"The rollout could’ve been better. Absolutely, I said the rollout has to be cleaned up and fixed."

Said Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "How New York’s Second-Home Tax Turned Into a Headache for Mamdani/The bumpy rollout of the tax created an opportunity for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s opponents to fight him in court and in the City Council" (NYT gift link).

Ms. Hochul, was concerned about what she saw as clumsy messaging by Mr. Mamdani as he introduced the esoteric tax to New Yorkers. She told the mayor that he needed to be clearer about how the tax would be administered and whom it would affect, according to two people familiar with their talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The governor had taken note of how the mayor, a democratic socialist who campaigned on “taxing the rich,” was talking about the policy. In a widely seen video, for instance, the mayor had decided to highlight an especially expensive second home owned by a hedge fund manager, Kenneth C. Griffin.

“There’s a better way to do it,” said, Ms. Hochul a pro-business moderate. “Point to Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes” rather than someone who invests in the city, she added.

Here's that widely seen video, which, exclaiming "Oh, no!," I impulsively clicked off at the 5-second mark:

I did finally watch the whole minute. From the transcript: "This pied-a-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live here.... This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers." 

What's "fundamentally unfair"? It's a child's reasoning: If someone has something that he's not using, it should be mine. 

The NYT calls the new tax "esoteric." I wonder what other adjectives it considered. Is it esoteric because it's hard for the general public to understand, or is it esoteric because it only applies to a discrete group of people?

"I think that these things are going to create a radical spectacle and exuberance for socialist policies that’s going to kind of light a fire for socialism around the country — unfortunately."

David Friedberg explains why Mamdani’s government grocery stores will actually succeed in the short term, and why that’s the entire point.

They don’t need them to work long-term.
They just need the spectacle in time for 2028.

“I think that these things are going to create a… pic.twitter.com/vp0U5iX4vL

— jay plemons (@jayplemons) July 31, 2026

"Every time we find out something new about GLP-1, it's a positive.... They're now saying that it reduces the likelihood of stage one cancer going to metastatic cancer..."

"... by 50%. Every time we keep waiting for another shoe to drop, we find out, 'Oh, it's actually a good thing.' Everyone at this table is going to be on a GLP-1 within 24 months....  I think when you look at the studies around the upside versus the downside here, it's the most transformative technology in the world."

Says Scott Galloway, ticking off Bill Maher:

Bill Maher shuts down Scott Galloway on the spot after he says “everyone should be” on a GLP-1 “within 24 months.”

GALLOWAY: “Every time we find out something new about GLP-1, it's a positive. They're now saying that it reduces the likelihood of stage one cancer going to… pic.twitter.com/2KUMXrkciF

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) August 1, 2026

AND: Speaking of Scott Galloway...

Scott Galloway is upset about being 'doxed' after he supported Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax:

"He's taken a legitimate source of tax revenue, and he's turning it into a wanted poster."

"What is the upside here? Why is he doing this?"

Incredible. pic.twitter.com/9Yrb9lw4An

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) August 1, 2026

"New York City bodega owners came to City Hall last week for a 'roundtable discussion' at the invitation of Julie Su, deputy mayor for economic justice..."

"... only to get barraged with 'intrusive' questions about their businesses, a source close to the situation said.... 'What items are sold the most at your stores?'... 'Where is your profit margin the greatest?' sources said. The bodega reps declined to answer.... 'They wanted us to share proprietary information with them but they don’t answer our questions and that’s why there is distrust,' said a bodega rep who did not want to be identified.... Mamdani’s plan to subsidize the grocery stores with taxpayer funds so they can offer rock-bottom prices on essential items threatens grocers who operate on 2% to 3% profit margins.... 'What is the main thing people come into your store for? What else do they buy while there?' 'It seems like a clumsy, one-sided fishing expedition,' a food policy expert who did not want to be identified told The Post.

From "Mamdani officials scramble to ease concerns about public supermarkets — but local business leaders aren’t buying it" (NY Post).

Su insisted that the city "wanted to understand is whether there are key products bodegas sell and rely on that we should not sell." And "That’s how serious we are about not undercutting them." The whole idea is about undercutting them. Now, the city seems to be trying to assure them that they won't undercut them too much. But the bodega owners don't trust the city. If there's a "2% to 3% profit margin" generally, but the city wants to know "Where is your profit margin the greatest?," it looks like the city wants its own operation to take advantage of the most profitable items. 

