(02-21-2021 12:29 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

The Chuckie-themed puppet is perfect.

Jen Psaki = Ginger Goebbels.

(02-21-2021 12:29 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

Yes it does require a yes or no answer, you lying twit.

(02-21-2021 04:05 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(02-21-2021 12:29 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

Yes it does require a yes or no answer, you lying twit.

I was surprised. ABC asked a tough question. And then when she refused to answer, they asked again.

She is just not good. She had that nervous smile while answering both times. Sarah and Kaleigh run circles around her.

damn, that was like the first hard hitting question, with followup, i've seen the msm ask of a democrat in about 2 decades.

[quote='CrimsonPhantom' pid='17284121' dateline='1613928574']

YES OR NO. Answer the freaking question.

Cuomo must be the new Jimmy Conway. All the wise guys are afraid to cross him.

(02-22-2021 12:52 AM)UofMstateU Wrote:  damn, that was like the first hard hitting question, with followup, i've seen the msm ask of a democrat in about 2 decades.

Well, remember that Biden is probably the first democrat in that time frame--or longer--that the media may want to see replaced. They want Harris, but she couldn't win, so Biden was the Trojan horse.

(02-22-2021 05:33 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(02-22-2021 12:52 AM)UofMstateU Wrote:  damn, that was like the first hard hitting question, with followup, i've seen the msm ask of a democrat in about 2 decades.

Well, remember that Biden is probably the first democrat in that time frame--or longer--that the media may want to see replaced. They want Harris, but she couldn't win, so Biden was the Trojan horse.

Can't wait for Kammie the commie to get in there and put in Cardi B as her press secretary.

Then we'll get some real answers !

Quote:PolitiFact Editor-In-Chief Angie Drobnic Holan defended New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s deadly policy that sent patients infected with COVID-19 back to long-term care facilities, instead blaming the disproportionate numbers of virus deaths in those facilities on their employees.

“I think the situation in New York is really complicated,” Holan told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “Certainly there are things to criticize about how the former administration handled data, but the heart of the matter goes back to last year when the state was asking nursing homes to take in patients, COVID patients, who are ready to be discharged from the hospital. We don’t see hard evidence that that made a significant difference in COVID deaths.”

In addition to denying the New York attorney general’s report detailing how Cuomo, his administration, and the state’s Health Department severely undercounted the number of COVID-related deaths in nursing homes and the coverup of these actions as admitted by his top aide, Holan also blamed the spread of the virus in nursing homes on employees, a narrative the Cuomo administration carried throughout 2020.

“If you look at the statistics New York is about having the same numbers as other states around the country, and the issue was employees workers in the nursing homes, who didn’t realize they were bringing COVID-19 into the nursing homes,” Holan said. “So it’s a really complicated situation. There’s not clear-cut answers here.”

Earlier this week, Holan’s site PolitiFact doubled down on one of its “fact-checks” concerning Cuomo, claiming that despite reports and even admissions from the governor’s office about a coverup of the thousands of deaths that occurred under his direction, it is still “mostly false” to claim the higher death rate as compared to other states without this policy was Cuomo’s fault.

“The fact check itself focused on a policy issued by Cuomo in March directing nursing homes in the state to accept patients who had or were suspected of having covid-19. As long as they were medically stable, the notice said, it was appropriate to move patients in,” the editor’s note on the article states. “Our ruling of Mostly False is unchanged by this new information. That rating was based on evidence that while the introduction of covid-19 positive patients into nursing homes no doubt had an effect on the spread of the coronavirus, Caputo’s statement suggested it was solely responsible. That’s not what the evidence showed, then or now.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also refused to condemn Cuomo’s fatal policy on behalf of the White House or President Joe Biden, instead choosing to praise the governor’s leadership and claim that it is up to “the appropriate law enforcement authorities to determine how that path is going to move as we look forward.”

“I think the president is focused on his goals, his objectives as president of the United States. He’s going to continue to work with Gov. Cuomo, just like he’ll continue to work with governors across the country,” Psaki said.

Link

Quote:Anyone following the growing nursing home COVID death scandal swirling around New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has likely heard about the governor's reported habit of threatening people who cross him.

Cuomo's alleged bullying tactics gained attention when New York state Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat, accused the governor of personally threatening him last week for calling out the governor's "BS" surrounding the nursing home cover-up.

Following Kim's accusation, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, also a Democrat, came out and said the lawmaker's allegation was "not a surprise."

"It's a sad thing to say, Mika, but that's classic Andrew Cuomo," de Blasio told MSNBC last week. "A lot of people in New York state have received those phone calls."

"The bullying is nothing new," de Blasio said, adding, "The threats, the belittling, the demand that someone change their statement right that moment — many, many times I've heard that and I know a lot of other people in the state that have heard that."

Now one New York journalist has gone on the record accusing Cuomo's office of bullying him during his time as editor of a magazine covering New York politics and saying that this is a pattern of behavior for the executive.

In a new op-ed for the New York Post titled "Cuomo's office terrorized me for doing my job as a journalist," former City & State editor-in-chief Morgan Pehme recounted an incident he claims took place in April 2014 when his magazine was prepared to run a story that the governor didn't like.

Pehme began his tale of Cuomo woe:

It was 4:30 a.m., so I pulled the bathroom door shut in my one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment to answer the phone without waking my then-5-year-old. On the line was Melissa DeRosa, Gov. Cuomo's then-communications director, now his second-in-command. She was threatening to destroy me.

