Dear Commons Community

Barack Obama had a simple elegant message for America as we celebrated July 4th. 

“Independence Day is a reminder that America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ America is owned by no one. It belongs to all citizens. And at this moment in history—when core democratic principles seem to be continuously under attack, when too many people around the world have become cynical and disengaged—now is precisely the time to ask ourselves tough questions about how we can build our democracies and make them work in meaningful and practical ways for ordinary people.”

Amen!

Tony

Jessica Tarlov

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News host Jessica Tarlov said the “big, beautiful bill” might be anything but beautiful for moderate Republicans during next year’s midterm elections who were jubilant  as they marked the passage of Trump’s  signature “big, beautiful bill.”

She warned said that some of them might not be celebrating next year and could face unexpectedly early retirement.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

Polls show the bill ― which adds trillions to the debt, cuts taxes for the wealthy, and slashes Medicaid ― is deeply unpopular with the American public.

With midterm elections looming in 2026, Tarlov ― a rotating co-host of “The Five” ― wrote on X that moderate Republicans in particular will be at risk next year:

The bill is so unpopular that CNN data chief Harry Enten earlier this week showed it was underwater in five recent polls by between 19 and 29 percentage points.

“The American public at this particular point hate, hate, hate the ‘big, beautiful bill,’” he said. “As far as they’re concerned, it’s not a ‘big, beautiful bill,’ it’s a big, bad bill.”

Democrats also believe that Republicans who support the bill will pay the price at the polls next year.

“There are House Republicans now, this morning, who are about to sign their political obituary with this vote,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) told Reuters before the final votes were cast. “They are literally walking the plank for Donald Trump.”

The party that wins the White House often suffers in the midterm elections that follow. Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews expects that to be the case next year, as well, and said the passage of the bill won’t make things any easier for Republicans.

He estimated that Democrats could pick up between 15 and 20 seats ― more than enough to win control of the House.

While I appreciate the optimism of Tarlov and others, the Democrats have to get their act together.  Right now they are suffering from a serious leadership gap.

Tony

Housing Affordability on the Rise. Courtesy of Seeking Alpha.

Dear Commons Community,

The Atlantic has a featured article this morning reviewing the cost of housing in  the country.  Here is an excerpt.

“Something is happening in the housing market that really shouldn’t be. Everyone familiar with America’s affordability crisis knows that it is most acute in ultra-progressive coastal cities in heavily Democratic states. And yet, home prices have been rising most sharply in the exact places that have long served as a refuge for Americans fed up with the spiraling cost of living. Over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas. (Over that same stretch, prices in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have increased by about 75 percent, 76 percent, and 97 percent, respectively).

This trend could prove disastrous. For much of the past half century, suburban sprawl across the Sun Belt was a kind of pressure-release valve for the housing market. People who couldn’t afford to live in expensive cities had other, cheaper places to go. Now even the affordable alternatives are on track to become out of reach for a critical mass of Americans.

The trend also presents a mystery. According to expert consensus, anti-growth liberals have imposed excessive regulations that made building enough homes impossible. The housing crisis has thus become synonymous with feckless blue-state governance. So how can prices now be rising so fast in red and purple states known for their loose regulations?

A tempting explanation is that the expert consensus is wrong. Perhaps regulations and NIMBYism were never really the problem, and the current push to reform zoning laws and building codes is misguided. But the real answer is that San Francisco and New York weren’t unique—they were just early. Eventually, no matter where you are, the forces of NIMBYism catch up to you.

The perception of the Sun Belt as the anti-California used to be accurate. In a recent paper, two urban economists, Ed Glaeser and Joe Gyourko, analyze the rate of housing production across 82 metro areas since the 1950s. They find that as recently as the early 2000s, booming cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix were building new homes at more than four times the rate of major coastal cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, on average. The fact that millions of people were being priced out of the locations with the best jobs and highest wages—so-called superstar cities—wasn’t ideal. But the Sun Belt building boom kept the coastal housing shortage from becoming a full-blown national crisis.

No longer. Although the Sun Belt continues to build far more housing than the coasts in absolute terms, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. “When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me. This explains why home prices in the Sun Belt, though still low compared with those in San Francisco and New York, have risen so sharply since the mid-2010s—a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work led to a large migration out of high-cost cities.

In a properly functioning housing market, the post-COVID surge in demand should have generated a massive building boom that would have cooled price growth. Instead, more than five years after the pandemic began, these places still aren’t building enough homes, and prices are still rising wildly.

