Will The Families For Excellent Schools Race Baiting Ad Hurt The Charter Movement?

Michael Fiorillo on the Families for Excellent Schools race-baiting ad:

Regarding FES's charges of racism against De Blasio, see Projection, Psychological, defined as the psychological phenomenon where humans (or, in Moskowitz's case, a rather toxic facsimile thereof) denies some aspect of their behavior or attitudes, and assumes instead that others are doing or thinking the same thing.

Everything about this episode, from the planning and marketing of the demonstration itself, to this ad, shows how so-called education reform is an ethical Black Hole, where the gravitational pull of greed, power hunger, hypocrisy and manipulation seek to suck in all public resources within reach, while emitting no light whatsoever.

These are bad people, brazenly performing shameful acts. It's fortunate that, after so many years of their vicious lies being given a free pass in media and political circles, they're starting to meet with more exposure and pushback.

I also get the feeling that the other big charter chains are probably not too happy with this. It's long been rumored/reported that they too loathe Eva (though for their own venal reasons) and they clearly like to operate in a less confrontational, faux-friendlier and behind-the-scenes manner. They worry that she'll fuck up their sweet deal with her compulsive belligerence. That's the difference among these characters: KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Democracy Prep are aggressive, but smooth enough to not be compulsively belligerent (as opposed to strategically aggressive, which is what they do try to be), which they know in the long run to be unprofessional and dangerous.

Eva is kind of the Raging Id of the local charter school movement, and that makes for volatile situations, including possibility of the narrative turning against her.

Last year, Families for Excellent Schools spent more money on lobbying than any other entity - $9.7 million dollars - with record expenditures in September and October of 2014.

Here we are again in the September/October period and their lobbying expenditures are ratcheting up once more.

Only this time, they have gone with some overt race-baiting in their ads for extra-added outrage.

But as Michael notes in his comment, this act isn't helping the charter movement any.

Witness how the press treated FES head Jeremiah Kittredge at FES's March rally in Albany.




A few years ago, members of the press would have been dutifully writing down Kittredge's lies without pushback.

But not any longer.

This is the unintended consequence from the FES outrageousness.

Their credibility gets tinier and tinier.

Same goes for charter operators/chains associated with FES.

Maybe Jeremiah Kittredge and Eva Moskowitz think this belligerence will help them, but I think there's already some evidence this strategy is backfiring on them and will, in the end, hurt their beloved privatization, er, charter school movement more than help it.

This Guy Makes NYSED Commissioner John King Look Good

From Political Wire:

"Pressure on the state's top school official to resign continued to mount Monday as more anonymous blog posts from John Huppenthal (R) emerged. Using an online alias, the superintendent of public instruction posted several comments on a conservative-leaning website calling for no Spanish language in the state," KTVK reports.

Wrote Huppenthal: "We all need to stomp out balkanization. No Spanish radio stations, no Spanish billboards, no Spanish TV stations, no Spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English."

Gotta love a top education official who works as a sock puppet at night leaving anonymous racist comments on blogs.

Bloomberg Finds He Can't Endorse Lhota

The newspapers are reporting that Bloomberg said today that he has decided not to endorse a candidate in this year's mayoral election.

The reality is, he can't endorse a candidate in this year's mayoral election.

Poll after poll shows that people are ready to move on from Bloomberg.

While his approval rating is right around 50% and he does not conjure up the same animosity that Giuliani did, he also does garner much warmth from people these days.

After 12 years, many New Yorkers are sick of their imperious billionaire mayor and his soda bans, his trans-fat decrees, his school policies, and the like.

That fact became clear as the campaign went on and de Blasio, the anti-Bloomberg, started to surge, and the other candidates in the Democratic primary were forced to pivot from their moderate positions and begin to criticize Bloomberg more.

While the GOP primary certainly did not turn anti-Bloomberg the way the Democratic primary did, it is no longer clear that a Bloomberg endorsement of Lhota would help the Lhota campaign - not after the New York Magazine article where Bloomberg called de Blasio a "racist" for using his biracial kids and his black wife in his campaign ads.

