By: Lieba Nesis

Turning Point USA , a non-profit organization founded on June 5, 2012 by 25-year-old Charlie Kirk, held its annual Teen Student Action Summit at the Washington DC Marriott Marquis from July 22-25 to an excited group of over 1,400 students who hailed from 1400 high school and college campuses around the nation. The diverse crowd also includes a large contingent of Hispanic and African American students. The impact of Turning Point has been undeniable as they have reached over 1,400 campuses and held more than 5,000 events with over 500,000 people throughout the globe, trying to counter the liberal zealotry of university zeitgeist.

Speakers during the four days included Eric Bolling, Ted Cruz, Jared Kushner, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Dan Crenshaw, Donald Trump Jr., Mike Gallagher, Candace Owens, Sebastian Gorka and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. The proceedings began Monday evening with welcoming remarks by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and an ice cream party in the lobby. The focus of this week long conference is to enable high school and college age youth to display their heartfelt admiration for the exemplary work that President Trump has done to improve the country since taking office.

The President arrived at the Marriott at 11:05 am on Tuesday and spoke for over an hour about his great friend Charlie Kirk and the influential movement that the young Kirk had created. Trump, who loves discussing his historical win, reiterated how traditional values had been restored, remarking that his ex-friend Bill Clinton predicted he would take Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump joked that he recently shook the hands of 1,100 Air Force cadets in the exhausting heat, whereas most presidents had left after 50 or 60 encounters. He said AOC+3, also known in common parlance as “The Squad” – Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-NY). Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) represented a detrimental element to the Democratic Party and he believed they hated our country. As a result, Trump expressed his view that because of them their party would lose the 2020 race to the White House. He called them out for their venom towards Israel and the Jews and said there were at least 20 more Democrats who were worse than this group.

He told the students to get used to the “unhinged” fake news and dishonest media and received the greatest applause when he spoke about the importance of the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms.” He also reiterated that “in America we don’t worship government, we worship G-d.” The President said he was looking forward to working with newly elected British Prime Minister Boris Johnson whom he called a British Donald Trump and that during his administration he will appoint 147 judges–more than any other president except for George Washington. Expounding upon the necessity of the southern border wall, Trump said that despite human trafficking becoming a significant problem the Democrats had withheld funding which forced him to garner funds from various other sources.

Referencing the strong economy in the US, Trump encouraged students to enter the workforce as 160 million people are currently employed with wages 10% higher along with the strongest stock market and greatest regulation cuts: whereas he stated a Hillary win would have resulted in a recession or depression. Building up our nuclear arsenal to unprecedented capacity was a necessary evil with his declaration that military might was at an all-time high. He criticized Iran for falsely claiming that they killed 17 Americans and saying we didn’t shoot down their drone and stated, “they lie a lot for religious people”.

The $40 million Russia investigation where 500 subpoenas were issued and no collusion or obstruction was found was a witch hunt which he said was initiated from the time he came down the escalator at New York City’s Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and decided to run for the White House . The days of Europe ripping us off were over with President Trump convincing them to pay more than $100 billion as part of their NATO obligation. He also took note of the fact that the European Union, and especially Germany, were worse to us than China. He said we will become the first nation to plant an American flag on Mars. He called out the radical left for having contempt for America who they see as a menace to be constrained and who espouse division, discord and demolition. He derided them for seeking to abolish ICE and now wanting to obliterate the Department of Homeland Security; thus placing the safety of Americans in jeopardy.

Their objective, he said, was to control the family and destroy the republic. Trump said he cherished the First Amendment and Americans right to speak their mind. He vowed to fight the liberals and social media giants who seek to unfairly silence the voices of the people. On top of the list of those that he will withhold funding from include colleges that ask for billions of dollars yet, punish dissent. The most impactful portion of the speech occurred in the last ten minutes when the President highlighted students who had flouted societal pressure to support Trump’s agenda. First in this group was student Ryan Zinke who was pepper sprayed at a Turning Point USA rally.

