Comments on Dixon
Baltimore citizens: Based on reports in the Sun and from other news organizations, what are your impressions of Mayor Dixon? Does her reported behavior as City Council president, the subject of a state prosecutor's investigation, shape in any way your view of her mayoralty? Comments may be submitted for live reading on the Midday show at midday@wypr.org, or submitted to this blog for posting here.
Today's guests: Charles Robinson, State Circle reporter for Maryland Public Television, and Stephen Henderson, deputy editor of the Detroit Free Press editorial page, commenting on how that city's mayor is functioning while under indictment. Here's a recent Henderson column on Kwame Kilpatrick. Midday on WYPR, 88.1 noon to 2 pm
Comments
The sad part is that, no matter how good or bad Mayor Dixon is as a person, the alleged behavior that is being investigated or uncovered has come to become my all-too-cynical and pessimistic expectation for any major city government, and absolutely nothing that Schmoke, O'Malley, or Dixon has done has changed my expectations. From Chicago to Detroit to Baltimore to Philadelphia to Los Angeles to New Orleans to the granddaddy of them all, Washington, D.C., we've seen this kind of behavior time and time again, and we've come to expect it as the norm. I would like to just call it a political thing, but because the cities in question have become overwhelmingly Democratic Party machines, it's become the Democrats' cross to bear. I have a friend who was named head of Philadelphia's Department of Licensing and Inspections, and he was so effective at uncovering past corruption and going by the book (instead of being able to be bought off) in his administration that he was run out of the city's political machine because his superiors were telling him to not do his job out of respect to the "old ways"--i.e., cronyism--that he was disrupting.
Posted by: Alexander D. Mitchell IV | June 26, 2008 8:49 AM
Didn't everyone know this had been coming since before the 2007 election? I would suspect that you folks at the sunpapers had heard rumors about this for a while, we certainly were hearing it on the West Side.
Posted by: Al Pierri | June 26, 2008 11:02 AM
Mayor Dixon only had 1 vote, and it's not as it here 1 vote could make or break whatever was being voted on. If she didn't recuse herself, no big deal.
A bigger deal is we're hearing about this again why Governor O'Malley gets away with the shady dealings he did as a mayor and now as a governor. How about him making sure one of his "acquaintances" got more millions in a land/real estate deal than he should have?
If you're going to drag skeletons from the closet, let's start at the top.
O'Malley doesn't have clean hands and a pure heart. It was on his shift that these alleged wrongdoings occurred when he was mayor.
I seriously doubt that anything unethical went on with his knowledge or participation.
Seems like since Mayor Dixon is doing a good job, some other politicians who shall remain nameless are upset that their corrupt dollars might be cut off.
Hmmm...
Posted by: Joyce | June 26, 2008 2:03 PM