October 23, 2025

The New York Times And The Approaching New York Mayoral Election

October 23, 2025/ Francis Menton

In the early days of this blog — say, prior to about 2020 — I made a regular sport of heaping scorn on the New York Times.
Every week or two I would take a particularly preposterous article and attempt to analyze whether it represented incomprehensible ignorance of the world versus intentional deception of the readership. Or maybe both! More recently, the Times has gotten so crazy, and the craziness so widely recognized, as rarely to justify such an effort on my part.
But then, sometimes I can’t stop myself. Take today’s Times.
As background, yesterday was the occasion of the last televised debate in the three-way mayoral race among Zohran Mamdani (Democrat), Andrew Cuomo (Independent) and Curtis Sliwa (Republican). Election Day is only 12 days away, and early voting starts in two days.

October 20, 2025

A Bright New Energy Dawn In The UK

October 20, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was just a couple of weeks ago — October 3 to be precise — that I reported that the long-running “net zero” political consensus in the UK was finally “crumbling.” In the intervening two-plus weeks, the slow crumbling has turned into a rapid collapse.
The biggest roadblock for opponents of a green energy transition in the UK has been that the Conservative Party, which should have been the natural home of opposition to net zero, has instead long (and foolishly) allied itself with the net zero cause. In June 2019, the Conservatives (under Prime Minister Theresa May) put through an ambitious amendment to enhance the net zero targets of the 2008 Climate Act, and then proceeded to a general election that December where they won a substantial majority of 365 seats (in a parliament of 650).
In subsequent years, a parliamentary faction in the House of Commons called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group struggled to get to about 50 or so Conservative members, who were far outnumbered by the opposing faction of the same party called the Conservative Environment Network. The UK voters had surely demonstrated their climate virtue.
But unfortunately things did not work out quite as they had anticipated.

October 17, 2025

October 17, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here in New York City, our mayoral election is less than 3 weeks away. Crazed “Democratic Socialist” candidate Zohran Mamdani continues to hold a commanding lead in the polls, with no signs of any tightening.
Among Mamdani’s announced policies are a substantial increase in the city income tax on “millionaires,” a multi-year rent freeze on rent-regulated apartments, having social workers instead of police respond to domestic violence calls, and having Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he shows up in town. Meanwhile, at both the City and State levels, destructive and impossible “climate” policies remain in place, like mandates to have 70% of electricity come from “renewables” by 2030 and to electrify most heat in large buildings by the same year.
You might think that panic would be starting to set in among the productive classes. But in fact that does not appear to be the case, at least as far as I can observe. Instead, most people are proceeding as if none of this is real. Are they right?

October 14, 2025

October 14, 2025/ Francis Menton

NYISO is the New York Independent System Operator — the not-for-profit entity created to manage New York State’s electrical grid. Their main job is assuring that there is sufficient electricity generated moment to moment to closely match customer demand. Neighboring states have multi-state ISOs (i.e., PJM and ISO-NE) to do the same job, but being New York, we have our own.
If there is any entity that ought to be loudly outspoken about New York’s ridiculous energy schemes, it is NYISO. After all, when generating most of our electricity from wind and sun proves not to work, as it will, and when the blackouts follow, as they will, NYISO stands to get a large share of the blame.
So where are they? The good news is that they are slowly waking up. The bad news is that even now they are not being nearly as outspoken or as loud as they should be.

October 11, 2025

October 11, 2025/ Francis Menton

The first nine months of the second Trump administration have seen extraordinary litigation efforts by opponents of the government seeking to block its initiatives of every sort.
This page at Lawfare Media tracks some 190 active cases challenging Trump administration actions; and I don’t think that that list of 190 is comprehensive. The cases cover subject matter areas ranging from spending reductions to employee terminations to migrant deportations to regulatory actions, among many others.
Those following these litigations, or some of them, have undoubtedly noticed a pattern whereby a District Court judge, usually in a blue state, enjoins the administration’s action, only to have that injunction stayed by a Court of Appeals or by the Supreme Court within a few days or weeks. This pattern has been repeated multiple times in areas including spending reductions and migrant deportations.
Although none of the cases has yet reached full merits review at the Supreme Court, nevertheless there is a growing sense of District Court judges going beyond their job of enforcing the law, and instead seeking to supplant legitimate executive authority with their own policy preferences.
The latest series of cases involves the efforts of President Trump to deploy units of the National Guard to Portland and Chicago to support the efforts of ICE in those cities to enforce the federal immigration laws.

October 08, 2025

October 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

A favorite subject of mine over the years has been the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA.
NYCHA operates hundreds of buildings housing some 500,000 people, in some 170,000 +/- apartments, mostly built from the 1950s to the 1970s. Organized on a pure socialist model of public ownership with heavily subsidized rents, NYCHA has followed the trajectory of all socialist schemes ever attempted, having gone from an excited beginning into a long, slow death spiral that has now been ongoing for at least two decades.
When NYCHA was building the buildings, everyone seems to have assumed that bricks and mortar just last forever; so nobody bothered to consider that at some point the capital investment would need to be renewed, or to plan for how that would be done.
By the 2010s, the buildings were turning 40, 50 and even 60 years old. In 2015 NYCHA announced that it had suddenly discovered a need for some $17 billion to fund urgently-needed repairs. Thereafter, the amounts claimed to be needed for such repairs escalated rapidly: by 2021 it was $32 billion; and by 2023 a new “audit” found the “need” to be $78 billion — about $460,000 per unit. And this is for “low income” housing. (For comparison, according to the most recent data from FRED, the median price of a single family house in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2025 was about $410,000.)
So what’s the plan now?