There are those who feel our esteemed Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (SRB), our beloved Mayor Vroom Vroom, is the worst city chief executive in the land.
Gregory Kane
A while back someone posed the question “Who’s the worst mayor in America?” A blogger on a website called www.bostonstreets.org gave this answer:
“For our money, Baltimore’s Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is the score to beat. Since assuming office in the wake of Sheila Dixon’s indictment in 2009, Rawlings-Blake’s reign has been characterized by a lack of vision, bungled projects, and ineptitude.
“She has presided over sweeping cuts to parks and after-school activities, tax breaks for a big-box super block development, and straight-up cronyism.
“Still, nothing typifies SRB’s failure as Baltimore’s mayor better than the ongoing Grand Prix debacle. The city recruited IndyCar to hold an annual race on the streets of downtown Baltimore. Rich with wide thoroughfares and generous curves, downtown streets are ideal for open-wheeled race cars driving 180 miles per hour.”
All that would make a pretty compelling case for SRB indeed being America’s worst mayor, if it weren’t for one key competitor.
And believe me, this competitor IS the worst mayor in the country. He’s so awful that he doesn’t even have a close second.
America’s worst mayor is none other than Michael Bloomberg of New York City.
During his tenure as the Big Apple’s chief executive, Bloomberg has gone above and beyond the call of duty in establishing himself as the nation’s number one enemy of liberty.
This is the guy that had his health board try to ban stores from selling sodas over a certain size— 32 ounces, if memory serves me correctly.
An appeals court ruled that ban was unconstitutional. But “unconstitutional” is what Bloomberg does. It’s where the guy lives.
Bloomberg approves of his police department’s surveillance of Muslims, even when said Muslims are engaged in constitutionally protected activity.
Like, say, praying in a mosque. How outrageous was the NYPD surveillance of Muslims? Read this quote from the website news.yahoo.com: “The surveillance by the NYPD’s intelligence division HAS EXTENDED BEYOND NEW YORK’S FIVE BOROUGHS INTO NEIGHBORING NEW JERSEY AND OTHER NEARBY STATES.”
The emphasis on the uppercased passage is mine, not Yahoo’s. The NYPD going beyond its jurisdictional boundaries to conduct surveillance on law-abiding citizens engaged in constitutionally protected conduct shows how the city’s mayor, Bloomberg, feels about things like liberty and the law.
Just last week— on the very day the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington was commemorated, ironically enough— an Associated Press story with the following headline appeared online: “NYPD Designates Mosques as Terrorism Organizations.”
The person that should take the weight for that outrage is the man who is chief executive of the city where the NYPD is running buck wild. Again, that would be Bloomberg.
No matter what Rawlings-Blake has or hasn’t done in Baltimore, her record can’t compare to Bloomberg’s. I’m betting the same applies to what Rawlings-Blake even will do in the future.
Recently federal court Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” practice is neither constitutional nor race-neutral— at least the way NYPD cops do it.
“Stop and frisk” is perfectly legal when it is in accord with the ruling handed down by the Supreme Court in its 1968 Terry v. Ohio decision.
Back then, the Court held that if a cop had a “reasonable suspicion” to believe that someone either had committed or was about to commit a crime, then said cop didn’t need probable cause to stop, frisk and question that person.
After hearing testimony— especially from one cop that said his precinct commander specifically told him to stop black males ages 14 to 21— Scheindlin found that New York cops were stopping way too many black and Latino men for no reason at all.
That’s why Bloomberg is America’s worst mayor. That’s why SRB isn’t even his close second.