By now, thanks to Queens Assemblyman Ron Kim blowing the whistle on the threats he received in a call from Cuomo, the public has a glimpse of the bullying practiced by the governor and his top brass.

Many Americans are shocked, having bought into the compassionate persona Cuomo conveyed in his pandemic briefings. But Kim's revelations came as no surprise to anyone who has dealt with the governor. As one Albany insider texted me last week, “everyone has an Andrew Cuomo story."
The onetime editor said his publication was going to expose Cuomo's efforts to distort a report on public corruption — a report for which Pehme's magazine got pushback from Cuomo's office the minute the outlet began digging.

Though he cannot quote exactly what the governor's office threatened him with, Pehme said he knows that a promise to "destroy" his career and get revenge was included in the threats.

And the fear he experienced was warranted, he added, considering Cuomo's "track record of vindictiveness":

I had no reason to think these were idle threats. I was fully aware of the governor's volcanic temper and track record of vindictiveness. If he wanted to crush me, he could and likely would.

This was a serious gut check for me. I worried about losing my livelihood, damaging my future, letting down my wife and daughter. But fortunately, I had bosses and colleagues who stood by the quality of our work. So we published the piece, like the press is supposed to do in the face of intimidation.
According to Pehme, "abusive calls" from the governor's office or the governor himself are regular fare for the Albany press corps:

[T]he abuse he privately metes out amounts to a systematic campaign to chill negative coverage of his administration. And it works.

Editors kill legitimate stories because of his threats; reporters shy away from promising tips; sources stay silent.

There are many reasons the media don't expose the governor's bullying. Albany reporters fear that if the governor freezes them out, they won't be able to do their jobs effectively. Some journalists see speaking up as a violation of the unwritten code of “off-the-record" conversations. Others just assume that “everyone knows" how Cuomo operates, so it isn't worth reporting.
Pehme closed his piece urging journalists to do their jobs and report the truth about Cuomo — just as they did when the #MeToo movement uncovered abusive "monsters" in the entertainment industry.

"Journalists are agents of accountability," he wrote. "It's time for New York's reporters to step up and tell their own Cuomo stories."

Link

Quote:A former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday provided new details to back up her claims of sexual harassment — including an allegation that New York’s top elected official kissed her “on the lips” without warning inside his Manhattan office.

Lindsey Boylan — now a Democratic candidate for Manhattan borough president — made the stunning allegation in an essay posted on the Medium website.

Boylan said the incident took place after her 2018 promotion to be Cuomo’s deputy secretary for economic development and special advisor to the governor — a job she initially turned down “because I didn’t want to be near him.”

“We were in his New York City office on Third Avenue,” she wrote.

“As I got up to leave and walk toward an open door, he stepped in front of me and kissed me on the lips. I was in shock, but I kept walking.”

Afterward, Boylan wrote, “I came to work nauseous every day,” then resigned on Sept. 26, 2018.

Boylan also alleges that Cuomo suggested, “Let’s play strip poker,” while they were “flying home from an October 2017 event in Western New York on his taxpayer-funded jet.”

Cuomo made the comment as he and Boylan sat facing each other, with his press aide to her right “and a state trooper behind us,” according to her essay.

“Governor Andrew Cuomo has created a culture within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected,” she wrote.

Boylan made her bombshell claims in the wake of The Post’s recent revelation that top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa privately admitted his administration hid the total number of nursing home residents killed by COVID-19 from lawmakers and the public over fear that federal prosecutors would use it “against us.”

The Post’s scoop has sparked calls for Cuomo to be impeached and a probe by the FBI and Brooklyn US Attorney’s Office.

In her 1,700-plus-word essay, Boylan said DeRosa and “other top women” around Cuomo “normalized” his alleged harassment so “that only now do I realize how insidious his abuse was.”

Boylan also posted screenshots of government emails, including one in which Cuomo’s executive secretary, Stephanie Benton, purportedly passed along a message from him that referenced a reported former girlfriend to show she was his type.

“He said look up Lisa Shields. You could be sisters. Except you’re the better looking sister,” the Dec. 14, 2016, email said.

Later, Boylan wrote, Cuomo “began calling me ‘Lisa’ in front of colleagues. It was degrading.”

Another image shows a Nov. 1, 2016, email exchange in which Cuomo’s chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, asked Howard Zemsky — then the state’s economic-development czar — whether Boylan would be attending a meeting the next day.

Zemsky wrote back, “Ha!” and added that Boylan would be in Albany “but it will be hard for her to concentrate on the presentations while worrying about how the Gov’s day is going in Rochester.”

In her essay, Boylan also said that after she first accused Cuomo of sexual harassment in a series of tweets in December, “two women reached out to me with their own experiences.”

“One described how she lived in constant fear, scared of what would happen to her if she rejected the Governor’s advances,” she wrote.

“The other said she was instructed by the Governor to warn staff members who upset him that their jobs could be at risk. Both told me they are too afraid to speak out.”

When she initially accused Cuomo, Boylan didn’t provide any details of his alleged harassment and didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

In a tweet Wednesday, she said, “I never planned to share the details of my experience working in the Cuomo administration, but I am doing so now in hopes that it may make it easier for others to speak their own truth.”

Cuomo’s office didn’t immediately return a request for comment, but the governor denied Boylan’s allegations in December.

“It’s not true,” Cuomo said during a news conference a day after her tweets.

“Look, I fought for and I believe a woman has the right to come forward and express her opinion and express issues and concerns that she has. But it’s just not true.”

