I have become pretty active in Brooklyn politics and have started to get to know some of our politicians and candidates. Now, anyone who knows Brooklyn knows that there is a corrupt Dem machine here. That is a problem that we need to deal with. But, having said that, I am noticing that many of NYC's candidates are very good. In fact, in some cases it is a shame that two good people are running against eachother.

First there is the mayor's race. At first I thought none of the Dem candidates is good. But as I have gotten to know them I find I like all of them for different reasons. All of them are better than Bloomberg and I find myself having a hard time choosing which I will vote for. I think I would be happy with any of them.

The race that makes me most congnizant of the surfeit of good candidates is a 2006 Congressional race. I have liked and supported Chris Owens in his bid for Congress. Now I learn that David Yassky (my City Councilman) is also running for that seat. Both are excellent people and both would make excellent congresscritters. I still lean towards Chris, but what I really wish is I could support BOTH of them. Too bad they are running for the same office in 2006 (Note: Yassky is running for reelection to City Council this year and for Congress next year). In many other parts of the nation it would be hard to find ONE candidate as good as these guys.

Brooklyn DA: the incumbent, Hynes, isn't bad. He has done great things on crime and has indicted the head of the corrupt Brooklyn Dem party. The main complaint against him is that he seems to have passed his prime some time ago (he has been Brooklyn DA for some 14+ years). Mark Peters is favored by some reform minded Brooklynites, though so far he has rubbed me the wrong way. Still, he probably is a good candidate. Better than these two, in my opinion, is Paul Wooten who has greatly impressed me as, in essence, the ideal DA. He knows the mechanics right and left, is reform minded without even realizing it and is VERY focused on civil rights and consumer rights, something Hynes has been a bit weak on. The only bad candidate for DA that I know if is Sampson who is endorsed by the corrupt Dem machine. So although I will work for Paul Wooten, I still have to realize that there are several good candidates.  read more »

An AP  News Report came out today reporting the fighting in the New York State Republican party over the decision as to whether or not to give an Executive Committee seat to the Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing gay members of the GOP.

One member of the New York State Senate, Serphin Maltese, who is also the Executive Director of the Conservative Party of New York State, was particularly outspoken in his opposition to allowing to group of gay Republicans to serve in a leadership capacity.
The fact that there are anti-gay Republicans in New York State is not the problem, that is to be expected.

The problem is that Serphin Maltese, and many other Republicans are being given a free pass by the Democratic party in election after election in New York State.

New York State has approximately 8 million registered Democrats, while Republicans have slightly less than 6 million. In Maltese's district, the 15th New York Senate District, in Queens, Democrats outnumber Republicans  77,000 to 34,00o. Despite this enourmous disparity, the Democratic party has not even run a candidate in the 15th in the last 4 elections!  read more »

This Thursday, June 9 The Blog Party presents a “meet the candidate

Once again I notice a sudden rush of negative reporting about Howard Dean in the Mainstream Media and on various blogs. The media versions usually come in the form of right-wing pundits attacking Dean for comments taken out of context, followed by the media in generally blindly following along and pretending Dean is some radical.

On blogs the attacks usually come in waves of nearly identical diaries that either pretend to be liberals outraged by Dean or are "reasonable conservatives" (according to their own claims) asking the liberals how they feel about Dean's supposedly outrageous comments. Generally the diaries are clearly drawn from some conservative pundit's "talking points" and only vaguely reflect reality. Sometimes some genuine liberals will follow along.

But none of this has anything at all to do with anything Howard Dean says. The simple fact of the matter is this always happens at anytime the Republicans are doing poorly. Right now Iraq is getting worse, Bush's popularity is plunging, Tom DeLay's scandals are now widely known and the scandals of other Republicans like Mike Oxley, Roy and Matt Blunt and Conrad Burns are starting to come out, and generally the public's view of the extremist Republicans is declining. At the same time, Howard Dean just successfully raised a huge amount of money for the DNC, including money to help out the state parties of states like West Virginia, Kanasas, Wyoming, etc. In other words Dean is being a successful party chair and is planning a strategy that stabs deep into Republican territory.  read more »

This Thursday, June 9 The Blog Party presents a “meet the candidate