As the issue of housing has become more salient in Democratic Party politics, some commentators have pointed to rising costs in the supposedly laissez-faire Sun Belt as proof that zoning laws and other regulations are not the culprit. “Blaming zoning for housing costs seems especially blinkered because different jurisdictions in the United States have very different approaches to land use regulations, and yet the housing crisis is a nationwide phenomenon,” the Vanderbilt University law professors Ganesh Sitaraman and Christopher Serkin write in a recent paper. Some argue that the wave of consolidation within the home-building industry following the 2008 financial crisis gave large developers the power to slow-walk development and keep prices high. Others say that the cost of construction has climbed so high over the past two decades that building no longer makes financial sense for developers.”

The article concludes:

“The forces opposed to new development are just as vehemently opposed to the kind of reforms needed to avert a future crisis. Many local and state governments across the Sun Belt have tried and failed to implement lasting pro-housing reforms. But the recent spike in home prices across the region has put even more pressure on lawmakers to act. The Texas legislature recently passed several pieces of legislation that will, among other things, reduce the minimum lot size of new homes, limit the power of the “tyrant’s veto,” and allow multifamily housing to be built on land currently zoned for offices and retail. Red states like to portray themselves as free from the pathologies that have made housing such a problem in other parts of the country. Now they have an opportunity to prove it.”

Interesting info.  The entire article is worth a read.

Tony

Dan Rather

Dear Commons Community,

Legendary former CBS News anchor Dan Rather expressed disappointment yesterday at Paramount Global’s decision to pay $16 million to the Trump administration and settle its lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” report.

“It’s a sad day for journalism,” Rather told Variety. “It’s a sad day for ’60 Minutes’ and CBS News. I hope people will read the details of this and understand what it was. It was distortion by Trump and a kneeling down and saying, ‘yes, sir,’ by billionaire corporate owners.”

Most legal scholars agreed the suit — in which Trump accused “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris — was frivolous and wouldn’t hold up under the First Amendment.

“What really gets me about this is that Paramount didn’t have to settle,” Rather said. “You settle a lawsuit when you’ve done something wrong. ’60 Minutes’ did nothing wrong. It followed accepted journalistic practices. Lawyers almost unanimously said the case wouldn’t stand up in court.”

Rather expressed a full backing of his former colleagues at CBS News and “60 Minutes”: “My support for them is total, absolute,” he said. “I do really think they fought a good fight on this, and they’ll continue to fight. The people on ’60 Minutes’ and at CBS News didn’t just take it lying down. They did their best to stop it.”

Nonetheless, he said he wasn’t shocked by Paramount Global’s settlement. The decision to strike a deal was widely seen as a critical step to receiving approval from the Trump-controlled FCC for Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of the media conglom.

“I was disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Big billionaire business people make decisions about money. We could always hope that they will make an exception when it comes to freedom of the press, but it wasn’t to be.

“Trump knew if he put the pressure on and threatened and just held that they would fold, because there’s too much money on the table,” he added. “Trump is now forcing a whole news organization to pay millions of dollars for doing something protected by the Constitution — which is, of course, free and independent reporting. Now, you take today’s sell-out. And that’s what it was: It was a sell-out to extortion by the President. Who can now say where all this ends?”

Rather then pointed to the larger issue of what this means for the United States as a democracy. “It has to do with not just journalism, but more importantly, with the country as a whole,” he said. “What kind of country we’re going to have, what kind of country we’re going to be. If major news organizations continue to kneel before power and stop trying to hold the powerful accountable, then we all lose.

“And then big time law firms have been settling right and left, kneeling the same way,” he said. “Big universities doing the same. Trump is extorting what he wants out of them. Now he’s extorting what he wants out of news organizations. So when I say, ‘Where does this go?’ What are the effects on journalism as a whole?”

Asked what advice he might give the folks at CBS News and “60 Minutes,” Rather humbly said it’s not his place — but that they already know “in their hearts, in their very being, the best things to do. I will say that, I do expect them to fully double down now on whatever great reporting they’re allowed to do.”

In his more than 60 years as a journalist, Rather said he’s never seen the profession face the kind of challenges it’s now up against. “Journalism has had its trials and tribulations before, and it takes courage to just soldier on,” he said. “Keep trying, keep fighting. It takes guts to do that. And I know the people at CBS News, and particularly those at ’60 Minutes,’ they’ll do their dead level best under these circumstances. But the question is what this development and the message it sends to us. And that’s what I’m trying to concentrate on.”

Shame on CBS and “60 Minutes”!

Tony

Zohran Mamdani

Dear Commons Community,

I was alerted to this story by my colleague, David Bloomfield.

Zohran Mamdani has not sketched out a plan to manage the nation’s largest school system yet. But the Queens assemblyman, who won a decisive victory for the Democratic mayoral nomination, has one big idea: giving himself less power.

