The first-round result of the New York City Dem primary certainly is welcome news. This is from the New York Times:
With NYC’s ranked choice system it’s still possible for Mamdani to lose the nomination. Since he fell short of 50 percent, there will be another round of vote counting. Next week the least-popular first choice winner will be eliminated, and the second-rank choice on those ballots will be counted as firsts. The rounds continue until somebody gets more than 50 percent, or until there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. But if I were Mamdani I’d be feeling pretty good about my chances now.
The Republican nominee is Curtis Sliwa, of “Guardian Angels” fame, who ran unopposed. I have a hard time believing he can win a general election in New York City. He’s too much like Trump. Just a right-wing blowhard.
But it’s especially satisfying that Cuomo got significant top Democratic Party endorsements and way more money and he still couldn’t close the deal.
See Democratic Leaders Tried to Crush Zohran Mamdani. They Should Have Been Taking Notes. by Rebecca Kirszner Katz at the New York Times. The Democratic Party continues “to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices,” she writes, in favor of the Same Old Centrism that has been losing for them since forever.
Since their losses last fall, Democrats have obsessed over how to reverse their declining fortunes. By and large, the consensus has been that we need candidates with a sharp economic argument that can connect with young people, men, voters of color and the working class.
In the New York City mayoral race we got a candidate who checked many of those boxes: Mr. Mamdani.
My media consulting firm made ads for Mr. Mamdani, so maybe I’m a bit biased. But whether you agree with him on the issues or not, it’s clear from early results — and Mr. Cuomo’s stunning concession Tuesday night — that he succeeded. The race may not be called until next week, and the general election isn’t until November, but Mr. Mamdani indisputably managed to leap from obscurity to front-runner in mere months. He did so by staying relentlessly on message and grounding that message in affordability. Ask an Andrew Cuomo voter for some of his top policy ideas, and he or she will probably struggle to name one. Ask a Mamdani voter, and I bet he or she could name a few: “Freeze the rent,” “free buses,” “a city you can afford.”
For that matter, if you asked New Yorkers what Cuomo accomplished in his ten bleeping years as governor, you’d mostly get mumbles and head scratches. And he had to resign in disgrace. Yet as soon as he announced he was running for mayor, the Dem establishment got in line with money and endorsements and by all accounts was “terrified” by the possibility of a Mamdani win. What is wrong with these people?
See also Nate Silver, Zohran delivered the Democratic establishment the thrashing it deserved.
There’s a legitimate worry that, if elected, Mamdani would fail to deliver on all his promises. Some of them will be a heavy lift, I think. But campaigning on nothing but empty pledges to “work for you” isn’t inspiring people that much.
In other news: The One Big Beautiful Bill is still stalled. Over the past few days the Senate parliamentarian has been taking lots of stuff out of it that failed to meet the “reconciliation” rules, which I believe I predicted. And which most of those Republican senators must have known would happen also.
Sarah Posner writes at Talking Points Memo,
Public support for the One Big Beautiful Bill is remarkably underwater by double digits in multiple polls, NBC reports. Similarly, bombing Iran is not popular, Greg Sargent explains at The New Republic. An analysis last week by the Pew Research Center found respondents had “mixed to negative views” on Trump’s immigration policies. The least popular actions, with the public disapproving by nine or more percentage points, were ICE raids at workplaces (-9%), building more detention facilities (-12%), ending Temporary Protected Status (-20%), suspending asylum applications (-21%), and deporting people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador (-24%).
This morning headlines that were not about the New York mayoral race were about the intelligence assessment that said Trump’s bombing set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. Naturally the administration is on the warpath to find out who leaked. And Trump is making The Usual Fool out of himself by insisting to anyone who will listen that his bombings were a brilliant military achievement comparable to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that “stopped the war.”
The Democratic Party continues “to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices,” she writes, in favor of the Same Old Centrism that has been losing for them since forever.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett drops bid for influential post on House oversight panel
The Dallas Democrat had said her party should respond more aggressively to the Trump administration and pitched herself as the best messenger for the job.
