Of course, Mamdani takes advantage of the existing law, living in rent-stabilized apartment, paying a mere $2,300 a month for a 1-bedroom in Queens.

But Andrew Cuomo is challenging him. "[M]ove out immediately," he wrote on X. "[G]ive your affordable housing back to an unhoused family who need it. Leaders must show moral clarity. Time to move out."

Where is Cuomo, in his "moral clarity," living these days? And would he be forefronting this issue if he had scored the nomination, as he'd expected? I think it's only because Mamdani got the nomination that Cuomo talking about rent-stabilization, which is a problem, but not one that could be solved by trying to guilt-trip the beneficiaries of it to move out of their apartments.

This reminds me of the time Hillary Clinton tried to shame Donald Trump out of using the tax advantages that are written into the law:

"But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them."

"In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes. Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide...."

Writes Jonathan Malesic, in "There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore" (NYT).

I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.

For example... 

It's October 5th, so that means 1 month until Election Day.

And maybe you think the race is really tight, almost exactly tied. But I'm looking at this...

Biden was up 6.0 points in Wisconsin in 2020 on October 5th, but he won the state with only a 0.63 margin. Clinton was up 5.5 in Wisconsin in 2016 on October 5th, but Trump won, with a 0.77 margin. How can Harris be looking at a win, when she's only up by 0.8? To believe the candidates are truly tied, you ought to see Harris up by something closer to 5 points.

Note that Harris needs Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump only needs to pick off one of those states. In all 3, Harris is far behind where Biden and Clinton were on October 5th. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 with a 0.72 margin. In 2020, Biden won it, but he had only a 1.17 margin, when the polling on October 5th showed him with a 6.6 point lead. As for Michigan, Biden won by 2.78 points, after showing a 5.8 lead on October 5th. And in 2016, Trump won Michigan — by 0.23 — after Clinton was up by 5.7 on October 5th.

Imagine if Harris were up by 5.7 in Michigan right now, 5.5 in Wisconsin, and 7.5 in Pennsylvania. The media would portray her as absolutely crushing Trump. That's what Clinton had on October 5th. Her supporters were very confident, calling those 3 states the "blue wall." And then Trump won them all.

Of course, Harris's advisers must see this. I presume that behind the scenes, there is panic, if not despair.

ADDED: Here's the headline at The Washington Post for you to read between the lines: "Harris is running a much bigger campaign than Trump. Will it matter? She spends three times as much, employs hundreds more staff and dominates the ad war. But the race is effectively tied."

"Yeah, well, Trump has that unvarnished element, and that's also something that's very appealing to working-class people...."

"He doesn't talk down to people.... He's very good at that.... Yeah, well and he's got that gift of spontaneity. You know, he doesn't craft his speeches, and of course that makes him a bit of a loose cannon, but people like that.... You might be deceiving us, but not in a practiced and calculating way. Right, you know, some of your personality flaws are leaking through, but but at least that's kind of like honest deception. I thought when when Trump won, I thought, well, they they preferred the spontaneous lies of Trump to the calculated lies of Hillary. You know, and that's very cynical but but there's still there's something about it that's accurate...."

Said Jordan Peterson, and it rings true to me. They're all going to lie, but which form of lying do you feel more inclined to trust?

"Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again."

That's the last line of a post I wrote on May 23, 2023 — "DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, 'normalcy': 'We must return normalcy to our communities.'"

That was back when DeSantis was endeavoring to replace Trump by being essentially Trump minus the weirdness. Yes, there was talk of weird-versus-normal just like there is today. I said:

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

"These guys are just weird. That's where they are.... The fascist depend on fear. The fascists depend on us going back, but we're not afraid of weird people. No, we we're a little bit creeped out, but we're not afraid."

Said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in audio played in the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The V.P.’s Search for a V.P."

The podcast host observes that the message — "Republicans are... just too weird for America" — "does seem like it's sticking a little bit."

Is it "sticking" or is it just the word that's getting said by people who say the same word at the same time. I'm thinking of those people who all used the word "selfless" when Biden accepted getting ousted.

Here's a whole NYT article on the emergence of "weird" as the word: "One Word Has Elevated Minnesota’s Governor to the Democrats’ V.P. Wish List/'These guys are just weird,' Gov. Tim Walz, a former schoolteacher, has said of the opposition."

"My baseline view of politics... is that political parties engage in something roughly resembling game-theory optimal behavior..."

"... and undertake reasonably rational strategies in an effort to win elections and fulfill their other objectives.... As compared to Republicans’ decision about what to do about Trump, I thought Democrats had more agency about Biden following his disastrous debate. Unlike Republicans in 2016, Democrats hadn’t even bothered to hold a competitive primary — if they had, Biden’s flaws might have been even evident earlier — so the will-of-the-voters argument was weak. And unlike Trump in October 2016 following the release of the 'Access Hollywood' tape — after which some Republicans called on him to drop out — Biden wasn’t even the Democratic nominee yet since the party convention hadn’t been held. And Biden has always been a loyal Democrat who got a huge boost from the party establishment in wrapping up the nomination in 2020 — not someone who gave his party the middle finger...."

