Don’t miss today’s edition of Big Talk. This’ll be the first in my series of chats with candidates for Bloomington city council. The primary is Tuesday, May 7th; the general election, Tuesday, November 5th.
Rosenbarger
This week’s guest will be attorney and nonprofit veteran Kate Rosenbarger. She’s now the very first executive director of TEDx Bloomington and has served as an analyst for NeighborWorks America, a federally-funded organization that advocates for and facilitates affordable housing and neighborhood development.
This is Kate’s first go-round as a candidate although she has participated in seven previous campaigns for other people, going back to Baron Hill‘s 2002 bid for reelection to the United States Congress. She served as Liz Watson‘s deputy campaign manager last year.
Kate’s trying to unseat long-time incumbent Chris Sturbaum for the council 1st District seat, a mighty challenge indeed for her.
Already slated for Big Talk in the coming weeks are Miah Michaelson and Andrew Guenther.
With only 10 weeks to go before the May primary, I won’t be able to feature all the candidates for the council so I’ll have to cherry-pick those I think are most interesting. My thinking right now is I won’t invite incumbents on because, well…, their actions in office already are a matter of public record. If you want to learn about them, pick up the Herald Times or listen to WFHB’s Daily Local News at 5.
Big Talk airs every Thursday at 5:30pm on WFHB, 91.3 FM. I’ll post today’s podcast at 6:00pm and give you the link here, tomorrow morning.
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Opine & Condemn
Sticking with politics, gotta say all these social media opinionators who are screaming bloody murder about Bernie Sanders — either pillorying him for daring to run again or condemning Dems who prefer someone else to hell — ought to shut the hell up.
What’s My Line?
Flat out, it’s not Bernie’s fault Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. For that we can thank Russkie bots and hackers, James Comey, and the sweeping, innate stupidity of the American public. Throw in HRC’s own refusal to be the second coming of Mamie Eisenhower and her campaign staff’s refusal to see the writing on the wall and — voila! — you’ve got a crass, gross, unlettered, incurious, anti-intellectual, unprepared, impulsive, pathological greed monkey as your Dear Leader. That all said, Bernie ran a spirited primary campaign that, happily, moved the Democratic Party to the left.
I like much of what Bernie stands for. I voted for him in the 2016 primary. But too many of his fankids saw him as another Jesus H. Christ and regarded everybody who didn’t hold him in such idolatrous esteem as lower than pond scum. That same either/or bullshit seems to be carrying over now that he’s running again in 2020.
Then there are the Hillary holdovers who see this second Bernie effort for the Big Prize as the worst thing since the ebola virus. It’s not. The couple of years leading up to a presidential election are the time for everybody to jump into the fray, say their pieces, and get winnowed out in the primaries and caucuses. This is when the chorus of voices is raised, people can toss around all their grandiose plans for remaking this holy land, the pretenders are distinguished from the contenders, and the party settles on one banner carrier. Let Bernie speak. Let him run.
Hell, let Joe Biden run, too (although if he somehow becomes the nominee, I’ll have to drag myself to the polling place to put a checkmark next to his name). Let John Kerry run, too. Hillary Clinton can jump in. For pity’s sake, how about Michael Dukakis (Andy Borowitz already has him declaring)?
None of these tilts at windmills will result in a second term for President Gag. The dude’s dead, politically. Right about now, he should be more worried about whether he’ll lam to Saudi Arabia or the small apartment above V. Putin’s garage once he’s either thrown or elected out of office.
I’m sick to death of the childish absolutism that’s infected public chat in this supposed enlightened age. It’s nothing more than a new puritanism or some other such slavish devotion to an arbitrarily determined standard of rectitude.
Stop it. Stop it now.
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