Since 2002, the state has granted the mayor of New York City almost complete authority over the public school system. The mayor unilaterally selects the schools chancellor and appoints the majority of the Panel for Educational Policy, a board that votes on school closures, contracts, and other major changes to Education Department regulations.

Most mayoral candidates this year said they support mayoral control, though some suggested tweaks. Every mayor has lobbied state lawmakers in Albany for extensions to mayoral control since it was enacted more than two decades ago. Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic socialist, has vowed to be an exception to that rule.  As reported by Chalkbeat/New York.

“Zohran supports an end to mayoral control and envisions a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together,” his campaign website states. In its place, he calls for a “co-governance” model that empowers existing organizations, such as elected parent councils and local school teams that include administrators, teachers, and caregivers.

Mamdani’s plan would represent a fundamental shift in school governance at a time when the system faces many pressing issues, including elevated rates of chronic absenteeism, declining enrollment, and persistent gaps in student achievement.

“That’s a signal that he’s thinking about this in a very different way than the typical mayoral hopeful,” said Jonathan Collins, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University Teachers College. “Not too many politicians have been in the business of giving power away.”

Mamdani could also be forced to confront local decisions he may disagree with; Manhattan’s District 2, for instance, passed a controversial resolution in 2024 calling for a review of the city’s policy of allowing transgender girls to join girls’ sports teams.

“Is Mamdani really willing to go down roads like that?” said David Bloomfield, a professor of education, law, and public policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Bloomfield, who previously served as the general counsel for the city’s Board of Education before mayoral control, added that Mamdani’s pitch for “co-governance” may be a winning campaign message because it has a populist appeal to make the system more democratic.

“It is a signal of a mindset more than an operational plan,” he said.

Good comment from Bloomfield.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Lost for Words:  The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) by Lynda Mugglestone..  This is the third book I have read about the OED this year. See: https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2025/05/27/book-the-meaning-of-everything-by-simon-winchester/ and https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2025/04/23/new-book-the-dictionary-of-lost-words-by-pip-williams/

Lost for Words…was published in  2005 and is meant as a scholarly treatment of the topic.  It took me a while to read its 200-plus pages.  Ms. Mugglestone does a fine job of explaining its history with many details that require very careful reading and rereading.  Regardless, I found it interesting and am glad that I stuck with it. Because it was published twenty years ago finding a review was difficult.  Below  are three brief comments about the book courtesy of Goodreads.

Tony

————————————

Goodreads

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) holds a cherished position in English literary culture. The story behind the creation of what is indisputably the greatest dictionary in the language has become a popular fascination. This book looks at the history of the great first edition of 1928, and at the men (and occasionally women) who distilled words and usages from centuries of English writing and “through an act of intellectual alchemy captured the spirit of a civilization.”

The task of the dictionary was to bear full and impartial witness to the language it recorded. But behind the immaculate typography of the finished text, the proofs tell a very different story. This vast archive, unexamined until now, reveals the arguments and controversies over meanings, definitions, and pronunciation, and which words and senses were acceptable—and which were not.

Lost for Words examines the hidden history by which the great dictionary came into being, tracing—through letters and archives—the personal battles involved in charting a constantly changing language. Then as now, lexicographers reveal themselves vulnerable to the prejudices of their own linguistic preferences and to the influence of contemporary social history.

A pleasant, thoroughly researched and very dense book on the O.E.D., which I would solely recommend to specialists, wordsmiths and people with a fervent, not passing, interest in the development of the dictionary as we know it today.

Intense and written with authority and passion by a woman who knows her subject. The research is mind boggling. I absolutely recommend this for anyone who truly loves books and language studies. It’s not an easy read, for sure, but well worth the effort if you are a lover of libraries as I am.

Courtesy of USA Today.

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk escalated his criticism of President Donald Trump’s tax and budget mega-bill as the Senate took up the legislation, warning that he would boost primary challenges to defeat Republican lawmakers who vote for the legislation.

Musk, the richest man in the world and former top White House adviser, unleashed a flurry of posts on June 30 on X attacking the bill, the centerpiece of Trump’s domestic agenda, over the tech entrepreneur’s well-documented concerns the bill will increase the national debt.  As reported by USA Today.

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame!” Musk wrote. “And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”

Musk’s new round of criticism, which started over the weekend, came after he had taken steps to repair his strained relationship with the president ‒ including personally apologizing for insults he made during his combative exit from the Trump administration last month. Musk led the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency for the first four-plus months of Trump’s second term before leaving in late May.

In another X post, Musk renewed his call for a new political party. “It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country – the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” Musk said. “Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people.”