Link

Quote:Sixty percent of New Yorkers say Gov. Andrew Cuomo did something wrong in handling COVID-19 nursing home deaths and 40 percent believe he shouldn’t be reelected to a fourth term, according to a Marist Poll released Tuesday.

More than 15,000 people have died in New York state’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities from COVID-19, but as recently as last month, the state reported only 8,500 deaths. A top aide to Cuomo in early February told Democratic lawmakers that the state withheld the death toll out of fear that the true numbers would be “used against us” by federal prosecutors.

Republicans have called for investigations and subpoenas and some Democrats have referred to Cuomo’s conduct as criminal.

Cuomo said his administration “made the mistake in creating the void of information on nursing home deaths” and that a toxic political environment contributed to the backlash against his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Marist poll found that just 19 percent of adults believe Cuomo has done something illegal in his handling of nursing homes during the pandemic while 27 percent think he has done nothing wrong.

Cuomo’s performance numbers have dipped, though. The poll found that 49 percent of New Yorkers approve of Cuomo’s job performance, down from 66 percent in July, while 42 percent say he is doing an excellent job, down from 60 percent in July.

Link

Quote:In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) used his emergency powers to spend more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds to acquire critical medical equipment such as ventilators and PPE in the fight against the virus.

But many of the vendors never fulfilled their end of the bargain, and for several months, his administration has been scrambling to recoup the funds.

What are the details?
The New York Post reported Tuesday that Cuomo's Department of Health was "duped" into buying millions of dollars worth of medical supplies from Chinese firms "and has been forced to hire a law firm in Hong Kong in a bid to recoup the taxpayer money it lost."

The newspaper, which first reported that Cuomo's administration intentionally underreported nursing home deaths during the pandemic, has now reported that the DOH hired the Hong Kong firm Gall Solicitors for $125,000 in an effort to get money back from overseas suppliers.

A Cuomo spokesperson confirmed the contract, saying they hired the firm in late December "to help us pursue recovery of state funds there, related to procurement."

Gall is reportedly trying to get back a $12.5 million deposit Cuomo's administration delivered to a company called Please Me LLC, which had promised 1,000 ventilators to the state despite never selling the devices. The supplier never delivered a single ventilator.

The Post pointed to a New York Times article from December that showed Please Me LLC is a company "whose products include not just small medical devices but also sex toys, children's books and a mask for dry eyes."

The owner of the company, Eddie Sitt, defended his firm to The Times, claiming that medical products were actually his main business. New York officials claim the company asked to substitute the ventilators requested for a different model after the deposit was already made but the state refused. Sitt claims the ventilators were, in fact, shipped to New York but remain in storage amid the dispute.

Cuomo's people are also trying to get $10 million back from a man named Yaron Oren-Pines, whom they paid $69 million for 1,450 ventilators after he tweeted to former President Donald Trump, "We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and non-invasive. Have someone call me URGENT." He never delivered, but has thus far returned $59 million of what he was handed by the state.

The Times also reported that at the time of its December report, New York had already recouped $233 million in wasted funds from companies that failed to hold up their end of bargains.

Meanwhile, Cuomo is facing calls to resign from New York Republicans and Democrats alike over the reports of his mishandling of nursing home policies regarding the coronavirus and subsequent allegations of burying the true data. President Joe Biden and the White House has refused to speak of the scandal, after previously saying that Cuomo's response was the "gold standard" among U.S. governors.

Link

Quote:New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) approval rating has dipped six points since it was revealed that the administration covered up the number of coronavirus-related deaths in nursing homes out of fears of a federal investigation, a Morning Consult survey released Monday found.

The survey, taken February 12-21 among 3,203 registered New York voters, showed Cuomo with 57 percent approval. While it seems positive on the surface, that reflects a six-point drop from the 63 percent approval he saw in the last survey taken prior to the New York Post bombshell, which featured the stunning admission from Melissa DeRosa, New York’s secretary to the governor.

The last survey, taken February 2-11, also showed Cuomo’s disapproval at 33 percent. That number is on the rise, now standing at 38 percent.

“By comparison, perceptions of Cuomo went unchanged in the aftermath of state Attorney General Letitia James’ Jan. 28 report that first revealed the undercounting of nursing home deaths,” Morning Consult reported, noting that Cuomo continues to be “more popular than he was before the pandemic began”:

But the past 10 days have brought the governor his worst numbers since April, when he and a number of other state chief executives saw surges in popularity as they took active roles in tackling the virus. For Cuomo, the nursing home story may be snowballing into something more as he faces public allegations of political bullying from officials in his own party.

The survey’s margin of error is +/- 2 percent.

Similarly, a Siena College Research Institute survey released last week showed Cuomo’s approval ratings falling from 56-42 percent to 51-47 percent.

The survey comes as Democrats rally with Republicans, calling for transparency and accountability from the Cuomo administration.

“I strongly believe criminal charges are needed up to and including the highest level of state government. Anyone who is complicit needs to be charged criminally,” New York state Rep. Colin Schmitt ® told Breitbart News Sunday, floating impeachment as a viable option for legislators moving forward.

He also said he is working on a bipartisan measure to repeal Cuomo’s “extraordinary power.” The entire fallout, he added, “very well could” result in New York electing a Republican governor down the road.

Link

Reminder: Cuomo Admits He Wouldn’t Have Put His Own Mother In A Nursing Home After COVID Order…

Quote:On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) blasted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) as a “hypocrite” and pointed to his calls for a polygraph test and an FBI investigation into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Malliotakis said, “He’s a hypocrite. It is rules for thee, not for me. He has called for an FBI investigation, for a polygraph test when it came to Justice Kavanaugh. As a matter of fact, in 2013, there [were] similar charges against an assemblyman. He demanded his resignation immediately. He said there was no tolerance for sexual harassment in New York State, and so, the governor now has a lot of answers that he needs to give New Yorkers. This just adds to his problems.”

