Rudy Giuliani has been tanking across the country, he has less delegates than Ron Paul and McCain has surged past him, even in New York. Rudy is staking everything on Florida. And that is why he must be crushed in the Sunshine state next week. This man must be stopped cold. I write a lot about him, I know, it may be a lot, but if people outside New York knew him like New Yorkers do, the less they like him. So I hear he is still in the running down there so I want to make sure he is toast in a week from now. He runs on how he turned New York City around right? Well take a look at how he performed as Mayor, and tell me if you want that from your President.
From The New York Times:
In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”
And that is just one story out of many. He figuratively bashed in the heads of anyone that crossed him. If you worked for an agency, even one that fights for AIDS patients and speak ill of the mayor, your funding could disappear overnight. Former mayors like Dinkins and Koch spoke out against his authoritarian ways and Rudy responded by trying to crush the careers of anyone who worked for them, people like Richard L. Murphy and John Beckman.
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