JVB: Champion of the Working Class and dutiful cog of the Queens Machine

The battle for Queens civil court: John "The Canopy" Ciafone vs. Jessica "ex Machina" Earle-Gargan

 

City Limits


Judge of the Civil Court: Queens

Jessica Earle-Gargan: A St. John’s Law School grad like her opponent, Jessica Earle-Gargan is a former Assistant District Attorney who specialized in prosecuting domestic violence crimes, according to her campaign site. A Bayside resident, Earle-Gargan’s other law experience includes serving as court attorney for two Supreme Court justices, where she worked on divorce and child custody cases.

John J. Ciafone: A trial attorney and lifelong Queens resident, John Ciafone studied at St. John’s Law School and has worked as an hearing officer for the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) and as a small claims court arbitrator. In a campaign ad posted to YouTube, Ciafone described himself as “independent” and criticized the current judicial establishment as beholden to special interests. He made headlines last year when he was fined for advertising his legal services on buildings he owns without a city permit.

Everybody knows about The Canopy as Crapper came back to remind you. But Jessica has, um, quite a machine backing her up.

 Queens County Democratic Organization

Congressman Gregory Meeks

Former Congressman Joe Crowley 

 Found "Qualified" by the Independent Judicial Qualifications Commission

State Senator Toby Stavisky

State Senator Leroy Comrie

Assemblyman Daniel Rosenthal

State Assemblyman Ed Braunstein

State Assemblyman Michael DenDekker

NYC Council member Francisco Moya

NYC Council Member Rory Lancman

NYC Council member Danny Dromm

District Leaders: Ari Espinal, Ellen Raffael, Carol Gresser, Deirdre Feerick, Martha Taylor, Jacqueline Boyce, Yanna Henriquez

Supreme Court Justice Jeremy Weinstein, Ret. Former Administrative Judge Civil Term, Queens County.

Supreme Court Justice, Agustus Agate, Ret.

"Better Call" Saul Weprin Democratic Club

I know I have a proclivity to refer and defer to the Simpsons when I see shit like this, but another one won't hurt. (Yes I know it's one party, but it's still two bad choices)

Vote your conscience comrades.

The Queens Machine makes a special endorsement

Hilarious update, BP candidates Costa and Van Bramer are bellyaching about this: 

NY Post 

 
The Queens Democratic Party machine was up to its old tricks Monday — holding a hastily called, barely publicized meeting before 9 a.m. to endorse leaders’ chosen candidate for borough president, critics said.

“This could’ve been that opportunity to bring in those who want to be part of something larger,” contender and city Councilman Costa Constantinides tweeted. “Sad that won’t appear to happen.”
Party leaders were voting on who to endorse to replace Beep Melinda Katz, who is Queens’ new district attorney, in a special election likely to be held in March.

City Councilman Donovan Richards easily won the executive committee’s vote.

But Constantinides and other contenders were furious over the way things went down, saying the move smacked of a backroom deal.

“Received a letter yesterday, not email, saying @Queens_Dems will hold a district leader meeting this Monday at 845am. No agenda is set …,” the councilman tweeted.

City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer also railed against the endorsement process.

“The corrupt Queens Democratic Machine is the opposite of democratic, and Monday’s meeting & endorsements are clearly a sham,” he tweeted. “I beat the county machine in my 2009 insurgent progressive campaign for Council and have proudly stood up against the machine since.
“Queens needs an independent Borough President, not another machine puppet.”

The Queens Machine is suffering from AOC derangement syndrome

NY Post

 If the Queens Democratic establishment was badly rattled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning victory against incumbent and kingmaker Joe Crowley last year, then a largely ignored civil court race this summer shook the city’s most powerful political machine to its core.

During primary elections in June, a Hispanic woman from the Bronx routed the candidate hand-picked by the Queens County Democratic Party for a seat on the county’s Civil Court — a race that had not been contested in nearly four decades.

“It was an incredible moment, and it was as important as AOC’s victory,” said a political strategist active in Queens and the Bronx. “Suddenly, people smelled blood.”

Insurgent candidate and lawyer Lumarie Maldonado Cruz, 47, beat Wyatt Gibbons, 56, with nearly 62% of the vote compared to 38% for Gibbons, a Queens attorney.