Link

Quote:After snubbing Tara Reade, the woman who made a very credible sexual assault allegation against His Fraudulency Joe Biden, the left-wing Time’s Up organization has decided to turn on Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) in calling for an investigation of the credible sexual misconduct allegations made against the disgraced governor by a former staffer.

Earlier this week, Lindsey Boylan, Cuomo’s deputy secretary for economic development for a little more than three years, starting in March of 2015, added troubling details to her December 2020 allegation that Cuomo “sexually harassed me for years.”

The details include allegations of outright harassment and a lot of creepy behavior. Using her Medium site, Boyland detailed how Cuomo “repeatedly touched her body, attempted to kiss her on the mouth, invited her to play strip poker, and overtly objectified her.”

After that, my fears worsened. I came to work nauseous every day. My relationship with his senior team — mostly women — grew hostile after I started speaking up for myself. I was reprimanded and told to get in line by his top aides, but I could no longer ignore it.

On September 26, 2018, I sent a mass email informing staff members of my resignation.

The governor’s office has denied the allegations.

Naturally, America’s fake news media ignored the story.

Cuomo is already under fire for pouring the coronavirus into nursing homes and then lying about the number of deaths that resulted from his disastrous order. He is also facing allegations of toxic bullying of both the media and his fellow Democrats. And now he has a credible sexual harassment allegation to deal with, and not from a political enemy or the opposing party.

Adding to his troubles is Thursday’s news that the celeb-fueled Time’s Up organization will not, as they did for Biden, look the other way for Cuomo:

“Allegations of inappropriate behavior in any workplace are deeply troubling and should be addressed,” foundation president and CEO Tina Tchen said.

“We call on the Cuomo administration to conduct a full and independent investigation into these claims immediately.”

Time’s Up board members include Ashley Judd and Eva Longoria, two longtime Cuomo fan-girls.

Also calling for an investigation are New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, another fellow Democrat, and sexual assault activist Rose McGowan.

“Look, these allegations are really disturbing, let’s be clear about that,” de Blasio said Thursday. “When a woman comes forward with this kind of very specific allegations, we have to take it seriously.”

In a statement to Fox News, McGowan said, “I completely stand by Lindsey Boylan. Its truth leaks from every word on the screen that she wrote. She, none of us, should endure what she endured.”

McGowan added, “If they’re doing it to her, what are they doing to constituents? What is he going to do to what he considers the little people? It’s monstrous.”

Andrew Cuomo has pretty much gone into hiding and has so far not commented personally. It’s obvious he is counting on his allies in the national political to make this go away by continuing to ignore it.

Democrats sure got it good.

Link

Quote:America’s three most prominent networks–ABC, NBC, and CBS–ignored any mention of sexual harassment claims against Gov. Andrew Cuomo during their evening news programs Wednesday. CNN and MSNBC also declined to address the scandal.

According to transcripts, ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’s Evening News, and NBC’s Nightly News made no mention of the embattled Cuomo, who is also facing calls for his impeachment and resignation after he was accused of covering up the number of deaths from the coronavirus in state nursing homes following his controversial order that these facilities accept coronavirus-positive patients.

Cuomo’s former deputy secretary for economic development and special adviser Lindsey Boylan alleged on Wednesday in an essay published on the website Medium that the governor went “out of his way to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs,” forcibly kissed her on the lips during a one-on-one briefing, and suggested they “play strip poker” during a plane ride.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) later on Wednesday called for Cuomo to resign in the wake of twin scandals over his handling of data on coronavirus deaths in the state’s nursing homes and allegations of sexual harassment by a former aide.

Boylan’s allegations come as Cuomo’s administration is under investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn following reports that the governor’s top aide told Democrat lawmakers officials withheld the nursing home data due to concerns that the figures could “be used against us” in a federal investigation.

Link

Quote:On Thursday’s broadcast of Fox News Radio’s “Fox Across America,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) reacted to the sexual harassment allegations against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) by stating that there are “several people who would be speaking out in a New York minute if it wasn’t Andrew Cuomo,” and that “Cuomo himself, if he wasn’t the one being accused, he would be one of the most outspoken of the group.”

Zeldin said, “There are several people who would be speaking out in a New York minute if it wasn’t Andrew Cuomo, if it was someone they didn’t have a relationship with. And quite frankly, Andrew Cuomo himself, if he wasn’t the one being accused, he would be one of the most outspoken of the group. It’s kind of like, if you view Andrew Cuomo, the former attorney general, if he was the attorney general right now on the nursing home scandal, he probably would be taking down the governor. And right now, on these sexual harassment allegations, Andrew Cuomo’s history is that he would be, if it wasn’t Andrew Cuomo being attacked, he would be very public about how he absolutely believes the victim…Brett Kavanaugh, he called for lie detector tests. So you’re seeing a lot of hypocrisy and double standard on many fronts lately from Democrats. And this, unfortunately, is no exception. But kudos, by the way, to the Democrats who are speaking up.”

Link

Quote:Prominent progressive women who usually jump at the chance to condemn powerful men accused of sexual harassment went suddenly and mysteriously mum in the wake of allegations against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo from one of his former aides.

