Good News From Tish James

Good to hear her get very specific about education and where she would like to see the de Blasio administration go:

Over the course of the campaign, de Blasio made some of his own educational priorities clear: universal pre-K, a plan to charge well-financed charter school networks to operate in public space, a moratorium on school closures, and the elimination of the school letter-grade system.

More broadly, James said she and the mayor-elect agree on the need for “a more comprehensive idea of education,” meaning more resources for schools, smaller class sizes, and what she termed “disbanding standardized testing.”

The desire to de-emphasize testing is why she said she would be consulting Carmen Farina, the former second-in-command at the Department of Education who later criticized the use of test scores to measure schools, during her transition. (Farina, whose name has been floated as a possible chancellor, has been informally advising the de Blasio campaign.)

If charter school advocates are hopeful that de Blasio can be swayed toward more pro-charter positions as the governing process begins, they definitely won’t find such flexibility from James. She speaks of “charter schools” and “public schools” as separate entities, and repeatedly referred to what the money the city spent supporting charter schools could do for other parts of the school system.

...

“I don’t think, in terms of education, we diverge on much of anything,” James said, referring to de Blasio.

The standardized testing and teacher evaluation problem cannot be solved by a de Blasio administration looking to de-emphasize standardized testing.

But couple a de Blasio administration looking to de-emphasize testing along with the ongoing parent revolt around the state over the state education reform agenda, the Common Core, the data collection, et al. and we could actually see some real and positive change in the public education system here in NYC.

We'll see - I'm still waiting for the hedge fundies and edu-entrepreneurs to parachute in with suitcases full of cash for anyone in power willing to continue the ed deform status quo.

Let's see what happens after that.

Still, good to hear James continue to talk tough on corporate deform.

She put Reshma Saujani on her transition team, but she hasn't started parroting Saujani's DFER rhetoric.

Don't Get Too Excited

So we have a new mayor, a so-called progressive mayor, who won yesterday's election by an overwhelming margin over his GOP challenger.

Exit polls showed 3 out of 4 New Yorkers want the city to go in a different direction from where Bloomberg took it in his 12 years.

And Bill de Blasio ran as just that candidate and was rewarded for it at the ballot box.

Yet, I feel a tinge of concern over this de Blasio fellow.

His friendship with corporatist Democrat Andrew Cuomo, his working for corporatist Democrat Bill Clinton, his running corporatist Democrat Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign, his reaching out to Rahm Emanuel for transition advice, his calling Rahm Emanuel a "great mayor" who he looks forward to working with "very closely" - all are red flags that give me pause in my celebration of last night's de Blasio victory.

Especially the visit with Rahm Emanuel and the declaration of Rahmbo as a "great mayor."

The optimist in me tells me to ignore the red flags and just "believe" the progressive platform de Blasio ran on in the election will be the blueprint for his mayoral administration.

The cynic in me tells me the red flags are something to be concerned about, something to watch very, very closely as de Blasio now turns to his transition team and begins to choose members of his administration.

Right now, I'm leaning toward listening to the cynic inside telling me to watch this guy very, very closely.

Yeah, he talks a good game in his speeches.

But those meetings he has behind the scenes with pals like "great mayor" Rahm Emanuel have me wondering how much of that speech stuff is real.

Couple de Blasio's praise of Emanuel with Tish James's reaching out to DFER-favorite Reshman Saujani for her transition team and I can already see the signs of the two "progressives" who were elected last night turning rightward after the election.

By all means, let us celebrate the end of the Bloomberg Era.

But let's not get too excited about the de Blasio Era just yet.

Tish James Puts DFER Reshma Saujani On Her Transition Team

Okay, bad news folks:

members of .@Tish2013 transition team: @reshmasaujani, the publisher of El Diario & C. Virginia Fields. #pubadv2013
— Azi (@Azi) November 6, 2013

De Blasio calling Rahm Emanuel a "great mayor," James putting DFER fav Reshma Saujani on her transition team.

Starting to look like we have two "progressives" who put their walking shoes into the closet once they got elected.

