Mediaboss Marketing

Nan Whaley| Akron Beacon Journal

During my time as the mayor of Dayton and as Ive traveled to all 88 of Ohios counties on this campaign, what Ive heard over and over again is that everyone, regardless of what they look like or where they live, wants to feel safe in their communitywhile also being treated with respect. Its not hard to believe both of these things at the same time, but too many politicians try to set up a false choice between the two.

It doesnt have to be this way. As governor, Ill fight to make sure every Ohioan feels both safe and respected.

After the murder of George Floyd, Dayton like so many other cities took a hard look at how we could improve the relationship between our police and our community, especially our Black community. Where so many other cities fell short, I believe we succeeded. Why? Because we brought together the people directly involved to tackle these tough issues.

Over the course of 10 months, more than 100 Daytonians met for hours every week to examine our public safety policies and make recommendations for improvement. The groups included folks from all walks of life: clergy, activists, public defenders, neighborhood leaders, and importantly Dayton police officers.

Democrats: Cranley selects Sen. Teresa Fedor, Whaley picks Cheryl Stephens as running mates

The result was hundreds of changes, including body cameras, better training and recruitment practicesand a new alternative responder model that will get people the help they need while allowing police to focus on their mission: preventing crimes. But just as important was the process itself. Not only did we build real trust between citizens and police, but we also empowered them to create these solutions themselves.

While challenges remain, we are seeing results. We have new citizen groups in place to continue to implement these policies and examine additional changes. In 2021, while so many other cities across the nation saw increases in violent crime, Dayton actually saw a significant decrease.

If we can bring people together in Dayton to tackle these issues, we can do it all across Ohio. As governor, Ill create a Cabinet Coordinating Council on Justice to better coordinate these efforts across agencies.

More: Ohio governor's race: Nan Whaley, John Cranley debate who'd be better to face Mike DeWine

Well provide better support to local communities to create innovative public safety and crime prevention programs, investigate potential problems, and recruit and train the best police officers, including setting up a new college loan forgiveness program for police.

My administration will work to reform Ohios juvenile justice system to provide better oversight and make our state a national leader in this area once again. Well ensure our prison system focuses on rehabilitation and that prison employees and incarcerated people are safe.

Finally, we will strengthen Ohios re-entry systems so that when people have served their time, they can successfully return to their families and become productive members of their communities.

These common sense, bipartisan solutions will make Ohio safer. Just like we did in Dayton, I believe we can bring folks together to get these things done.

I know that my opponents will try to lie about my record and divide Ohioans on these issues. So let me be clear: I have never and will never support defunding the police. Our police officers have some of the toughest jobs imaginable and I have incredible respect for them.

I was proud to organize mayors across the country to successfully fight for hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for local police departments.

I also know that truly supporting our police means keeping them safe. Thats why I joined with police in opposing the permitless concealed carry bill that Gov. Mike DeWine signed that will put officers lives at risk.

Ohio deserves better than fear and division. No matter where you live in our state, you deserve to feel safe. I believe that is possible if we come together, reject the divisive politics of a few extreme politicians, and fight for our communities.

Nan Whaley is the former mayor of Dayton and a Democratic candidate for governor.

Follow this link:
Democrat Nan Whaley vows to involve police in talks about better relations with public - Akron Beacon Journal

Oregon makes it easy to vote fill out your ballot at home, then pop it in the mail, no stamp needed.

But Oregon voters dont get a say in which Democratic or Republican candidates get nominated for governor, Congress or the Legislature unless theyre a registered member of one of those parties. And right now, a huge chunk of Oregon voters about 41%, or nearly 1.3 million are not. (About 34% of registered voters are Democrats and 24% are Republicans.) Registering without a party affiliation has become much more common since Oregon adopted automatic voter registration tied to getting or renewing an Oregon driver license or state ID.

You might be among the 1.3 million who are not registered with a major party and its easy to check. Simply go to oregonvotes.gov/myvote. Enter your first and last names and birthday and youll see whether your registration is current and which party, if any, you belong to.

Many unaffiliated voters are perfectly content with that status. They get to vote in the May 17 primary for state labor commissioner, county commissioners, city council members and other non-partisan positions, such as auditor.

But elections officials say the top complaint about perceived election unfairness in spring primaries comes from voters who are certain they registered as members of the Republican or Democratic parties and are outraged someone changed their registration and took away their ability to vote for or against a major party candidate.

The Oregonian/OregonLive and state and county elections officials looked into many such complaints in 2020 and found no cases where a voters party registration was changed by anyone but the voter.

