulted her for taking a step the city had not objected to six years earlier—and it did so in a manner that precluded her from defending herself from the suggestion that she had been unethical.
Research by University of Virginia Law School professor Toby Heytens, soon to be published in the Stanford Law Review, underscores the aberrant nature of the panel’s removal order. Heytens found that appeals court replacements of trial judges have been highly unusual. More important, he did not find a single case issued by any of the nation’s thirteen federal circuit courts in which removal was required before an appeal had been decided on the merits.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/removing-judge-who-ruled-stop-and-frisk-unconstitutional-blow-justice/
Judge Shira A. Scheindlin speaks for herself!
Headline: Departing Judge Offers Blunt Defense of Ruling in Stop-and-Frisk Case
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The attacks on Judge Scheindlin only intensified after a federal appeals panel stayed her ruling, criticized her actions in the case and removed her from continuing to oversee it.
But last week, as Judge Scheindlin prepared to step down after nearly 22 years as a federal district judge in Manhattan, she offered her first extensive interviews about the case and her tenure, with a particularly blunt response to the criticism.
She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.”
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The attacks on Judge Scheindlin only intensified after a federal appeals panel stayed her ruling, criticized her actions in the case and removed her from continuing to oversee it.
But last week, as Judge Scheindlin prepared to step down after nearly 22 years as a federal district judge in Manhattan, she offered her first extensive interviews about the case and her tenure, with a particularly blunt response to the criticism.
She would never forget, she said, seeing a front-page photograph in a newspaper the day after she released her ruling, showing Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, as she put it, “looking like two angry white men.”
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What Mr. Adams misses, in his comments regarding what he paid, or didn’t pay is that he needs to be above reproach. Present the receipts!
Political Reporter