This Comment Crystallizes Why You Should Vote Against Dan Squadron

Someone left this comment on the Daily News endorsement of Dan Squadron for public advocate:

How can the Daily News, once the paper of the working man, endorse an anti-labor candidate who is in bed with Bloomberg's developer cronies and charter school hedge fund investors and charlatans?

As I wrote earlier,

2013 Election: Predictions And Endorsements

Well, we're one day away from the Democratic primary.

It has been one long, long, long primary battle.

We have gone from Christine Quinn as the presumptive favorite to Anthony Weiner's toying with entering the race to the Anybody But Quinn folks launching anti-Quinn ads in April to Weiner jumping in the race in May to Weiner going ahead in the race in late June to beginning to look like a Quinn/Weiner runoff in July to Weiner's Sexting Scandal 2.0 that effectively ended his campaign to Quinn taking the lead again post-Weiner Sexting Scandal 2.0 to de Blasio beginning to gain traction in August to de Blasio gaining momentum by late August and now looking like the presumptive nominee one day before the primary.

The question is, can de Blasio avoid a runoff and if he can't, who will he face in that runoff?

I'm going to go with my gut here and say de Blasio narrowly misses 40% and is forced into a runoff in two weeks. 

Quinnipiac has had de Blasio over the 40% threshold, but Siena, Marist and the AM New York/Newsday poll have not.

As of my writing this post, a PPP poll was rumored to have de Blasio at 38% - also below the magic 40% threshold.

Quinnipiac famously got 2009 wrong, having Bloomberg up mid-teens in their last poll while he only beat Bill Thompson by 5 points.

So I'm a little leery of putting too much faith in Quinnipiac.

I think de Blasio gets somewhere between 36% and 39%, enough to crush his opponents, but not enough to avoid the runoff.

I think Bill Thompson will place second on Tuesday.

I think Thompson places second not because I think he's such a great candidate (frankly he has run almost as anemic a campaign this time around as he did in 2009 against Bloomberg) but because Quinn is such an awful one.

She's gotten hammered for months now over term limits, the slush fund, proximity to Bloomberg, etc. and all that negativity has taken its toll.

It's true that she won all the newspaper endorsements, but no one gives a crap about newspaper endorsements in a top-line race.

In the public advocate's race, in the comptroller's race, an endorsement from the Times might matter, especially if people do not know the candidates (obviously people know Spitzer, but the rest of the candidates in the two races are relatively unknown.)

The Times endorsement did not help Quinn in the least, nor did the tabloid endorsements.

She has some establishment figures, a few celebrities, some unions - those all help.

But her negatives are so high and the downward trajectory in all the public polls so steep that I don't think any of that helps her.

She comes in third in the race.

So it's Thompson and de Blasio in a runoff - a bad situation if you're a teacher hoping for the race to end tomorrow.

I don't want Thompson in a runoff because that gives the UFT a chance to screw up this race even more than they already have.

In my opinion, they endorsed way too early in the race.

With Weiner sucking up all the Anybody But Quinn oxygen in the race in May and June, I can see why they decided Thompson was the best candidate to endorse.

Nonetheless, it didn't take a genius to see that Weiner was still hiding something around his sexting scandal and that eventually it would come out.

I would have held off endorsing for a month, had I been the UFT brain trust, for that very reason.

I wrote in the late spring that the unions, the candidates needed to start attacking Weiner, get the newspapers to scrutinize his record, his sexting scandal, especially the communications he had with the seventeen year old back during his Sexting Scandal 1.0.

I thought a little scrutiny would bring him back to earth.

I was right - it did.

Again, didn't take a genius to see any of this.

Weiner wasn't answering questions straight when asked about the sexting scandal and while I thought the thing that would bring him down would have been something he did before he resigned Congress, I still thought something would eventually bring him down.

I was just hoping it would happen before Primary Day because as of early July the worst teacher nightmare was starting to come together - a Quinn/Weiner runoff to take on Lhota in the general.

Fortunately for us, Sexting Scandal 2.0 made it to TheDirty.com and the rest, as they say is history..

After Weiner imploded, Quinn took a "lead" in some of the public polls, but it was a "soft" lead based as much on name recognition as anything.