Ryan Zinke was called to the stage as the crowd excitedly chanted Ryan. Ryan said conservatives were being silenced and shut down and that their voices needed to be proudly expressed. Membership of Turning Point USA has skyrocketed after the group was smeared for holding up an American flag. Intrepid chapter leader Dan Gallipoli ascended to the podium to declare that irrespective of what any teacher, school administrator, or any student says, we will “stand up for what we believe in.”

Hunter Richard, another bullied high school sophomore, was wearing a red cap when a thirty year old man threw a drink at him and called him a racial slur. Hunter arrived on stage declaring he was proud to wear his MAGA hat and was upset he only gets to wear it for six more years. Trump concluded by praising these trailblazers for their bravery and stating the “silent majority is silent no more ” because of the greatness of the future leaders in the room. Hinting that presidential material was in the room, Trump told the youthful assemblage that someday, some of them might be standing where he is at that very moment.

By: Howard M. Riell

Property taxes are a mess in New York City, and officials – even the mayor – appear reluctant to mess with them.

In fact, Mayor Bill de Blasio said during an interview on radio station WYNC this past week, tinkering with the creaky property tax system could put too big a strain on an already strained city.

A report is expected shortly from a commission that the mayor and City Council put together in 2018 to look at the labyrinthine system of real estate excises. He warned the caller, though, that he would not permit any reforms that might be called for to strain the budget and keep the city’s expansive workforce from further expansion.

“We cannot end up with a system that reduces our revenue substantially, unless people want to see a change in the services provided by the city,” de Blasio said on air. “Right now I believe the city is at a point of some equilibrium: crime has continued to go down, the economy is strong, more jobs, city services are stronger in many ways than they’ve been. But we still have a lot of giant problems to address. And we can’t—in my view—reduce revenue without really negatively affecting the quality of life, and negatively affecting the economy and our safety.”

“For decades, tax laws have prevented assessments from rising more than 6% a year, even though property values in certain areas—such as de Blasio’s home neighborhood of Park Slope—have increased far more,” Crain’s New York Business recently reported. “Advocates argue this has forced a disproportionate burden on rental buildings, commercial properties and houses in outer-ring neighborhoods which are more likely to belong to minority homeowners.”

“We’re going to have to figure out how to make the system better, but not lose substantial revenue in the process. So it’s not going to be a panacea to say the least,” de Blasio told the radio audience. “In the end, I gotta go with what is the quality of life of New Yorkers? How safe are we, how strong is our economy, how good are our services, what is the quality of life—and what do we need to sustain it?”

If the mayor was taking heat for the tax and budget picture, he was more concerned with the summer heat searing the city. He, Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell and Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot updated New Yorkers on the heat emergency. The Mayor signed an Executive Order proclaiming a state of local emergency due to the extreme heat.

“New York City is dealing with a major heat emergency with temperatures in the high 90s this weekend,” said de Blasio. “Every single New Yorker must take this seriously. Drink plenty of water, stay cool and seek help if you need it. To limit strain on our energy grid, I have ordered both City government buildings and private office buildings to limit their energy consumption by turning thermostats to 78 degrees. Everyone must do their part to ensure safety until this heat wave passes.”

By Andy B. Mayfair

Dots continue to be connected in the case of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

In a story headlined “Ghislaine Maxwell brought Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein: report,” the New York Post has reported that former President Bill Clinton’s “connection to since-convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was established through British heiress and longtime Epstein pal Ghislaine Maxwell, who also became a friend of former first daughter Chelsea, according to a new report Sunday.”

Politico.com ran a similar piece titled “Meet the woman who ties Jeffrey Epstein to Trump and the Clintons: Heiress Ghislaine Maxwell paved the way to presidents.” The site reported that Maxwell, “who has denied accusations made in civil suits of aiding and participating in Epstein’s sexual abuse of minors, has been among the financier’s closest associates. Unlike Epstein, she comes from a rarefied background that gave her entrée to the rich and powerful.”

