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Citizen D
Rad Field
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09/10/04 DMN let's James Ragland play
the Race Card.
Regular DallasArena.com readers know that I've been
pretty hard on Our Mayor for much of this year. That's because she seemed
to have gone so far from her promise of back to basics and seemed to have
abandoned her original supporters while trying to win over people who not only
opposed her but really hate her.
On more than one occasion, I warned Our Mayor the people who currently have her
attention are either setting her up or will turn on her again. Last year,
she tried to convince me that Brain-Dead actually could be reasonable. Events of
the past few weeks at City Council make me pretty smart, don't they?
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I have been really disgusted with the council for rewarding the bad behavior of
the likes of Brain Dead Thornton-Reese, Shakedown Chaney and Beat that
Indictment Fantroy. Now, I'm outright furious because this morning I read
James Ragland's column in The Dallas
Managed News and this afternoon I read
Jim Schutze's piece in The Dallas
Observer. |
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James Northrup:
Real problem with new Black
leadership is that new Black leaders have moved
out of those districts.
Over time, it's
probably a matter of new
Brown leadership in old Black districts.
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Here they are, you tell me if I'm overreacting.
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Black officials' rift with Miller is deep
08:24 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 8, 2004
By JAMES RAGLAND / The Dallas Morning News |
... Dallas Mayor Laura Miller was publicly berated
and backed into a corner. One black council member, Dr. Maxine
Thornton-Reese, threw down the gauntlet, openly accusing the mayor of
pushing "a white agenda" and ignoring issues of importance to black
constituents.
... "There's a basic lack of respect by the mayor
for the collective wisdom of the council and, in particular, the
African-American council members," Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill said
yesterday during a break in the council meeting.
"We're going to work with her, but
she's going to have to fundamentally change the way she deals with us."
... At issue last week was whether the city should
spend $250,000 over the next five years to keep the annual Grambling State
University vs. Prairie View A&M University football game at the Cotton Bowl.
The mayor
wanted to delay the vote a week because she wasn't quite sure what the money
was for or if it was really needed.
... Not wanting to stall the vote on the
UT-OU game, the mayor threw in the towel and endorsed funding for both
games.
... What we didn't see was how the fight really
started, how racial tensions began to mount.
Earlier that day, the council voted
to appoint nine municipal judges. But one judge, Vonciel Hill, whom Dr.
Thornton-Reese and other black council members wanted to keep on the bench,
was booted off.
... Tempers flared, she said, because she
and other black council members believe that Ms. Miller worked behind the
scenes to get rid of Ms. Hill, a black judge who has a reputation of giving
prosecutors a tough time.
The mayor denies trying to oust Ms.
Hill, saying she and the council majority followed the recommendation of the
Judicial Nominating Committee, which ranked the 14 candidates. And they
agreed to take the top nine, which included eight minorities. Ms. Hill was
ranked 10th.
... But not even that fully explains the rift.
Black council members said tension has been building between them and the
mayor since she took office and vowed to get rid of the city's first black
police chief, Terrell Bolton.
The mayor, as
you may remember ? and she certainly does ? survived several failed recall
efforts.
...The black council members wanted the Cowboys to come to Fair Park,
and they said the mayor didn't work with them or the rest of the council to
make that happen.
"Sometimes the mayor is not listening
to the representatives of the black community," said council member James
Fantroy. "Whether you like it or not, we are the black representatives, and
we do represent the community."
... Dr. Thornton-Reese, who has been criticized by
some for the way she verbally attacked the mayor, said she has no regrets.
"A lot of people said that it needed
to happen," Dr. Thornton-Reese said.
... The mayor says she's being unfairly
criticized. Any perceived rift with the black community, she said, stems
from her days as a reporter.
... "This goes way back," she said.
... "Obviously I need to be a bigger part of that
solution. And there's lots of work to do." |
There are two outright lies in
Ragland's column -- or he's just not competent to be covering city hall.
The Mayor knew exactly what Shakedown Chaney wanted the money for -- for his
amigo, the game promoter -- not the teams. She also knew that Chaney had
not told the council that he had coerced $75,000 already from the State Fair
people for Grambling-Prairie View's promoter -- again not for the teams.
What Miller got done was to get the city's money directed to the teams -- not to
Chaney's buddy.
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The second lie is that mayor "survived several
failed recall efforts". There was one recall effort that was a huge
failure. I still want to know how those churches that were involved in
the effort are keeping their tax exempt status. Remember all the
footage of church members using church computers to look up voter
information? The same so-called preachers who led the failed effort
claimed they were going to do it again. We're still waiting. You
can't really call their first effort a "recall effort" because they couldn't
even get enough signatures to call the election, and they would not have won
had they actually got an election. |
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James Northrup:
Time for new, young leadership in
the Black community.