Bloomberg endorses Lhota, Lhota owns those comments.

So Lhota doesn't really want Bloomberg's endorsement.

He's got enough trouble trying to live down the Giuliani association (Lhota worked for Rudy in the 1990's), he doesn't want to have to explain away Bloomberg's inexplicable "de Blasio is a racist" comments.

So Bloomberg, a man with so fragile an ego that he puts his name in big letters on everything he owns (BLOOMBERG!!!!), now must suffer the humilaition that nobody wants his endorsement this election season after 12 years running this city, that not only would his endorsement of Quinn hurt her in the Democratic primary, but an endorsement of Lhota in the general might hurt him too.

This humiliation can't make Mike Bloomberg happy.

He likes to think he is the most indispensable person in the room, the city, the state, nation.

This is guy that looks pained when he has to stand next to the governor or the president and make believe like he defers to them on the power chart.

And here is, unwanted for an endorsement, unloved by the New York City electorate, with most people simply ready to move on from the Bloomberg Years and the Bloomberg policies.

Bloomberg Calls De Blasio Campaign "Racist"

No, seriously - in an interview with NY Magazine:

Then there’s Bill de Blasio, who’s become the Democratic front-runner. He has in some ways been running a class-warfare campaign—

Class-warfare and racist.
 
Racist?

I mean he’s making an appeal using his family to gain support. I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching what he’s been doing. I do not think he himself is racist. It’s comparable to me pointing out I’m Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote. You tailor messages to your audiences and address issues you think your audience cares about.

But his whole campaign is that there are two different cities here. And I’ve never liked that kind of division. The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills. The people that would get very badly hurt here if you drive out the very wealthy are the people he professes to try to help. Tearing people apart with this “two cities” thing doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a destructive strategy for those you want to help the most. He’s a very populist, very left-wing guy, but this city is not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other.

Hey, Bloomberg has a couple of Latino pool boys and some colored help to clean up around the mansions, but you didn't see Mikey's campaign use them in his ads, did you?

How outrageous for this greedy, power hungry billionaire to call the de Blasio campaign "racist" for using the de Blasio family in the campaign ads and classist for pointing out that people outside of the 1% in this city are struggling even as the wealthy people yuck it up over champagne and caviar in their gleaming glass towers built in areas of the city Bloomberg rezoned specifically for them.

How dare he?

Can you imagine that Bloomberg has decreed de Blasio shouldn't use his family in his ads because, you know, his wife is black and his kids are biracial, and that might be seen as looking to reach black voters?

Ethnic politics has been alive and well in this city since the Brits knocked off the Dutch.

Bloomberg's campaign looked to solidify support with the Jewish community when he ran for mayor.

Just another example of what's good for Mikey isn't good for anybody else.

There's also a fundamental flaw in Bloomberg's argument that if you drive the "fortunate people" out of the city you hurt the "less fortunate."

The reason why real estate is so expensive, why apartments are so expensive, why food is so expensive, why other expenses are so high in this city, is because the market is skewered by all the "fortunate people" living here driving up the prices by their willingness to pay, say, $5000 a month for a freaking studio apartment.

I find Michael Bloomberg to be so much more vile and disgusting than Giuliani, and yet somehow he is leaving office without the widespread disdain people had for Giuliani (at least before 9/11.)

These comments he made in New York Magazine show the classist and racist myopia Bloomberg is infected with.

Did Joe Lhota And Republicans Poll To See If They Can Use De Blasio's Interracial Marriage Against Him?

The allegation that the Lhota campaign poll-tested a negative message against Bill de Blasio for being married to a black woman first showed up in a Christian Science Monitor article yesterday.

The writer wrote that a GOP operative not affiliated with the campaign but privy to the campaign polling was claiming this was so.

This GOP operative denied he told the CSM reporter anything of the sort, but the CSM reporter stood by his story.