For years, Politico continued, “beginning in the early ’90s, she and Epstein cut glittering figures on the Manhattan, N.Y., and Palm Beach, Fla., social circuits, with Maxwell taking the lead. While people who knew Epstein in Palm Beach described him as “very odd” and said “he didn’t go out much,” those who know Maxwell described her as “vivacious,” “warm” and “effusive.”… Maxwell first grew close with the Clintons after Bill Clinton left office, vacationing on a yacht with Chelsea Clinton in 2009, attending her wedding in 2010, and participating in the Clinton Global Initiative as recently as 2013, years after her name first emerged in accounts of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse.”

Maxwell was also associated with the Clinton Global Initiative “as recently as 2013, when it promoted a “commitment to action” by a group that included Maxwell’s environmental nonprofit, the TerrarMar Project, which she shuttered in the wake of Epstein’s arrest earlier this month,” according to the Post. “All of those dates followed Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart-deal of a conviction in Florida on two prostitution-related charges, one of which involved a minor. The multimillionaire financier was busted July 6 on child sex-trafficking charges and last week was ordered held without bail pending trial. He has pleaded not guilty.”

Meanwhile, where exactly the trail will lead has become a popular guessing game. As Bloomberg pointed out, “Since Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest, the speculation has mounted. Will any among the rich and powerful he courted be caught up in the case? Some answers might come soon. A judge could decide on July 24 how and when to unseal a trove of documents — some 2,000 pages worth — in connection with a civil lawsuit filed by an Epstein accuser against his one-time companion Ghislaine Maxwell. The papers may reveal allegations of sexual abuse involving people described in court filings as “prominent individuals.”

By: Angelina Carson

And the high-profile virtue signaling continues.

This time it’s over tear gas.

A group of eight artists have informed those who run the Whitney Museum of American Art that they wish their art works to be taken out of the upcoming Biennial exhibit. The reason? The presence on the museum’s board of directors of someone connected to the sale of military supplies such as tear gas.

No, really.

The eight who have dropped out leave 67 artists and collectives in the Whitney Biennial, which ends September 22.

Featuring artists and collectives working in painting, sculpture, installation, film and video, photography, performance, and sound, the 2019 Biennial takes the pulse of the contemporary artistic moment. Introduced by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Biennial is the longest-running exhibition in the country to chart the latest developments in American art, according to the museum.

“Since March, there have been protests at the museum and calls from artists and scholars for the museum to remove the trustee, Warren B. Kanders, who owns a company that distributes law-enforcement equipment, the Safariland Group,” according to The New York Times. “Mr. Kanders has vigorously defended the company. One artist selected for the Biennial declined to participate before the exhibit opened because of Mr. Kanders’s business. Dozens of others called for Mr. Kanders to resign, even as they took part.”

In a note to the curators that was made public on Friday by Artforum, four artists insisted that they were enraged to find out about Kanders’s connection to Safariland, but “were well into fabrication of major pieces” for the Biennial and decided to forge ahead.

“The Museum’s continued failure to respond in any meaningful way to growing pressure from artists and activists has made our participation untenable,” the four wrote in a copy of the letter provided to The New York Times. “The Museum’s inertia has turned the screw, and we refuse further complicity with Kanders and his technologies of violence.”

Often described as a snapshot of art in the United States, the Biennial brings together work by individuals and collectives in a broad array of mediums, according to its curators. “Over the past year and a half—an undeniably intense and polarized time in this country—we made hundreds of studio visits. While we often encountered heightened emotions, they were directed toward thoughtful and productive experimentation, the re-envisioning of self and society, and political and aesthetic strategies for survival. Although much of the work presented here is steeped in sociopolitical concerns, the cumulative effect is open-ended and hopeful.”

By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh

New Yorkers were at a loss as to how to spend Saturday, which was branded the hottest day since 2011. Sunday topped off the weekend with even hotter temperatures.