The ABQ vote was coming together once more after the Weiner implosion and there were only two places it could go - Thompson or de Blasio.

Thompson, running another poor campaign, tying himself in knots over stop-and-frisk, impressing nobody on the campaign trail with his "meet and greet" skills, was not that candidate.

Rather de Blasio, the one who ran the consistently "progressive" campaign, the one with the consistent stop-and-frisk critique, was that candidate.

Had the UFT waited even just a couple of weeks with their endorsement, they would have been able to make a different choice.

Now it's possible that the UFT was always going to go with Thompson.

NYC Educator and I had this conversation over email - with Randi on board his campaign and Tisch as his co-chair, it was probable they were going to go with Thompson no matter what.

Let's be honest, Mulgrew runs the UFT the way Randi wants him to run it - and that includes evaluation negotiations, contract strategy, and endorsements.

So it's probable that no matter what, the UFT was picking Thompson because Randi wanted him and whatever Randi wants in the UFT/AFT, Randi gets.

In the end, Randi is not going to get what she wants, however, because Thompson is not going to beat de Blasio in a runoff.

It's true that he's only polling down 12 to de Blasio in the Marist poll (Quinn is down 22 in a runoff to BdB), a lead that is not insurmountable, but that's only if you have a decent candidate trying to surmount the lead.

Thompson is not that candidate.

An awful candidate, an awful man, a crook, a phony and a hypocrite (see here, here and here.)

That's our Bill Thompson.

Plus Randi Weingarten and Merryl Tisch are shilling for him.

Can you think of two better reasons to not support Thompson than Weingarten and Tisch want him?

In the end, I think de Blasio beats him double digits in a runoff and that's that - on to the general.

As for the comptroller's race, I think Stringer wins a close one.

Spitzer's under 50%, he's acted increasingly desperate these past two weeks, indicating that his private polling is telling him he's in trouble, and while Spitzer has name recognition, he does not have a great GOTV effort.

Stringer, with union backing, party backing, certainly does have a good GOTV effort, and I think that will make the difference for Stringer come Tuesday.

As for endorsements, I am enthusiastically endorsing Letitia James for Public Advocate.

You can read my reasons for that endorsement here.

In the comptroller's race, I make no endorsement.

I wanted to endorse Spitzer, but his hiring of Students First shills and his touting of charter schools will not allow me to do that.

Stringer I cannot endorse.

Yes, I understand he appointed Patrick Sullivan to the PEP.

Let me tell you something about that appointment.

If that seat mattered, Stringer would not have appointed Patrick Sullivan.

If that was a vote needed by the deformers, you can bet Stringer would have been told by the powers that be that a deformer must get that seat and a deformer would have gotten that seat.

Because the mayor had all the votes he needed already on the PEP, the Stringer appointment (like the other borough president appointments) was superfluous to the deform movement and Stringer was allowed to appoint whomever he wanted.

In Patrick Sullivan, Stringer appointed a good man and an articulate defender of public schools.

But that's only because the fix was already in on the PEP.

So I cannot endorse Stringer for comptroller either.

He's a hack.

Therefore I endorse nobody.

In the mayor's race, I hold my nose and unenthusiastically endorse Bill de Blasio.

I don't trust de Blasio for a whole host of reasons.

First, his work with the real estate industry.

Second, his hiring of Reshma Saujani as deputy public advocate so he could use her Wall Street connections to fund raise for his mayoral campaign (see more about what an awful human being she is here.)

Third, his "Tale of Two Cities" campaign strategy is simply that - a campaign strategy.

He doesn't believe anything he is saying any more than any other politician (see here.)

So de Blasio is the best of a bad lot.

I know he is saying some good things around education, but as James Eterno can tell you, de Blasio can talk a good game about supporting public schools, and then you can never hear from him again.

So de Blasio is my "hold your nose, pull the lever and hope for the best" vote.

Not a ringing endorsement, I know.

But I'm too old and I've seen too much in this fake democracy we call America to believe in that kind of thing anymore.

Change We Can Believe in kinda disabused me of all of that.

