The MCDC: And a stupid little girl shall lead them.

On Wednesday night, Jamie Romeo was elected as the MCDC's new chairman.
It was poorly attended; the ghetto oriented Gantt-Warren faction of the Democrats didn't even bother to show up.
That faction already proved that they and their candidates can be successful without the party chairperson's blessing. They don't have any use for the party chairperson, at least not within the ghetto.
That is an ominous sign.
She is being touted as the youngest chairman in recent years, and only the second female since the notorious Molly Clifford held that office for a few minutes in 2003-2005.
Her opening statements should also qualify her as being one of the stupidest.
Rochester's liberal newsrag, the Democrat and Chronicle, quoted her as saying “The road ahead may be difficult, but we’re Democrats. We don’t shy away from tough fights. We organize, we unite and we win.”
The D&C's own staff writer, David Andreatta, did a very nice job describing how incorrect that statement was.
You might want to check out Andreatta's summary in the D&C: "Chaos is the Democrats' fatal flaw."
In very polite terms, he was saying that Romeo doesn't know what in Hell she is talking about.
At thirty, Romeo is too old to be an innocent. Or a novice.
On the other hand, liars and fools come in all ages and sexes.
Judging by her statement, she chose to ignore the bitter truth about her badly splintered party.
Romeo is not the person to raise massive funds for her party. She will be incapable of bridging the chasm between the Morelle-Clifford clique and the Gantt-Warren faction.
Nobody can.
And she won't last long either, unless nobody else wants her position.
Nobody else wanted it this time.

Sabrina Nesmith's lies cost a city worker his job.

Sabrina Nesmith complained that her son wandered away from the recreation center at School 42 last week and that nobody called to tell her that.
She also claimed that her mother found her son wandering along Lake Avenue.
The city promptly fired one recreation associate, Jason Johnson, and disciplined another.
The identity of the second person remains a mystery.
Jason Johnson promptly got hold of a surveillance tape at School 42 which showed the boy's grandmother picked him up at the school's driveway.
Sabrina Nesmith lied.
The city refuses to reinstate Jason Johnson because, as spokesperson James Smith put it,  "As part of that investigation it was discovered that policies and procedures were not followed which led to disciplinary action.  While we are aware of the video, its content does not change the result of the investigation or the course of discipline."
Smith never bothered to explain what policies and procedures were not followed. The recreation program at School 42 has an open door policy. Children may come and go as they please, although Smith claimed that there is a system in place for accounting for kids, without explaining what it is.
Sabrina Nesmith said that she's sorry about Johnson losing his job, but there should be a law preventing children from wandering off.
City Hall shit canned Johnson to prevent Nesmith from going to the media. She did anyway.She couldn't resist having her fifteen seconds worth of fame on local television news cameras. She conned the media like she conned City Hall.
Then video tape came to light. The tape didn't lie. It proved Nesmith did.
Now she's been caught in a lie, and is getting more than fifteen seconds worth of fame. Or infamy.
Johnson should lawyer up.

The piss-poor political propaganda of LaShana Boose.

When I left the Republican party three years ago, I registered as a "blank." I chose to remain unaffiliated with any political party because the two major parties are both as corrupt as Hell, and because of the less than welcoming behavior of the Northwest Democrats to former Republicans.
The lesser political parties are filled with kooks. Well meaning kooks, sometimes, but kooks nonetheless.
My husband remains registered as a Democrat, which entitles us to receive political propaganda from Democratic bullshit artists seeking election to public office.
Yesterday, stuffed into our door jam, we found just such propaganda from LaShana Boose.
Ms. Boose is running for the northwest city council seat being vacated by Carla Palumbo.
One side of this political blurb features a very nice photo of Ms. Boose. Underneath it states that she is "connected to the community."
She is no such thing. Nobody ever heard of her before.
The only connection Ms. Boose has is to the Gantt-Warren faction of the Democratic party. She worked on Ms. Warren's election campaign. This is to be Ms. Boose's reward.
The Gantt-Warren faction needed a black female to run as a foil against the notorious Molly Clifford for Palumbo's city council seat. Those are her only qualifications, race and sex, and the Gantt-Warren faction chose to ignore better potential candidates for those reasons alone.
And so there will be a primary election for the Democratic nod.
On the flip side of the card, Ms. Boose makes trite statements about being a working mother and her concerns for the northwest district, something she has never been publicly concerned about before.
It's sentimental claptrap, and hardly enough to justify voting for her in the primary. It's just plain stupid.
It is similar to the rhetorical garbage offered by Molly Clifford's candidate for LD 26, Yversha Roman.
Roman has no connection to the community, either.
She is running solely on the fact that she is a Democrat, and party affiliation alone is a pretty stupid reason to vote for a candidate.
It usually works because most voters are stupid.
It is on the pillars of stupidity, party affiliation and race that both the Morelle-Clifford and Gantt-Warren factions are counting.

Dave Garretson couldn't hack it as MCDC chairman.