"Schlossberg’s Defeat Dampens Dream of a Renewed Camelot."

That's one of the NYT's front-page headlines about yesterday's primaries. Dream of a Renewed Camelot... Who was still dreaming that dream? 

Here's The Washington Post's front-page coverage of the action in yesterday's primaries:

I'll have to search beyond the front page to see if there's a tear shed for Schlossberg.

Ah, here: "A Kennedy scion loses in a crowded, pricey New York City congressional primary/The Kennedy dynasty won’t be returning to Congress next year." They don't trust readers to recognize the name Schlossberg. 

From the NYT article: "Once considered a favorite, Mr. Schlossberg, 33, landed in third place in a Democratic primary in one of the nation’s most liberal districts, now held by Representative Jerrold Nadler, the veteran Democrat, who is retiring. Micah Lasher, an assemblyman who had been endorsed by Mr. Nadler, won the primary.... Schlossberg poured at least $1 million of his own into the campaign, and had tried to press his case in its closing weeks, including in a lengthy interview with The New Yorker.... “I’m running because I want to pass laws,” he told David Remnick, the magazine’s editor. “I want to pass laws that help the people in this district and in our country.”

Pass laws that help the people... Ever since Ted Kennedy's famous screwup, everyone running for office has known that the one thing you've got to have ready to go is an answer to the question why are you running. And that's his answer, a child's answer: I want to pass laws that help the people.

"[T]he dominant mode in Democratic politics right now. It’s not the rebellion or radicalism manifest in, say..."

"Hasan Piker’s Twitch-streamer Marxism or Zohran Mamdani’s telegenic democratic socialism. Notable as those tendencies may be, the Democrats’ fundamental condition is a late-Trumpian stasis — in which the president’s stark unpopularity encourages his opponents to imagine that they can keep everything basically as it was in the Biden era, with the same broad priorities and deference to activists and interest groups, and float back to power automatically. The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of this stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "Slouching Toward Kamala Harris" (NYT).

Harris is ahead in the polls for the Democratic nomination in 2028. The Real Clear Politics average has her up by 9.3 percentage points. The most recent poll, from Harvard-Harris — has her up by 28 percentage points. Here's her closest competition:

This is about as bad as I’ve seen him. pic.twitter.com/xksNZfG0BE

— Kira (@Kiradavis) May 3, 2026

What does an arch mean? If Trump, fascism. If Mamdani, warmth and friendliness.

There was this, April 10th, in The Washington Post:

Today, we've got this in The New York Times:

"Mamdani himself put out a statement Sunday condemning 'white supremacist Jack Lang' for organizing a protest outside Gracie Mansion 'rooted in bigotry and racism'..."

"... that has 'no place in New York City.' 'What followed was even more disturbing,' he said. 'Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.' Critics slammed the mayor for failing to identify who was responsible for bringing bombs to a protest. 'This is insane… Mamdani calls out first, and by name, a "white supremacist" for protesting,' said Geiger Capital on X. 'He then leaves out the 2 Muslim men, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, who were arrested by NYPD after they yelled 'Allahu Akbar!' and threw a homemade bomb into the crowd."

From "Manhattan BP Brad Hoylman-Sigal ripped after he blamed wrong protesters for hurling bombs outside Gracie Mansion" (NY Post).

Things I'm not talking about.

1. Susan Rice.

2. Mamdani's snow shovelers and the 2-ID requirement. 

3. Trump's re-tariffing gimmick.

4. Our war with Iran.

5. Photograph of Prince Andrew.

I'm not judging these stories to be inconsequential. I just have nothing to add, nothing that fits my approach to blogging anyway. I like them as items to list. The list signifies that I feel some pressure. They're nagging at me. But I'm resisting. Feel free to talk about them in the comments. They're actually all good topics. I'm just not feeling the value of my own yammering on them. Maybe you think I've already said too much, what with that one word.

"Gimmick" is "Originally U.S. slang," according to the OED, which defines it like this: "A gadget; spec. a contrivance for dishonestly regulating a gambling game, or an article used in a conjuring trick; now usually a tricky or ingenious device, gadget, idea, etc., esp. one adopted for the purpose of attracting attention or publicity."

The oldest appearance of the word is an entry in the 1926 "Wise-crack Dictionary": "Gimmick, device used for making a fair game crooked." 

"Cow Licking."

