Unlike Ann Murray & Jennifer Gottlieb, repeat no-shows at contentious Ben Gamla mtg. in HB Tuesday, Michelle Rhee will show up in public

Above, Ann Murray, our completely unreliable elected representative to the Broward School Board.
Her devotion to her constituents -us- like her time priorities, are completely upside-down and unacceptable.
She works for us, not the other way around, yet she seems to be unaware of this particular working arrangement.
Perhaps she needs to be "educated."


To quote the ever-observant Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic Online, below, in his essay on D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who resigned this week after Mayor Adrian Fenty was defeated in his re-election bid:

"And -- she was accessible. She did not cloister herself, nor did she shy away from town hall meetings. She showed up and made her case. Parents could talk to her, although they might not have liked what she had to say."

Well, at least Ben Gamla founder Peter Deutsch publicly admitted -a few times- to the SRO crowd of about 200-250 people at the HB Cultural Center Tuesday night what we in opposition to his proposed site in a single-family HB neighborhood have long suspected but heretofore been unable to prove.

If the City of hallandale Beach didn't require Deutsch to hold a "Community Meeting," he wouldn't hold one or talk to city residents.

Repeat after me - " He just doesn't care what YOU think."
If by YOU, I mean Hallandale Beach Residents.
I do.

Among the elected No-Shows at this meeting: Broward School Board members Ann Murray of District One, School Board Chair and At-Large member Jennifer Gottlieb, HB mayor Joy Cooper, and HB City Commissioners William "Bill" Julian, Anthony A. Sanders and Keith London.

London at least was next door, across the hallway, holding one of his regularly-scheduled monthly Resident Forum meetings with residents and interested guests, and had the event planned for that date long before Deutsch asked for that date, too.
(His next public meeting is Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the HB Cultural Center.)

London's the only HB commissioner who has regularly-scheduled monthly meetings with HB city residents and outsiders like Greenberg Traurig's Debbie Orshefsky have attended in the past, though her appearances were mostly for recon purposes in support of her client, the incompatible Diplomat LAC proposal which was later voted down by the Broward County
Commission.

And as anyone who has ever attended one knows, Mayor Cooper frequently crashes London's meetings too, -or sends her not-too-clever and transparent spies- when she feels like it, the most recent instance being the one held in mid-Sept. that City Manager Mark Antonio was at for about an hour, listening and answering questions about problems in the city
that the mayor foolishly insists don't exist, despite the fact that they are both numerous and self-evident to anyone paying the slightest attention.

That mid-September meeting was the one where Cooper reacted with a audible gasp when London responded cleverly in response to a resident's query about campaign contributions, as he spoke about the upcoming election, for which he is running for re-election -after Antonio left the room.

Cooper's gasp, which you can hear on the videotape I made of the meeting -which, for the record, are done largely so I don't forget something and don't have to write everything down and can just relax like everyone else- came when he mentioned that another HB city commission candidate, Cooper pet Alexander Lewy, who was sitting in the front row, just five feet away, had received contributions from both Cooper's husband and son-in-law.
About $1,500 between the two of them as I recall it now.

I will try to post that video here soon if I can, since the lighting in the small rooms is not always so great for recording purposes.

I am unable to go to the Broward School Board today for their 1 p.m. Ethics Policy Comm. meeting as I had originally planned, but I am going to find out in the next few days from the Broward Dept. of Elections how long we'd have to wait before, hypothetically, initiating a recall of Ann Murray, our dependably undependable No-Show of a School Board member, who acts like the HB part of her district is terra incognita, despite the fact that she lives in next-door Hollywood.
That's completely unacceptable.

I'll soon be filing a public records request at Broward School Board HQ to get Ann Murray's records and work schedule since getting into office, to see if, as everyone agrees, she has NEVER been at a public HB event that wasn't political or a fundraiser.

Like the meeting we made a point of being at on Tuesday night.

