D'Esposito gets a shot in the arm

Daily Point

CD4 candidate works his GOP status

An upbeat announcement circulated in Atlantic Beach Village and other communities for a governmental event this week — a public training session in the emergency use of Narcan to treat opioid overdoses. The Narcan trainer is featured in a grinning official photo: Republican congressional candidate Anthony D’Esposito.

In seeing promotions for this and other events like it elsewhere in CD4, at least one local resident noted to The Point: “The trainer could easily have been someone from the Fire Department or an emergency management office.”

Instead, Town Hall insiders happened to back appearances, on the cusp of an election, of one of their own who just happens to be running against the town’s former Democratic supervisor, Laura Gillen. Best of all, nobody would dare question the civic worth of the activity itself — learning how to save a life.

Other photos included on the announcement — which was also featured on official websites such as the village’s — include those of the current supervisor, Don Clavin, and council member Melissa Miller.

The fuller context: As a town board incumbent, D’Esposito has insider advantages beyond the serendipitous exposure of his council job.

Not only is he related to several GOP members in good standing with town patronage jobs, D’Esposito, a former NYPD detective, in 2018 landed a $100,000 position as administrative assistant on the Nassau County Board of Elections — purportedly to oversee “polling security” and “cybersecurity” — while already earning $71,000 as a council member.

In opponent Gillen’s world, this dual D’Esposito role is nothing new. Four years ago, as supervisor, she demanded that he either refuse his new job or resign from the town board. He did neither, and said the election board job would entail a “90 percent” commitment.

Back then, Gillen said as quoted in Newsday: “It is wholly unethical and a clear conflict of interest for Councilman D’Esposito to continue serving in his elected capacity while he accepts a plum, six-figure patronage job from his political party … America’s largest township deserves and requires more than ‘10 percent’ of the councilman’s time.”

Obviously that’s still her position.

— Dan Janison @Danjanison

Talking Point

In a New York state of mind

President Joe Biden is putting an awful lot of time and attention into New York these days.

Less than two weeks before Election Day, Biden headed to Syracuse Thursday to join Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand to put a spotlight on Micron’s decision to build a computer chip manufacturing plant upstate and invest as much as $100 billion over two decades into the state and its manufacturing efforts. It’s Biden’s second trip to New York this month.

Then, on Sunday, first lady Jill Biden is heading to New York to stump for Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat running in CD3, and Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who is running for reelection in CD17.

And that’s not all. In an unusual move Wednesday, Biden reportedly called Rabbi David Twersky, an enormously influential figure in the Hasidic community in New York and beyond. Twersky is the chief rabbi of the Skverer Hasidic sect, and leads the religious community of New Square in Rockland County. New Square has been known to vote as a bloc, and Twersky has been courted in the past by everyone from former Vice President Al Gore to former Sen. Hillary Clinton, who won nearly unanimous support from the village in her Senate race.

Biden apparently urged Twersky to support Maloney in his reelection campaign against Republican Assemb. Mike Lawler. According to the Rockland Daily, Biden told Twersky he would have “an open door to my administration.”

But Republican gubernatorial candidate Rep. Lee Zeldin is doing some courting of his own. The Queens Jewish Alliance, a group of Central Queens Orthodox Jewish activists and rabbis, and the Far Rockaway Jewish Political Action Committee both endorsed Zeldin earlier this week. Zeldin has spent significant time campaigning among Orthodox groups and voicing his opposition to the state’s efforts to regulate and enforce education standards on Orthodox yeshivas.

— Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Pencil Point

Tricky business

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Reference Point

Old lies, new battles

The editorial appeared on Oct. 27, 1948, with a title that ranks among the most arresting in Newsday’s history:

“Bambi and the Cardinal.”

It immediately invites flights of imaginative fancy as to the topic which, as it turns out, was movie censorship and distortion around the world. And that, Newsday’s editorial board declared 74 years ago, “has hit a new low in stupidity.”

Russia had recently barred Disney’s “Bambi” from being shown in the country, which the board deemed “a loss” for the Russian people.

“The Reds dread the Disney influence that might give their people Americanized ideas of the animal world and convert ‘Soviet substance into an organically alien form.’ The next step in that direction would be something horrible, like converting the Russian bear, a ravenous beast, into something soft and amiable like the American teddy bear toy that was named for Theodore Roosevelt.”

Long Island’s Teddy Roosevelt.

The board also decried the way Russia had “distorted, deleted, and denied facts of history,” citing as examples the crediting of “great inventions” by Thomas Edison and others to “obscure” Russian inventors.

The board went on to castigate Hollywood for a production of “The Three Musketeers” that depicted the powerful and wily Cardinal Richelieu as the prime minister of France instead of a cardinal of the Catholic Church because of Hollywood “code” that prohibited showing “ministers of religion” as villains.

“Distortion of history has long been a Hollywood sin,” the board wrote. “This is the first time we have noticed it being done for code censorship reasons. As such it is an outrageous corruption of the truth. The precedent set by this deliberate Hollywood fraud is frightening at a time when America is one of the last bastions of freedom.”

While the piece was firmly rooted in the events of the day, it remains relevant to the events of these days.

Distortions of history abound, with the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election and Russian propaganda related to the war in Ukraine being only two of many here and abroad.

China routinely bans or edits films it considers unsuitable — from “Brokeback Mountain” to “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” to “Christopher Robin.” Saudi Arabia censors all sorts of media, from books and newspapers to films and television.

Various countries have blocked their citizens from accessing portions of the internet for political reasons. And the television series “The Crown” is just the latest production to draw criticism for its fictionalized portrayals of real events.

Perhaps the moral of this story is that when it comes to censorship and distortion, the notion of “a new low in stupidity” is actually very old.

— Michael Dobie @mwdobie, Amanda Fiscina-Wells @adfiscina