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Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.
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Happy Memorial Day!!!
Hi Dannie.
Oprah has Corey Booker on her “Next Chapter” series.
hi dannie :)
BWA HA HA HA @ BLOVIATING IGNORAMOUS
OOPS!
Hispanics, Democrats biggest groups on Florida’s list of potential noncitizen voters, analysis shows
By Marc Caputo and Patricia Mazzei, Miami Herald
In Print: Sunday, May 13, 2012
Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls, a Miami Herald computer analysis of elections records has found.
Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal, the analysis of a list of more than 2,600 potential noncitizens shows. The list was first compiled by the state and furnished to county election supervisors and then the Herald.
The numbers change by the day. The state’s Division of Elections says it initially identified roughly 180,000 potential noncitizens by performing a search of a computer database that doesn’t have the most-updated information.
About 58 percent of those identified as potential noncitizens are Hispanics, Florida’s largest ethnic immigrant population. They make up just 13 percent of the overall 11.3 million active registered voters.
Those who have been flagged as potential noncitizens by the state are being contacted by county election supervisors. Many legitimate voters aren’t happy with what they see as a needless hassle from a government using bad data.
“I’m upset, because if someone is an American citizen, it is his right to vote. How can they be asking for this?” said Juan Artabe, a 41-year-old Democrat from Cuba who said he became a citizen in 2009.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/hispanics-democrats-biggest-groups-on-floridas-list-of-potential/1229860
Here’s the latest piece of FILTH
Pingback: Sunday Open Thread | 3CHICSPOLITICO | Higher Education Journal
FRIDAY, June 1, PBO will visit Honeywell’s Golden Valley facility in Golden Valley, Minnesota for an event on the economy where he will urge Congress to act on the ‘To Do List.’ Afterwards, he will attend a campaign event in Minnesota before traveling to Chicago in the evening to attend campaign events. The President will spend the night in Chicago.
YEAH!!!!!!!
GAWKER-TYT
May 27: Newt Gingrich and Martin O’Malley talk about the use of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital record in the 2012 presidential campaign.
VIDEO
http://video.ca.msn.com/watch/video/gingrich-o-malley-discuss-bain-s-role-in-2012/17yxbfgu6?cpkey=4d8b28eb-b03c-4efb-8487-b7e9075f1c1b%7C%7C%7C%7C
NOTICE HOW THE SUNDAY TALKING SHOWS ARE TRYING TO BAIT THE DEMS ON BAIN.
See Corey Booker, here’s how a TRUE OBAMA SURROGATE ROLLS
So Bob Schieffer and CO. think PBO is going negative. “people think he’s going negative when he offered “hope & change”
LOVE IT! The Bain ads are working.
Willard Romney’s Accidental Truth Slips Out
By Charles P. Pierce
at 8:15AM
Chris Hayes caught this first, and he was chatting it up with kindly Doc Maddow last night, but, as near as I can tell, it has otherwise dropped down the holiday news well, never to be seen again. During Mark Halperin’s extended Tiger Beat session with Willard Romney, the following exchange took place:
Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.
Now, as it readily admits, the blog’s knowledge of economics is limited to the blog’s first law of economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money — and it also believes that most professional economists arrive at their conclusions by reading the entrails of doves and cutting up goats on a rock, so it may be wrong here, but didn’t Romney, in saying that, pretty much blow up the entire rationale for over 30 years of Republican economics right there? Cutting government spending will throw us into a recession or depression? No Christmas cards from the Ryan household this year, Willard.
That this remarkable moment sailed over Halperin’s head and lodged in the wall behind him goes without saying.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-government-spending-9146518#ixzz1w5qP888V
Friday, May 25, 2012
The political meta story that is being missed
We can add a new name to the list of conservatives who have parted ways with the wingnut takeover of the Republican Party. The list already includes former Republican administration officials David Frum and Bruce Bartlett; former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren; and former legislators like Chuck Hagel.