I've been a huge admirer of Georgia O'Keeffe since I first saw the Life Magazine article "Georgia O'Keeffe, on the Ghost Ranch." That was 1968, and I was 17. I've looked at so many of her pictures, in person and in books, but I had never seen "Cow Licking" until this morning. 

I love it. Don't you? But let me tell you how I happened to run across it this morning. It was 5:43 a.m., and I'd been downstairs in breakfast-and-blog mode for a while when I got this text from upstairs:

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

I know what that is. It's Meade, sending me a Bob Dylan lyric and boldfacing the part about a small dog licking the face of whoever "you" is. Who is this person whose only teachers — law professors — are Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the jungle, and the sea? He rode in on a white horse, he's buff and handsome, and now he's lolling about in a field with a small dog licking his face. Maybe you remember being told that this song, "Jokerman," is about Jesus.

I don't know about that. I see that Dylan said it was something "mystical" that came upon him down there in the Caribbean — something "inspired by these spirits they call jumbis."

I didn't get far into that because Meade texted "What is that famous painting?" And he didn't mean that Dürer painting that is the first image in the "Jokerman" video, that image that just about everyone thinks is Jesus but is the artist himself, Albrecht Dürer:

Meade was thinking about something else: "Black man, lying supine on desert sand with stars above and a small dog."

I immediately thought of Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy":

Yes, that's not a dog. It made me think of this scene in a Chaplin movie I'd watched upstairs last night while Meade was watching basketball downstairs:

Texting this morning from upstairs, Meade thought it might be a different Rousseau painting. I found "La Noce," which has a "comically oversized and awkward" dog that, we're told, takes "the eye deep into the composition" and asserts the artist's "position as the master of spatial paradox."

I text-typo'd "that’s the only rousseau with a god that i found."

I asked Grok, "What's that famous painting with a dog licking a person's face." And then "Is there ANY famous painting showing any kind of tongue-licking?" and "Dog or person or other animal — now I'm just looking for licking. I'm thinking licking isn't seen as something worth painting — too in-the-moment and active to be frozen into a still image. But maybe somebody did it. All I can think of is that Rolling Stones logo."

And that's how I found "Cow Licking."

UNANSWERED QUESTION: Why did Meade send me that Dylan lyric and boldface "with a small dog licking your face"? I think it had something to do with the rumor that Mayor Mamdani has a secret plan to run all the dogs out of New York City.

Juiciest dog rumor since "They're eating the dogs."

"School called and asked why one of my children have not logged on. I explained that me and my wife both work and suggested that maybe Mayor Mandummy could come by the house to help the kids get connected."

From the comments section to the NY Post article "Remote learning is not for the weak — here’s how a day of it went thanks to Mamdani’s no-snow day verdict."

And here's the most popular comment:

I looked at my grandkids this morning and said - "OK, here is the deal. Get dressed for the snow, as we are hitting the park, and NO computers today or Tue. We go back to school on WED.......but today and tomorrow is fun, french fries, milk shakes, pancakes - with lots of nutella"

They screamed, and we had a blast.

They ran and ran and ran around in the snow and they were so adorable.

"New York City Could Get a Foot of Snow. Mamdani Knows It’s a Test."

The NYT puts its finger on why this foot of snow is such a big deal. It's hitting political hot spots.

Subheadline: "Plenty of New York City mayors have faced blowback over their handling of blizzards. In several appearances this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has sought to show he is prepared."

I guess his opponents are hoping for a snow nightmare.

As for Mamdani, he's getting out in front of Snowmageddon and endeavoring to seem lovable:

Stay warm, stay safe New York. pic.twitter.com/aFbDsOkzLn

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) January 18, 2026

"[H]is policies ranged from ripping up the streets and replacing car transport with bicycles, to putting dishonest drug dealers in the stocks because 'no drug worth taking should be sold for money'..."

"...to disarming police because street violence was usually down to 'some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy.' He also cut his hair off so he could refer to his Democratic rival in debates as 'my long-haired opponent.' This might have seemed a satire of politics, populism as a joke, but Thompson was very serious. 'There is common sense in the apparent madness of my campaign,' he told an audience ahead of polling day. 'I am not running for sheriff in the traditional sense, but to help get hold of our destiny and begin controlling development.' He wouldn’t try to force changes, but encourage referendums and create a legal advisory board of lawyers to sit with select citizens to consult with the sheriff’s department. 'We either have a participating democracy or a police state.'... To Thompson, a 'freak' was 'not a beast roaming the streets chewing drugs, but someone who is spiritually disenfranchised, who has not wanted to participate in government.'... Thompson’s individualism... feels at odds with the community spirit and citizen participation required to realise the ascendancy of the collective good.... 'Unfortunately,' Thompson said in his 1970 concession speech, 'I proved what I set out to prove… that the American Dream really is fucked.'..."