Still, all things considered, we're in better shape than we thought we were going to be in July.

Back then, it was looking like Weiner/Quinn to take on Lhota.

I would prefer a straight de Blasio victory tomorrow to keep Mulgrew from making things worse with de Blasio than he already has.

But even if we get a de Blasio/Thompson runoff in two weeks, that's a helluva lot better than the Quinn/Weiner runoff we thought we might be getting back around July 4.

Most prognosticators do not make predictions in political races because it's so easy to be wrong.

But I figure, what the hell, so what if I'm wrong?

It's been a helluva campaign season, so why not go out with a bang?

Frankly, I hope I am wrong - I would love to see de Blasio get well over 40% tomorrow and send Thompson and Quinn off to their post-election Wall Street gigs right away.

In any case, let's hope for a decent election tomorrow, no problems with the machines and, God help us, nothing unforeseen happening as happened back in 2001.

Reshma Saujani, Wall Street's Favorite Democrat, Caught Lying About Family Finances

How do you know when DFER-approved public advocate candidate Reshma Saujani is lying?

She's talking, that's how.

She has claimed in debates that she is sending money home to her parents because they are struggling to make ends meet. 

You can see here how badly her parents are "struggling."

Note the moat behind the mansion in the wealthy Chicago suburb where the Saujanis live.

Note the amount of money the Saujanis donated to Reshma's campaign.

I have to admit, I took a dislike to this woman back when she ran as one of those DFER-sponsored ed deform candidates a few years ago.

But the more I see, hear and read about her this election year, the more I dislike her.

The scrubbing of her Wikipedia page of any of reference to her Wall Street or hedge fund past, her refusal to own up to the scrub job she had her campaign do at Wikipedia, her work defending corporate malfeasance as a Wall Street lawyer, now her misleading voters over her family's financial status - she  is a congenitally dishonest person who does not belong in public office, certainly not as public advocate.

And let's not forget her attack of one of her opponents in the public advocates race, Dan Squadron, as "Trust Fund Dan" for having grown up in a family of means.

Only one problem with Reshma's attack - Squadron's family lost most of their money to Bernie Madoff.

Yeah, really.

Did that stop Saujani's attacks?

Not a bit - she said Squadron was "whining" and playing the victim for mentioning that his family lost their money to Madoff.

On top of that, she compared Squadron to Madoff because, well, here's what her campaign spokesperson said:

"Trust Fund Dan is not a victim of Bernie Madoff, but a beneficiary," a said Saujani spokesman. "Irving Picard, the trustee for the real victims, has rejected Squadron's poverty routine as totally bogus. The money he claims to have lost is chump change compared to the millions in fictitious profits he made before the scam was exposed."

"Now Trust Fund Dan is whining and fighting in court to avoid paying the true victims of the Ponzi scheme. Only someone from incredible privilege whose Dad was close personal friends with Bernie Madoff would have the audacity to plead poverty after making millions off so many ruined lives," he continued.

Reshma Saujani truly is a despicable, despicable person.

To be frank, it worries me a little that Bill de Blasio hired her to work as a deputy public advocate in his office.

Something to keep an eye on with de Blasio - a willingness to hire and work with congenitally dishonest former Wall Street lawyers who spent their careers defending corporate malfeasance.

De Blasio hired this piece of work long after the Maloney race she ran when she exposed herself to the world as a) a Wall Street shill b) a clueless politician and c) a moron

If de Blasio is elected and Saujani is not, will Mayor de Blasio hire DFER-approved Reshma Saujani for his administration?

He has once before, you can see him doing so again.

And if he does, what does that tell you about the "progressive" de Blasio?

Wall Street Democrat Reshma Saujani Can't Scrub Away Her Wall Street Past

Reshma Suajani, a former hedge fund lawyer and DFER-backed candidate for Congress (Carolyn Maloney beat her handily a few years back in a primary), wants you to think she's progressive Democrat.

She used to hawk around her hedge fund connections and talk about how important Wall Street was to the health of the city, but that was before she decided running for public advocate was her next career move.