Former Cuomo aide Lindsey Boylan published a lengthy essay on Medium on Wednesday morning detailing several years of working with the Democratic governor during which she says he forcibly kissed her on the lips in his office in 2018 and made her feel extremely uncomfortable on a regular basis.

“Let’s play strip poker,” Boylan remembers Cuomo saying to her as she sat near him on a government jet in October, 2017.

Cuomo “created a culture within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected” and “used intimidation to silence his critics,” Boylan wrote, adding that, “if you dared to speak up, you would face consequences.”

Boylan, who is currently running for Manhattan borough president, originally tweeted about her experience working for Cuomo in December before offering more details on her allegations this week. She said that other women shared similar stories about Cuomo’s inappropriate behavior toward them.

But it took nearly two days for a number of influential progressive women to eke out even a minimal response to the allegations against the New York governor.

On Thursday afternoon, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) finally offered a semblance of a response, telling CBS News that the allegations against Cuomo are “extraordinarily serious” and “deserve to be heard.”

“Once we actually get to the bottom of the situation, we can figure out what accountability looks like,” the New York progressive said, adding that she is calling on the state legislature to ensure Cuomo receives due process.

Ocasio-Cortez’s template-like response came just three weeks after she tearfully revealed on Instagram Live that she herself is a survivor of sexual assault and accused Republicans of re-traumatizing her by urging people to move past January’s Capitol riot.

Another New York Democrat, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), offered a similarly tepid and delayed response to the allegations against her state’s Democratic governor, admitting to Politico that she has not read Boylan’s post, but that all have a right to tell their story.

“Well, obviously these allegations are serious and deeply concerning and anyone has a right to come forward to be heard and to have allegations be investigated,” Gillibrand said.

“Governor Cuomo also has a right to be heard and he has come forward and has denied these allegations. But ultimately the decision will be up to the state,” she added.

Gillibrand was one of the leading voices championing victims of sexual assault when the #MeToo movement was cresting a few years ago, leading Democrats in their fight against Brett Kavanaugh during his acrimonious 2018 Supreme Court confirmation. She declared at the time that she was sure Kavanaugh was not telling the truth because he had not asked to have the FBI review the sexual assault accusations leveled against him by Christine Blasey Ford, which was, in Gillibrand’s view, guilty behavior.

She was also one of the leading voices calling for Minnesota Democrat Al Franken’s ouster from the Senate in 2018 after he was accused by multiple women of sexual harassment.

Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor who aggressively questioned Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing and joined Gillibrand in calling on Franken to resign, remains silent on the allegations against Cuomo.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has also said nothing.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also finally responded on Thursday to the allegations against Cuomo and also attempted to distance President Biden from his former praise of the New York governor’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Cuomo is currently weathering another scandal relating to his dismal failure to prevent the coronavirus from spreading in New York nursing homes, and his administration’s subsequent coverup of the nursing home death toll.

“He made some positive comments about Governor Cuomo and his role in New York at the time as he did about a range of governors,” Psaki said about Biden’s remark in early 2020 that Cuomo’s response to the pandemic is the “gold standard.”

“Let me first say that the president has been consistent in his position,” Psaki said when asked about the sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo. “When a person comes forward, they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Their voice should be heard, not silenced. And any allegation should be reviewed.”

Even the bare bones responses Gillibrand and Ocasio-Cortez mustered this week to the allegations against Cuomo were better than what they offered the woman who made a more serious allegation against Joe Biden, his former aide Tara Reade.

Reade alleges that in 1993, when she was an aide to Biden, then a senator from Delaware, he pinned her up against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers while forcibly kissing her. Reade went public with her accusation against Biden in April of 2019, before he announced his run for president. She was joined by several other women who claim Biden has touched them inappropriately.

“He’s devoted his life to supporting women, and he has vehemently denied this allegation,” Gillibrand said of Biden at the time.

“I’m satisfied with how he has responded. I know him. I was proud to endorse him on Monday,” Pelosi said of Biden’s response.

The question now is whether Boylan’s allegations against Cuomo and potentially claims against him from other women will fade and be consigned to the news cycle dustbin before they are given the attention they are due, partly thanks to the listless response from prominent Democrat women, the supposed champions of #MeToo victims.

Link

‘Impeach’ billboard vents fury over Gov. Cuomo nursing home scandal

Quote:ALBANY, N.Y. — A second former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is accusing him of sexual harassment, saying that he asked her questions about her sex life, whether she was monogamous in her relationships and if she had ever had sex with older men.

The aide, Charlotte Bennett, who was an executive assistant and health policy adviser in the Cuomo administration until she left in November, told The New York Times that the governor had harassed her late last spring, during the height of the state’s fight against the coronavirus.

Ms. Bennett, 25, said the most unsettling episode occurred on June 5, when she was alone with Mr. Cuomo in his State Capitol office. In a series of interviews this week, she said the governor had asked her numerous questions about her personal life, including whether she thought age made a difference in romantic relationships, and had said that he was open to relationships with women in their 20s — comments she interpreted as clear overtures to a sexual relationship.

Mr. Cuomo said in a statement to The Times on Saturday that he believed he had been acting as a mentor and had “never made advances toward Ms. Bennett, nor did I ever intend to act in any way that was inappropriate.” He said he had requested an independent review of the matter and asked that New Yorkers await the findings “before making any judgments.”

Ms. Bennett said that during the June encounter, the governor, 63, also complained to her about being lonely during the pandemic, mentioning that he “can’t even hug anyone,” before turning the focus to Ms. Bennett. She said that Mr. Cuomo asked her, “Who did I last hug?”

