Wednesday sampler
Can't afford much blogging time, so only the top handful of interesting stories here today. Weeklies tomorrow...
- Democrats feel voter sentiments on issues will help them this year in state legislative races. Ferrick's board of anonymous soothsayers opine that it looks bad for incumbents almost across the board.
- The headline here is that Sherrie Cohen is giving up her City Council ambitions for next year (perhaps letting Florence have a shot at holding the seat until spring without everybody's assuming that she's holding it for her daughter); however, the article is really about widespread discontent with the process by which insiders annoint candidates for open seats.
- A group of Democratic legislators took calls for gun laws to the suburbs yesterday, announcing a package of bills that they plan to introduce in the upcoming special session in Harrisburg. This move appears to be capitalizing on a study showing that suburban counties favor gun legislation by a large margin, meaning it's not just a city issue as opponents often claim.
- An Inquirer editorial addressing campaign contribution limits suggests that Philadelphia apply the state standard, which calls "campaign committees" enough to make a person a "candidate" . . . Councilman Goode appears to have drafted just such a bill -- if the opening paragraph is a good summary of the legal mumbo jumbo, then it sounds like a definite improvement.
posted by ACM at 2:50 PM
2 Comments:
As a progressive, I'm a little pissed that fellow progressives don't see annointing Florence Cohen as equivalent to what the party bosses are doing with their hack choices for Council. It's really the same thing...either way, the people don't get to choose.
No, there's a really important difference: the council choices are bad precisely because they'll have the power of incumbency going into the spring primaries. Florence has said that she will not run again, meaning that appointing her specifically guarantees a fair and open primary for that seat in May.
If the City Committee wanted to appoint the Chiefs of Staffs of the former councilfolk (or anybody else, ward leaders included!) to the district seats, with the understanding that such appointees could not run again in the spring, I'd have no problem with it -- it would be just a way to be sure that the business kept getting done. But picking winners in order to preempt the fairness of an open election is quite a different matter. Florence is the only person who has volunteered to serve but not run again, which is the sole reason I have for supporting her.
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