Vote While You Can 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯 💣

27 Days and Counting:  The government shutdown is about to get very real.  Open enrollment for Obamacare with its new inflated premiums begins on November 1, the same day that federal funding for SNAP (food stamps) runs out.  The Department of Transportation is warning that there will be more airport delays and shutdowns like the one experienced in Los Angeles on Sunday where flights were halted for two hours due to already stretched unpaid flight controllers calling in sick. Trump who has no plans to fill the SNAP gap, has been moving money around to pay military salaries but it’s not clear how much longer he’ll be able to do that which may be why a “secret” donor who turns out to be the ultra-right wing reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon, decided to donate $130 million to help pay those salaries. It’s inappropriate for a private individual to fund what’s supposed to be a non-political military but at the end of the day Mellon’s largesse won’t accomplish much since $130 million will only cover $100 per serviceman.  Over the weekend, Trump took to Truth Social to call for the DOJ to go after some more of his enemies.  This time the targeted group who he called “radical left lunatics,”  includes former AG Merrick Garland, former FBI head Christopher Wray, former Special Counsel Jack Smith, and former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. He insists that they need to be investigated and prosecuted for their “illegal and highly unethical behavior.” Projection or just the pot calling the kettle black, or lots of both? It’s also reported that signoff has been granted for a Florida Grand Jury to be impaneled in January to investigate the “grand conspiracy” against Trump, because every witch hunt accuser needs his own witch hunt?  In other disturbing news, the Department of Justice announced on Friday that it plans to send election monitors to polling sites in California and New Jersey for the redistricting and gubernatorial elections scheduled to take place on November 4th.  Those monitors aren’t needed, so it’s fair to assume that they are being sent in to intimidate voters and, even worse, as a dry run for the 2026 midterms. And, of course, the plan is to name the ballroom that will be replacing the East Wing after Trump.  How about the Orange Room or Trump’s Folly?

Election Day 2025 🗳️:  Here in New York the focus is on the mayoralty race but as indicated by Trump and his DOJ’s mobilization of election monitors, that’s not the only election that matters this cycle.  Californians are being asked to vote on Proposition 50, a redistricting proposition geared to add five more Democratic seats to counter the redistricting already done or in process by Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio. As one Republican politician in North Carolina said out loud, the sole purpose of his state’s redistricting is to keep Republicans in power and the strategy could work because at this point the Republicans are likely to have guaranteed themselves at least eight additional seats, more if their efforts to get Indiana and New Hampshire, two holdout states, to join in.  In a perfect world, voting maps would be agnostic grids, adapted to accommodate bodies of water and mountains but, sadly, they aren’t.  Given that Trump and his policies have grown increasingly unpopular, he’s figured out that the only chance he has of keeping himself as de facto Speaker of the House role, is by gerrymandering and voter intimidation which is why he’s pushing for his maps and gearing up to station troops near midterm polling places. November’s elections aren’t just about gerrymandering, in New Jersey and Virginia, voters are choosing Governors.  Both of the Democratic candidates are moderate women with military backgrounds who’ve served or in the case of NJ’s Mikie Sherrill are still serving in the House.  In contrast, both of the Republican candidates, NJ’s Jack Ciatterelli and Virginia’s Winsome Earle-Sears, are very Trumpy and in Earle-Sears case also extremely bizarre.  Governorships matter now more than ever, particularly if you value health care, the environment, and reproductive rights so don’t buy into the “swift boating” spin that the Republicans are pushing, particularly against New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill.

The Big 🍎:  Then there’s New York City where our election choice is between former/ousted Governor Andrew Cuomo, cat lover/eccentric/ Guardian Angel Curtis Sliwa and Zohran Mamdani, a woefully inexperienced socialist whose views on Israel and its right to exist particularly as a Jewish state are extreme to say the least, that last part especially telling given that he’s okay that there are several Islamic countries. We got here because the soon to be former Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, though not bad at his job got caught accepting bribes from Turkey and engaging in campaign finance offenses, because NYC’s Republican Party has given up on nominating real candidates, and because NYC really is an expensive place to live. Moreover, to vote in New York State primaries you have to be registered in a party, a practice that because it leaves independents on the sidelines tends to skew primary results to the extreme. My vote is going to Cuomo because despite his “warts” I think he’ll be more effective as a Mayor, particularly at pushing back at Trump the way that San Francisco Mayor David Lurie (NYC Congressman Dan Goldman’s first cousin, once removed) did last week when he enlisted help from his city’s tech leaders to persuade Trump to put his planned military invasion on hold but also because Mamdani scares me.  That fear isn’t because of his religion, I could care less about his ethnicity, but because anyone who can’t come out and convincingly say that the Hamas terrorists and their actions on October 7 are evil, especially when running to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews isn’t going to step up when it matters.  As we learned on 9.11 and during too many threats and a few deadly occurrences since then, here in New York City, that’s very important. Also, New York is a big city facing complex problems with financial constraints that will only get worse under the erratic Trump who will probably be around at least until 2028.  We need a competent and experienced leader rather than someone making pie in the sky, populist promises about rent and free services. Bernie Sanders as Senator may work for Vermont, but he wouldn’t be my choice for Mayor of New York. In any case, vote, because even if you disagree with me your vote matters and the way things are going, it’s not clear how many more opportunities we’ll have.