New York legislator Naomi Rivera is the daughter of a corrupt Bronx Democrat machine politician. She also has a boyfriend named Tommy Torres whom she put on her payroll — and on her secret Facebook page, as Candice Giove of the New York Post reports:
Dozens of photos on Daniela’s page show Rivera with her hunky “babe” in various poses — locking lips, nuzzling his cheek and dirty dancing.
The legislator began posting romantic photos of Torres in 2009, when she created the page under “Daniela,” her middle name, and a year before she hired him or finalized her divorce from husband Antonio Rodriguez. Torres pulled down $18,123 in taxpayer-funded salary while working out of Rivera’s Morris Park district office for four months in 2010, records show.
But exactly what he did for his $1,100-a-week rate remains unclear — as does the question of how it was even possible for him to work for Rivera when he was already working full time as a gym teacher and high-school sports coach.
According to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office and Assembly records, Torres was listed as a “full-time” community-relations director for Rivera from Aug. 30, 2010, until Jan. 1, 2011.
At the same time, city Department of Education records indicate, he worked full time at Brooklyn’s PS 157 and made extra money coaching after class. In 2010, he earned a total of $89,550 from the DOE, records show.
So between what he was making as a public school teacher and what he got as a politician’s hired boy toy, Torres was collecting more than $100,000 a year from taxpayers. And yet when confronted with the evidence, his girlfriend/client Rivera asks the reporter to “respect my privacy,” as if having taxpayers pay a salary your boyfriend was a private transaction.
Has there ever been a campaign that went, literally overnight, from being about nothing to leaping neck-deep into the most treacherous, dangerous issue in American politics? Until [Friday] night, I thought Romney was running for president because he wanted to be president, full stop. Everything about him suggested personal ambition over vision — the endless flip-flops, the extreme caution on the trail, the negative-ad carpet-bombing of Gingrich and Santorum in the primaries. Then I wake up [Saturday] morning and find he’s made the boldest move on entitlement reform in modern U.S. history, all but gambling his candidacy on the public’s ability to not only see through Democratic Mediscare smears but to embrace a reform agenda. I don’t know how to process it. I respect Romney tremendously for it, but it just doesn’t compute. It’s like watching C-3PO lead the raid on the Death Star.
Some people are natural-born worry-warts, and that’s OK. You wouldn’t want everybody on your side to be boldly sanguine, cockeyed optimists expressing “irrational exuberance.” The critics and naysayers who serve as the voice of caution, pointing out the dangers and risks, are doing a service to the cause. The key in dealing with worry-warts is not to let yourself be paralyzed into inaction by such concerns.
Everybody’s worried — I’m worried, too — but leadership requires action, and fear is the enemy of action. Great victories cannot be won by avoiding risk. Now, everybody put on their game faces, and let’s go kick some butt.
MANASSAS, Virginia — Just left a Romney-Ryan rally in downtown Manassas. The crowd was huge, numbering in the thousands. Other reporters kept trying to make an estimate of the numbers, and all I could say was, “overflow.”
The crowd filled the pavillion and overflowed off in every direction. People stood in line for blocks in the hot August sun, and there were still people in line at the metal detectors when the rally started. Smitty was there with his video camera and I managed to get a few photos myself.
The next polls you see out of Virginia . . . Well, look, the “gender gap” will evaporate instantly now that Paul Ryan’s on the ticket. Trust me on this — chicks dig him. It was like Sinatra with a crowd of bobby soxers at the Paramount in 1944. Elvis at the Overton Park bandshell in Memphis in 1956. Total swoonsville. As I explained it on Twitter:
I’ll be back to update with actual news in a few minutes.
UPDATE: This video just in from Berlin:
UPDATE II: The headline at the Washington Examiner:
Click the headline to read the article by Mark Tapscott.
UPDATE III: Here’s a photo from the rally:
This was the first event where they distributed “Romney-Ryan” signs and the lady holding it is Prince William County resident Donna Widawski, who was a Secret Service agent during the Reagan presidency.
UPDATE IV: By now, I’m sure some of you are wondering, “Yeah, Stacy, but what did they actually say?” Details, details.
My notes show that both ruggedly handsome Republican candidates spoke without a teleprompter. Ryan said that Obama’s policies are “just not working,” that Obama wants a “government-centered society and a government-run economy.”
