Cory Booker must stop blaming Sharpe James!

It has been a year and counting for Newark Mayor Cory Booker and as a staunch supporter I am terribly disappointed. It seems he has a PR campaign of slash and burn and then blame former Mayor Sharpe James.

He is failing in all major categories: crime, neighborhood services and taxes, job creation and education. In the area of crime and crime prevention, he waited all summer after the homicide rate went through the roof to hire a new police director.

Neighborhood services did not get off to great start, either; James always made it a point to keep the streets well-swept at least in my neighborhood in the North Ward. The streets today are still riddled with potholes and work on the new school on my block has left my street in disrepair for too long.

Booker ran a campaign on promising relief for citizens and especially taxes. He knew that the tax revaluation had already hurt Newarkers and was going to study a way to get more from the Port Authority and others so as to offset an already hefty tax load for one of the poorest cities in the country.

His answer: raise taxes on Newark homeowners by 8 percent. This is hard to digest, especially since he claimed that he would be a new mayor with a keen sense of compassion. Job creation was also an area that was going to be a prime component of turning around the city.

He has not had much success there in creating more jobs, but has in fact stated that he may have to lay off city employees.

There have also been cuts to Newark's schools. This must be corrected and fast. There has to be a way to funnel more monies into our schools to save our future. Only great schools will lead to a real renaissance of the city.

The challenge is there for Booker, who said he was up to it. He should be the one to turn it around and should stop blaming the former mayor. Booker must put his idealism in motion and start applying his theories and give us what he promised. Make me a believer again.

-- Steve Sacco, Newark

Tragically, oh-so-often, those of us who aren't fond of the overlarge prison population, or having our tax money spent on TWO idiotic, unwinnable wars at once, or who actually believe that the government should have no hand in our personal lives have our opinions shouted down by those who point to (for example) elderly grandmothers in high-crime neighborhoods who hate drug dealers.

"Lookit Nanna Mae! She doesn't like drug dealers in her neighborhood! Are you gonna tell Nanna Mae they should be there forever because you want to legalize drugs?!"

Well, no. Because that's not the issue. Drive-by shootings, no matter what happens to drug laws, will be illegal. Gangs, street crime, selling drugs to kids, all that - still illegal, no matter what drugs we legalize or decriminalize. Only someone who's never bothered to give the issue even 10 minutes of thought would think that taking drugs off the streets and putting them in your convenience stores would somehow cause those things to remain at the same level, or increase. Hell, with street dealers losing pretty much all of their business (and thus, income) I fail to see how that's going to make them even more well-armed.

Not that that's even a cogent point of this debate, anyway. Clearly (as the Nanna Mae examples show) when we debate drug laws and their application in the inner-cities, we're not supposed to talk about justice, government rights vs. individual rights, or anything like that - we're just supposed to talk about what'll make the neighborhood more pleasant for harmless old ladies. In those cases, repressive laws that're used as an excuse to oppress a good percentage of the country's population are A-OK, 'cause Nanna Mae's afraid of the alternative.

But it doesn't take a genius on the Nanna Mae level to realize the simple formula that's at work here:

1) No space in existing prisons, so the government pays a huge corporation to build new, impressive prison.

2) Area that's not quite able to NIMBY-lobby the prison out of their town at least gets a load of well-paying (comparatively) new jobs opening up.

3) Prison is rapidly filled with real criminals, and then some drug-users (remember, the issue here is not VIOLENT OFFENDERS, Nanna Mae.)

4) Those cycled out (because of the fact that they were in at all) are unable to get jobs that can actually pay enough to live on. They've been in, they don't want to go back, but their two alternatives are to either sell drugs, because you can do that even after you've been in prison, or to use them in order to forget how horrible your life is - either way, you're soon back in prison for quite a while because (as was pointed out in the story) the whole place is a drug-free school zone.

5) Prisons fill, then overfill, return to step 1. Government wins (no matter what you think of taxes, when everything else is cut, NO ONE will fight against upping the taxes a bit to keep those dangerous pot-smokers locked up), Halliburton et. al. wins, nobody loses but felons, and they can't vote anymore, so who cares? (Oh, and Republicans win, when they can use the names of those felons to purge about 50,000 other voters in Democratic-leaning areas.)

So pardon me if I don't think of Nanna Mae as the be-all-end-all of debate on the drug war. Perhaps we need harsher penalties for crime that's actually part of a campaign to destroy an area. I think we could all agree on that, but to say that repressive drug laws are cool because Nanna Mae refuses to believe otherwise just doesn't wash.

Then you need to get lost and do not come back with such weak posts..

IVAN: For the sake of ending this ‘ish, I’ll take that’s what you meant. But you are committing the same acts you are accusing me of doing. It’s good that you are in a mixed neighborhood, and it’s good that you help out. But you have to understand that you aren’t the first white person to tell black people that they have problems. If you are a responsible black person in America, you grapple with this EVERY DAY. Since you have created a character for me, and you think I am some bean pie eating member of the nation of Islam, I will repeat what I said in my last post.

1: 7 out of 10 black men need to take responsibility of their kids

2: schools need to be held more accountable

3: These young brothers need to stop listening to minstrel porn that degrades women

4: community policing (which worked under the Clinton admin and what bush gutted) needs to be supported.

Don’t think I’m the only brother in the world that knows this. I know almost every disaffected Salon liberal thinks black people don’t do anything but listen to T.I and blame the man for their problems, but trust me, I’m not the only black person who talks about these stats. Don’t get mad, act emo and throw a damm temper tantrum because black people get irritated when you assume that you are the first person to tell them they have problems.

JOE: “ your all ostriches. Your all ostriches!” What? If you are going to respond like a middle schooler, I’m not going to talk to you.

STONE: So we shouldn’t even talk about our problems? We should let the government handle it? We shouldn’t say a damm thing about what we need to do for ourselves? I could go into a spiel about what we need to do, or the pain we have, but that would be useless. I’m tired of having these conversations, so I’ll parrot the party line “ everything the white man’s fault”. “ long live the oppressed black man”. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Will you go away now?

THRASHER: You are stunting on a web site. Do you know how foolish you sound. You are stunting on a bleeping website. You are beating folks down? You are an activist? You are an icon? You are stunting on a website? Nothing says "I’m 35 years old, weigh 300 pounds, and live at my momma’s basement" more than a man who stunts on a website.

Each and every one of you can call me a racist militant and an uncle tom oppressor until the cows come home , but I’m done with y’all. This isn’t the most ignorant conversation I have ever had about race, but it’s on the shortlist. Goodbye.