"In the summer of 2005, police burst into a Gardner (MA) apartment and expected to find a drug-dealing operation. They allege they did, but they also found a surprise: a 15-year-old boy from Baltimore who had been kidnapped ... The kidnappers were never found."
Former Sun editor-in-chief Bill Marimow has resigned as head of news for NPR, taken demotion to post of "ombudsman."
Nothing to do on a Saturday evening? Catch the live gubernatorial debate at 7 p.m. on WBAL, again Monday at 7 on JZ, or anytime at thewbalchannel.com.
Update: In case you missed it... the debate just raised more questions!
Why were the candidates sitting in little wooden bumper cars?
Why can't either one of them find a suit that fits? Were the slouchy sportcoats a conscious effort to project the common touch?
Does Ehrlich ever smile? And what's up with his gummy bracelets?
When did O'Malley start copying Bill Clinton's delivery, blinks, hand gestures and all?
O'Malley's desk was tidy and Ehrlich's was covered with papers ... what does that mean?
Who looked worse: O'Malley for interrupting over and over, or the governor for getting (repeatedly) flustered by it?
And finally, who won? (I have my opinion, but I want to see what you-all think!)
ps. the JZ story sums up a few points, if you can get past the typo in the headline.
8 comments:
the marimow link appears to be an error. fyi.
You're right. Ehrlich shouldn't look so grouchy. As for pasty Marty, he's really a rude punk. No manners. Ehrlich did a much better job of backing claims with specifics, but most voters don't understand the numbers. Especially on health costs and utility deregulation.
O'Malley came through with broad generalizations about "I support the middle class, my opponent is on the payroll of the Rockefellers.", but no one ever agrees who's middle class. To many people in Baltimore B, if you have a job paying 30,000 you are middle class. In Howard County, that's poverty. In Baltimore A people earning $75,000 think they are middle class.
So, if O'Malley isn't beholder to big business, who is he beholden to? A nice middleclass working man like,.. Bill Struever of developer Struever Bros., Eccles, & Rouse??? Or maybe Johns Hopkins, the biggest private company in Maryland??? So what's O'Malley done for the little people of East Baltimore's Hopkins project??? Evicted them. Nice.
Too little time and not enough detail given to crime. By either candidate. But it is rather disingenous that NO'Malley is going to argue that his cops arrest the same criminals over and over because of revolving door sentencing, when the Baltimore delegation to the Assembly has opposed minimum sentencing.
Those are very clearly his people. They did his party's bidding in the schools contest and the energy bill, he needs to explain how he's going to end the revolving door without the legislative change sought by Ehrlich.
I understand why Ehrlich didn't drive harder on the false arrests in Baltimore. It makes him look easy on crime. It takes a lot of airtime to explain to people that these are not productive arrests of known hoodlums, but harrassment arrests with no probable cause as claimed by the Mayor. Bottom line, the only reason the Mayor can get away with wasting resources this way is because his public safety program delivers one service to Baltimore A and a very different, frequently nonexistent one to Baltimore B. But that's a subtle argument that takes more than 90 seconds. Hopefully one day a public prosecutor will take much more time explaining it in an indictment.
fixed the link.
Speaking of pasty, didn't the O'makeup look airbrushed? I was thinking he looked suspiciously golden.
And yeah there's no time to learn anything in these debates, and they both have run terrible campaigns. I don't really get what either one of them stands for (other than they hate each other!)
The scariest prospect in this is the new Mayor. She has quite a personal record and she seems to be headed for a confrontation with Jessamy over candidacy for the Mayoralty, not criminal justice.
An obvious solution to the State's Attorney vs. Police dispute presents itself: howzabout the FBI pulls a decent sample of arrests at random and determines whose shortcoming resulted in the guy being back on the street (including innocence, the ultimate defense).
Because I've appeared in a large number of (admittedly lower-violence) cases, I'm pretty comfortable offering that the ASA's need to be more aggressive when they have good ammunition, but also that many of the cases they receive simply needed more manpower (ie. legwork and surveillance) to generate a compelling case.
This new policy of barricading neighborhoods for weeks to temporarily cut down the supply of outside drug customers is a great solution if you were interested in minimizing manpower requirements, as your primary objective, but notif you want to punish unlawful behavior. That, like any good policing, takes personal attention and situated knowledge, not a roadsblock and a traffic cop.
How does it affect more violent crime. Well, the gestapo tactics make an impression on the middle-aged and elderly black females who make up most of the voter roles, which is to say, the jury. When they don't really have much regard for cops, justice suffers.
You need to ditch your lousy cops and hire anew about the same total number we have now, although the pay scale must be higher to attract good cops. This will double the force, so you can do community oriented patrol carried out with a civil public tone which enhances, rather than diminishes, public trust.
I just re-watched the O'Bullsh!t.
He speaks of the shortcoming of the City as "...the most gains we have yet to make."
In other words, you've failed. The nicest way I've ever heard someone refer to his own failure.
Well, you have yet to make a whole lotta gains in my neighborhood. Does that make it a great place in your mind ????
I'm with D's C. This is a grudge match between two guys who can't stand each other. It's a clash of personalities - not policy - which makes me not want to vote for either of them.
It is safe to say Maryland has seen some progress with Ehrlich at the helm. He deserves the same second terms that his predecessors had been given. O'Malley, on the other hand, has whole lot of explaining to do about the condition of Baltimore. Perhaps Baltimore is the new New Orleans. I also wonder what Sade Baderinwa would have to say. Furthermore, O'Malley seems to be clinging to the "we can work together" answer for everything.
example:
Question: Would you raise taxes as Governor, Mr O'Malley?
O'Malley: "We need to work together....teamwork"
Question: Why are Baltimore's schools doing so poorly?
O'Malley: "We need leadership and we can do this together"
Martin O'Malley needs to go away. If we wanted an actor for governor we would rather have the Carcetti character on HBO's The Wire......at least he's acting because its his job to do so.
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