Well meaning oaf Dave Garretson threw in the towel today as MCDC chairman, less than ten months after being elected to the position.
I have stated before that he was ill suited for the position, that he had neither the strength nor imagination to heal the severe fractures within his party: the fratricidal war in Rochester between the Morelle-Clifford faction and the Gantt-Warren clique.
They are still merrily slicing away at each other, to the amusement of the Monroe County GOP.
Garretson's tenure merely made the county Republicans look stronger, and himself look ridiculous.
Nor was Garretson any good at raising funds for the party, or finding decent candidates to run against Republicans this year.
Really, Dave. Choosing two time loser Dick Bebe to run against Fred Ancello again?
His excuse for leaving was family illness rather than abject failure on his part.
Now, everything is undone again, leaving the door open for Molly Clifford's boy toy, Ken Warner, to reactivate his campaign for MCDC chair. Warner stood down last year when it became obvious that their notoriety was more than most Democrats would stand.
They are good at reactivating campaigns, just like with Tom Richards.
It will provide a real circus for Rochesterians of all political stripes to watch over the next few months, complete with shits and giggles.

Rochester's City Council wusses out.

Mayor Warren got the money for a feasibility study for a Broadway style theater after all.
Last night, City Council voted 7 - 1 to approve $30,000 for the study.
The only dissenter was Carolee Conklin, the only man on City Council.
She claimed that it was obvious that the mayor planned to put a theater in downtown no matter what. The only question is where.
Why else would Rochester millionaire Arnie Rothschild commit nearly $60,000 of RBTL funds to this study?
The county will supposedly hand over another $30,000.
The state will be contributing $100,000.
The feasibility study will be conducted by an out of state agency, which will come back and say it will work.
That's why the mayor didn't want her Neighborhood and Business Development Department to conduct the study. She feared that the new commissioner, Baye Muhammad, might be too honest in his investigation.
Or maybe not.
After all, she picked him.

City Council nixes Mayor Warren's feasibility study for a Broadway style theater.

Mayor Warren received a shock yesterday.
Our usually complacent City Council refused to do as they were bidden and approve a feasibility study for a new theater downtown.
Previous studies and plans for such a project always concluded with the fact that a theater of such magnitude in downtown Rochester was not economically feasible. Such a project would require continued public subsidies to keep it in operation.
That means we, the taxpayers, would get stuck footing the bill for something most of us would never use.
Councilmember Carolee Conklin referred to those previous studies and their conclusions. She asked what had changed.
Nothing has changed, except perhaps that Rochester has gotten poorer.
Mayor Warren based her campaign on a "two cities" rhetoric: one for the rich, one for the poor. Especially the black poor.
Unfortunately, the mayor built better than she knew.
Her associates could not approve a feasibility study that would result in building a downtown playground for Rochester's rich and not so famous, and try to pass it off as something necessary to the poor voters who repeatedly elect them to office.
That would be rather hypocritical. City Council does not wish to appear hypocritical.
Conklin also asked why it was necessary to hire a consultant to do the feasibility study. Wasn't City Hall's own department of neighborhood and business development be capable of doing it for nothing?
The NBD might be capable of conducting such a study, but if it was honest in its research, it probably wouldn't come up with the results the mayor and Arnold Rothschild want.
Nobody but the mayor and Rothschild's Rochester Broadway Theater League want such a theater, anyway.
If you buy and pay for a study of some topic, you can generally be assured of the desired prognosis.
The Broadway style theater will again be put on the back burner, an object of apathy to most Rochesterians.
But you have to hand it to Carolee Conklin. She has bigger brass balls than anyone in City Hall.

The poor to pay for the pleasures of the rich.

Rochester is one of the poorest cities in America for its size.
So, to combat poverty, Rochester will be hiring consultants to the tune of $211,000 ( plus change ) to study the feasibility of building a Broadway style theater downtown.
The city got a state grant for $100,000 for this purpose.
Rochester, and that means you and me, will cover the rest.
Plans for such a theater has been on the table for years. The stumbling block has always been the cost.
Its chief proponent is the Rochester Broadway Theater League, led by local millionaire Arnold Rothschild. They argue that a theater of this nature is a necessity.
For what? For whom?
For them, definitely.
The solution is clear: They want it, they need it, they can pay for building it themselves.
But the neat, well-heeled elite who meet to eat overpriced meat at 2Vine have no intention of paying for it themselves. They want your tax dollars to do it so that they can better enjoy their lifestyles of the rich and not so famous at no cost to themselves.
Mr. Rothschild, it might be recalled, was a heavy contributor to Mayor Warren's election campaign.
Ms. Warren has been scrupulous about paying her debts to her rich supporters, so she has already asked for $100 million dollars from Governor Cuomo for the purpose of building an entertainment center downtown.
She was turned down. So now we are going to have a feasibility study about such a theater to convince the government to pay for it.
Perhaps the Mayor can also convince the government to pay for their polo ponies.
What a way to fight poverty.