Murray not only couldn't bother, but never even responded to reminder emails sent to her last week about it by both Etty Sims and Csaba Kulin, the latter of whom's letter I ran here a few days ago.
Ann Murray just doesn't get it.

In a few months, we may well need to stage an intervention and help make Ann Murray's public invisibility act a permanent one, so that HB residents have a fully-functioning rep on the Broward School Board who is responsive and forthcoming, NOT impudent and thoroughly anti-social.

------

I subscribe to Marc Ambinder's daily dispatches from The Atlantic Monthly Online in large part because he seems much more prescient than 99% of the political observers around.
I urge you to consider subscribing, too.

I was actually a subscriber to The Atlantic magazine for most of the 15 years I lived in Arlington County, VA, a little over three miles west of Georgetown, and kept the past issues stored in my garage in carefully labeled faux-wood paneled cardboard Banker Boxes.

Keeping The Atlantic company in the garage archives -with current ones upstairs- were, if I can remember the list: Harper's, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Maxim, The Washington Monthly, Esquire, The New Yorker, National Geographic Traveler, Conde Naste Traveler, Vanity Fair, Variety, Premiere, The Wilson Quarterly and some political, film and marketing trade journals that I received because of either my own personal interests or because some friends were involved with them as writers, editors or management.

Plus, of course, my favorite read, a newspaper, The New York Observer. which I first became familiar with in 1989, when I was up in New York City for my sister's wedding, and I discovered it while taking some personal time away from the family that weekend and walked on The West Side. I was immediately hooked -and still am. http://www.observer.com/

Make of that varied reading mix what you will, since it gives you some sense of my personality and interests, but the best part was that my part of the garage was -generally- like a pretty well-ordered and deep-pocketed law firm's library, with everything in its place.
You know, in case something unfortunate happened to the Newspaper and Current Periodicals Room at Library of Congress, long one of my haunts!

http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/
http://www.loc.gov/index.html

Marc Ambinder is the politics editor of The Atlantic. He has covered Washington for ABC News and the Hotline, and he is chief political consultant to CBS News.
Follow him on Twitter @marcambinder

Bio | All Posts

What's Next for Michelle Rhee?
Posted: 13 Oct 2010 02:01 PM PDT

Michelle Rhee has a plan.

Hours after she stepped out of the maelstrom that is the D.C. public schools system, her patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, having been bounced out of office, she launched a Twitter feed and a website, teasing would-be followers to find out what she'll be doing next.

Rhee is a Grade-A edu-lebrity, and she's the perfect bureaucrat for the Reality Show age, when personal brands matter as much as ideas. Or when, at the very least, ideas don't succeed unless they've got good brands behind them.

Rhee is well-liked by the major educational philanthropy organizations, and though I Tweeted last night that she's probably headed to the Obama administration or to another school district, she could just as well become the public face of a major, well-funded campaign to promote her ideas about teachers, merit pay, and reform.

Read the rest of Ambinder's spot-on post at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/whats-next-for-michelle-rhee/64517/

DCWATCH kindly reminds us how ineffectual Eric Holder was as U.S. Attorney for D.C.

Sunday, December 14, 2008 
5:25 PM

As a longtime reader of dcwatch.com -and more recently, an actual subscriber via email- I just wanted to send up another flare to you re Eric Holder, like some of my previous head's up,
where dcwatch was the first to really ring the bell on the Cult of Michelle Rhee and her failure to produce "any measurable improvement in student performance" in D.C., the lack of national media attention shown to Mayor Adrian Fenty's autocratic ways, etc., which you'd think even the cablenets would've noticed by now, once the election was over.

But no, and certainly not now that we all have Rod Blagojevich to keep the cablenets yakking.
Anger and Indignation http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-02-03.htm
A City of Enemies http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-08-20.htm
Practice Makes Imperfect http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-12-03.htm

They have been all over the Michelle Rhee story in a way that nobody else in the country has been, even while columnists all over the country, who are unaware of the reality, jump on her media bandwagon and join the flack army with nary a thought.

