Today is Tuesday, June 24, 2025. I forgot to mention in yesterday’s blog that today is New York’s mayoral primary where polls have closed at 9. Where the city was still gripped in 98-degree heat, but that didn’t stop Elliot and me from voting earlier than usual since I woke up at 7:40 which is not the usual time when I wake up. So by 9, we trundled off to the elementary school where Elliot volunteers for a remarkable kindergarten teacher at P.S. 196. Before we voted downstairs, Elliot paid a visit to this teacher on the first floor and I could hear her kids say to Elliot, “Hi, Mr. B.” Then he walked in and hugged his colleague, “Irma.” I followed Elliot into the room and hugged and kissed Irma and was immediately greeted by a young girl who asked how I was related to Elliot. Boy, was she curious. She first inquired if I were a cousin, I believe, then asked if I were a friend. I thought it was easier to say the latter and leave it at that.

I have not been personally engaged in the mayoralty race because of obvious concern of what’s happening on the national level with this current fascistic regime, so excuse me for not writing about it. An online article in the Mirror provides some early results of the race for mayor and they are quite interesting. The article is written by Falyn Stempler and it’s entitled “Zohran Mamdani leading in early NYC mayoral race exit polls followed by Andrew Cuomo.” As I said, these early results are quite intriguing.

The article states in the first paragraph that Mamdani is currently leading in early exit polling for New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary race. This candidate is a democratic socialist and he has been endorsed by such progressive figures as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg (formerly a survivor of the Parkland high school shooting in Florida on February 14, 2018), who currently leads with 43.8 percent of the votes, followed by former NYC Governor Andrew Cuomo (35.8 percent), NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (11.7 percent), and NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (4.1 percent), according to the Associated Press.

These results reflect approximately 84 percent of votes cast, totaling over 866,000 voters. I’m not sure if that’s an impressive number, considering how many registered Democrats there are in the city.

These results will only reflect the voter’s first choice, including mail-in ballots processed by June 20. The full ranked-choice tabulations will not be available until the beginning of next week.

In the ranked voting system, if no candidate is the first choice on a majority of ballots, then the election will advance to ranked voting.

If Mamdani wins, his would be a historic feat for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as it challenges establishment figure Cuomo who led the city through the horrific COVID-19 pandemic. Cuomo, 67, also faces nearly a dozen accusations of sexual harassment.

Mamdani, 33, is currently a New York State Assembly member who is a registered democratic socialist. He was born in Uganda to a Muslim-Indian family and raised in New York City.

He champions working-class causes and has focused his campaign on the cost-of-living crisis. Among his other progressive proposals are creating affordable housing and free childcare, raising the minimum wage, offering free public bus transit, and creating city-run supermarket stores, according to his website.

If elected, he will be this city’s first Muslim mayor and it highlights the split within the Democratic Party’s older entrenched faction and a new, younger one, as embodied by Mamdani and other young progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Oops, an update: Cuomo has indeed lost the primary and he has conceded to Mamdani. Very interesting. Maybe this young man’s victory has all the earmarks of a fucking backlash to Chump’s supposed victory in November.

Today we heard an actual sitting president use the F-bomb in comments he made to reporters in which he condemned both Israel and Iran for the unraveling of the ceasefire that he supposedly brokered between the two warring nations. But now both Israel and Iran said they will not break the ceasefire unless the other does first, after the two countries traded accusations of truce violations. So Dump lashed out at both parties, saying, in fury, “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” This was heard around the world, as parents will now have to explain to their children how their president can stoop to such vulgar language like everyone else. Maybe this toddler was responding to the reports that those military strikes he deployed on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities did not destroy the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, not years. The assessment was done by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. But we all know that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “have been obliterated.” Maybe they were obliterated – but only in his head.

Tomorrow I was going to see my Long Island friend “Jake” and not write my blog since I usually spend at least 12 hours with him, always ending up coming home past midnight generally. But my friend called me to cancel because of the expected heat and other reasons I won’t mention here. “But I already bought my train ticket,” I told him. Jake responded that it is still good for several months; he’s right – I checked. So we rescheduled to get together in two weeks: on Wednesday, July 9. That’s fine with me; I didn’t really want to ride the subway to the Jamaica LIRR train station. So I can now go to my comic book store as planned.

I should see you tomorrow then if nothing else arises out of the blue.

And so it went!