In 1999, Braves reliever John Rocker forever cemented his bonehead status with a notorious interview with Sports Illustrated’s Jeff Pearlman in which the former made his feelings on regarding New York City rather plain (“Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you’re [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids…I’m not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?” ).   Though Rocker’s long since flopped his way out of baseball and is in the midst of a second act as a wingnut pundit, his most recent entry for World Net Daily — Dino Costa’s preferred news source — reveals the Big Apple still occupies his thoughts.  Applauding “what Mayor Giuliani along with several others have done to clean up the city,”, Rocker takes aim at current Hizzoner Bill DeBlasio’s proposed scheme to provide municipal ID cards for undocumented New Yorkers, warning that no one has fond memories of “the city that smelled like a sewer and had the murder rate of an African civil war”.

New York has and always will be a trendsetting town the rest of the country often looks to. Not only is Mayor de Blasio seeking to impose his left-wing ideology on our nation’s largest city, but in doing so will be blatantly breaking federal law as he sends the Big Apple into a tail spin toward third-world mediocrity, while inadvertently setting the rest of the country up like a big fat road apple poised to receive the same fate.

This nation has evolved into the greatest country this planet has ever seen on the backs of hardworking immigrants who wanted to be here; they wanted to assimilate and were willing to sacrifice their time, effort and resources to make that happen. Individuals will always care more about something when they have skin in the game.

Bill de Blasio, in an attempt to exercise his left-wing ideology under the umbrella of pity and fairness, will do nothing more than remove the incentive for New York’s immigrants to put skin in that game and join the American brotherhood.