Official temperatures on Saturday matched the record of 96 degrees at Kennedy Airport. After combining humidity, however, the “heat index” reached 110 degrees, as per the National Weather Service. The streets of NYC were a lot hotter than the weather services reported though, thanks to the asphalt, concrete and glass buildings, which absorb heat from the sunlight, known as the “heat island” effect. Weather services place official thermometers in grassy areas, protected from direct sunlight, which underestimate the heat. As per the NY Post, on Saturday temperatures reached 110 degrees in Union Square. At a basketball court in Greenwich Village, the pavement reached a sweltering 122 degrees, and in a Brooklyn playground, the rubber flooring measured an extreme 155 degrees.

Sunday was a dreadful repeat with temperatures reaching 100 degrees, and a heat index topping Saturday’s to hit 113 degrees in Times Square, as reported by the NY Post’s unscientific titanic thermometer.

Big Apple residents did anything they could think of to keep cool. The pools and beaches were packed beyond capacity, leading to long lines and overcrowding. Hours of operations at city beaches and pools were extended, as well as hours for Spray showers and fountains at the city parks. Five extra New York Public Library branches were open for customers on Sunday, functioning as official city “Cooling Centers”. Brooklyn and Queens libraries followed suit at a number of branches. Lyft, the ride-sharing company, had a nice idea, offering two free rides going to a nearby Cooling Center, via a coupon on the app. The EMS logged more than 88 calls for heat exhaustion on Saturday alone.

New Yorkers who had air conditioning should consider themselves lucky. Some feared another loss of power, due to the heavy strain onto the grids. There were some patchy outages, but luckily they were limited. Con Edison reported that roughly 2,900 customers lost power. PSEG said there were about 2,000 outages in the Rockaways.

About 3,700 inmates at two of New York’s jails had no air conditioning. City Correction officials at the Brooklyn Detention Complex and at Rikers’ Otis Bantum Correctional Center said prisoners were given fans, ice, plenty of water and cool showers in the absence of air conditioning.

Adults and children alike across the five boroughs eagerly awaited forecasted showers and thunderstorms, ushering the break of the heatwave, and mid-80s temperatures expected for Monday.

By Benyamin Davidsons

On Friday July 19th, a Kazakhstan-born Brooklyn man, who the feds say moved to Syria six years ago to join ISIS, was ordered detained without bail. Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, 42, allegedly rising in the terror group’s ranks to become one of ISIS’ top snipers, has been caught red-handed thanks to a trove of threatening and boastful text messages uncovered.

“You will be f–king scared for the rest of your life,” wrote the accused jihadist in a text to an unidentified recipient in early 2015. “We will get you. We will f–ing kill you,” the text raged on, as per court papers. “You heard of ISIS. We will get you. You need to obey. You need to be punished you f–ing (redacted). We will find you and teach you how to behave.”

As reported by the NY Post, Asainov was flown back to NY on Thursday under the custody of the FBI, after his detention overseas by the Syrian Democratic Forces. He is being charged with providing material assistance to a terror group and attempting to provide assistance. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 20-years imprisonment. “The defendant is an ISIS warrior who served as a top sniper for the organization and as a trainer,” Assistant US Attorney Saritha Komatireddy alleged to Magistrate Judge Steven Gold.

Asainov, born in Kazakhstan, is a naturalized US citizen, who lived in Brooklyn for 15 years from 1998 to 2013. In December 2013, he left the Bensonhurst neighborhood in Bay Ridge where he had resided with his then-wife and young daughter, and took a flight to Istanbul. A former neighbor described his wife as “very nice, a typical American girl”. “They were a nice married couple,” recalled Albina Veribrus, 57. “She worked in retail. He was polite, but aloof. At first he was normal, but then he grew a beard. She said they were arguing before, he was drinking, then she said he stopped and everything was good between them.” She has since moved seperately to England, a different neighbor said.