Now she wants you to forget she has connections to the hedge fund crooks on Wall Street and believe that she's a progressive Democrat out to protect the people while her opponents are tainted by their connections to wealth, power, privilege and the status quo.

As such, she launched an attack against one of her opponents in the race, Dan Squadron, calling him "Trust Fund Dan" because he was born into a wealthy family and inherited a trust fund from his father.

So far so good, right - Saujani's framing her opponent as a child of privilege who is tainted by his wealth while trying to get voters to overlook her Wall Street past.

But that's where the story gets complicated:

In what had been a low-key race for New York City public advocate, Reshma Saujani's campaign has begun to attack her rival, Brooklyn state Sen. Daniel Squadron, by calling him "Trust Fund Dan," to imply that he has been the beneficiary of money earned by his late father, Howard Squadron, a prominent media attorney whose clients included Rupert Murdoch.

In fact, the story of that money had a very sad ending, according to Mr. Squadron, 33, who said it was lost in 2008 in Bernie Madoff's infamous Ponzi scheme.

In the 1980s, the elder Squadron and his wife, Anne, became one of Mr. Madoff's early investors, and were friends with the now-disgraced fraudster.

When Mr. Squadron was 22, his father died, leaving a savings account for Mr. Squadron and 18 other family members, including Anne and his four older siblings. In December 2008, according to Mr. Squadron, that savings vanished: It had been invested with Mr. Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme financially devastated a number of families and nonprofits, especially in New York's Jewish community.

"Like so many others, my family and I were victims of Madoff. I—and all of us—lost virtually everything that my late father had left for us," Mr. Squadron wrote in a statement to The Insider.

Indeed, a 2009 article in Forbes recounts how Mr. Squadron's mother, Anne, had to sell her Manhattan apartment after Mr. Madoff's Ponzi scheme collapsed. She was also sued by fellow family members because the account was worthless.

Mr. Squadron, who grew up in Riverdale, an upscale Bronx neighborhood, has had advantages in life, including a Yale education. His grandfather had immigrated via Ellis Island, and his father grew up in the Bronx and went to the elite Bronx High School of Science and the once-prestigious City College before making a small fortune in the legal field.

Informed of Mr. Squadron's Madoff story, Ms. Saujani's campaign doubled down, saying that Mr. Squadron was simply "whining" and that a lawsuit shows that Mr. Squadron's family made more through Mr. Madoff than it lost. Her campaign noted that Mr. Squadron and the 18 relatives are named in a complex "clawback" lawsuit filed by a Madoff bankruptcy trustee, who has launched some 1,000 similar cases. The suit states that the Squadron family invested $10.8 million in Mr. Madoff's fund and received $11.8 million in "fictitious profits," and that some of that money should go to Madoff victims who suffered a net loss. Mr. Squadron and his family, who have not been accused of any wrongdoing, differ with the trustee's accounting.

The trustee's case has not been resolved, but Ms. Saujani's campaign took issue with Mr. Squadron's tale of woe.

"Trust Fund Dan is not a victim of Bernie Madoff, but a beneficiary," a said Saujani spokesman. "Irving Picard, the trustee for the real victims, has rejected Squadron's poverty routine as totally bogus. The money he claims to have lost is chump change compared to the millions in fictitious profits he made before the scam was exposed."

"Now Trust Fund Dan is whining and fighting in court to avoid paying the true victims of the Ponzi scheme. Only someone from incredible privilege whose Dad was close personal friends with Bernie Madoff would have the audacity to plead poverty after making millions off so many ruined lives," he continued.

The attacks from Ms. Saujani's campaign may be designed, in part, to blunt any attacks against her own history working as a hedge fund lawyer on Wall Street. Ms. Saujani touted that history in her 2010 run for Congress against Upper East Side Rep. Carolyn Maloney, but this year is seeking to position herself as a progressive. Mr. Squadron's campaign said that her campaign's statements were insensitive.

