Steve's Midweek Notebook

Some non-surprises, some updates, and revisiting settling scores with Gore.

• Betcha didn’t see this coming:

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani says New York City is facing an unexpected $10 billion projected budget deficit in the coming year and plans to push state lawmakers to increase taxes on high-income New Yorkers and corporations to close the hole.

“Unexpected”! Always the go-to word when leftists have overspent.

But for some reason, other New York Democrats aren’t amused. Is it an election year? I’ll have to check.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who would have to sign off on the increases, has said she opposes income-tax hikes but has previously been more open to a potential corporate-tax increase. “I don’t believe in raising taxes for the sake of raising taxes,” she said earlier this month.

Mamdani said in the interview the tax increases were now urgently needed to meet the moment. “New York City has not seen a gap of this scale since the Great Recession,” he said, referring to the 2008-09 financial crisis. He added that his administration has already begun conversations with state officials.

Mamdani also wants Albany lawmakers to increase the amount of state funding the city receives. Hochul has boosted state funding to the city since she took office, according to a spokeswoman for the governor.

Let’s take note of the fact that New York City, like California just now, is running huge deficits during a time of general prosperity and growth. It used to be that huge fiscal deficits only happened when there is a sudden and severe economic downturn, as Mamdani references by comparing the current plight to the housing/financial crash of 2008-09. There’s no excuse for this, only a simple reason: out-of-control liberalism.

• A follow up on my Monday item, “Are Democrats in Trouble?” Well, the New York Times must be really worried, because they’ve run a second op-ed feature on the problems with Democrats by frequent contributor Thomas Edsall.

Edsall’s usual method combines data mining and asking for comment from Democratic thought leaders and academics. Here are just a few samples:

Edsall: “If Democrats are to succeed in excising the Trump malignancy from the body politic, their party faces a major hurdle: public distrust, if not downright animosity.”

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, summed up the Democratic dilemma in an email responding to Edsall’s queries:

“The party’s favorability ratings remain at record lows. . . And while Democrats may temporarily be de-emphasizing some of the rhetoric that made them so unpopular, most voters do not believe that they have had a real change of heart about wokeness or D.E.I. — much less that they have a coherent set of political ideas to fill the resulting vacuum.”

Edsall again: Four studies conducted in the second half of 2025 reveal the depth of the predicament Democrats face. Even as support for Trump deteriorated, each analysis found that the public, including many Democratic voters, had a dismal view of the Democratic Party.

“Many Democrats see their political party as ‘weak’ or ‘ineffective,’” The Associated Press reported based on a July poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which it said also found “considerable pessimism within Democratic ranks.”

This part of Edsall’s narrative is also worth noting:

In October, the group behind the centrist Democratic WelcomePAC issued “Deciding to Win,” an analysis of “election results, hundreds of public polls and academic papers, dozens of case studies, and surveys of more than 500,000 voters” that found that “since 2012, highly educated staffers, donors, advocacy groups, pundits and elected officials have reshaped the Democratic Party’s agenda, decreasing our party’s focus on the economic issues that are the top concerns of the American people.”

The authors tracked key word usage in Democratic platforms from 2012 to 2024 and found the frequency of the word “hate” increasing by 1,323 percent; “white/Black/Latino/Latina” by 1,137 percent; “L.G.B.T./L.G.B.T.Q.I.+” by 1,044 percent; and “equity” by 766 percent.

Over the same period, usage of “father/fathers” fell 100 percent; “crime/criminal” by 30 percent; “responsibility” by 83 percent; “middle class” by 79 percent; and “veteran” by 31 percent.

And also this:

“Working-class voters see Democrats as ‘woke, weak and out of touch’ and six in 10 have a negative view of the party.”

Well, maybe that’s because Democrats are woke, weak, and out of touch. Other than that, things are fine.

There’s much more at the link from this long piece. (See also Henry Olsen on this point.) On the other hand, some times it is hard to take the NY Times very seriously. Also this week:

I’ve tried it. I don’t see the appeal.

• Meanwhile, over on our team, I have a long piece up today at Civitas Outlook about what “The New Right 5.0” might look like beyond Trump. An excerpt:

A reinvigorated conservatism ought to step up its public rhetoric, recognizing our many grave problems under the general theme that nothing less than Western Civilization itself is at stake. The tension between reason and revelation — between Athens and Jerusalem — that has been a part of the West's vitality for two millennia has been overtaken by the left's assault on both traditions. What those two rival traditions have in common now looms more important than what has divided them, which may, oddly enough, be a cause for optimism. (In other words, Voltaire might be a conservative if he were alive today.)

And descending from the level of thought and ideas, perhaps we should consider a serious effort to turn out thousands of conservatives in street protests — something that conservative resistance groups in Europe have, for once, been ahead of American conservatives. Now that would be a genuinely "new" right. There have been hints of this potential before, such as the Tea Party protests of 2009-2010. And the Charlie Kirk memorial service also demonstrates the potential impact large-scale demonstrations can have. Let's stop ceding the streets to the left. This might provide a new burst of conservative energy that resembles actual fusion power.

• Has it really been 20 years since Al Gore’s horror movie, An Inconvenient Truth? Al Gore ignored the First Rule of 21st Century Environmental Doomsaying, which is, always make your predictions sufficiently far into the future (as in many decades) so that people will not remember them when they fail to come true. Instead, Gore made a number of near-term predictions that failed miserably. Here are just a few of his many predictions that flopped:

• Among the predictions Gore made in the documentary is that Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro would have no more snow on it by 2016. In 2020, The Times reported that the snow on the 19,000-foot mountain remained.

• Gore also predicted that Glacier National Park would be “the park formerly known as Glacier” after all the ice melted away in the blazing hot temperatures that were to descend upon the human race. The U.S. Geological Survey predicted all the glaciers in the park would be gone by 2020. Signs were placed throughout the park warning visitors of the impending end of glaciers, which never happened. Instead, CNN reported, the signs had to be removed in 2020 when it was clear the glaciers remained.

• In 2009, Gore stated that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer within five to seven years. As of today, the Arctic still has ice in summer. In fact, the slight downward trend of Arctic ice seems to have stopped over the last few years.

As it happens, a few months after Gore’s movie, I made my own documentary disputing him, called “An Inconvenient Truth—Or Convenient Fiction?” I deliberately aped his style. And it still exists on YouTube. You’ll have to excuse the production values; this was before the Hi-Def era got going remember.

It’s about 47 minutes if you want to take it in:

A year later I did a seven-minute update, which recounts how modest first effort at filmmaking actually got covered in the New York Times (though the Bruce Jenner reference obviously didn’t age well. At all.)

AI thinks this is me, which shows it still has a long way to go.