I remember when I first read the Washington City Paper story below about Eric Holder eleven years ago. It immediately reminded me of another one of the corruption stories I heard about shortly after I moved to Capitol Hill, ironically, across the street from Sen. and Mrs. Moynihan, the man who first publicly defined deviancy down.
Right near the intersection of East Capitol Street and S.E. 7th Street where an early DC friend of mine who worked at the State Dept. was beaten robbed at gunpoint my first summer on 'the Hill.'

It was one of those news stories that made me stop and think, "Only in DC!," in the same incredulous way I'd always though about certain things being "Only in South Florida!" from having grown up done here and being deeply involved in Dade and state politics at an early age in the '70's -and having a father who worked as a Dade County policeman for over 25 years.
Usually, the "Only in South Florida!" story had the requisite foreign intrigue angle or something about crates marked bananas actually being weapons being smuggled out towards some distant war zone, or allegations about someone really being either a foreign spy or CIA or...

The DC Public Schools had decided to create a summer program for employees who were cafeteria workers at schools eight months out of the year.
The idea was to supplement their pay by during the summer to ensure they stayed afloat financially and ensure they'd be available once school started up in August.
Now as I recall it, once you signed up, you were assured of getting a paycheck, regardless of whether you actually were called in to do some work over the course of the summer.

Well, naturally, things being what they were in DC at the time, with little advance thought given to the overall process or what sort of audit control system they'd have, other than names being written down on a list -somewhere- things went about as bad as possible.
If there were X amount of legitimate workers entitled to be in the system, DCPS was actually paying something along the lines of 2.3X in checks, with hundreds of people who weren't legit actually receiving govt. checks for months on end.
Result: Most people getting DCPS' summer checks didn't actually work for the school system.

I don't recall now if there were any federal funds attached to the summer worker program, though my guess is yes, since the DC school system then wasn't exactly a great incubator of bright ideas or overflowing with cash.

It's also important to grasp a point the article hints at: DC juries then were a notoriously bad way to try to prosecute crime and corruption, because to many, the whole city was tainted, and not a place that respected the rule of law but rather the law of opportunity, with no judgment given or taken for how people got their hands on money.

Over 15 years of living in the area, I had my fair share of friends who served on DC juries who later told me that it was one of the worst experiences they ever went thru, largely because of the number of people on the jury with them who were not the least bit interested in upholding their responsibility.
Or, even in paying attention.
It literally scared them to death to think about all the people whose fates had been left up to such dis-interested DC residents, a subject they'd never hertofore considered, their personality and politics being what it was.
And if you don't think that experiences like this give people pause, and cause them to re-think their decision to eschew the suburbs for the city, for some abstract idea of living in a diverse urban village, you're very much mistaken.
Actually, in two specific cases I can think of, it proved to be the last straw, and led to them moving the family out towards me in Northern Virginia.

This laissez-faire attitude towards crime and corruption was brough home to me personally by a very brilliant and dedicated friend who was a prosecutor under Holder, but someone who, initially, took DC's culture of crime, cronyism and corruption a little too personally.
I felt like Jack McCoy trying to shake her out of her funk.

After I met her and we'd become trusted friends, I started attending her trials whenever I could manage, which -shocker!- often involved gangs, guns and lots of mayhem.
She later told me she thought it was odd that local DC media, who always seemed to be camped outside of the courthouse, and who came to recognize who all the other courthouse "regulars" were, never thought to wonder aloud on the air or in print, why so many young teens were always congregating inside the courthouse who didn't have a legitimate reason to be there.

She was right of course, as the sense of obliviousness by so-called security in the courthouse was palpable to anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention.

Yeah, witness intimidation was yet another thing that if not exactly winked at, got MUCH less
attention -and media attention- than it rightfully deserved then.
It finally got to the point that once she'd arrived at the Metro train station closest to our neighborhood, she'd walk thru a very large office building lobby, so she could be sure that nobody was following her home from the courthouse.