In Syria, Asainov trained to be a top ISIS sniper and firearms instructor, as per prosecutors. Incriminating evidence against him include a flood of text messages and photos he sent, including from battlefields. In August 2014, Asainov tried to recruit a NYPD informant. Though, he didn’t follow through, Asainov messaged the same informant in March 2015 requesting $2,800 with which to purchase a rifle scope. The informant didn’t sent the funds, but a month later he got a selfie from the recruiter garbed in combat gear and holding a scope on his rifle.

During his appearance in Brooklyn’s federal court on Friday, Asainov seemed subdued and quiet. His defense lawyer, Susan Kellman, said after the court appearance that her client did not like answering to the judge. “He answers to a higher authority,” she said. “He says his ruler is Allah.”

By: Spencer Truworth

Robert M. Morgenthau, the respected chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York State and Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, is dead. He was 99.

“In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Mr. Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors, who came and went while he stayed on — for nearly nine years in the 1960s as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and for 35 more as Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney,” lamented the New York Times in summing up Morgenthau’s career.

Morgenthau was born in 1919 in New York City into a prominent Ashkenazi Jewish family that had emigrated from Baden in 1866. He was the son of Elinor (née Fatman) and Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as the Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman from 1934 until 1945, according to Wikipedia. His maternal great-grandfather was Mayer Lehman, a co-founder of Lehman Brothers. His grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Before going into diplomatic service, Henry Morgenthau Sr. had made a fortune in real estate, and became a strong financial backer of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. Morgenthau’s paternal grandmother was born in Montgomery, Alabama.

From the boy’s earliest days, the Morgenthau family was well-connected politically. The family home was near Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Springwood Estate at Hyde Park, New York, and he grew up knowing Roosevelt.

Morgenthau took office in 1975 and ran the district attorney’s office for 35 years until the age of 90, making him New York City’s longest serving district attorney.

“In that time, he navigated the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the crime boom of the ’80s and ’90s and the post 9/11 era in the 2000s, all the while racking up high-profile prosecutions of celebrities, mobsters, terrorists, money launderers and Wall Street fraudsters,” CNN recounted. “Morgenthau created 34 bureaus and units within the DA’s office specializing in labor racketeering, identity theft, firearms trafficking, Asian gangs and cold cases, among others. The sex crimes unit, in its infancy when Morgenthau took office, grew into the prototype for similar units across the country, CNN wrote in 2010.”

“He seemed almost out of central casting — tall and patrician, with a cultivated above-the-fray presence,” opined AP. “And in fact, former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau inspired some television casting of his own, as the model for the avuncular character of prosecutor Adam Schiff, played by actor Steven Hill on the long-running television series, “Law and Order.” “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf called Morgenthau “the greatest district attorney in the history of New York.”

By Hellen Zaboulani

Governor Andrew Cuomo is taking on the new wave of “progressives” who have become outspoken spokespersons for the state. Apparently rising stars like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have started to quirk him. The newly elected leftist state senators have at times referred to the governor as an obstacle rather than an ally. The governor is now making it public that the feeling is mutual.

The governor wrote an op-ed earlier in the month, featured in the NY Daily News, about how the other progressive lawmakers in New York City have failed on several issues, only offering “bumper sticker” solutions. “New York City is the progressive capitol, but homelessness today is worse than it was under the Republican and independent administrations of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg”, wrote Gov. Cuomo.

“Meanwhile, the Legislature is one of the nation’s most progressive, but we still don’t increase funding to poorer school districts — our top social justice and equity priority — without simultaneously raising funding to richer districts,” he continued. The governor also pointed to the “Rikers Island replacement debacle” calling it “a national disgrace”. He also wrote about “the incompetence of NYCHA”, which allows “children being housed without heat and exposed to lead poisoning, without any coherent solution.”