“Hope and change has now become attack and blame,” Ryan said of the president’s message. The tall blue-eyed GOP running mate then spoke of the American dream on the horizon, “the dream you have for yourself and your children,” and introduced the square-jawed presidential candidate, describing Mitt Romney as “the kind of person made for this moment.”
“Today was a good day for me, I gotta tell ya,” Romney said, flashing his magnetic smile and praising his young running mate for providing “intellectual leadership” for the GOP.
There were huge cheers when Romney promised to “get rid of ObamaCare,” and boos when he spoke of Obama’s claim that small business owners “didn’t build that.” Romney got another huge cheer by citing the Declaration of Independence’s statement that people are endowed with rights by their Creator, and when Romney said the rest of the famous preamble — the part about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — the crowd loudly recited it with him.
“We’re going to stand for America,” Romney said and drew more cheers when he shouted, “I love this country!”
The postlude music was Kid Rock’s “Born Free.” Kid Rock, a Michigan native, endorsed his fellow Michigan native Romney in February.
Is that enough details for you? Gee, so demanding . . .
The announcement in Norfolk, VA, with the USS Wisconsin in the background was a nice touch, as the Romney campaign tours this battleground state, going through the Obama-Biden ticket in proverbial fashion today:
I’m off to go cover the Manassas rally. If fortune smiles, I might link up with Stacy and try to work on a Downfall parody. I can foresee various tidbits to include, but, if you have any ideas, leave them in the comments.
This is predictable, and is the best argument for picking a conservative like Ryan: No matter whom Romney had chosen, the Democrats would have demonized the GOP running mate as a Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of Dick Cheney and Martin Bormann.
In that kind of situation, why not go bold?
So we’ll have a few days of “evil heartless Paul Ryan,” then the Democrats will go back to the “clueless rich guy Romney” message and then, if the Romney-Ryan ticket moves ahead of Obama in the polls, they’ll start playing the Mormon card with frenzied desperation.
“This is an emergency post. . . . Mitt Romney must choose Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential nominee, period.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 4, 2012
Who would have thunk it, huh? Friday night I went to bed early, and Ali Akbar kept calling to tell me the news, but my wife couldn’t get me to wake up. The headlines in the order they appeared at Memeorandum:
Everybody I talked to last Friday night at the Americans for Prosperity Summit — Aug. 3, at the terrace bar of the Washington Hilton — said it was going to be Tim Pawlenty.
That inspired a sort of panic: “Good Lord, not T-Paw!” When I heard that Marco Rubio had been eliminated due to “vetting” issues, I started an all-out push for Paul Ryan. One of the first people I spoke to was Suhail Khan of Americans for Tax Reform who told me, “Ryan vets. The worst thing they could come up with was that he worked as a bartender at Tortilla Coast when he first came to D.C.”
That was Saturday afternoon. In addition to pushing Ryan on Twitter, Ali was busy behind the scenes. After a long conversation with him on Tuesday, I reported the final three:
That post was linked by Jackie Wellfonder, Bob Belvedere, Andrew J. Patrick and others. By then, the conservative drumbeat for Ryan was getting loud enough that headlines were popping up left and right. When Alex Moe of NBC News reported that Ryan was planning a “vacation”? Yeah, that was a tea leaf. And by Thursday, the choice was clear:
When I finally woke up and called Ali about 3 a.m. today, he was driving to Norfolk to attend the rally where Mitt Romney will announce this morning that Paul Ryan will be the next vice president of the United States. Did the #GiveUsRyan hashtag have as much influence as, say, Bill Kristol pleading on Ryan’s behalf? No, but it definitely had an impact: Ali has friends on the Romney staff and, when the word started leaking out Friday, the Romney staffers told him, “Good work, Ali.”
Your Tweets — and you know who you are — definitely made a difference. As I explained Thursday, Romney’s people pay attention to their online metrics. Every Tweet to @MittRomney with #GiveUsRyan was a signal that Ryan was the grassroots consensus.
UPDATE: Instalanche! BTW, there are some retroactive hindsight claims by GOP “insiders” that Mitt picked Ryan before Aug. 4, but don’t believe it. That’s just the Establishment trying to deny credit to the conservative grassoots.