From "Hunter S Thompson’s freaks have overrun America/The pioneer of gonzo chronicled his people’s wild descent – and saw what his country has now become" by. Barney Horner (New Statesman).

The boldface is my nudging to tell you that I see what maybe you see: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

Mamdani gives clear instructions on how to deal with ICE.

Does he get anything wrong?

"Now the senator came down here/Showing ev’ryone his gun/Handing out free tickets/To the wedding of his son."

"An’ me, I nearly got busted/An’ wouldn’t it be my luck/To get caught without a ticket/And be discovered beneath a truck...."

Sang Bob Dylan, in his most-Bob-Dylan song, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

I'm just trying to read The New York Times* and the headline is "Handing Out Free Tickets, Mamdani Says Theater Should Not Be 'a Luxury.'"

What's with these politicians handing out free tickets? I'm suspicious, but maybe the mayor's just flaky, pie-in-the-sky.

“The shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama — these are moments that every New Yorker deserves,” Mamdani said later, explaining the initiative during a news conference at one of the festival’s venues, Brooklyn College’s Leonard and Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts.

That quote is wild. What man of the people would say "the eager debrief after a musical"? He seems like more of a poet... an abstruse poet. 

There was once a country ruled by a poet. It was Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia. 

_________________________________

* If you're with me in Bob Dylandom, you just thought "shoot a few holes, blow their minds." But I don't like seeing those words today, in the shadow of the killing of Renee Good, and there they are along with "showing ev’ryone his gun" and "discovered beneath a truck" — truck ≈ SUV.

"I think the reality is that for centuries we really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good and..."

"... in transitioning into treating it as a collective good and towards the model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently, and it will mean that families — especially white families, but some POC families as well — are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

NYC Mayor Mamdani's Tenant Director, Cea Weaver:

"We'll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good. Whites especially will be impacted." pic.twitter.com/RZSdCs8oEa

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 5, 2026

See also "Zohran Mamdani’s new NYC tenant advocate called to ‘seize private property,’ blasted home ownership as ‘white supremacy’" (NY Post). Excerpt: "Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants, made the statements and urged her followers to elect more communists in several lecturing posts on her now-deleted X account that were unearthed by internet sleuths. 'Seize private property!' she said on June 13, 2018.... 'Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,' she said [in August 2019]."

"Collectivism" — he spoke the word, as if a wedding vow.

Mamdani said it, he highlighted it: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism." He promised it. He attributed warmth to it.

The link goes to my post yesterday with that quote as the title. In the comments, I wrote: "He's saying the words that have been left unsaid in the past. In that way, he's like Trump."

Who are the other American politicians who might have said "collectivism" — in a positive way, not as a way of criticizing somebody else? Bernie Sanders, who swore in Mamdani, doesn't use that word.

This blog has a 22-year archive, so I did a search to see how "collectivism" has figured into our discourse. I found 14 items, and I don't think any of them count as a positive use of the word in the style of Zoran Mamdami. 

Here are all the past occurrences of "collectivism" on this blog, in chronological order:

"We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani: "We'll replace rugged individualism with collectivism" pic.twitter.com/dhUqGm2X26

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 1, 2026

He really said that. It's not AI. I checked. From the transcript of the inaugural speech:

"The most new York couple is: very sweet man that everyone loves with a wife way out of his league that he’s obsessed with."

That's the top rated comment on this TikTok about Rama Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani:

Trump and Mamdani, together at last.

Question 1 (to Trump): You called him a communist! Question 2 (to Mamdani): You called him a fascist!

Trump: "And I've been called much worse than a despot, so it's not — it's not that insulting."

Later, Mamdani is pressured again: "Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?" And Trump breaks in: "That's okay, you can just say it. It's easier than explaining."

Trump and Mamdani displayed their unity: They're both practical and they both want what's good for New York. The press kept confronting them with the way they've insulted each other, but neither man took the bait. They were stunningly relaxed and friendly and entirely able to slough off each other's political remarks.