As per the NY Times, the governor took the opportunity to critique the younger progressive wing, in an effort to get like-minded Democrats to upgrade their platforms for the 2020 presidential campaign with real ideas. “True progressives understand that if we fail to perform or pursue misguided, uninformed or unworkable priorities, we make government look incompetent, proving Republicans right and losing the vital public support we need to gain”, Cuomo wrote in his op-ed.

Mr. Cuomo, the third-term Democratic governor in the deep blue state of NY, said he was tired of hearing about the ideals and wanted to get things done. “I believe I am the most progressive, or one of the most progressive leaders in the state,” Mr. Cuomo said in a recent radio interview. He said several of the senators and representatives in his party are full of “aspirational goals with no realistic plan or knowledge or analysis.” “I like to say you can’t be a progressive without making progress,” Mr. Cuomo explained. “I am the left”.

“Progressivism is not about the ability to make promises, but about the ability to deliver them,” he said. “While this distinction may be too subtle for the Twitter dialogue of today, it makes all the difference. How we define a true progressive will determine our electoral — and more importantly our governmental — success,” the governor wrote, ending off his op-ed.

By Clark Savage, Jr.

Taxi medallions are becoming an increasingly valuable asset in New York City – which could mean changes ahead in the way people get around town.

Marblegate Asset Management of Greenwich, Conn., is a private-equity firm founded by distressed-asset specialists. Since 2017, it has reportedly bought up 46 taxi medallions that were formerly the property of Gene Freidman.

In 2018, according to Crain’s New York Business, the company purchased more medallions at auction, bringing its current total to at least 300 “and purchasing Capital One’s taxi-loan portfolio, according to three people familiar with the matter,” according to Crain’s. “Once one of the largest lenders in the industry, Capital One held the debt of around a thousand medallions, and its taxi- related portfolio in early 2017 was valued at nearly $700 million, sources said.”

Marblegate’s professed goal is to partner with medallion holders. But its purchase of Capital One assets might end up making the company a major player in the private transit business.

“Marblegate is doing direct buying of medallions at auction, and (shell company) DePalma (Acquisition) is buying distressed paper at a discount on the same asset,” Richard Feinsilver, a bankruptcy attorney on Long Island who has represented clients with loans taken over by DePalma, told Crain’s. “Field Point is now the servicing agent for essentially all of the medallions picked up by DePalma.”

“Owners of taxi medallions and their drivers in New York and other cities like Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia have been hobbled by the flood of app-based ride-hailing services such as those run by Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc.,” explained the Wall Street Journal last October. “There are more than 80,000 vehicles used for ride-hailing services in New York City, more than triple the number in 2015, regulators say. They now dwarf the roughly 13,500 yellow cabs, whose numbers have risen by only a few thousand since the 1940s. The competition has led to declines in yellow-cab trips and fare revenue even as the overall number of passenger trips in for-hire vehicles has soared.”

Naturally, this has impacted the value of each and every taxi medallion. “Medallions change hands most frequently through private sales and auctions, nowadays often following bankruptcies and foreclosures,” the Journal added. “Buyers such as Marblegate have paid less than $200,000 apiece for medallions in recent auctions, down from the record $1.3 million they garnered in 2013.”

The medallions, which are metal plates on yellow cab hoods allowing them to legally pick up street-hails, “have plunged in value since the arrival of Uber and other ride-sharing services in the city,” Business Insider reported back in 2017. “They once fetched as much as $1 million but were sold for $186,000 each at the auction, an industry source told Business Insider.”

By: Kenneth DeCrispo

The de facto ideological leader of the Democratic Party, NYC’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told followers over the weekend that President Donald Trump reveled in the crowd’s chant of “send her back” (about the antisemitic, Somalia-born Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota) when he spoke at a campaign rally in North Carolina last week.

In fact, the president publicly disavowed it.

“Roll back the tape … He relished it. He took it in and he’s doing this intentionally,” said Ocasio-Cortez to s spare crowd at a town hall meeting in the Corona section of Queens.

“We’re gonna stay right here,” she added, drawing a smattering of polite applause. “That’s where we’re gonna go. We’re not going anywhere.”