You know, in a way, I can feel a detached sorrow for the poor soul that is Trump. He drops more, and *BIGGER* ordnance than ANYONE EVER, and people are supposed to CHEER goddamnit! And now, they're saying it looks like it FAILED, probably due to PISS-POOR PLANNING. And, I mean, in his own mind, someone is cheating, because all military action is supposed to cover a President in glory.
And the more headlines come out about this, the worse the news is going to get, and yet, his sycophants will tell him he's doing great, and their lies are going to wear thinner and thinner.
But really, the sorrow is better felt for someone who didn't make his own bed, crap in it, and roll around in the resulting mess. Also, too, for someone who might someday face criminal consequences.
Thrilled for New York City and for the voters who put Mamdani over the top. I hope he's not a flash in the pan and can deliver. For a party that desperately needs a transfusion of young blood, this is great news.
Next up, Senator Alexandria Occasio Cortez. I'm reminded of how Indivisible would hold "retirement parties" in front of this or that politician's office whom they wanted to retire, complete with cake and balloons. Such a party is certainly in order for Chuck Schumer. A progressive can dream…
I only hope that the election of Mamdani (not yet final) indicates a shift in national voting patterns. What passes for "moderate" in the Democratic Party is actually just loyalty to the moneyed class. Democrats are screaming about the bill that will make tax cuts for the rich permanent at the expense of damn near everyone else. But who in the Democratic Party has the … ahem, moral fortitude to utter the words, "tax the rich."
I'm not sure if Mamdani can get the city fathers to carry out what he promised. Rent controls will be supported by everyone except property owners. The idea of city-owned grocery stores makes sense to me. The city can leverage major buying power that mom-n-pop stores can't access. It could seriously bring down prices, especially in poor areas where people are gouged.
One election does not make a trend but maybe voters will participate more in elections if/when the incumbant isn't guaranteed a return to his party-protected seat.
I'm gonna bore you with an appropriate story that relates to trying new ideas. Decades ago, I lived in Chapel Hill, NC. At that time, NC was at the bottom of the list, year after year, in the CAT tests, the scholastic achievement test. Except Chapel Hill not only led NC, they were among the top school districts in the nation. My kids went to elementary school there.
I asked a teacher WHY Chapel Hill excelled. Within his answer is a seed of wisom. "We come up with an idea how we might improve the curriculum or teaching methods. Then we devise a way of scoring how effective the change would be. We try it – if it works, we incorporate it. If it doesn't, we try something else."
Progressives shoud be the source of new ideas. They should also admit that not all new ideas will work. IF THEY DON'T, THAT'S NOT A FAILURE. It means you gave it an honest try and move on to a different method.
You do raise a good point. One of my favorite "wow, I'd have done it wrong," was acid rain. "Limit acid rain causing chemicals," was the obvious solution, but the Republicans pushed for cap and trade.
Someone would try to create pollution trapping mechanisms – some companies would try them, they'd fail, but someone, with all that money on the line, would succeed, and then, that person could make bank, and people who bought this (likely expensive) new technology had pollution credits to sell to help offset the cost.
Does that mean cap and trade is a godsend? No – the economics of the situation just worked in our favor, and, typically, they will, as long as there's a big enough financial prize for the company that engineers a real solution.
What it *did* mean, was, I had to step back and acknowledge my instincts could have been wrong.
Alas, nowadays, Republicans don't try to push ideas like "cap and trade". Unlike Democrats, which they demonize as "tax and spend," Republicans are just "spend and spend, and cut taxes."
Liberals have pulled off some good policy goals. For example,, "housing first!" is a success story. Quit demanding homeless people get off heroin before you help them keep the rain off their head. Once they have a for-real bed to sleep in, they can go to 12 Step and see about anti-addiction drugs. It just has better overall outcomes.
Alas, Republican ideas about the homeless are "find ways to make public benches impossible to sleep on, so homeless people don't clutter up the landscape."