Writes Nate Silver, noting his failure to predict that Trump would win in 2016 and his early prediction that Biden would withdraw, in "Biden and Democrats make the rational choice/They're probably still underdogs against Trump, but Biden dropping out improves their odds."

"The kind of folks that were Tea Party in 2010 are part of the MAGA movement in 2024. We owe all this to the Tea Party."

Said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University polisci professor, quoted in "How Did Haley’s South Carolina Become Trump Country? Ask the Tea Party. Veterans of the conservative, grass-roots movement see the state’s presidential primary as a fight between a 'crazy uncle' and a 'snowflake niece.' They’ve made their choice" (NYT).

Mr. Trump... made few gestures toward the libertarian economics championed by the Tea Party.... Instead, he had won attention from Tea Partiers by fanning the flames of conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and the construction of an Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

Some national Tea Party organizers had labored to keep such preoccupations on the fringes of the movement, but they remained persistent among its rank-and-file supporters and local activists.

“It was an ethnonationalist passion about a changing America,” said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University professor of government and sociology who has studied the Tea Party movement. “And that is something that Trump ended up picking up on.”...

"In 2016, I asked the Lord to give us the president who loves the country more than he loves himself."

"That would be the man that’s been persecuted by the Justice Department, by the media. We need to stand with him — you’ll gain a lot more votes if you stand with him."

Said "an older man with a small American flag sticking out of his shirt pocket," who posed the final question for Ron DeSantis "at a machine shop in Estherville, Iowa, last week," quoted in "Republican race remains stuck as Trump dominates heading into fall/Some campaigns don’t want to go after Trump for fear of alienating his supporters — but don’t see a path to beating him without attacking him at some point" (WaPo).

The WaPo article has over 5,000 comments. I haven't read them all, but I'd bet no one attempts to understand how Trump supporters feel. The most-liked comment is "If God answered that prayer with Trump, God is a psychopath."

"I recall finding it a little jarring, back in 2016, to walk the corridors of the Republican convention in Cleveland and not see more than handful of Republicans I recognized from years past."

"That’s because, when you win that many primaries as a hostile outsider, you physically replace the long-serving delegates who made up the base of the party with the alienated neophytes who supported you. In other words, Trump was not suddenly in charge of the party as it existed the year before; he actually created an entirely different party, beholden only to him. So, for Trump, pledging loyalty to the party is indistinguishable from pledging loyalty to himself...."

Writes Matt Bai, in "Trump won’t profess loyalty to his party. Neither will most Americans" (WaPo).

Bai ends with this prediction: "The age of pop-up movements and celebrity takeovers in our politics is likely just beginning, I’m afraid. And the time for loyalty oaths — to any party — is rapidly coming to an end."

"Biden With Higher Approval Than US Congress & Supreme Court."

"The latest Emerson College Polling national survey of US voters finds..."

....a majority disapprove of President Biden, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Biden has a 40% job approval, while 53% disapprove of the job he is doing as president. Since last month, Biden’s approval has increased two points. The US Congress has a 19% job approval, while 70% disapprove of the job they are doing. The Supreme Court has a 36% job approval; 54% disapprove.

That's a very nice way to deliver Biden's low approval rating. Everyone else is even less popular. 

And Democrats seem to be stuck with him:

I see that Senator Ben Sasse called out the "weirdos"... but who are the weirdos?

It sounds so childish, calling other people "weird." I'm writing this, still not knowing what the reference is. I decided to blog this based on the headline — "Sen. Ben Sasse calls out ‘weirdos’ dividing country in fiery Reagan Foundation speech" (Yahoo) — and beginning to read this quote: 

"This is a government of the weirdos, by the weirdos and for the weirdos,” Sasse said Thursday night in California. “Politicians who spend their days shouting in Congress so they can spend their nights shouting on cable, are peddling crack — mostly to the already addicted, but also with glittery hopes of finding a new angry octogenarian out there."

Octogenarian! What kind of ageist bullshit is this? And isn't he exemplifying the problem he's attempting to state — which seems to be something like mindlessly emoting about politics. 

"Trump... is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain..."

"... Alan Hale from 'Gilligan’s Island,' say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident.... His trademark double-eye squint evokes that group of beanie-hatted street-tough Munchkin kids; you expect him to kick gruffly at an imaginary stone. In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it. Once, Jack Benny, whose character was known for frugality and selfishness, got a huge laugh by glancing down at the baseball he was supposed to be first-pitching, pocketing it, and walking off the field. Trump, similarly, knows how well we know him from TV. He is who he is. So sue me, O.K.?"

Writes George Saunders in a New Yorker piece titled "Who are all these Trump supporters?"