Current crop of black leaders resort
to passive aggressive tantrums because they know
their non-Black colleagues will pander to race
quota guilt trips.
Best
way to stop tantrums is to ignore them.
When that happens, these old
school politicians won't have any cards left to play.
They will be
replaced by more talented, more effective, and probably less corrupt
leadership. |
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Our Mayor's comments are
exactly why she's in this mess. She cannot help herself, being the
limousine liberal that she is. What does Our President call it? "The
soft bigotry of low expectations"? She just cannot put the blame where it
belongs -- on 4 African-American council members who are using their
office for personal gain.
I am getting really sick of so-called reporters like Ragland skewing the facts
to promote their own agenda. Ragland's columns should be on the editorial
page -- not in the local news section.
But, honestly, Ragland's column is not as bad as what Jim Schutze writes about
the same outrageous behavior and results regarding Chaney's shakedown.
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Laff in the Dark:
For Dallas, for the city council, for now, this was
good
BY JIM SCHUTZE
dallasobserver.com
| originally published: September 9, 2004 |
Wouldn't you know. All the time I criticize the Dallas City Council
and say they've screwed up, and they get mad at me because they think
they're doing such a damn stellar job. So last week I walk out of a city
council session thinking for once they really did do a great job. And
they're mad at me, calling me an idiot because they say they screwed up.
... The debate was whether to pay one big subsidy
to two white schools and another one to two traditionally black colleges in
order to keep two popular football games at the Cotton Bowl.
... they accused each other of infamous perfidy,
scurrilous villainy, racism, fraud, parliamentary infraction, legislative
inaction, mental inelasticity, patronizing didacticity and being dumb. Then
they joined hands and voted unanimously in favor of the subsidies.
... The first has to do with the history of the
State Fair of Texas as a sharp stick in the eye of black Dallas.
Anybody black in Dallas whose family
has been here more than 50 years knows all about "Nigger Day." Throughout
the 1930s and '40s, that was the one day African-American families were
allowed to attend the State Fair of Texas. And that's what it was called.
... So we think what? Black people are going to
forget this stuff?
... In the weeks leading up to last week's battle
over subsidies for the football games at the State Fair, Chaney, it seems,
ran a serious scam on the rest of the council--the white and Latino members,
anyway.
... But in the absence of a rebuttal and after
running this by several of his colleagues on the council, I have to say he
comes across in this chapter as scam artist of the month.
... Chaney argued that if the city was going to
pay a subsidy for a white football game, it needed to pay one for a black
game played at the fair also. He said he wanted the city to pay a $250,000
subsidy to support the Prairie View-Grambling State Fair Classic.
A whole lot of complete nonsense has
been uttered recently, both on the council and in The Dallas Morning News
letters column and elsewhere, about the relative economic values of these
two games, Texas-OU and Prairie View-Grambling.
... Anyway, because of various contract issues and
so on, the two subsidies only recently came up for a vote. At that point,
Chaney and council member Dr. Maxine Thornton-Reese, who is black, began
brow-beating the rest of the council and race-carding the hell out of them,
especially Mayor Laura Miller.
What Chaney did
not mention to his colleagues was that he had already negotiated a $225,000
subsidy for the black game from a group of State Fair concessionaires. The
only reason anybody even found out about the extra $225,000 in payola was
that the mayor, former investigateuse that she is, sniffed around and found
out about it from Errol McKoy, president of the fair.
Even then, Chaney tried to
pretend for a while that he was shocked! shocked! to hear about this extra
money for the black game. But then Miller was able to establish that it was
Chaney who had negotiated it.
... Then the mayor, who obviously thought all of
this stank to high heaven, swallowed hard, too. She joined the rest of the
members present in voting unanimously for both subsidies, for the white game
and the black game, too.
... But the council, weird and blemished and
screwed up as it may be, deserves huge credit for finding its way to some
kind of an agreement. I mean it.
As I say, when I button-holed people
on their ways to their cars in the parking garage and told them I thought it
was "marvelous, just marvelous the way you people pulled together in the
end," they all gave me looks like, "Oh, gag a maggot, you weenie.
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Same dopey mindset as Our
Mayor. How absolutely stupid to think it's a good thing to give into a
shake down for the sake of peace and harmony. Isn't that appeasement?
I'm glad Messrs. Ragland and Schutze think all of this stuff is funny and
interesting or somehow a good thing. Actually, I'm not glad. I think
it's disgusting and discouraging that two men who occasionally write sensible
stuff would approach this tragedy from the perspective of payback.
Even Our Mayor seems to think she did something wrong when she wrote the truth
about crooked politicians regardless of their pigmentation.
How is it ever going to get better if this attitude prevails? How are we
ever going to see and treat each other as equals if everyone thinks that one
side is less capable and needs exemptions from standard rules of ethical
behavior?
sb
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