New York must have sensed the shift of power to the rich and knows full well that they need a political buffer from the forces of greed. The old guard of the Democratic Party had to get a lesson from those who make things work and get things done in today's world where it takes several hours of work just to afford a sandwich. They see the gusher up design of too many Bs bill and know what the future holds for them. They probably do not realize that current measures are indicating about half of the economic growth rate of the Biden era and rising unemployment. Still, they know by now the social safety net is a tattered mess at best. They watch people fall though it on a daily basis. Worse yet they see those hanging onto its treads while the rich scissor though swaths of it to give themselves huge tax breaks. It is quite the horror for many facing a hot and ugly future.
New York is so expensive to live in that people making what would be a comfortably middle-class income just about anywhere else are reduced to renting crackerbox-size apartments in squalid apartment buildings. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $6,191. And the median price of a condo or co-op is between $1.37 million to $2.6 million, depending on the borough. And any place within commuting distance ain't all that much cheaper. For years builders have invested in luxury high-rise apartment buildings so they can sell the units to the super-rich. But the luxury apartments are often empty, while working people who really need a place to live are renting space in unfinished basements that flood during storms. I've known professional people in the publishing industry who could only afford places that, say, didn't have a kitchen, so they cooked on a hot plate and washed dishes in the bathtub. And that was 20 years ago; things have gotten worse since. Administration after administration has promised to address this, but nothing really substantive ever gets done.
It ocurrs to me that a bunch of the yahoos I've seem with long guns in ICE raids look like deputized mobsters. Not people with degrees in law enforcement. Democrats in Congress should demand raw information, names with education for all ICE new hires since January. If they ARE mostly MAGA goons, that's something OCE should own and Democrats should be screaming about.
In 2028, passing a law or issuing a Presidential Order that no one can work in law enforcement in the federal government without meeting a clearly defined academic threshold. Clean up law enforcement almost overnight of MAGA creeps.
The US Constitution provides that no one can be forced to labor without pay except a convicted felon. In 2028, for those goons who have carried out the illegal orders of the administration in racist raids, hate crimes, I propose they be assigned to labor gangs doing the work the people they deported were doing, harvesting crops, construction in high heat, etc. Congress can authorize those companies that profited from putting up prisons to become prison plantation owners who exist to squeeze every las ounce of profit out of slave workers until they are to sick and weak to be useful.
Migrants were/are doing that work for damn low pay to the benefit of US citizens. Let the MAGA bigots do it for free as part of their sentencing. And I'd like this proposal to be spread far and wide NOW, before Congress appropriates the money for a MAGA Gestapo. If you participate in hate crimes, even if you were told the raids were legal, you are risking your freedom when the regime falls.
The outcome is not set in stone, but it looks to me like Iran won the war.
Yes, they were gifted a dozen bunker busters that hit their marks and damaged to an unknown degree some nuclear facilities. I'm reading about an issue I raised a week ago – Iran must have had plans to evacuate the weapons-grade fuel to a secret location if they anticipated a strike. So they may be months getting things back in order for more enriched uranium production, having lost not an ounce of what they have.
The key points that make the exchange a victory for Iran: 1) No regime change and 2) No restrictions on future production with any inspections. Idiot Trump is so eager to have Tehran endorse him for bringing peace that he's not setting ANY conditions for a cessation of hostilities.
So eager is Trump to claim credit for solving all the problems of the Middle East that he's bullied Bibi into backing down. IMO, Netanyahu intended for the US to invade and suffer all the losses and costs of a ground war in Iran to guarantee an end to Iran's nuclear capability. Iran is promising Trump that they want to end hostilities (For the moment, they do.) But they want the US to hold back Israel from future strikes. Trump may have threatened to cut off Bibi's access ro US munitions if he does anything to disturb the appearance of a peace settlement. So no inspections, and Supreme Leader will promise Trump anything he wants to hear.
As long as Tehran strokes Trump's ego, the US will ease sanctions – US intelligence will suppress any reports of Tehran supplying terrorist organizations – reality is whatever picture Trump wants to paint. There's plenty of time for my opinion to be proven wrong but Tehran may have three years to stock up for whatever strikes they plan – the US troops in the Middle East will surely be on the list.