Anthony Weiner was lying low this morning after releasing a video announcing his last-minute entry into the race for mayor.

A crush of reporters was camped outside his Park Avenue South apartment for so long that campaign aides treated them to three boxes of pizza and made plans for individual interviews later in the day.

Some of Weiner’s rivals, meanwhile, wasted no time poking fun at the sexually-charged Twitter messages that led their newly-minted opponent to resign from Congress in 2011.

“If he can penetrate the field, I’ll be ready for him in November,” Independence Party candidate Adolfo Carrion declared in a statement.

Democratic Sal Albanese got a huge laugh at a Crain’s mayoral forum in midtown when he dismissed Weiner as just another career politician, except for his “additional quirks.”

The campaign of Bill Thompson — who is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of the suddenly expanded field — was celebrating.

“We couldn’t be happier to welcome Anthony into the race,” tweeted campaign manager Jonathan Prince.

Comptroller John Liu said Weiner’s personal foibles would be a legitimate topic for the campaign trail.

“I think any issue of open game, any issue is fair game,” Liu said. “That’s for the voters to decide.”

Many political professionals were left scratching their heads.

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The 50-year-old southern regional representative of Jacksonville’s New Black Panther Party for Self Defense was arrested Monday on charges of false imprisonment and resisting an officer without violence, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Mikhail Shareef Muhammad of North Myrtle Avenue remained held on $200,000 bail Wednesday, according to jail records.

Police were called just after 2 p.m. by a friend of Muhammad’s wife, Claudia Lizeth, who said he wasn’t willing to let her leave and was afraid for her life, according to the arrest report. Officers went to Muhammad’s home, where Lizeth mouthed, “Help me” to a sergeant.

Muhammad demanded to know where officers were taking his 41-year-old wife as they escorted her outside to question her. When he left the room to call his attorney, his wife told police she wanted to leave and was afraid of her husband, the report said.

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg cursed out the chief executive officer of a taxi company who won a court case against the city and pledged a post-mayoral revenge against the entire industry, the CEO and one witness said.

“[I will] destroy your [expletive] industry,” Mr. Bloomberg said to Taxi Club Management CEO Gene Freidman, The New York Post reported.

He made the comments during last Thursday’s game at Madison Square Garden during an impromptu meet at the 1879 Club, a witness told The Post. Mr. Friedman subsequently confirmed the exchange to The Post and added that Mr. Bloomberg also said that come January — when his mayoral term wraps — he would destroy “all you [expletive] guys.

“It was like Gene had kidnapped his child,” the witness told The Post. “He used the f-word twice.”

Rep. Mike McLachlan will live to fight another day.

Opponents of the Durango Democrat failed Tuesday to round up enough signatures to force him into a recall election.

Tuesday was the deadline for the campaign to submit at least 10,587 signatures on recall petitions from voters in McLachlan’s district. But the campaign got a little more than 8,500, said Dave Saleh, an organizer of the recall campaign.

Far from being disappointed, Saleh said people in his “disorganized” and “amateur” campaign are energized by the result, and they will either initiate another recall campaign or engage McLachlan on the campaign trail in 2014, when he’s up for re-election.

“I think everybody’s learned a lot in the process. By no means is this over. If McLachlan wants to pound his chest and claim victory, he’s in for a big surprise,” Saleh said.

McLachlan said he was pleased the campaign didn’t succeed, because it would have forced a divisive and expensive special election.

“I think what it does show is there is a minority of persons who were supporting the recall. They are loud, extremely vocal in their views, but not necessarily in significant numbers to make a difference,” McLachlan said.

Recall efforts began after McLachlan voted for a series of gun bills by fellow Democrats. He sponsored an amendment on a bill to a limit ammunition magazine sizes to raise the cap from 10 to 15 rounds. But opponents were incensed that he voted for the bill, no matter what the limit was.

Saleh said the issue was less about guns than that McLachlan lied on the campaign trail about his support for the Second Amendment.

McLachlan, though, thinks the blowup was about competing interpretations of the Second Amendment.

“I think the Second Amendment clearly allows for police-power regulation and safety regulation,” McLachlan said.

A federal judge could decide whether the bills McLachlan voted for violate the Constitution. County sheriffs and several others filed suit against the state in U.S. District Court last week, seeking to overturn the magazine limit and a bill to require background checks for private-party sales.

McLachlan was the first of five Democrats to be targeted for a recall campaign. Only one of them, Senate President John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, seems to be in any danger of having to face a recall election.

The Morse recall campaign already has exceeded the number of signatures it needs, and now petitioners are working on padding the total, Saleh said. There are also campaigns against Pueblo Sen. Angela Giron, Westminster Sen. Evie Hudak and Aurora Rep. Rhonda Fields.