The latest entry to the list is Michael Fumento who wrote a scathing critique in Salon about the extremist’s takeover of the current conservative agenda.
The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger.
One of my reactions when I read about this kind of thing is to wonder whether or not these people represent many other conservatives who are equally disgusted with the current nonsense coming from their side of the political spectrum. Given what we saw happen to Senator Lugar recently, I doubt we’ll be hearing much of anything like that from Republicans who are currently in office or running for re-election. But I have to believe that the folks on this list represent many other conservatives who might not have a public voice, but are nevertheless wondering WTH has happened to their party.
This, to me, is the meta story about what is happening in our politics today. Its what future historians will be writing about these times we’re living in. Centrists pundits like Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein finally said it – but not many folks are paying attention.
Instead we get crap like the story in Politico today, pundits who simply follow the electoral horse race and say over and over again what a tight race the 2012 election is going to be, and liberals screaming about every crack in the Democratic message while ignoring the ongoing deep fissures on the right.
There are definitely times that, as I watch all this unfold, I feel like I’m living in another parallel universe to the one so many pundits (both paid and armchair) are seeing. But I know that my eyes are not deceiving me. Ornstein and Mann are right – the Republicans are currently in the grasp of a faction that is having ONE BIG HISSY FIT and a few brave souls from their ranks are standing up to say so. The country is still nervous about our economic future. And President Obama is calmly but surely showing us the way FORWARD.
by Smartypants
http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2012/05/political-meta-story-is-being-missed.html
May 26, 2012
Dionne, me, and the consensus school
I see that E.J. Dionne’s embrace of what is known among American historiographers as the “consensus school” has become as fragile as mine:
[U]ntil recently conservatives operated within America’s long consensus that accepted a market economy as well as a robust role for a government that served the common good. American politics is now roiled because this consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in more than 100 years.
Such things cause shifts in historical perspective. The relatively peaceful and prosperous postwar era–that in which the consensus school thrived, and to which I have always been intellectually if not anachronistically wedded–helped to instill in the chroniclers of American history their view of American history. Think of it as classically Eisenhoweresque: we were, and always had been, one big family of millions, replete with every family’s heated squabbles and bubbling discontents; but by and large we got along–we compromised, we cooperated, we all, in our own little ways, accepted the realization of the American Dream as a worthwhile hope to pursue. The consensus school was far from unimpeachable, but that was OK. Reconciling its flaws kept a lot of historians employed–and published.
At any rate, it is obvious that this is also the school out of which came Dionne. And he has a question:
So why has this consensus unraveled?
To which he answers:
Modern conservatism’s rejection of its communal roots [once grounded in the American consensus] is a relatively recent development. It can be traced to a simultaneous reaction against Bush’s failures and Barack Obama’s rise.
But (and historians, like lawyers, love to say “But”) here we encounter the additionally tricky question of periodization. That is, can conservatism’s wholesale philosophical collapse really be compartmented into such a narrowly recent slice of history?–that pre-Bush and even throughout Bush there was “conservatism,” yet post-Bush, there wasn’t?
I’m skeptical of Dionne’s op-ed tidiness, which I won’t pursue critically, since I’m also sure that in his book on the subject (Our Divided Political Heart–which I haven’t yet read), he has taken advantage of greater explanatory room to run in. Which is my way of saying I’m confident that Dionne would not disagree: there’s something about today’s misnomered “conservatism” that is creepily similar to the far right of the New Deal era, the far right of the postwar era, the far right of the Goldwater era and the far right of the 1970s New Right, and beyond.
Conservatism today is, in brief, the far right of consensus-historian Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style,” a well-known political neologism that sprang from his still-circulating work but is tied thematically to another of his less-read works today–his New Deal chapter in The Age of Reform, in which Hofstadter brilliantly reduces conservatism’s anti-New Dealism to a frothing, hysterical reaction rooted in an ideological shift to essential indifference to human tribulation and remedial, pragmatic experimentation.
