Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Trump Rising, Christie Sinking

The morning after the New York Police Department arrested pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University, the city’s mayor appeared satisfied. “This is not a department that was dealing with one production at a time,” Mayor Eric Adams said, flanked by top police officials, during a press conference on Wednesday. “You have to be a well-organized professional operation to deal with all of those encounters.” This was part and parcel for Adams, a former NYPD officer with a habit of calling the city’s law enforcement “my cops” and “my police department.“ But then came the first inklings of what has become Adams’ calling card as he justifies the crackdown by the NYPD on protests. “When I first started seeing the protest take place in the city, it just did not fit right,” he explained.

Former president Donald Trump will likely face additional sanctions for violating the gag order in his criminal case in New York City after a brutal contempt hearing Thursday morning. He had already been fined $9,000 on Tuesday for nine violations. Trump is facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for his role in a 2016 scheme to cover up an alleged extra-marital affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels.

It’s been more than five years since the Larimer County commissioners said no to Thornton burying miles of pipe in the county to transport water from the Cache la Poudre River. Now the northern Denver suburb is back in the same hearing room. And it has the same basic request: Let us move the water we own to our fast-growing and thirsty community. Larimer County’s board of commissioners will decide the fate of the 70-mile, half-billion-dollar infrastructure project as soon as Monday.

The Northglenn City Council on Wednesday unanimously voted to file an ethics complaint against state Sen. Faith Winter after she appeared at an April 3 community meeting in that city while apparently intoxicated. As outlined in a letter drafted by City Attorney Corey Hoffmann, the city alleges that Winter’s conduct at the meeting violated the Senate’s ethical standards.

Spoiled, cossetted pro-Hamas protestors apparently never learned to clean their rooms.

People don’t seem to mind the idea of former President Donald Trump acting as a dictator, he told Time magazine in an interview that drew swift rebuke from the Biden-Harris campaign. In a wide ranging interview given to the magazine — and shared by the 45th President Tuesday morning  via his Truth Social media platform — Trump was asked to explain comments he made to Fox News host Sean Hannity, in which the former president said he would become a dictator on his first day in office. “A lot of people like it,” Trump reportedly told Time. As might be expected, President Joe Biden’s reelection team was quick to note the revelations contained in the interview and respond. “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today – because of Donald Trump.