Durango began as the epicenter for recall efforts across the state, but soon Saleh’s group and a statewide umbrella group called the Basic Freedom Defense Fund parted ways over who had the right to lead the campaign against McLachlan. The BFDF is now focused on Front Range recalls, and the anti-Morse campaign has hired professional signature-gatherers.

The McLachlan campaign was nearly exclusively a volunteer effort.

“We paid one college kid to gather 40 signatures,” Saleh said.

About five or six Durangoans worked intensely on the recall campaign, with a total of 30 or 40 intensely involved throughout McLachlan’s district, which stretches up to Gunnison. Altogether, about 100 people worked on the campaign, Saleh said. Organizers will regroup soon and decide whether they can use what they have learned to launch another recall petition, he said.

Brad Blake, chairman of the La Plata County Republican Central Committee, didn’t fault the recall effort’s ground game.

“I think there was a pretty good ground effort. I don’t know of anybody that went door to door, I couldn’t tell you if they did,” he said.

No one contacted the county Republican Party for its list of voters, Blake said.

The 8,500 signatures that the campaign gathered are unverified. Saleh said an audit of 500 signatures gathered by Pagosa Springs activists showed 90 percent of them were valid signatures from registered voters in McLachlan’s district. But he expects the total might have been lower in Durango.

Petition campaigns in Colorado typically see 30 percent to 50 percent of their signatures invalidated.

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This past Saturday, May 18th, 2013, approximately 50 gun rights activists attended a “Guns for Groceries” event to stage a demonstration of their own against the Wayne County (MI) government.

The Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano and the Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon teamed up with a local church (The New St. Paul Tabernacle Church of God in Christ), the Meijer’s grocery store chain, and the Goodman-Acker law firm to entice citizens to turn in their guns on a “no questions asked” basis.

All month long commercials were being ran over the airwaves seeking to convince Detroit residents that the cause of the violence in their town was caused by guns owned by them. Thus, if they wanted to reduce the amount of violent crime in Detroit, the “obvious” solution floated by the local county government was for everybody to sell their firearms for a $50 gift card to buy groceries at Meijer’s.

Two New York City men and a New Jersey man have been charged in the kidnapping of another man off a Queens street in broad daylight, holding him for over a month and demanding a $3 million ransom from his family in Ecuador, authorities said Wednesday.

Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Christian Acuna, 35, and Dennis Alves, 32, both of Queens, and Eduardo Moncayo, 38, of Lyndhurst, N.J., are facing charges of kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment. They face 25 years to life in prison if convicted.

An arraignment was scheduled for Wednesday evening. It wasn’t clear if they had a lawyer.

Authorities identified the man involved as Pedro Portugal, 52. They said he was approached on a Queens street on April 18 by Moncayo, who showed him what looked like a police badge, along with two other men. He was forced into a car, a mask was put over his face, and he was threatened with a knife, authorities said.

Portugal was taken to a warehouse in the Long Island City section of Queens, where he was kept for over a month, authorities said, during which time he was burned with acid and beaten, along with being threatened with mutilation and death. He allegedly was held captive with his hands bound and masked.

Some critics have pointed to New York State’s new gun control law as chilling in its scope and intent.

But new allegations coming from sheriffs may add to the outcry, as some authorities maintain that Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed local sheriffs to stop publicly speaking out against the SAFE Act, the gun-control law he signed in January.

One source, in fact, told a local outlet that the governor threatened sheriffs’ jobs if they don’t comply.

Law enforcement officials were reportedly summonsed to Albany last month, where they met with the governor about the contentious issue. It’s no secret that sheriffs have come out to publicly oppose the law, sharing their concerns with the public at large. But during the meeting at the capitol, Cuomo allegedly asked them to stop being so vocal.

“The governor was of the opinion that the sheriffs around the state should not be interjecting their personal opinions in reference to the law,” Chemung County Sheriff Christopher Moss told the Times Union.

He can’t believe the effrontery of a foreigner offering pungent commentary on a horrific crime shortly after it has occurred, nor the gall of this interloper to dare to tell a country of which she is not a citizen what gun-control laws they ought to have to prevent such crimes.

So she’s now banned from his show.

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WHY did it take this long?

The "religion of peace" strikes again.

That Oleg Volk Poster is years ago and still relevant. Just ask the Pink Pistols.

I wonder how he liked that "upside down view" of the gas station with his mistress?

And this is why they have been losing the national debate - they are stupid children, worthless assholes.

Eat shit, Sharpton!!!!

About fucking TIME!!!!!!

They have a mentally unstable obsession with the NRA which only became political in the early '70s in response to ...

Glad to see the Oathkeepers involved.

Mussolini didn't like dissent either.