"Ms. Saujani has a long history of misleading and mean-spirited personal attacks against progressive Democrats who get results, so we're unsurprised by her campaign's latest outburst," a Squadron spokeswoman fired back in a statement. "Attacking a candidate's deceased father is, for Ms. Saujani, as predictable as it is inappropriate. Our campaign won't stoop to her level. Ms. Saujani should practice what she preaches, release her household's tax returns, and stop the mudslinging." (Ms. Saujani has released some of her own tax returns but not any of her husband's.)

Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James and Staten Island's Cathy Guerriero are also in the race for the Democratic nomination, which is tantamount to victory in the November general election.

Leaving aside the efficacy of the Saujani campaign's attacks on Squadron, let's take a look at the hypocrisy they're engaging in by launching these attacks.

Alex Pareene reported on the Saujani campaign back in April on Salon and noted how she conveniently forgot to mention her career on Wall Street working for some very scummy firms:

Oddly, her campaign biography doesn’t mention anything about Saujani’s career, which, before she began running for things, was spent working for Wall Street. Tom Robbins got Saujani to give up her closely guarded résumé in 2010. Saujani has worked at one prestigious law firm and three hedge funds. At the law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, Saujani defended securities fraud cases. She worked for two years as an affiliate of the Carlyle Group, Carlyle-Blue Wave Partners Management, that invested in mortgage-backed securities. Then she went to Fortress Investment, a fund that “was revealed to own a subprime mortgage lender that foreclosed on New Orleans homeowners who fell behind on their payments after Hurricane Katrina.”

Saujani's campaign vanity edited Hedge Fundie Reshma's Wikipedia page to remove any evidence of her working on Wall Street and even removed how badly she lost to Carolyn Maloney in the 2010 primary she waged against the Congresswoman (81%-19%).

But all that information is back and, helpful person that I am, let me put it here for you:

Saujani worked at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she defended securities fraud cases,^[9] and on a pro bono basis handled asylum cases.^[10] In 2005, she joined the investment firm Carret Asset Management.^[10] After Saujani left Carret, its principal owner, financier Hassan Nemazee, was convicted on felony charges relating to bank fraud carried out over the course of several years at Carret, including during Saujani's time at Carret; she later told the news media that she had had no knowledge of any illicit conduct at Carret.^[10][11] Subsequently, she joined Blue Wave Partners Management, a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, the global alternative asset management firm specializing in private equity with a wide variety of investments ranging from defense contractors to nursing homes. She was an associate general counsel at Blue Wave, which invested in mortgage-backed securities; it was closed in the aftermath of the 2008 market collapse.^[9] Immediately prior to running for Congress, Saujani was a deputy general counsel at Fortress Investment Group,^[12] which had previously gained notoriety after it was reported that Fortress had invested some of its assets in subprime mortgage lenders who had foreclosed on the homes of Hurricane Katrina victims in the Gulf Coast.^[13]

Her Wikipedia page also notes the vanity editing her campaign did of her Wikipedia entry:

In January 2013, Saujani's Wikipedia page was heavily edited to remove traces of Saujani working for Wall Street firms such as hedge funds. Her campaign admitted to this,^[28] arguing they did it because they disagreed with the stated facts.^[29]

So here we have Wall Street Democrat Reshma Saujani, once supported by the hedge fundies at the Democrats for Education Reform, once proudly running for Congress as the candidate who was “running on my Wall Street record, not from it," now attacking Dan Squadron as the Wall Street crook.

That takes some chutzpah, doesn't it?

Well, we'll just have to make sure that Hedge Fundie Reshma's proud Wall Street past isn't forgotten as she runs away from her record and tries to fool people into thinking she's something she isn't - namely a progressive Democrat who will look out for the little guy.

Reshma Saujani is one of the more despicable people in politics in this city.

Her attacks on Squadron as a Wall Street crook tied to Madoff while Saujani herself worked for Wall Street firms that helped bring about the 2008 collapse and foreclosed on Hurricane Katrina victims is just the latest example of that.

No matter how many times her campaign tries to scrub her Wikipedia page, they won't be able to scrub the taint off Reshma Saujani herself.

DFER-Supported Candidate Tried To Raise Campaign Funds Through Domestic Violence Ads

From Politicker:

Shortly after ads appeared today urging New Yorkers to “Combat Domestic Violence” by giving contributions to Reshma Saujani’s campaign for public advocate, the order was given to take them down.