The upshot: If you want to vote for or against Tina Kotek, Bud Pierce or any other Republican or Democrat next month, you should act now. http://oregonvotes.gov/myvote and consider changing your party registration if youre not satisfied with the current one. All you need to switch your party membership online is your birthdate and Oregon driver license or state ID number to verify your identity. But you must do it by Tuesdays deadline to affect which ballot youll receive later this month.

-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@oregonian.com; @OregonianPol

Read the original post:
Want a say in who becomes the Democrat or Republican nominee for Oregon governor? Tuesday is the deadline to - OregonLive

April 21, 2022

April 21, 2022

There are plenty of reasons that President Biden and the Democrats are in trouble this November. The lingering pandemic and worsening inflation are up there, but the inability of congressional Democrats to capitalize on their narrow majorities in the House and Senate has been just as consequential. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has mostly kept her caucus in line, but in the Senate, two Democrats Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) are almost single-handedly responsible for torpedoing Biden's presidency.

And it may be prudent for Democrats to move on from them.

There is no legal mechanism to expel these miscreants from the party. But there are growing strategic reasons why Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and his allies should make life so unbearable for Manchin and Sinema (both of whom aren't up for re-election until 2024) that they leave the party sometime before the 2022 midterms if one last push for even a microscopic version of the Build Back Better social investment package fails because of them. Go on a judicial confirmation binge first, but don't be delusional about what can be achieved with Manchin playing impossible to get in what looks like a plan to run out the clock on behalf of his fossil fuel overlords.

First, Schumer could announce that the Democratic Party will not support re-election bids for Manchin and Sinema and will actively side with their primary challengers. Second, the paircould be stripped of their committee assignments, after which Biden could deliver a speech arguing that Democrats who deliberately sabotage their party over and over again are not welcome in the big tent. The DNC could formally censure both senators, as the RNC did with GOP Reps. Liz Cheney (Wy.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) due to their support for the impeachment of former President Trump.

It is hard to imagine either Manchin or Sinema refraining from a party switch in the aftermath of such public and dramatic rebukes. After all, the fragile Manchin hardened his opposition to the president's signature legislative goal after his feelings were hurt by a December White House statement in which Jen Psaki accused him of "a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the president." In early February, Manchin declared the framework "dead."

I know what you're thinking: That's deranged! Why would Schumer and the Democrats willingly give up their Senate majority? Wouldn't that be passing control of the Senate majority to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans without even putting up a fight?

The best retort is that Democrats do not really haveworking legislative control of theSenate anyway. While Manchin and Sinema have occasionally roused themselves out of torpor to vote for things like the Bipartisan Infrastructure package, their votes have been needed on only a few important occasions like the COVIDrelief bill from March 2021 and the 50-50 votes to make appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. You can throw in the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown, too, even though she got two Republican votes, since McConnell would have probably invented some kind of "no confirmations in the spring before a midterm election year" rule to prevent even giving her a committee hearing.

Are those achievements sufficient to justify the extraordinary amount of damage that has been done to the Democratic brand over the past year, almost all of it inflicted by Manchin and Sinema on their own party? Considering that Jackson will get outvoted 6-3 or 5-4 for the next 20 years, that the electoral glow from the American Rescue Plan faded months ago, and that the single most important piece of it increasing the child tax credit and turning it into an automatic monthly payment was allowed to expire by these same Democrats, I would argue no.

It air-fries my blood just gazing at the list of missed opportunities to transform America into a more equitable and livable country. Here is a partial list of things that have not happened almost exclusively because of Manchin and/or Sinema's opposition: a federal minimum wage hike;an extension of the Child Tax Credit payments;paid family and medical leave;D.C. statehood;voting rights protections;a ban on partisan gerrymandering;universal pre-K and subsidized daycare; and investments in encouraging adoption of clean energy technologies and electric vehicles.

But is that frustration worth the obvious downsides of voluntarily sacrificing the Senate majority this way? After all, onceManchin leaves the party or loses his seat in the Senate, it is likely gone for a generation. There is not one other Democrat roaming the Mountain State, which Trump won in 2020 by nearly 40 points, who could come anywhere near winning, let alone run a competitive race. PushingManchin out of the Democratic Party permanently changes the already tough calculus for securing a Senate majority.

There is no such problem withSinema. Arizona now sports two Democratic senators, and its ongoing demographic transformation will likely work in Democrats' favor in the long term, despite this year's difficult national environment. Losing her seat now might mean going without it for just two years, at a time when Democrats are likely to be in the minority anyway. Sinema has almost no chance of winning her Senate primary, and the country is too polarized now for her to run and win as an independent la Joe Lieberman in 2006.