Indeed, the freshman member of Congress dabbled in racism and chauvinism herself when she said that “men like him,” meaning the president, have been dismissive of women for a long time.

The former bartender has had to walk back several of her own statements throughout her tenure in the House. Most recently, she claimed that the crisis on the border is no crisis at all. “This is a manufactured crisis because cruelty, because the cruelty is manufactured. This is a manufactured crisis because there is no need for us to do this. There is no need for us to overcrowd and to detain and under resource. There is no need for us to arrest innocent people and treat them no differently than criminals when they’re pursuing their basic human rights…”

Her sentiment was later contradicted by members of her own party, who eventually conceded that there is, after all, a crisis at the southern border.

President Trump had previously and accurately made the case that Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali-born refugee who fled civil war when she was 12, “says horrible things about Israel, hates Israel, hates Jews.”

As Christians United for Israel has pointed out, “Omar has come under fire from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other Republicans over her comments criticizing Israel, both remarks made since her election to Congress and long before she even began her political career. In November 2012, in the midst of an Israeli military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Omar said on Twitter “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Omar’s comments “touched upon a long-running, and particularly ugly, thread of the anti-Semitic movement — that Jewish money fuels backing for Israel in the United States and elsewhere,” the group noted. “A freshman Democrat, Max Rose of New York, said, “Congresswoman Omar’s statements are deeply hurtful to Jews, including myself.”

By Hadassa Kalatizadeh

One state’s loss is another state’s gain. Disgruntled New York residents are eyeing Miami for more than just a vacation. The high costs of living in the Big Apple and the sky high taxes are driving out residents. As reported by the NY Post, the fleeing masses have a common destination—Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

Miami is becoming known as an economic paradise. A study posted by the Unhappy New Yorkers website computes a potential savings of roughly $25,000 annually for those making $100,000 for living in Dade County compared to New York City, thanks to the lower taxes and lower cost of living. The same calculation would bring an estimated $235,000 in annual cost savings for an income of $1 million, after making the move. The disparity between the different state taxes was intensified in 2017 with the updated federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which gave New York, New Jersey and Connecticut residents the short end of the stick. A cap was placed on deductions for state and local taxes which works against higher earners as well as those already paying high property taxes.

In June, a study conducted by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, moreover, found that residents of New York pay more money in federal taxes but get back less in federal programs and funding. “Forty states have a positive balance of payments, meaning that they receive more from Washington than they contribute in taxes, but New York is on the extreme other end,” confirmed New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica.

“The results are stark. The state’s massive negative balance of payments for 2017 was -$35.6 billion, which ranks it the worst in the nation,” the report said. “In fact, New York’s gap in 2017 is almost as large as that of the next two states — New Jersey ($21.3 billion) and Massachusetts ($16.1 billion) — combined. This worst-in-the-nation rank remains the same as it was in 2016,” the report continued.

“The governor has been upset about this and has been fighting it for years,” said a spokesman for Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

So it’s not surprising that people are fleeing the Empire State for sunnier pastures. Florida had the highest number of migrants from other states. Most of those migrants came from New York. During the 12 months period ending in July 2018, 63,722 people moved to the Sunshine State from NY, as per data from the US Census Bureau.

Miami-Dade in particular has become a haven for frustrated New Yorkers. “I have never seen such demand like this from New York before,” said Armando Codina, executive chairman of Codina Partners, developer of Downtown Doral. He says New York’s tax modifications have been as encouraging for business there, as Venezuela’s socialist government, which led thousands of Venezuelans into Florida. Codina approximates that roughly 25 percent of the 60,000 residential apartments for sale in his neighborhood will be purchased by New Yorkers, adding another 5,000 former New Yorkers to the area.

“Here’s the reason why people are coming: Lower taxes, weather is better — it is a lot better down there,” said Sen. Rick Scott, the former Florida governor, earlier in the year.