The web ads, which ask for $10 contributions “to help Reshma advocate for victims of domestic violence,” raised eyebrows across the internet, with one Twitter user calling them “the tackiest ad of the campaign cycle.” Ms. Saujani, a former deputy public advocate, soon apologized on Twitter and claimed the language had not been approved by her campaign.

“ad not approved by campaign. poorly worded & taken down-would never exploit cause im so passionate abt & have been fighting for,” she wrote this afternoon.

While her campaign spokeswoman declined to provide official comment, sources told Politicker that the snafu occurred when a vendor sent an array of web ads to the Saujani camp at once. The campaign initially said it did not want to use domestic violence as a fund-raising issue, according to the account, but was told by the vendor that violence and human trafficking were important issues with women who were likely to engage with Ms. Saujani through advertisements. The topic was eventually approved, but the language of the ad was not.

According the sources, Ms. Saujani never saw the mock-up or draft for the ad.

Lame excuse from the Suajani campaign - oh, we didn't want to use human trafficking/domestic violence as a fund-raising tact, but the "vendor" said these were issues that would help the campaign connect with women.

Nothing like a public advocate passing the responsibility onto somebody else.

Saujani is a former candidate for House in 2010 who had DFER backing but was shellacked by Carolyn Maloney.

Saujani's political instincts do not seem to have grown any better in the past three years.

But you can see why she would have DFER/hedge fundie backing, can't you?

What is it the crooks in the hedge funds say?

Always be closing...always be closing...

Tish James For Public Advocate

Almost all of the major unions who have announced endorsements in the race for New York City public advocate have backed Tish James.

Here's the latest:

After receiving nods from all but one of the city’s major unions thus far, Brooklyn Councilwoman Tish James public advocate campaign is continuing to roll out other notable labor endorsements.
Yesterday, Ms. James scored District Council 37, the city’s largest municipal workers’ union, and today, she’s adding UFCW Local 1500, which represents the city’s grocery store workers.

At this point in the race, bigger union endorsements for Ms. James are anything but surprising; she already has SEIU 32BJ, Central Labor Council, and the labor-backed Working Families Party. But for Ms. James, who has lagged in fund-raising and will need a small army of volunteers to get her message out, each one is certainly welcome.

“UFCW is proud to endorse Councilwoman Tish Jame … because she understands the challenges that working people in our city deal with every day,” the UFCW’s president, Bruce Both, said in a statement. “Tish has fought hard to protect good-paying jobs, preserved affordable housing in our neighborhoods, and stood up for the idea that New York City must work for working people, not just the wealthy and the privileged.”

Also in the hunt for the public advocate’s office race are three other Democrats: State Senator Dan Squadron, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani and Professor Cathy Guerriero.

Mr. Squadron and Ms. Saujani are leading the pack in fund-raising, but with the exception of the well-organized Hotel Trades Council for Mr. Squadron, the pair have mostly focused on their support among other elected officials and advocates. Ms. Guerriero, loud and known for making her presence felt at forums, has steadily rolled out smaller trade and uniformed union chapter endorsements, of which she possesses dozens.

Saujani is the DFER/hedge fundie-backed ed deform candidate in the race (they supported her in a losing primary bid against Carolyn Maloney a while back), and while she placed last in a recent poll (with just 4% support), she will have a ton of hedge fundie/Wall Street criminal cash to try and win votes.

Just what we need, a hedge fundie/Wall Street-backed Public Advocate.

Actually, just what we don't need.

I am supporting Tish James in the race.

James has been very good on public education issues, economic issues, labor issues, policing issues, real estate issues.

I think she would make an excellent Public Advocate.

Saujani, on the other hand, with her corporate cash and hedge fundie/Wall Street-backing, would not.

Cathy Guerriero has come out in support of intrusive National Security Agency surveillance.

That disqualifies her immediately in my view.

The last thing we need is a NYC Public Advocate looking to make excuses for government spying and intrusion.

Isn't the Public Advocate supposed to do just the opposite of shill for excessive government power?