Ms. Bennett said she had tried to dodge the question by responding that she missed hugging her parents. “And he was, like, ‘No, I mean like really hugged somebody?’” she said.

Mr. Cuomo never tried to touch her, Ms. Bennett said, but the message of the entire episode was unmistakable to her.

“I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared,” Ms. Bennett said. “And was wondering how I was going to get out of it and assumed it was the end of my job.”

Ms. Bennett said she had disclosed the interaction with Mr. Cuomo to his chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, less than a week later and was transferred to another job, as a health policy adviser, with an office on the opposite side of the Capitol, soon after that. Ms. Bennett said she had also given a lengthy statement to a special counsel to the governor, Judith Mogul, toward the end of June.

Ms. Bennett said she ultimately decided not to insist on an investigation because she was happy in her new job and “wanted to move on.” No action was taken against the governor.

In his statement, Mr. Cuomo called Ms. Bennett a “hard-working and valued member” of his staff with “every right to speak out.” He said that Ms. Bennett had opened up to him about being a sexual assault survivor, and he had tried to be supportive and helpful. “The last thing I would ever have wanted was to make her feel any of the things that are being reported,” the governor said.

The governor did not deny that he asked Ms. Bennett personal questions; he said in the statement that he would have no further comment until the review concluded.

Ms. Bennett’s account follows another detailed accusation published on Wednesday by Lindsey Boylan, a former state economic development official who said that Mr. Cuomo had harassed her on several occasions from 2016 to 2018, at one point giving her an unsolicited kiss on the lips at his Manhattan office.

Mr. Cuomo’s office has called Ms. Boylan’s accusations untrue, but they have nonetheless prompted calls for investigations into her claims. In addition to the two women’s harassment allegations, the governor, a third-term Democrat, is confronting significant political fallout over his handling of the state’s nursing homes during the pandemic.

After seeing Ms. Boylan detail her accusations against Mr. Cuomo, Ms. Bennett shared Ms. Boylan’s account on Twitter, suggesting that people read it if they wanted a true picture of “what it’s like to work for the Cuomo” administration.

The Times contacted Ms. Bennett, and she agreed to relate her own account of harassment. She said she felt an obligation to other victims of sexual harassment and wanted to counter the way Mr. Cuomo “wields his power.”

Ms. Bennett said she had told her parents and friends about the exchange with the governor around the time that it happened, as well as about her growing discomfort with having to work closely with him, and had kept text messages from that period.

The Times reviewed the messages and confirmed their contents with those who received them. Ms. Bennett also retained text messages from Ms. DesRosiers and Ms. Mogul that alluded to their meetings in June, but did not mention the subject matter.

“I have no problem with what they did,” Ms. Bennett said of Ms. DesRosiers and Ms. Mogul, describing both women as sympathetic to her concerns. “I have a problem with what the governor did.”

Ms. Bennett was hired by the administration in early 2019, working out of the governor’s Manhattan office as a briefer, an entry-level position. She had graduated from Hamilton College in 2017, where she was active in women’s issues and founded a sexual misconduct task force. She said her own experience in surviving a sexual attack had prompted her to “help sexual assault survivors be heard and enforce victims’ rights,” according to a bulletin on the college’s website.

By mid-2019, Ms. Bennett had been promoted to senior briefer and executive assistant after an interview with Mr. Cuomo. The two became friendly, she said, and they bonded over shared connections with Westchester County: At the time, he was living with Sandra Lee, a celebrity chef, in Mount Kisco; Ms. Bennett was living with her parents in a neighboring hamlet. She mentioned to Mr. Cuomo that she had played middle-school soccer against one of his daughters, who are also in their mid-20s.

“We got along really well,” she said of the governor. Mr. Cuomo, she said, would sometimes ask questions about her dating life that she said seemed inappropriate but not necessarily unmanageable.

“I saw him more as a father figure,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about it as anything sexual.”

In January 2020, Ms. Bennett sent her mother a text. “Had a really long convo with Gov today,” she wrote, outlining a two-hour conversation about numerous topics, including her career goals.

“He had a lot to say and was very emotional and serious but also asked a lot of questions,” she wrote, adding, “He got emotional. Not me.”

Ms. Bennett’s mother, Jessica, confirmed the text, and her feeling, at the time, that it was reassuring that the governor seemed to be taking on the role of a mentor.

Ms. Bennett said she was asked in late March to begin working in Albany as part of the state’s Covid-19 response effort. Two months later, in mid-May, the governor’s perception of their relationship seemingly began to change, she said.

On May 15, she said she arrived at the Capitol around 7 a.m. to find Mr. Cuomo already at work. Ms. Bennett was there to drop off some briefing papers, but Mr. Cuomo was chatty, asking about her love life and, in a gossipy way, whether she was involved with other members of the governor’s staff. She memorialized the exchange in several texts to another Cuomo staff member that The Times reviewed.

Ms. Bennett said she had mentioned a speech she was scheduled to give to Hamilton students about her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. She said she had been taken aback by Mr. Cuomo’s seeming fixation on that element of her life experience.

“The way he was repeating, ‘You were raped and abused and attacked and assaulted and betrayed,’ over and over again while looking me directly in the eyes was something out of a horror movie,” she wrote in a second text to her friend. “It was like he was testing me.”

In retrospect, Ms. Bennett said, she viewed the May 15 meeting “as the turning point in our relationship.”

“Anything before it I now see differently,” she said. “I now understand that as grooming.”