Conservatism’s principal difference today from that of its anti-New Deal manifestation is that, as the cliche roughly goes, its paranoid psychotics are running the asylum. However there is continuity, which is elemental to the consensus school of historical thought. So take heart, E.J. Our old-school perspective isn’t toast yet.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/05/dionne-me-and-the-consensus-school.html
May 27, 2012
Mitt Romney’s ‘Vision’ deficit
Ronald Reagan’s presidential idol, Calvin Coolidge, would have been appalled that Mitt Romney, as Politico reports, “has some Republicans worried he lacks the ‘vision thing.’ ”
“Excellent,” the former vice president to steady-as-she-goes President Normalcy would have said. ” ‘Vision’ implies not only big and boat-rocking ideas, but even utopian aspirations, and those are things that no conservative leader would care to abide, let alone peddle.”
On the other hand Coolidge’s apostate worshipper, President Reagan, would have joined the chorus of Republican hand-wringers about Romney. Reagan went to the White House not to modestly conserve, but to aggressively lay waste to the problem-solving bloat of big government (that he instead bloated it even further is a different subject). He was endowed with a “vision”–it’s all rather a blur now, but to voters it essentially entailed manly and highly individualistic cowpokes (still packin’ Social Security cards) singin’ by the campfire as futuristic space guns protected the whole idyllic scene.
For conservatives, “Vision” had arrived and was planning a lengthy stay. If one requires confirmation of that revolutionary turn, just recall the conservative trouble into which H.W. got for lacking the damn thing.
Yet Bush’s lack was congenital: he was born a conservative and raised with authentically conservative ideas–pragmatism and empiricism and all that. Reagan, however, came to conservatism later in life and through its increasingly whacky filters of an unstoppable socialist Frankenstein monster intent, for instance, on forcing humble villagers into the Stalinist gulag of Medicare.
Things got so out of hand that Poppy had to swear to the base that he would never as president do the empirically right and pragmatically smart thing–raise taxes when taxes needed raising–which of course he later did, which of course cost him his job, and which of course then set conservatism’s permanent course of fiscal lunacy.
And just what is this venomous lunacy called? You got it. “Vision.” And Mitt, you best get yourself some of it, of an additionally lunatic sort, because your base is on a kind of Robespierrean-Bolshevik-Cultural-Revolutionary rampage which demands constant feedings of fresh lunacy.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/05/mitt-romneys-vision-deficit.html
maybe it’s my cynicism, but I don’t believe if she was WHITE, she would be placed in jail.
………………………………………………
Honor student placed in jail for tardiness and truancy at school
A judge threw a 17-year-old 11th grade honor student from Willis High School in jail after she missed school again.
Judge Lanny Moriarty said last month Diane Tran was in his Justice of the Peace court for truancy and he warned her then to stop missing school. But she recently missed classes again so Wednesday he issued a summons and had her arrested in open court when she appeared.
Tran said she works a full-time job, a part-time job and takes advanced placement and dual credit college level courses. She said she is often too exhausted to wake up in time for school. Sometimes she misses the entire day, she said. Sometimes she arrives after attendance has been taken.
The judge ordered Tran to spend 24 hours in jail and pay a $100 fine. Judge Moriarty admitted that he wants to make an example of Tran.
“If you let one (truant student) run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ‘em? Let them go too?” Judge Moriarty asked.
Tran said she is working so hard because she is helping to support an older brother who attends Texas A&M University and a baby sister who lives with relatives in Houston. Tran said her parents divorced “out of the blue” and both moved away, leaving her in Willis. Her mother lives in Georgia, she said.
“I always thought our family was happy,” the teen said tearfully.
Tran lives with the family of one of her employers. They own a wedding venue. She works at the Vineyard of Waverly Manor on weekends and at a dry cleaners full time.