“AOC’s victory reminded me of my obligations to stand up for what is right,” Maldonado Cruz said when she entered the race earlier this year.

Still reeling from the victory of Ocasio-Cortez over Crowley, a 10-term Congressman and longtime Queens party boss who was also chair of the House Democratic Caucus, the party was again caught “asleep at the wheel” with no discernible strategy during the June primaries, said the strategist. He, like many of the political consultants and elected officials interviewed by The Post, did not want to be identified for fear of antagonizing the Queens party or AOC.



In addition to the judicial race, the party nearly lost the election for Queens district attorney. Party-backed candidate Queens Borough President Melinda Katz should have trounced little-known, late-to-the-race progressive Tiffany Caban, but instead squeaked by, after a month-long series of recounts, by 60 votes.

“They hate AOC,” said Baruch College political scientist Doug Muzzio, referring to the leaders of the Queens County Democrats. “She killed their meal ticket.”

But as they battle for relevancy against a progressive wave, the moderate Democrats in the Queens party are still mired in the past, observers say.  The party is still controlled by Crowley’s old backers — “the three white men in the room” who have controlled Queens politics for more than three decades and reaped the benefits.

Michael Reich is the longtime executive director of the political party, and Frank Bolz is the law chairman. Gerard Sweeney has held his appointment as counsel to the Queens public administrator since 1992. In that capacity, he has raked in tens of millions of dollars for the law firm, administering estates of those who die without wills in Surrogate’s Court.

In March, party delegates elected a scandal-scarred lawmaker as the new kingmaker. But observers told The Post that Rep. Gregory Meeks, an 11-term Congressman from southeast Queens, is a lightweight.

“Meeks is essentially a backbencher in Congress, who lacks Crowley’s gravitas,” Muzzio told The Post. “He’s their puppet.”

The true political powerhouse in Queens is obvious.

AOC has national stature, demanding the attention of the House Speaker and the president. She has more than 5 million Twitter followers.

Katz wins primary. The Queens Machine rolls on

NY Daily News

Tiffany Cabán conceded the Democratic race for Queens district attorney on Tuesday, officially cementing Melinda Katz’s razor-thin victory after six weeks of contentious recounts and court battles.

Addressing supporters at the Katch beer garden in Astoria, Cabán said she would keep fighting for progressive criminal justice reform.

“To every woman, to every young person of color, to every queer person, every single human being who was inspired by the movement we built, you are next," Cabán said after supporters had chanted her first name for nearly a minute. "And I promise that I will be the first there knocking on doors for you.”

Cabán, a Manhattan public defender, added, “This campaign may be over, but the movement does not stop ... We are just getting started.”

Katz, the establishment favorite and Queens borough president, now claims victory by a mere 55 votes — 34,913 to Cabán’s 34,858. The borough president is all but certain to win the general election against long-shot Republican candidate Daniel Kogan on Nov. 5.
 

There's no way an 1100 vote lead disappeared without corruption

New York Times

The Democratic primary for district attorney in Queens, a race that drew nationwide attention, was thrown deep into uncertainty on Wednesday after a count of paper ballots flipped the primary-night result.

Tiffany Cabán, a 31-year-old public defender, saw her almost 1,100-vote lead evaporate, with 

Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, edging out to a 20-vote lead.

The tight margin will automatically trigger a recount, according to Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, a spokeswoman for the New York City Board of Elections. It also spurred accusations from Ms. Cabán’s side that elections officials improperly invalidated more than 2,000 affidavit ballots before the paper ballots were counted.

“We are going to fight to make sure every valid vote is counted and every voter has a voice,” said Bill Lipton, the New York director of the Working Families Party, which supported Ms. Cabán. “And when all the votes are counted, we are confident Tiffany Cabán will be the next Queens district attorney.”

The primary race was cast as a battle between the traditional power bases in Queens and the progressive forces that propelled Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to her primary victory in New York last year. Ms. Katz had the backing of unions and local political leaders, while Ms. Cabán received support from prominent members of Congress, including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.