Three weeks later, Ms. Bennett said, she was summoned to Mr. Cuomo’s second-floor office and was asked to take dictation with another aide.

After the second aide left, Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Bennett continued their work. When they finished, she said, he asked her to turn off her recorder, and he began a winding conversation that touched on the Black Lives Matter protests and his daily news conferences.

But, Ms. Bennett said, the governor also started to ask questions about her personal life, including whether she was romantically involved, whether she was monogamous in her relationships and whether she had ever had sex with older men.

A series of text exchanges with a female friend from that afternoon, June 5, comported with Ms. Bennett’s recounting of the story this week. In the texts, she told her friend that she was shaken and upset by the episode and worried about even writing it down.

“Something just happened and I can’t even type it out or put it in a video,” Ms. Bennett wrote.

Ms. Bennett went on to say to her friend, who confirmed the texts’ content and validity but asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, that she and the governor had just spoken “about age differences in relationships.”

When her friend asked whether Mr. Cuomo had done anything physical to Ms. Bennett, she responded: “No but it was like the most explicit it could be.”

The next day, the women continued to discuss the episode via text. Ms. Bennett wrote that the governor had asked her whether she was having sex with other people “while in my recent relationships.”

In the interview, Ms. Bennett said Mr. Cuomo told her he was lonely, particularly since the end of his relationship with Ms. Lee in 2019. He said Ms. Lee was “out of the picture,” according to Ms. Bennett, adding that he referred to “wanting a girlfriend, preferably in the Albany area.”

Ms. Bennett, who had just turned 25 at the time, said Mr. Cuomo had also asked about her feelings about age differences in relationships, saying “age doesn’t matter,” according to a text she sent to her friend.

“He asked me if I believed if age made a difference in relationships and he also asked me in the same conversation if I had ever been with an older man,” Ms. Bennett reiterated in an interview with The Times.

At one juncture, Ms. Bennett said, the governor also noted that he felt “he’s fine with anyone above the age of 22,” a point that came up after they discussed her speech at Hamilton on what was her 25th birthday.

Asked if she felt Mr. Cuomo’s questions and comments were an entreaty to a sexual relationship, Ms. Bennett said: “That’s absolutely how it felt.”

Ms. Bennett said that she had felt deeply uncomfortable with Mr. Cuomo’s comments and had tried to shift the conversation into more neutral territory — something “not about my sex life,” she recalled — like intellectual theories about monogamy and power dynamics, and even a tattoo she was considering getting.

She said Mr. Cuomo had suggested that perhaps she should put the tattoo on her buttocks, so people would not see it when she wore a dress.

A friend of Ms. Bennett’s, a former Cuomo administration official, said he had spoken to her shortly after the June 5 episode. He confirmed the contours of her account, saying that she had made it clear to him that she believed the governor wanted to have sex with her.

Ms. Bennett told her parents about the encounter within days, her mother recalled, saying her daughter had made a special visit home to do so. “She was obviously upset,” Ms. Bennett’s mother said.

Ms. Bennett said she spoke to Mr. Cuomo’s chief of staff, Ms. DesRosiers, on June 10, five days after the episode.

She said the meeting, in Ms. DesRosiers’s office, had lasted about 10 minutes. Ms. Bennett said she had recounted her interaction with Mr. Cuomo and she recalled that Ms. DesRosiers had asked a few questions, been apologetic and asked to speak to her again in two days.

In a text message sent to a friend after the meeting, Ms. Bennett said Ms. DesRosiers had said: “How can we do this?,” asking whether she wanted to stay in the executive branch or move to another part of the state government.

When Ms. Bennett’s friend asked what that meant, Ms. Bennett explained that an outside job would still be with the administration, but “just not interacting with him.”

She also told her friend, in the same series of texts, that she trusted Ms. DesRosiers but was worried about Mr. Cuomo’s reaction: “I just said I didn’t want him to find out and get mad.”

Two days later, on June 12, Ms. DesRosiers told Ms. Bennett she would be transferred to a new position as a health policy adviser, still working in the executive branch, but in a different part of the Capitol. Her new job was announced in a June 17 email to Department of Health officials. “Welcome Charlotte!” it concluded.

Later that month, Ms. Bennett met with Ms. Mogul, a special counsel to the governor, and repeated her claims. She said, however, that she soon decided to “let this go and move on.”

In a statement on Saturday, Beth Garvey, another special counsel to the governor, said that “Ms. Bennett’s concerns were treated with sensitivity and respect and in accordance with applicable law and policy.” She characterized the transfer to a health policy position as fulfilling “a longstanding interest” of Ms. Bennett’s.

Of Ms. Bennett, Ms. Garvey said, “she was consulted regarding the resolution, and expressed satisfaction and appreciation for the way in which it was handled.” Barbara S. Jones, a former federal judge in Manhattan, will lead the outside review into the matter, Ms. Garvey said.

Ms. Bennett left state government last fall and she now lives and works in a neighboring state. She said that her anger about what had happened had continued to percolate and had led to her departure.

“His presence was suffocating,” she said. “I was thinking that I could recover and have distance but that is so naïve.”

She added that she had been committed to her job in the administration, even after her interactions with Mr. Cuomo, and had tried to “not have him ruin this for me.”

But, she said, “I learned that’s not how that works.”

Link

Quote:A report released last month by the Empire Center for Public Policy undermines claims by the New York State Department of Health that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-NY) controversial March 25 order requiring nursing homes in the state to admit coronavirus-positive residents had no impact on nursing home coronavirus death rates.