“She goes from job to job, from school she stays up ‘til 7 o’clock in the morning,” said her friend, co-worker and classmate Devin Hill.
http://www.khou.com/video/yahoo-video/Honor-Student-Jailed-for-Absences-153847275.html
People across the country offer help to honor student jailed for truancy
People across the country have expressed their support for the Willis honor student sent to jail Wednesday night for missing too much school.
Diane Tran is often exhausted because she works a full time job, a part time job, and takes honors classes at Willis High. She is trying to support a brother in college and a little sister who lives with relatives. Her parents divorced and moved away.
Tran stood alone before Judge Lanny Moriarty Wednesday.
“Now this girl’s got a record, which could hamper her later in life,” said KHOU viewer David Byrne of the Woodlands. “My immediate reaction was there’s something wrong here, so that’s when I got in touch with you guys.”
Judge Moriarty is off on Fridays so he has not made a decision as to whether he will throw the case out.
“I hadn’t thought on that issue because it turns me, ‘Well, he’s soft. He’s not gonna do nothing.’ I’m taking off at 11:30 today,” said the judge.
Tran says her future could be greatly hampered. She may want to be a doctor some day.
Many people expressed their outrage on Facebook.
http://www.khou.com/home/People-across-the-country-offer-help-to-honor-student-jailed-for-truancy-154235505.html
this is total fukery here. It’s rigged to set this child up to fail, no matter how hard she works to better herself, and not ask for handouts. How you gonna jail a child who is striving to go to school, work and take care of herself.
Damned if she does and damned if she do.What is going on with our public school systems where this school didn’t try to help a child in trouble with homelife, and is struggling to survive.
Then there’s another option, Privitize shcools,If you can’t afford to go, it’s jail for you!!!!
Obama Has a Mean Streak and He Turned It on Romney This Week
by Lloyd Grove May 26, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
The president, for all his cool, has a mean streak—just ask Hillary Clinton—and this week he turned it on Mitt Romney, writes Lloyd Grove.
Never mind “cow pie of distortion”—President Obama’s earthy attack on Mitt Romney that dominated the headlines Thursday night from his barn-burner at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.
The psychological heart of Obama’s campaign speech was “prairie fire of debt,” the phrase that set up his scatological punch line.
“I know Gov. Romney came to Des Moines last week,” the shirt-sleeved, sweating Obama told a crowd of fervent supporters. “Warned about a ‘prairie fire of debt.’ That’s what he said. ‘Prairie fire.’ But he left out some facts. You know, his speech was more like a cow pie of distortion.”
Taken at face value, the president was simply quoting his Republican opponent to buttress his argument that Romney’s economic proposals were nothing but a throwback to George W. Bush’s disastrous policies that produced financial meltdown and a near-depression.
But there was something darker and sharper lurking just below the surface, in Obama’s facial expressions, body language, and mocking tone of voice: Not to put too fine a point on it, but the president has a mean streak.
“He does have a very biting side to him, which he inherited from his mother,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Maraniss, whose much-anticipated Barack Obama: The Story will be published next month. The late Ann Dunham “could be very sarcastic, but she never addressed it to people who were vulnerable,” Maraniss continued. “Obama has got that style that comes out when he’s in combat or competitive.”
Let’s return to the “prairie fire” moment, around 28 minutes into the videotape of Obama’s speech. The president’s tone drips with sarcasm, especially when he shouts the phrase “prairie fire!,” raising his left arm in mock-alarm, and punctuates the gesture with a suppressed giggle.
It’s not difficult to interpret the thrust of Obama’s non-verbal communication: Romney, Obama would have us believe, is not only awkward and uncool but a comically clumsy panderer who uses crudely calculated rhetoric to appeal to whomever he imagines he’s trying to woo.
