"Fresh kale!" says Martin O'Malley. "Fresh kale! Get some fresh kale.
from Bloomberg:
Martin O'Malley, Baltimore's Prodigal Mayor, Gets to Work
Dave Weigel/Bloomberg
"Fresh kale!" says Martin O'Malley. "Fresh kale! Get some fresh kale. I cut it myself."
The former mayor of Baltimore, former governor of Maryland, and likely candidate for the Democratic Party's next presidential nomination, was standing at the end of a food giveaway at the St. Peter Claver parish hall in northwest Baltimore's Sandtown neighborhood on Wednesday. He had arrived around 1 p.m., clad in white shirt, suit pants, and tucked-in tie.
And, yes, he'd been lifting pallets of food and water, and pulling the official leafy green of yuppiedom into plastic bags. That way, they could be collected by people whose local Save-A-Lot and CVS has been looted in the riots that followed the death of 25-year old Freddie Gray in police custody. He'd dug into the job, pausing occasionally to note the Irish-American history of the city, or the fact that as governor he'd plussed up the funding of the Maryland Food Bank, or that he knew a great recipe for vegetables...
Dave Weigel/Bloomberg
On Tuesday and Wednesday, he looked like a mayor again, albeit one whose entourage had been reduced to fit one SUV. That was a necessity. The mayor who had brought New York-style "zero tolerance" policing to Baltimore had to confront critics, long after he was in a position to change. On both days, during a walk through the Freddie Gray protests and during his visit to the food giveaway, O'Malley said he had been "promoted to citizen..."
At the parish, when asked to respond to the charge that "zero tolerance" policing led to the riots, O'Malley offered a lengthy answer about how the police needed "better understanding, better ways to make their departments more open and transparent" but that zero tolerance had worked.
"Our city has, for the last 15 years, been pushing back and driving down violent crime," said O'Malley. "Every mayor, in his or her time, does their very best to get the balance right. To save as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible. That's what we did in our time, and that's what I believe every mayor has tried to do since. In the history of race in America, there's not a single day when you have to be mindful of the constant need for improvement and rebuilding of trust. Really, no people can sustain the kind of crime reduction we've seen unless there's trust between police and neighbors."
https://twitter.com/aliknez/status/593470388430118913
"I was motivated to go into public life because of the great chasm that exists between justice and injustice in our country. Nowhere is that divide greater than in America's cities. Some people might look at Baltimore, from afar, and see nothing but hopelessness. I see, in Baltimore, tremendously good and compassionate people, and a tremendous opportunity to save a lot a lives. And that's what we've done. If you look at violent crime in Baltimore as compared to where violent crime was in the decades before, it's hard to conclude anything other than that. Hundreds and hundreds would have died violent deaths."
O'Malley had been saying this for a while, when the critics held smaller megaphones. Just two weeks earlier, he'd given a speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network, in which he said that "there are a thousand fewer black men in Baltimore today who died violent deaths over the last 15 years who otherwise would have died" without the policing reforms he'd championed. He recalled how after his 1999 mayoral win, he'd told police that their best allies on the blocks they covered were "the good people that live on that block."
read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-29/martin-o-malley-baltimore-s-prodigal-mayor-gets-to-work
https://twitter.com/WPJohnWagner/status/593479842810732544
= new reply since forum marked as read
Martin O'Malley:
1. Ended death penalty in Maryland
2. Prevented fracking in Maryland and put regulations in the way to prevent next GOP Gov Hogan fom easily allowing fracking.
3. Provided health insurance for 380,000
4. Reduced infant mortality to an all time low.
5. Provided meals to thousands of hungry children and moved toward a goal for eradicating childhood hunger.
6. Enacted a $10.10 living wage and a $11. minimum wage for State workers.
7. Supporter the Dream Act
8. Cut income taxes for 86% of Marylanders (raised taxes on the rich).
9. Reformed Maryland’s tax code to make it more progressive.
10. Enacted some of the nation’s most comprehensive reforms to protect homeowners from foreclosure.
There is a lot more, but I'll only add that Mother Jones magazine called him the best candidate on environmental issues.