Ms. Katz is ahead by 20 votes, 34,898 to 34,878, according to lawyers representing her. Jerry H. Goldfeder, a veteran election lawyer representing Ms. Cabán, agreed that Ms. Katz was now ahead by 20 votes.

The new vote total meant that Ms. Katz drew twice as many votes from the paper ballots as Ms. Cabán did.

Mr. Goldfeder said he intended to challenge the decision to invalidate all but 487 of the 2,816 affidavit ballots cast. Election officials said they had determined that the ballots, used when a voter’s name is not listed at the polling place, were invalid or had been cast by ineligible voters.

The Board of Elections would not release any information until the election results were certified but confirmed that there would be a recount. The board has a policy of conducting a manual recount when the victory is by less than 0.5 percent, Ms. Vazquez-Diaz said.

Crappy emailed me this bizarre (although expected) turn of events and wrote in the subject line and I am inclined to agree. Something like this happened in a district in Florida that the notorious Debbie-Wasserman Schultz represents. And of course there was the incident where 200,000 votes in Brooklyn vanished during the 2016 presidential primary. Go figure this would happen on the eve of the day of the birth of this nation. Apparently, the Queens Machine will stop at nothing to keep their crappy patronage jalopy running.

Update: I found a more appropriate picture.

Rory Lancman drops out of D.A. race to support Melinda Katz

NY Post


In a stunning move mere days before the election, Rory Lancman announced Friday that he’s dropping out of the Queens district attorney race to endorse rival Melinda Katz.

The decision was just as much about old-school Queens Democrats circling the wagons to ensure insurgent Tiffany Caban – a young public defender being endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – doesn’t win as it was about backing Katz, the borough president whom Lancman harshly attacked during the campaign, sources said.

“The numbers are simply not there for me to win this Tuesday’s Democratic primary,” said Lancman, a city councilman.

“And I owe it to the voters, and particularly to my supporters, to acknowledge that fact and withdraw from the race.”

Lancman, who was joined by Katz at a Queens press conference in making the announcement, attributed his bowing out to being “especially concerned about causing a split in the South Queens vote” and “effectively diluting the voice of the community most impacted by the decisions our next DA must make.”

South Queens consists of predominately African American communities, a critical vote in borough primary races.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo also is backing Katz.

One Queens Democratic Party official told The Post that Lancman did the right thing.

“If you’re Rory, you don’t want to play spoiler. You don’t want to burn down the house. It’s a big blow to Queens County if we lose this race,” said the official, who requested anonymity.

What does that official mean by "we lose this race"? These are all democrats that are running, how does the whole party lose? It's clear the candidate they are targeting is Caban, but do they consider candidates like Lasak or Malik and the other 3 spoilers too?

More importantly, why did the NY Post protect the identity of this person if he or she serves the constituency of the "world's borough" and says shit like this? Clearly this "insider" as well as "the house" doesn't have the voter's interests in mind and is more concerned with maintaining the power structure of the Queens Machine.

This is all just warped.

And now you readers see why I included that SE Queens article a few days ago.

Congressman Gregory Meeks is the new chairman of the Queens Machine

 

Patch

 U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks was unanimously elected Monday as the new chairman of the Queens Democratic Party. Meeks succeeds former U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley, who stepped down in February.


Meeks was considered the most likely successor to Crowley, according to a City & State report that broke the news ahead of the Monday election. Crowley left the post after he joined one of the country's top lobbying firms. Meeks, a Crowley ally, is unlikely to spearhead radical changes within the party, City & State reported. He's a vocal opponent of a bill that would raise taxes on Wall Street traders and supported the Amazon HQ2 deal for Long Island City.

In 2013, Meeks was named one of the 13 most corrupt Congress members by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit that investigates the influence of money in politics. In 2006, Meeks paid a below-market sum for a St. Albans house built by one of his campaign contributors on land owned by another contributor, according to the CREW report. He has also failed to report loans on personal financial disclosure forms, CREW found.

Utterly disgraceful. And they talk about the President and his own sordid corruption and abuse of  power? This political neoliberal gangster has made a productive and lucrative career with his own dirty deeds and wheeling and dealing in his career as an elected official. And Jamaica is still blighted in the two decades since he's "represented" the district.