Joe Scarborough is a thug

The Ugly Story in Joe Scarborough’s Political Closet

Grisly Discovery Has Curious Ties to Joe Scarborough

Tips for Chris Cillizza

Chris Cillizza has a column about how he missed Cantor’s defeat. Sadly he concludes that opinion polls are the gold standard and that he will continue to rely upon them. Big mistake. Opinion polls are commissioned by keepers of conventional wisdom and will have their blind spots. For example, as late as September 1975 presidential opinion polls did not include Jimmy Carter as an option. Big miss. In the summer of 2010 no opinion polls picked up on the issues that would launch the Occupy movement, certainly no indications that it would catch on like a wildfire with occupations sprouting up all over the country. And if you were foolish enough to confine yourself to opinion polls you would think that the suppression of the Occupations ended the movement. Wrong. A former occupier now sits on the Seattle City council. Cillizza should contact Freddie Mac, or Citi, or Wells Fargo, or almost any other bank and ask if any of their executives have been contacted by Occupy Our Homes concerning individual foreclosure cases. Or he could just follow Popular Resistance on Twitter to track left wing activism. Locally he should follow Eugene Puryear and Dan Robinson in Silver Spring. At some point all this dissastisfaction with the legacy parties will express itself by electing emergent party candidates, it could happen this year. Other races to watch are Asher Platt’s in Maine and the Howie Hawkins in New York. In the age of social media you don’t have to travel to a place to get a feel for the zeigesit, just follow the local personalities on Twitter. If it is too much trouble to develop 50 separate twitter lists to follow politics in those states, just subscribe to existing Twitter lists. I gaurantee, there is at least one political Twitter list for each state. Looking at polls will trap you in the conventional wisdom bubble. You need to expand your sources if you want to detect signficant shifts in the zeitgeist.

Jeffrey Brown betrays Elizabeth Campbell

Chicago Board of Education Plans to Shut Down 54 Schools, Move 30,000 Students

JEFFREY BROWN: The Chicago Public Schools proposal would close 54 underutilized schools, forcing the relocation of approximately 30,000 students. The district says the move would save $560 million dollars over the next decade.

CPS chief executive officer Barbara Byrd-Bennett addressed the plan in a video posted Wednesday on the district’s Web site. …

… Declining enrollment has also forced other major cities like Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia to close scores of public schools in recent years. …

… KAREN LEWIS, Chicago Teachers Union: Well, we oppose it because it’s completely destabilizing of neighborhoods in which their neighborhood is already destabilized.

Jesse Ruiz is very good at laying out the problems from a spreadsheet analysis. And it makes perfect sense. Oh, let’s put two places together that are underutilized. The problem is, the reason most of these buildings are underutilized is because we have had decades of school closings.

So, the school closings have created this underutilization issue. And one of the things that is very problematic about it is, if you listen to him, it’s all corporate-speak. So, this is an attack. It’s a corporate attack on public education. We have 25 buildings right now that are still vacant from the closings.

I love how he says, well, we’re going to repurpose these buildings. Those are all perhaps. I hope everybody noticed that. There’s no plan for this. There’s no safety plan block by block. People do not understand how unsafe Chicago is right now. I know you have heard it and you have talked about it. But, literally, we have 59 different gangs in Chicago and 650 branches of those gangs.

So, we’re talking block by block. So sending children from one place to the next could be deadly. And, in addition, there are a lot of special ed programs. I was at a school yesterday that was a fairly new building that had already been retrofitted with the things that they said they wanted to give, libraries, computer labs, science labs, beautiful building.

They’re being sent to a school that is much, much older, not in good shape, and not really equipped to handle the children with special needs there.

That last part would send bells off for any real reporter. Why would you ever shut down a school with new equipment and special adaptions for an older less adapted school? That is something a real reporter would follow up on.

WETA came out of the Arlington County Public School System. Elizabeth Campbell had a profound commitment to the public schools. The legal heirs of Ed Campbell are those lawyers fighting to keep DC public schools open. Sharon Percy Rockefeller and Dalton Delan have allowed the NewsHour to trample on that legacy. They owe public school teachers and parents an on air apology. Which they will get on the 12th of never.

Racist buffoons

Charles Murray

Andrew Sullivan

Tom Friedman

Washington Post “disappears” the DC Statehood Green Party

The Washington Post “disappears” the DC Statehood Green Party in its 2012 Voters Guide listing of candidates
WASHINGTON, DC — DC Statehood Green Party leaders and candidates are asking The Washington Post why the newspaper chose to omit party affiliation in its 2012 ‘Voters Guide’ listing of DC Statehood Green candidates.

The Post’s annual Voters Guide was published on Thursday, November 1 in the paper’s Local Living section (District edition, page 18). Candidates for public office are listed with information about their campaigns, along with an indication of party affiliation.

The party affiliations of Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian candidates (abbreviated D, R, and L) follow their names in the headline for each candidate. Statehood Green candidates are included in the Voters Guide, but no party is given for them. (Below is a list of Statehood Green candidates and their web sites or contact information.)

The DC Statehood Green Party has major party status and ballot access in Washington, DC. In recent elections, Statehood Green candidates have collectively received more votes than Republican candidates, leading some to call Statehood Greens “DC’s Second Party” in terms of election day numbers.

Calls to the Post have not been returned, as of 6 p.m. Friday, November 2. …

DC Statehood Green candidates in the 2012 election:

Natale “Lino” Stracuzzi, for DC Delegate to US House
https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/stracuzziforcongress

David Schwartzman, for the ‘DC Statehood’ seat in the US Senate
http://www.davidschwartzman.com

G. Lee Aikin, for the ‘DC Statehood’ seat in the US House of Representatives
http://gleeaikin.blogspot.com

Ann Wilcox, for DC Council At-Large
Contact Ann1Wilcox@gmail.com

Jill Stein for President, Cheri Honkala for Vice President
http://www.jillstein.org

MORE INFORMATION

DC Statehood Green Party http://www.dcstatehoodgreen.org

The perversion of the American News Media

Kevin Drum is an anti-union hack

Kevin Drum’s Labor Contrarianism

My guess is that he want’s to go on cable TV to play the part of the anti-liberal liberal. There is good money in it.

And I lost all respect for Mother Jones when they failed to cover the Pittston coal strike. Imagine a magazine styling itself as Mother Jones and ignoring a coal strike and you begin to understand how our country went downhill.

DCist rumormongering

Permitless Protesters Could Move To McPherson Square

Actually, no. They plan to stay until we are out of Afghanistan.

Dancing on Our Occupation Permit

The DCist had only to look at the web site to ascertain this. So clearly you cannot believe what is posted at the DCist.

Chris Powell’s cheap shot

Chris Powell joins those demonizing public employess.

It is not that public employees are paid too much. It is that many other workers are paid too little.

Kaplan Test Prep daily attacks Mayor Gray

Maybe there is a real story here. But I think this is the Washington Post’s way of maintaining pressure on Gray.