University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato said it reminded him of the Saturday Night Live skit during the 1988 presidential campaign, in which Jon Lovitz—playing a smoothly articulate Michael Dukakis in a debate with Dana Carvey’s panicked, tongue-tied George H.W. Bush—sighs in exasperation, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
In Iowa, Obama “was on an eye-roll—which is what the cool kids always do,” Sabato went on. “They eye-rolled at me a lot when I was in Catholic school and it still hurts after all these decades.”
There was a similar moment earlier in the fairgrounds speech, around 15 minutes in, when Obama quoted Romney’s notorious observation that “corporations are people.” “‘Human beings, my friends’—that’s what he said,” Obama added, doing a naughty Romney impression.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/26/obama-has-a-mean-streak-and-he-turned-it-on-romney-this-week.html
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Democrats V Republicans – The Debt and Employment
THE DEBT, DEFICIT AND DEBT CEILING
Don’t Blame Obama for Bush’s 2009 Deficit
by Republican Daniel J. Mitchell of the Conservative Cato Institute
Most government spending occurs automatically, without any action by the Congress or the President. Since fiscal year 1957, the amount of debt held by the federal government has increased each year.
But Democratic presidents are better at debt reduction.
http://www.thepragmaticpundit.com/2012/05/democrats-v-republicans-debt-and.html
Fact check: What a real Romney presidency would look like
http://www.keepinggophonest.com/fact-check-what-a-real-romney-presidency-would-look-like?source=em12_20120526_sc_tt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=obama&utm_campaign=em12_20120526_sc_tt
From kindergarten to college: The clear choice between Romney and President Obama on education
Education plays an integral role in a strong economy. President Obama has made critical investments and reforms that broaden educational opportunities for every American.
Mitt Romney is now trying to convince the American people that he has an education plan that ensures a “chance for every child.” But a look at his record and the budget plan he supports would jeopardize the education and economic future of millions of students.
When it comes to education, the contrast between President Obama’s and Romney’s record is clear. Here’s a breakdown of Romney’s record of undercutting education in Massachusetts, and how he would double down on his failed ideas if elected president.
K-12 education
Mitt Romney:
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Education funding: Romney has consistently opposed investment in education, declaring in 1994 that “we don’t need to spend more on education.” [Boston Globe, 10/12/94] As Massachusetts Governor, Romney closed a $1.2 billion budget shortfall partly by slashing millions in funding for K-12 education, shifting “at least part of the tax burden onto towns and counties.” In fact, the draconian cuts from his first year in office resulted in the layoff of 14,500 teachers, police officers, librarians, and others.
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School improvement: By Romney’s second year as governor, Massachusetts schools saw one of the largest percentage cuts in the nation on a per-pupil basis, forcing school districts to cut staff, increase class sizes, and raise fees. In fact, Romney actively opposes small classes sizes—in his book, he called it “non-reform reform,” and even claimed efforts to reduce class sizes “may actually hurt education more than it helps.”
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President Obama
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Education funding: The President implemented the Race to the Top program, the largest-ever competitive investment in school reform. For less than 1 percent of total education spending nationwide, 19 states received Race to the Top funding, benefiting 22 million students. Designed to encourage and reward states that close achievement gaps and improve high school graduation rates and college preparation, Race to the Top has shown it can be “a powerful spur to innovation in education.”
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School improvement: The Obama administration offered states greater flexibility, and has already granted waivers to 11 states from No Child Left Behind as long as states show that “they will prepare children for college and careers, set new targets for improving achievement among all students, develop meaningful teacher and principal evaluation systems, [and] reward the best performing schools and focus help on the ones doing the worst.” The plan “strikes a new balance between the federal and state roles” in education.
Higher Education
Mitt Romney:
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Student loans: Romney would enact the Ryan budget plan that would allow student loan rates to double in July, costing students an average of $1,000. As a presidential candidate, Romney “has no specific plan to address student loans, according to his policy director.”
