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After vow to restore ‘optimism’ to NY ‘first thing tomorrow’ Gov Hochul jets off to Puerto Rico!

November 10, 2022 | | Print Article

During one of her campaign stops on Election Day Tuesday, incumbent New York Gov. Kathy Hochul promised to restore “optimism” in her state “first thing tomorrow morning.”

“This city is back, and I want to lead this state into the next four years and possibly beyond with a sense of optimism we have not had here in a long time. That will start first thing tomorrow morning,” she said, according to the New York Post.

But it appears she lied.

“[A]s tomorrow became today, the newly elected governor — unlike many past gubernatorial and mayoral winners — had no public schedule on Wednesday. In fact, she was preparing for a trip out of New York altogether — to the SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico,” the Post reported Wednesday.

In fairness, SOMOS is “a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)3 organization committed to addressing the needs of the Hispanic population of New York State,” and so it’s not like her trip to Puerto Rico has nothing to do with her constituents.

But on the other hand, the conference is nothing more than “a five-day sun-soaked getaway for Albany lawmakers and lobbyists to maneuver and get facetime with one another at conferences, parties and the beach,” according to the Post.

She was scheduled to fly out Thursday, not Wednesday, regardless.

The point is she absolutely did nothing noteworthy on Wednesday. And as far as one can tell, it’s not like she has anything substantive planned for Thursday and Friday.

Something substantive like, for example, moving to revoke the state’s disastrous, widely panned no cash bail law for alleged minor offenses.

Indeed, the governor’s reelection comes only a week or so after a Buffalo mother blamed the murder of her 30-year-old daughter by her estranged husband on Hochul.

“She should be charged for the crime. She’s also responsible for the crime,” Tammy Hudson, the mother of the late Keaira Bennefield, told the Post the first week of November, referencing the governor.

The fact is that Keaira’s killer, Adam Bennefield, shouldn’t have been out on the streets when he murdered but was free nevertheless because of the no cash bail law that Hochul has stubbornly refused to nix.

Flashback to Sept. 28th, when Keaira posted a horrifying 8-minute video to Facebook that showed her being brutally beaten by Adam.

“She had set up two surveillance cameras from opposite angles in her Cheektowaga apartment. The video shows her walking away from the front door, and then a man tackling her to the floor. He punched her in the stomach and then repeatedly hit, slapped and kicked her as she writhed on the floor,” according to The Buffalo News.

“The video shows him holding her down at times and then standing over her, as he appeared to take cell phone photos of her, the flash of the camera flickering against his shirt. He paced around, and then cornered her against a door and pulled at her pants,” The Buffalo News reported mid-last month.

A week after she posted the video, Adam was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors. But thanks to New York’s no-cash bail law, he was immediately released.

The Buffalo News notes specifically that “[b]ecause of the level of the charge, under state law, Adam Bennefield didn’t have to post bail to be released.”

The judge also wasn’t allowed to factor in his past criminal history: “He was convicted of stealing a car and using it to cut off an ex-girlfriend’s vehicle. He then forced the ex-girlfriend and her friend to drive at gunpoint to Grand Island as police chased them. While awaiting trial, he escaped from the jail. He served 15 years in prison.”

The day after he was released for beating Keaira, Adam tracked her down and killed her.

Yet in response to complaints from Keaira’s mother, Hochul refused to accept any responsibility and, instead, blamed the “system” that she presides over.

“The system absolutely failed her. The system has to work. Orders of protection have to be granted, transition homes have to be available and we have to make sure that judges and prosecutors charge appropriately,” she reportedly said at a rally, not this Wednesday but the one before.

But the “system” is working exactly how she and other Democrat lawmakers — namely her predecessor, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — have engineered it to work.

Sadly, she’s either too stubborn or too busy doing nothing to fix it …

Vivek Saxena
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