In that report, titled, “COVID-positive Admissions Were Correlated with Higher Death Rates in New York Nursing Homes,” the Albany, New York, based think tank concluded, “The admission of coronavirus-positive patients into New York nursing homes under March 25 guidance from the New York State Department of Health was associated with a statistically significant increase in resident deaths.”

Cuomo’s controversial March 25, 2020, guidance was in effect until May 10, 2020.

“Statewide, the findings imply that COVID-positive new admissions between late March and early May, which numbered 6,327, were associated with several hundred and possibly more than 1,000 additional resident deaths,” (emphasis added) the Empire Center study found .

Cuomo’s policy was particularly damaging in upstate New York nursing homes, the study noted:

The effect [of Cuomo’s March 25, 2020 guidance] was more pronounced upstate—possibly because the pandemic was less severe in that region at the time, so that even a single exposure would have had a larger impact on the level of risk.

Among nursing homes outside of New York City and its suburbs, each positive admission was associated with 0.62 additional deaths (MOE plus or minus 0.17), and any number of positive admissions was associated with 9.33 additional deaths per facility (MOE plus or minus 2.6).

Also in the upstate region, facilities that admitted at least one positive patient during this period accounted for 82 percent of coronavirus deaths among nursing home residents, even though they had only 32 percent of the residents.

“I do think that this policy [implemented on March 25, 2020 by the Cuomo administration] made things worse. It was a bad situation to begin with. It was going to take an awful lot of lives regardless,” Bill Hammond, co-author of the report and a Senior Fellow for Health Policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Wednesday.

“It sure seems to be politically motivated,” Hammond said of Gov. Cuomo’s efforts to withhold nursing home COVID-19 death data, an effort that was stymied on January 28 when New York Attorney General Letitia James dropped a bombshell report “which found Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration had ‘undercounted’ the number of coronavirus-related deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.”

Then in February, a judge ordered the New York State Department of Health to release nursing home data requested by the Empire Center for Public Policy in a Freedom of Information Act request.

“He’s defensive on this. He’s said a number of misleading things about the nature of the policy. He’s pretty egregiously misstated the data,” Hammond said of Cuomo’s responses.

Kaiser Health News, (KHN), the news arm of the Kaiser Family Foundation reported on Tuesday that Gov. Cuomo’s claims about the effects of his March 25, 2020 guidance have been highly misleading:

Cuomo frequently touts how well New York stacks up against other states in preventing nursing home covid deaths. In September, he said New York ranked 46th out of 50 states, a claim we examined and found to be Mostly False. A key problem is that until recently the New York totals didn’t include deaths of nursing home residents that occurred in hospitals.

State comparisons are tricky. But most other states, perhaps all of them, do include hospital deaths in their covid nursing home totals, said Priya Chidambaram, a senior policy analyst at KFF, the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

“New York’s decision to pull out the hospital-based deaths was not based on standard practice,” she said, noting that federal rules for reporting covid nursing home deaths require that states include off-site deaths in hospitals.

“That number was low as it was because they were not reporting the full count,” Hammond said of Cuomo’s September claim that KHN rated “mostly false.”

“It was pretty disingenuous. It undermined his credibility. They still have not backed off on their claim that New York State did a wonderful job handling COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. The other explanations they’ve given about why they withheld data make no sense,” he added.

Hammond also addressed the explosive admission by Melissa DeRosa, Secretary to Gov. Cuomo, made to Democratic lawmakers in early February, that the Cuomo administration withheld nursing home data to avoid scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice.

“The DeRosa explanation, I think it was a strategy to convince the Democratic state legislators on the call not to make more of a fuss,” Hammond concluded.

As a consequence of these revelations, public opinion appears to be turning against Cuomo’s credibility on this issue, as the Hill reported Monday:

More than seven in 10 voters say New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) was aware of the true number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes and concealed the figures, according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll.

Seventy-one percent of registered voters in the Feb. 24-26 survey said Cuomo was aware of how many residents had died in the state’s nursing homes during the pandemic but concealed the accurate figures. Twenty-nine percent said they didn’t think he was aware of the discrepancy.

The survey results follow allegations that Cuomo’s administration purposely reported a lower number of nursing home deaths. The accusations are now the subject of an investigation by the FBI and U.S. attorney in Brooklyn.

Breitbart News reported in May on Gov. Cuomo’s controversial decision to send nursing home residents sent to the hospital who tested positive for coronavirus back to their Long Term Care facilities:
The governors of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are under fire for controversial nursing home policy decisions that critics say fueled coronavirus deaths in those facilities.

On March 25, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) ordered nursing homes to accept patients who tested positive for COVID-19, as the New York Post reported:

An executive at the unnamed Queens nursing home says that the facility was coronavirus-free until Gov. Andrew Cuomo forced facilities in the state to accept coronavirus patients on March 25. . .

Though not all 50 states are currently providing complete data, a huge percentage of the 83,231 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, as of 5 p.m. eastern on Tuesday, May 12, were among residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

The Henry J. Kaiser Foundation has assembled nursing home/long-term care facility COVID-19 mortality data from the 33 states that report that data, and calculates that, as of May 7, nursing home and long term care facility residents accounted for 38 percent of the COVID-19 deaths in those states. The percentage of coronavirus deaths from nursing homes appears to be increasing as the pandemic drags on.

The Kaiser Family Foundation currently reports as of March 3 that 35 percent, or 171,813, of the estimated 515,899 deaths from COVID-19 since the pandemic began are from residents of long term care (LTC) facilities.

Link

Riker's Island is calling