He also singled out two Republican members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus ‒ Reps. Andy Harris of Maryland and Chip Roy of Texas ‒ whose votes could be needed for House to give final approval of the bill.

“How can you call yourself the Freedom Caucus if you vote for a DEBT SLAVERY bill with the biggest debt ceiling increase in history? @RepAndyHarrisMD @chiproytx,” Musk said in another X post.

Republicans, who hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, are set to vote on what Trump has dubbed his “big, beautiful bill,” after finishing a whirlwind of votes nicknamed a “vote-a-rama” on dozens of amendments. The process could take several hours.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects Trump’s reconciliation bill would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade by extending the president’s tax cuts that he first implemented in 2017. The bill would also cut 11.8 million people from Medicaid by 2034, according to the CBO, and cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, by nearly $300 billion.

Musk pumped nearly $290 million into the 2024 election to help Trump and other Republican candidates, making him the largest donor, by far, of the election cycle.

However, ahead of his departure from DOGE, Musk suggested he would cease his political spending as he shifts his attention back to his companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

“I think in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk said on May 20 at the Bloomberg News at the Qatar Economic Forum. “I think I’ve done enough.”

Musk is trying to atone for all of the political damage he has already done.  

Tony

University of Virginia president, James Ryan.  (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

Dear Commons Community,

James Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia, facing heavy pressure from conservative critics and the Trump administration over the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices, announced last week that he was resigning rather than “fight the federal government.”

The departure of Ryan, who had led the school since 2018, represents a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s effort to reshape higher education. Doing it at a public university marks a new frontier in a campaign that has almost exclusively targeted Ivy League schools. It also widens the rationale behind the government’s aggressive tactics, focusing on DEI rather than alleged tolerance of antisemitism.   As reported by The Associated Press.

Ryan had faced conservative criticism that he failed to heed federal orders to eliminate DEI policies, and his removal was pushed for by the Justice Department as it investigated the school, according to a person who was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

Ryan referenced the Trump administration pressure in a statement to the university community Friday in which he said he had submitted his resignation with a “very heavy heart.”

“To make a long story short, I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this University,” he said. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my job.”

Ryan had already decided that next year would be his last, he said, and remaining in his position until then would be “knowingly and willingly sacrificing this community.”

The New York Times first reported on the resignation and the Justice Department’s insistence on it.

In a CNN appearance Friday, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights denied that Ryan’s removal was an explicit demand but said the agency “significantly lacked confidence” in his leadership. “I don’t have any confidence that he was going to be willing and able to preside over the dismantling of DEI,” Harmeet Dhillon said.

Ryan’s removal is another example of the Trump administration using “thuggery instead of rational discourse,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents university presidents.

“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,” Mitchell said. “It’s clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.”

Virginia’s Democratic senators react

In a joint statement, Virginia’s Democratic senators said it was outrageous that the Trump administration would demand Ryan’s resignation over “‘culture war’ traps.” “This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future,” Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine said.

After campaigning on a promise to end “wokeness” in education, Trump signed a January action ordering the elimination of DEI programs nationwide. The Education Department has opened investigations into dozens of colleges, arguing that diversity initiatives discriminate against white and Asian American students.

The response from schools has been scattered. Some have closed DEI offices, ended diversity scholarships and no longer require diversity statements as part of the hiring process. Some others have rebranded DEI work under other names, while some have held firm on diversity policies.

The University of Virginia became a flashpoint after conservative critics accused it of simply renaming its DEI initiatives. The school’s governing body voted to shutter the DEI office in March and end diversity policies in admissions, hiring, financial aid and other areas. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin celebrated the action, declaring that “DEI is done at the University of Virginia.”

Among those drawing attention to the Charlottesville campus was America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller. In a May letter to the Justice Department, the group said the university failed to dismantle DEI programs and chose to “rename, repackage, and redeploy the same unlawful infrastructure under a lexicon of euphemisms.”

The group directly took aim at Ryan, noting that he joined hundreds of other college presidents in signing a public statement condemning the “overreach and political interference” of the Trump administration.

On Friday, the group said it will continue to use every available tool to root out what it has called discriminatory systems.

“This week’s developments make clear: public universities that accept federal funds do not have a license to violate the Constitution,” Megan Redshaw, an attorney at the group, said in a statement. “They do not get to impose ideological loyalty tests, enforce race and sex-based preferences, or defy lawful executive authority.”

Ryan has been leading the school since 2018.

Ryan was hired to lead the University of Virginia in 2018 and previously served as the dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Earlier in his career he spent more than a decade as a law professor at the University of Virginia. A biography on Harvard’s website credits Ryan with increasing the “size, strength and diversity” of the faculty, adding that building a diverse community was a priority.