Having first heard and then seen what I had, what was I going to do, tell her that she was wrong to be concerned, when there was ample evidence she was right?

Personally, I think unless he's prepared to put the whole thing around President Clinton's neck, the more that Eric Holder tries to describe his own role in the Marc Rich pardon, the more difficult his nomination will be to swallow whole by the Senate.
Plus, there's the prospect of him having to discuss Elián González...
_______________________________________________
excerpt from the latest dcwatch.com posting

Partying in the mail, December 10, 2008
Dear Partiers:

For some reason, which is unrelated to local DC affairs and which we therefore won't mention (Blagojevich), we've been thinking about government corruption a lot today.
The problem with political corruption in the District of Columbia, as opposed to some other unnamed states (Illinois), is that political corruption is almost never prosecuted here, and there aren't any negative consequences for engaging in it. (The DC workers who stole from the Office of Tax and Revenue weren't engaged in government corruption; they were practicing just plain old-fashioned thievery.)
One of the best examples of official overlooking of official corruption occurred in the last term of Mayor Marion Barry. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia for three-and-a-half years of that term never prosecuted a single instance of official corruption, and his inattentiveness didn't seem to hurt his career (see Stephanie Mencimer, "Placeholder?", http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207). _________________________________________________
Washington City Paper
PlaceHolder?
With 12 years' experience prosecuting public corruption at the Justice Department, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder was a perfect choice to clean up a corrupt city. But after three and a half years, he may be moving on, and D.C. is still one of the most crooked cities in the nation.
By Stephanie Mencimer
Mar. 7 - 13, 1997 (Vol. 17, #10)

When President Bill Clinton tapped Eric Holder to be U.S. Attorney for D.C. in 1993, he immediately became the District's black sheriff in the white hat. The first African-American ever to hold the job, Holder's appointment broke a stretch of 12 years of white Republicans overseeing the predominantly black city. Not only was Holder representative of the city's majority population, but the former D.C. Superior Court judge had gone straight from Columbia Law School to the Justice Department's public integrity section, where he had spent 12 years successfully prosecuting corrupt public officials. Many people in the District were thrilled; Holder arrived with both exceptional qualifications and the moral authority to crack down on public corruption without the taint of racism that derailed his predecessors.

Up to that time, the city's relationship with the U.S. Attorney's office had been an awkward one. During the 1980s, the city watched as former U.S. Attorneys Jay Stephens and Joseph diGenova went after Mayor Marion Barry and his cronies only to be thwarted by juries that saw their prosecutions as politically and racially motivated crusades aimed at bringing down a popularly elected black mayor. Not only did Barry prevail in court, he came back and then some, reclaiming his old job in 1995. In spite of his history of personal malfeasance, a majority of city residents were willing to give Barry the benefit of the doubt. But many drew confidence from the fact that when Barry moved into 1 Judiciary Square, Holder would be a block away, looking over his shoulder. Holder seemed like a gold-plated insurance policy promising that Barry wouldn't get one over on the city. After all, Holder knew as much about prosecuting corruption as Barry seemed to know about perpetrating it.

After three and a half years on the job, Holder is still revered in the city's halls of power and widely respected by his peers in the legal field. He is the presumptive nominee to replace outgoing U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, a major plum position. He is infinitely qualified by all accounts, and his appointment would be a historic one, since the position has never been held by an African-American. But for all the love Holder has engendered in the community as U.S. Attorney, he has had precious little impact on the city's endemic municipal corruption. Barry has returned to his old tricks, nudging contracts and city jobs to old cronies and new girlfriends. Holder is apparently leaving, and he hasn't thrown a punch.
It isn't for lack of targets.

To read the rest of this great article, go to
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207

Stephanie Mencimer is now at Mother Jones.
For her more recent work, go to
http://www.motherjones.com/people/Stephanie-Mencimer.html