This crew just loves their theories, reality be damned.
Page F2From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 17 September 2026
$266 million critics tally against Mamdani dwarfs the $10 million grand jury found DeSantis's administration actually misappropriated
As it ran on the front
The New York Post opens the ledger on a $60 million housing-seizure debacle it attributes to Mayor Zohran Mamdani's staff, calling them "geniuses" the way you'd call a raccoon in the pantry industrious. That's the first entry, no line-item, just a total: sixty million, filed under Mamdani.
The second entry comes from GOP state comptroller candidate Joseph Hernandez, who priced Mamdani's still-unbuilt municipal grocery store plan at $206 million over its opening years. Seventy million to construct it. A hundred and six million to run it. Hernandez's own analysis says the total breaks into three categories; the release accounts for two of them and stops there. The math for the rest of the $206 million doesn't make it into the copy — a category with a number attached and no name.…
…(cont) Add the Post's $60 million to Hernandez's $206 million and the running tab against Mamdani reaches $266 million, entirely in tallies and estimates, not one dollar of it audited.
Then, in August, a Florida grand jury closed the books on a different file: the state's own Hope Florida Foundation, run through first lady Casey DeSantis's office, had $10 million from a Medicaid settlement misappropriated into political activity. The grand jury reached a determination on that number the way the other two did not — by actually opening the drawer and counting what was in it. Insufficient evidence turned up to bring criminal charges, the same panel found, which leaves the finding on the books as fact without a courtroom to match it.
Reconciled side by side: $60 million is a tally, $206 million is an estimate for a program that hasn't opened, and $10 million is what a sworn body of Floridians actually confirmed left the account it was supposed to stay in. Two of the three figures describe money Mamdani might spend. One describes money DeSantis's administration already moved. The grand jury is the only one of the three that got to check the register, hon, and it didn't check the register on Mamdani.
“Ten million dollars actually left the account and that's somehow the one nobody's calling a scandal, while two made-up columns against a grocery store that doesn't exist yet get treated like an indictment. That's the trick — a governor's own agency can misplace real public money and walk away with a grand jury shrug, but price a store wrong on a spreadsheet and suddenly it's the crisis of the week. Watch the hole that's already dug, not the one somebody's warning you might get dug someday.”
“No charges were filed in Florida, so legally there's nothing there — a grand jury looked and, well, it did use the word misappropriated, but that's a paperwork term, not a — the real story is you don't panic about a grocery store before it's even open, you wait until the money's actually spent, which, okay, that's what happened in Florida, so maybe — did I say that? That's not where I was going with this.”
The receipts
· Mamdani: NYC leaders 'lied' about post-9/11 air quality from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million in Hope Florida debacle: Grand jury from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
· NYC-owned grocery store plan could cost $206M in first few years: GOP comptroller candidate from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.