The Christian Science Monitor added two paragraphs to the article after publication that it said were needed for clarification:

The Lhota campaign says there is no truth in Johnson's statement, and expressed outrage on Thursday that the Monitor did not seek to confirm it before publishing such an assertion. "I can say with 100 percent certainty that this question was never polled by our campaign, and this guy has never seen any of our polls," said spokeswoman Jessica Proud, who contacted the Monitor on Thursday after Johnson's claim about internal campaign polling drew attention in the press. "I don’t even know who he is. No one on our campaign knows who he is.”

In three separate followup conversations with the Monitor on Thursday, Johnson affirmed that he was quoted accurately and in the correct context. He did, however, say that he "misspoke" about his sources inside the Lhota campaign and that he had meant to say he "wouldn't be surprised" if there were internal polling about attitudes toward de Blasio's multicultural marriage.]

De Blasio responded to the mess on Al Sharpton's radio show:

I know who Joe Lhota worked for. He worked for Rudy Giuliani. He was the top deputy for Rudy Giuliani when Rudy was dividing this city as a matter of political strategy." De Blasio added, "Let’s face it, you and I went through every minute of the Rudy Giuliani era. We saw the worst appeals to racial bias and division."

Giuliani is a vile racist, make no bones about that.

And Lhota did work for Giuliani.

That said, I don't see how the Lhota campaign could use de Blasio's interracial marriage to their advantage.

Sure, maybe some older voters, especially some older ethnic voters, might be uncomfortable with de Blasio's marriage to a black woman.

I grew up in Irish Rockaway Beach and worked in Italian Mill Basin in the 70's and 80's - I know some of those kinds of folks.

But many of them vote reflexively Republican already anyway - there's no reason to try and use some race-baiting thing against de Blasio with them.

And I just don't buy that anybody in the Lhota campaign would be so stupid as to think this kind of push polling would help them in a general election in 2013.

I'm not saying there aren't racists in the Lhota campaign or the NYC GOP or that Joe Lhota isn't a racist.

I just think they're strategically savvy enough to know they have to get more subtle with their racist messages than to push poll "Did you know Bill de Blasio is married to a black woman and has biracial kids..."

The kind of racism Giuliani got away with in the 1990's Lhota would not get away with in 2013.

You have to work with more subtlety these days - like Bloomberg does.

Still, the fact that we're even talking about this story goes to show you how Lhota's past in the Giuliani administration is a double-edged sword.

Sure, in some ways that listing on his resume helps him.

But in some ways, that listing on his resume hurts him too.

Bloomberg Wrong On Stop-And-Frisk Race Comments

Last week the Mayor of Money said the NYPD stops too many white people and not enough people of color.

Those comments were controversial, to say the least, but the mayor doubled down on them, saying any City Council member who doesn't vote with him on the stop-and-frisk issue may have to deal with the Bloomberg PAC using its money against them.

Today the NY Daily News looks at the Bloomberg comments on stop-and-frisk and finds them wanting:

The mayor made headlines last week with his assertion that white New Yorkers were stopped too often by officers patrolling the five boroughs, and minority-group members weren’t stopped often enough.

But it’s right there in black and white: The mayoral math on stop-and-frisk doesn’t add up.

A Daily News analysis of NYPD data contradicts Bloomberg’s claim, by looking at all crime suspects versus just violent crime suspects — particularly in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics are in the population minority, but make up the majority of stops.

 ...
 
City Hall released statistics to support Bloomberg’s controversial claim about stop-and-frisk and race.
The NYPD numbers showed 6.9% of the violent crime suspects were white — although whites made up 9.7% of the total number of people stopped.

But The News’ review of NYPD data found police listed a “violent” offense as the suspected crime on little more than one-quarter of the 532,911 stops made last year — mostly for “robbery.” The rest listed “nonviolent” offenses like weapons possession, larceny, pot possession and criminal trespass.

When the lesser offenses are included, whites comprise 13.8% all crime suspects in the city — meaning they were stopped too infrequently.