What about the Democratic legislative agenda in the Senate? Won't it be sunk by handing the majority back to Republicans? It's a great question, to which I would respond: What legislative agenda? The two people who are holding it up are in the headline of this article, and neither has given any indication recently that they intend to budge.

Finally, let's be clear-eyed about the bleak landscape facing Democrats. If the election were held today, Republicans would easily win the House, the Senate, and a number of swing-state governorships. One recent poll showed that for more than two-thirds of respondents, non-economic issues are the most important facing the country, with a plurality citing "the government/poor leadership." That sounds a lot like frustration with the failure of Congress to act on key priorities, or any priorities at all.

Democrats can't run against themselves here, because most people don't care whether it is two or 50 of them holding up the show. The only way to rail against the "do-nothing Senate"is to make Republicans the villain, and the only way to do that is to give them a branch of government to play with for a few months. Make Mitch McConnell the face of Congress' refusal to act after the Supreme Court guts Roe v. Wade,as well as forhis branch'sinability to take radical action, like price caps, to battle inflation.

Do I thinkDemocratsshould do this before exhausting every possible effort to get Manchin on board with any piece of legislation that could be called Build Back Better? Obviously not, but I'd rather take the 10 percent chance that this gamble works rather than the 99 percent certainty that Democrats are going to get blown out of the water in November if they play out the string begging for scraps from other members of their own party. A handful of federal judges and some solar panel tax credits are going to seem pretty hollow when Democrats are staring down years in the Senate wilderness.

And if there's one sure thing about going on the warpath against Manchin and Sinema, it's that it would at least momentarily fill that void.

Follow this link:
Should Democrats force out Manchin and Sinema? - The Week

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade told viewers on Saturday's "One Nation" that he found something President Biden "perfected" during his time in office: the "unforced error."

BRIAN KILMEADE: Well, the Democrats are down right now, there's no denying it. Perfecting the art of the self-inflicted wound. Throughout time, presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have had to deal with things that were pretty much out of their control. But how they act and react to the uncontrollable is what truly decides what kind of leader they will be, what makes or breaks them. Case in point: Abraham Lincoln. He decided to save the Union. He saved the country. It cost him his life. FDR answered and inherited depression with the New Deal and answered a Japanese attack on our homeland by declaring and winning the war, World War II. And when you think of Ronald Reagan, think of steadfast. Reagan was able to stare down communism and win the Cold War in doing so. The president of the United States has been anything but great so far during his first almost two years in office, but we have found something that he has perfected. It's called the unforced error.

WATCH THE FULL SEGMENT BELOW:

President Biden. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo (Reuters)

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

The bipartisan infrastructure bill, he struck out by going with the all-or-nothing approach. So we didn't get Build Back Better. He was going to do the infrastructure bill. He didn't get Build Back Better, but he did the infrastructure bill. What about his record on inflation we're seeing impacting the amount of money in your pocket. The president thinks it's just transitory. Remember his botched Afghanistan withdrawal when he thought the Afghan army was one of the strongest in the world? What about the administration somehow missing the wave on COVID variants?

View original post here:
Kilmeade: Democrats perfected the 'art of the self-inflicted wound' - Fox News

As the May 17 primary draws near, Oregon Democrats and Republicans are making sure voters understand the differences between the two parties. A big one: educational attainment.

This week, Portland pollster John Horvick of DHM Research drew on 2020 census data to illustrate the wide variance in college graduates among Oregons 60 House districts. As of 2018, the year about which census takers asked, the median level of college graduates across all districts was 34%. But every district above that level belonged to a Democrat.

Its part of the education polarization thats happening in Oregon and across the country, Horvick says. I think its worth pointing out that the Democratic Party in some districts is really pulling away from the median voter.

In addition to the differences between parties, the numbers show big spreads among Democrats. House District 22 (Woodburn) had the lowest college graduation level (14%) but is solidly Democratic.

Here are the five districts with the highest percentage of college graduates:

1. House District 33 (Northwest Portland, Northeast Washington County)

Rep. Maxine Dexter

72%

2. House District 38 (Lake Oswego, Dunthorpe)

Rep. Andrea Salinas

71%

3. House District 36 (Southwest Portland)

Rep. Lisa Reynolds

66%

4. House District 43 (Northeast and North Portland)

Rep. Tawna Sanchez

61%

5. House District 42 (inner Southeast Portland)

Rep. Rob Nosse

59%

Sources: DHM Research, U.S. Census Bureau, Oregon Legislature

Read the original here:
New Census Data Shows the Most Educated Districts in Oregon Elect Democrats in and Around Portland - Willamette Week