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College tuition: As Governor, Romney cut about $140 million from higher education, forcing state universities to raise fees by 63 percent to cover the deep budget cuts. By the end of Romney’s term, Massachusetts community colleges cost 59 percent more than the national average, while four-year public colleges cost 34 percent more. As a candidate, Romney’s only advice to students struggling to afford college was to “shop around” or “borrow money if you have to from your parents.”
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Student aid: By the end of Romney’s term, the Massachusetts Higher Education Task Force recommended a significant increase in need-based aid, to combat a 22 percent five-year decline. And now, the budget plan Romney supports now “would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell Grants.” Romney continues to argue that student aid does nothing but result in higher tuition.
President Obama:
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Student loans: The President understands the burden of student loans, having worked to pay off his own student debts. He capped income-based federal student loan payments at 10 percent of monthly income and is pushing Congress to stop federal student loan interest rates from doubling on July 1st for over 7 million students.
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College tuition: The President’s proposed a plan that rewards states that curb higher education costs and rewards colleges that can successfully offer lower tuition prices.
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Student aid: President Obama doubled funding for Pell Grants so an additional 3.7 million students would get college aid and created the American Opportunity Tax Credit, worth up to $10,000 for up to four years of college.
Republican Governors, including Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. Bob McDonnell, and Gov. Bill Haslam, have praised President Obama’s efforts to reform and invest in education. Whatever Romney’s rhetoric, the contrast between the President and Romney is clear. While the President prioritizes education, Romney economics would prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy few over investments in our future.
http://www.keepinggophonest.com/from-kindergarten-to-college-the-clear-choice-between-romney-and-president?source=em12_20120526_sc_tt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=obama&utm_campaign=em12_20120526_sc_tt
Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch: “Obama spending binge never happened”
Mitt Romney continues to mislead Americans about the President’s record on spending and deficit reduction, falsely attacking the President for creating a “spending inferno.”
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/romney-warns-of-obamas-debt-spending-inferno/
HERE’S THE TRUTH:
Market Watch’s Rex Nutting examines the facts and concludes, “of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.” The actual record under President Obama “doesn’t show a reckless increase in spending. Far from it.” Take a look at Nutting’s breakdown of spending over the last four years, which says that, under President Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower was President:
Here are the facts, according to the official government statistics:
•
In the 2009 fiscal year—the last of George W. Bush’s presidency—federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget.
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In fiscal 2010—the first budget under Obama—spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.
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In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.
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In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.
•
Finally in fiscal 2013—the final budget of Obama’s term—spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.
http://www.attackwatch.com/wall-street-journals-market-watch-obama-spending-binge-never-happened?source=em12_20120526_sc_tt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=obama&utm_campaign=em12_20120526_sc_tt
Otis G. Clark, survivor of 1921 Tulsa race riot, dies at 109
By Matt Schudel, Published: May 26
For years, few people dared to speak about what happened on the night of May 31, 1921, during one of the most deadly and devastating race riots in the nation’s history. Otis G. Clark, who was 18 at the time, had grown up in Greenwood, a thriving African American section of Tulsa.
During a night that history almost forgot, Mr. Clark dodged bullets, raced through alleys to escape armed mobs and saw his family’s home burned to the ground. He fled Tulsa on a freight train headed north.
He would eventually move to Los Angeles, where he was the butler in the home of movie star Joan Crawford. He later turned to preaching and was known as the “world’s oldest evangelist.”