The 109th Precinct in Queens — where whites and Asians constitute more than 80% of the population — produced the biggest discrepancy: 48% of local crime suspects were black, while 65% of those stopped were black or Hispanic.

The 17-percentage point difference was the largest of any precinct, followed by the 6th Precinct (Greenwich and West Village, 15.6); Midtown North (Hell’s Kitchen, 15), Central Park (14) and the 104th Precinct (Ridgewood, Queens, 13).

Only four of the 22 precincts with a difference of more than 5 percentage points were home to a majority of black or Hispanic residents.

Bloomberg spokesman Marc La Vorgna defended the mayor’s numbers, sticking to the “violent” suspect standard.

Selective use of data to push their ill-begotten policies is a hallmark of this administration.

They're doing it with the stop-and-frisk and crime data.

Later today I'll take a look at how they're doing it with the 911 system too.

In the case of the stop-and-frisk policy, funking with the data to sell it is going to come back to haunt them in court:

The future of stop-and-frisk could hinge on Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling on a class-action lawsuit — a decision that could come as early as this week.

Legal experts predict Scheindlin will likely appoint an independent monitor to oversee the nation’s largest police force if she finds the police procedure is unconstitutional.

Scheindlin is widely expected to rule against the NYPD after taking the cops to task for the “high error rate.”

“You reasonably suspect something and you’re wrong 90% of the time,” the judge said. “That’s a lot of misjudgment of suspicion.”

Legal experts predicted she’s likely to order reforms, including a federal monitor who would report to her on problems solely related to stop-and-frisk. She could then compel the NYPD to make changes.

I highlighted part of the judge's statement because it is so emblematic of what is wrong with Bloomberg and Kelly.

 

They pursue an unjust, racist and unconstitutional policy that, at its core, is not about stopping crime but about intimidation and control.

 

Kelly is on record as saying they want every brown and black man in this city worried that they could be stopped at any moment by police and searched, that the city wanted to "instill" fear into them.

 

Kelly and Bloomberg don't care that 90% of the time, stop-and-frisk searches find nothing.

 

The point is to simply stop men of color and intimidate them.

 

At that, the policy is quite successful.

 

I still do not understand, given the racist polices this mayor has pursued, why he does not enjoy the same reputation of being a racist that his predecessor Rudy Giuliani enjoys.

Scalia And Bloomberg Are More Racist Than Paula Deen

I usually don't agree with Bill Maher, but I do on this:

Taking a swing at the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act, Bill Maher mocked Justice Antonin Scalia as “more racist” than Paula Deen.

The liberal comic on Friday quoted Scalia saying it’s difficult to remove “racial entitlements” through the normal political process.

“Just the fact that he talks about black people voting as an entitlement, that is so much more racist than anything Paula Deen ever said,” Maher said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher”.

He went on to defend Deen’s recent flap over her use of the “N word” as a punishment that did not fit the crime.

“We have replaced having a conversation about race with ‘oh OK, liberals feel good about themselves if they make the bad person go away,’” Maher said. “Who’s the bad person? The one we caught saying that one word. Donald Trump is a worse racist but he gets to keep his show because he never said the word. Sarah Palin is a worse racist, she said Obama was shucking and jiving his way to victory. Newt Gingrich said he was the food stamp president. This is real racism.”

Let me add Michael Bloomberg, the man who said "Nobody racially profiles" even as his own "private army," the NYPD, stops and frisks more black males a year than actually live in the city to that list of racists.

This is the same man who claims too many white people are stopped, we need to stop and frisk more minorities.

Paula Deen is clueless and stupid and yes, racist.

But is Paula Deen saying the "n" word a worse act than what Antonin Scalia did to the Voting Rights Act or Michael Bloomberg did to the Constitution?

She's lost $12 million+ in endorsement deals.

Scalia and Bloomberg?

They're riding high.

Accountability is only for some in this country.

Notice how few rich white men are held accountable for anything in the U.S.

Weiner's Racist Mailer

Just a refresher for those of you unaware of the real Anthony Weiner, via Azi Paybarah at Capital NY.