Day: November 11, 2015

Get a load of Copeland's response to the recent NJ editorial in the city of Wilmington. It would be funny if the stakes were not so high.

GOP Reaction to News Journal Editorial

Newark, DE -- The Chairman of the Delaware Republican Party, Charlie Copeland, released the following statement this afternoon after reading today's News Journal editorial "Wilmington, our broken city, must be saved": "The News Journal has hit the nail on the head, and I commend them for their editorial this morning. I was particularly struck by the line, 'We must work to improve access to high-quality education in the city. We must work to ensure our young people have employment opportunities and the resources to succeed. We must stem the tide of guns flowing onto our streets'. "Republicans have not held a significant seat at the table in the City of Wilmington in over 40 years, and we have not controlled the Governor's Office in 24 years. This has left the City in the hands of one party control, and the results of that have been devastating. Our Party is well aware of this fact, and we have begun to reengage in the City to offer residents a real choice when they go to the ballot box. "Republicans feel strongly that our party has real solutions to the very real problems that face the City of Wilmington. We are prepared to meet with the Mayor, and others who have an interest in saving Wilmington, to work in a bi-partisan way to make things better.

So...What are they, these solutions? Why the secrecy? Can it be because the GOP's "solutions" amount to a handful of tax cuts for the businesses and individuals that are already getting a pretty good deal? Maybe we've taken tax cuts as far as they can go, and now Charlie is going to propose direct subsidies to our wealthiest businesses and individuals. I wouldn't put it past him.

I've been stewing about what is wrong with Democrats and the Democratic Party for a long time. What's I've arrived as is a pretty simple realization. The American left, and…

Brian Beutler says the Republicans have no answer to a key 2016 question:

[T]he most revealing question of the first half of the debate, addressed to Carly Fiorina, posited that Democrats will point out, accurately, that the labor market has performed better in modern times under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones, and that it performed particularly poorly under the previous Republican president. "The Democrats will inevitably ask you and voters to compare the recent presidents' jobs performance," said moderator Gerard Baker. "In seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs per month. Under Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 per month, under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you will probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?" Fiorina, quite tellingly, had no answer. [...] “When Hillary Clinton runs, she’s going to say, ‘The Republicans gave us a crappy economy twice, and we fixed it twice. Why would you ever trust them again?’” Kevin Hassett, a Republican economist at the American Enterprise Institute, said earlier this year. “The objective for the people in the Republican Party who want to defeat her is to come up with a story about what’s not great.”

What's not great is income inequality, but Republican policies of tax cuts, union busting and deregulation have created income inequality, not lessened it. So the GOP cannot campaign on that either.

Last March the US Department of Education’s civil rights survey examined all 97,000 public schools in the US, representing 49 million students. They study found that...

Black students accounted for 18 percent of the country’s pre-K enrollment, but made up 48 percent of preschoolers with multiple out-of-school suspensions. Black students were expelled at three times the rate of white students. Black girls were suspended at higher rates than all other girls and most boys. Black students were more than three times as likely to attend schools where fewer than 60 percent of teachers meet all state certification and licensure requirements.

That's only 4 of the study's 14 key findings, and that is only looking at race and justice through the lens of public education. What does that say about us as a country? What does it mean for the lives of these young people who get caught in the gears of a criminal justice system so early in their lives? The town hall meeting on November 17th is set to address these and other pressing questions raised by the glaring racial inequities of our criminal justice system.