But for nine decades, he remained a living witness to a night of horror, when Greenwood died. Mr. Clark died May 21 in Seattle at age 109, family members told the Tulsa World newspaper. The cause of death was not disclosed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/otis-g-clark-survivor-of-1921-tulsa-race-riot-dies-at-109/2012/05/26/gJQA2UW6sU_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines_Sun
A Tale of Two Black Mayors
by BooMan
Sun May 27th, 2012 at 09:46:53 AM EST
As a Jersey-born and raised Democrat, it was interesting to watch the difference between the recent performances of the black mayor from the north of my home state (Cory Booker of Newark) and the black mayor from the south of my home state (Michael Nutter of Philadelphia). I come from Central New Jersey, about five miles north of the dividing line for sports and media allegiance. Culturally, I’m a New Yorker living currently in the Philly suburbs. New Jerseyians of the New Yorker persuasion tend to see South Jersey as an alien and backward place, and Philly as a strictly second-rate city. I’ve come to love Philadelphia, if not its sports teams, but I’ll probably never shake a certain arrogance about New York. I’ll always be a Jersey Boy, and, no, that doesn’t include people from the southern half of the state, which might as well be Ohio for topography and culture.
Yet, I am much more attracted to the politics of Michael Nutter than the politics of Cory Booker. I should probably qualify that. I think Cory Booker is a much better mayor than Michael Nutter, judging by the results. I just like how Nutter has no qualms at all about blasting Mitt Romney and the work he did at Bain Capital. And I am nauseated by Cory Booker’s discomfort with the same attacks. Nutter is telling anyone who will listen that Mitt Romney will screw urban-dwellers in a very uncomfortable place, which is the plain truth. When Romney made an appearance at a West Philly school last week, Mayor Nutter let him have it.
“I don’t know why this guy’s here,” said Nutter. “[He] has suddenly somehow found West Philadelphia, somehow now wants to talk about education.”
“If you’re going to talk about education, it’d be nice if you had an education record,” Nutter said. “It’d be nice if you had an education platform. It’d be nice if you seemed to know something about education. You can go wherever you want to go — that’s the beauty of the United States of America. But the man’s got no record to run on.”
As for his time at Bain Capital, the mayor was blunt:
“Mitt Romney’s economic philosophy for a short term profit for himself and his investors ahead of long term growth for the companies bought and sold were devastating for the communities where he and his partners invested,” said Nutter, who then went over the numbers: Claiming Romney bought a company in Marion, Indiana in 1994, fired the workers, hired them back at a lower cost, then ultimately fired them all again.
Nutter called Romney a “corporate buyout specialist,” whose specialty included buying companies, bankrupting them, laying off workers and shipping jobs overseas.
Cory Booker, on the other hand, said that he was personally offended by attacks on ‘private equity” before he retracted his comments and said that attacks on Romney’s work at Bain Capital were fair game.
I hate to say it, but these different attitudes about the financial sector may partially explain why Booker is a better mayor. Booker understands how thin-skinned the money folks on Wall Street are about any kind of criticism. To be successful as mayor of Newark, Booker needs those folks to invest in his city. And it won’t hurt to have them as friends should he pursue higher office. That’s something former Philadephia Mayor Ed Rendell seems to have internalized, and it helps explain why he managed to become the first Philadelphia politician to become governor since the late 19th-Century.
Booker and Rendell are clueless about the politics, but they’re more successful politicians than Michael Nutter will ever be. This is why the Democratic Party can never become the party of the 99%. You can’t alienate investors and simultaneously do the best you can for your constituents. Mayors, in particular, are reliant on Wall Street, as they generally have limited budgets and rely on state and federal legislatures they don’t control for supplemental funding.
To fix the problem with money in politics, we have to be cognizant of two things. First, people with money to invest will always be very important and very powerful. Their power needs to be limited, but no party can govern effectively by treating them as unvarnished enemies. Second, the movement for reform must come from outside the party system because everyone who has been elected has, by definition, learned to succeed in the system as it exists. Their motivation to change rules that they’ve mastered is always going to be quite limited. Bad rules make for bad Democrats. Better rules will make for better Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter).
Still, I love Michael Nutter’s attitude on the campaign trail. That’s one area where he has something to teach to Booker and Rendell.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/5/27/94653/3036
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Good Morning, rikyrah & Everyone! :-)
We’ve been getting tons of rain and hail. Everything’s so green and lush.