Robert D. Hardie, leader of the University of Virginia’s governing board, said he accepted Ryan’s resignation with “profound sadness,” adding that the university “has forever been changed for the better as a result of Jim’s exceptional leadership.”

Until now, the White House had directed most of its attention at Harvard University and other elite institutions that Trump sees as bastions of liberalism. Harvard has lost more than $2.6 billion in federal research grants amid its battle with the government, which has also attempted to block the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

Harvard and its $53 billion endowment are uniquely positioned to weather the government’s financial pressure. Public universities, however, are far more dependent on taxpayer money and could be more vulnerable. The University of Virginia’s $10 billion endowment is among the largest for public universities, while the vast majority have far less.

Disgraceful that Ryan felt he had to resign!

Tony

Kirsten Gillibrand and Zohran Mamdani

Dear Commons Community,

New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand joined the chorus of attacks against Zohran Mamdani, the party’s recently elected Muslim mayoral candidate for New York City.

Last week, New Yorkers elected Mamdani as the Democratic nominee for November’s mayoral general election, beating out former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Despite the young progressive skyrocketing in popularity, his campaign faced repeated attacks from the right on his identity as a Muslim American immigrant – attacks that only increased after his primary win.

Repeating that rhetoric is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York who  made claims about Mamdani’s beliefs during a Thursday radio appearance on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” The senator had responded on-air to a caller’s unfounded claims that New York’s Jewish community is facing threats as a result of Mamdani’s win. As reported by The Huffington Post.

“The caller is exactly the New York constituents that I’ve spoken to that are alarmed. They are alarmed by past public statements. They are alarmed by past positions – particularly references to global jihad,” Gillibrand said. “This is a very serious issue, because people that glorify the slaughter of Jews create fear in our communities. ‘The global intifada’ is a statement that means, ‘Destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.’”

The Arabic word “intifada” is used to describe uprisings and rebellions, most commonly the decades-long Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. “Globalize the intifada” is a phrase used by some activists to express solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. The Arabic word “jihad” means to struggle, though over time many non-Muslims in the U.S. have come to believe the word is synonymous with religious violence.

Gillibrand’s comments likely referred to a prior interview where Mamdani was asked if he would denounce the phrase, “Globalize the intifada,” to which he has repeatedly answered that while he does not use the term himself, he will not use the office of the mayor to police speech in the way that President Donald Trump does.

Lehrer pushed back at least three separate times during the interview with Gillibrand, reminding the senator that Mamdani has spoken extensively about his commitment to protect all New Yorkers – including the Jewish community – and that there is no evidence of the Democrat ever having expressed support for the violence Gillibrand and the caller accuse him of.

Despite the fact-checks and admitting she does not “have all the data and information,” Gillibrand continued to push the lie that Mamdani endorses rhetoric that endangers Jewish New Yorkers, without mentioning the anti-Muslim hate rising alongside antisemitism. After facing protests and public backlash for her comments, the senator’s office told Rolling Stone on Friday that she “misspoke.”

“Why is Senator Gillibrand parroting divisive Republican fear-mongering about Zohran? He has pledged from day 1 to combat anti-semitism & protect Jewish New Yorkers like me,” New York City councilman Lincoln Restler posted on X in response to her comments.

“Voters are clamoring for a vision to make life in our city more affordable – not politicians who just try to make us scared of each other,” he continued. “I wish the Senator took the time to do her homework and get her facts straight before attacking the Democratic nominee for mayor.”

Gillibrand’s comments were followed by fellow New York Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen, who this weekend pushed the lie that Mamdani has called for violence against Jewish people. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Sunday joined in elevating the false claims about Mamdani, demanding on ABC’s “This Week” that he clarify his position on Palestinian-related slogans.

“We should all be disgusted by the flood of anti-Muslim remarks spewed in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral primary – some blatant, others latent,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said on Sunday. “Shame on the members of Congress who have engaged in such bigotry and anyone who doesn’t challenge it.”

Mamdani has not directly commented on the senator’s rhetoric, but was asked Sunday by NBC’s Kristen Welker about whether he condemns the same phrases Gillibrand accused him of supporting. The progressive made it clear that he would not take the bait, maintaining that the public should focus less on slogans and more on his words and actions supporting all people in historically diverse New York City.

“That’s not language that I use. The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead this city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights,” he told “Meet the Press.” “And ultimately, that’s what is the foundation of so much of my politics, the belief that freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians as well.”

The Democrats have to get their act TOGETHER!

Tony