8th District Civic Federation Debate
By Amit Singh | Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 | PoliticsThe official election season was kicked off last night in Arlington with the annual Civic Federation Candidates Night. For Arlington County Board, Republican Mark Kelly attacked 14 year incumbent Democrat Chris Zimmerman, who also moonlights on the Metro board, about the deteriorating conditions on the metro that have led to delays and deaths in recent years. A very polished Zimmerman generally rode the wave of high ratings Arlington receives from various groups and was unapologetic about the money wasted on lawsuits and trolleys.
The congressional candidates were much more feisty. Republican Patrick Murray came out swinging in his opening remarks asking Jim Moran “what planet” he was on by telling Hardball’s Chris Matthews that the economy has recovered. Moran responded that he was not trying to be universally liked and that he had achieved that. Moran went on to brag about how he controls $40-50B on House Appropriations committee and other involvement in groups for animal rights. The questions asked in the debate were weak overall but here is my recap:
Question 1: Directed at Moran, was it ethical to send out a very expensive mailer to all the constituents using tax payer money in an election year. A little background, 8th district voters received a booklet in the mail outlining several policies (i.e. healthcare, BP oil spill, etc)
Moran: The mailer cost taxpayers $100K, not the $1M that Murray has been telling folks, and that his staff actually returned $150K of the money allocated to his office back to the Treasury.
Murray: Pulled out the mailer and his reading glasses and read “at tax payers expense” and gave the Churchill joke about haggling over price to sleep with a woman.
Question 2: Directed at Murray, having lived in the 8th district less than 2 years, what makes him think he can represent us.
Murray: Started his response with a McCain-esque, “I was protecting our country” all that time but also mentioned that he lived in Alexandria for 8 years while serving at the State Department and Pentagon.
Moran: Quipped that US Congress is not an entry level position and that he spent 20 years in public service including being the mayor of Alexandria before even considering a run for Congress.
Question 3: This one got a little animated due to the person asking the question but among a yelling audience he finally asked, “do you believe in the Constitution and do you follow it?”
Moran: Yes
Murray: Yes, it is our owners manual.
The answers were short because the Civic Fed president basically invalidated the question due to the high drama.
Question 4: Directed at Murray, questioned his statement that Roe v Wade was the worst Supreme Court decision ever and what restrictions he would put on a woman’s privacy.
Murray: Started that this was not a critical issue on the minds of voters and that there are ways to work together to reduce the number of abortions (i.e. via adoption, etc). Ended with saying he was a federalist and that this issue should be handled at the state level.
Moran: Wants abortions to be safe, legal and affordable and the issue cannot be handled at the state level. Said the worst decision of the Supreme Court was Dredd Scott.
Closing Statements:
Moran: Talked about how he is able to steer earmarks, how he believes in the Federal govt and that he has seniority. Also added that due to his funding, Arlington has one of the fasted response times to fire and police calls.
Murray: Said the biggest threat to America is the national debt. Criticized Moran for being one of 15 congressmen to vote himself a raise and said if you’re happy with the way things are going then send Moran back to Congress for a 3rd decade.
Overall, Patrick Murray was on the offensive and sitting in the front row I could sense that Moran was somewhat agitated (partially due to the hecklers from the Murray crowd) but not on his game as I have seen him in the past.
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4 Responses to "8th District Civic Federation Debate"
Good recap Amit. What chance does Murray actually have?
Did the green party guy say anything interesting?
CHRIS ZIMMERMAN: “Let ‘em eat cake.”
Who does this nonentity think he is? I will tell you who he is. Picture him as a woman in a beehive hairdo cavorting with the peasants in 18th century France, displaying an affectation for the countryside. You’ve got it. Marie Antoinette.
Chris Zimmerman is a male Marie Antoinette. He believes that people who live in Arlington are there to finance his boondoggles. They are there to pay for every one of his grotesque fanatasies about how to spend their money.
Picure another image. A laughing man in a white toga, playing a stringed insrument while a city burhs in the background. You’ve got it. Nero fiddling while Rome burns. That’s another way you could think about how Chris Zimmerman operates.
Let’s dump this clown before your property taxes get so high that even if you rent your landlord will raise your rent astronomically to fijnance the tax increase. If you have spent your hard-earned money to buy a house or a condo, you will have to sell and move somewhere else where elected government officials don’t rob you of it by enacting absurdly high taxes to finance absurd boondoggles.
Vote for Mark Kelly. Dump Zimmerman. Let’s dump Zimmerman and get rid of the bleeding. Stop sweating any more tax hikes. This is it. We have had enough.
I am not even a Republican. I just have had enough of this bleeding so Chris Zimmerman can carry out his absurd pet projects.
This is what I am wondering about today. Does Chris Zimmerman get campaign contributions from LuAnn Bennett, the developer wife of Jim Moran? Who else would he be helping with his various policies? Rich Democratic real estate developers, not the taxpayers who might actually be environmentalists.
LuAnn Bennett, who obviously must contribute to her husband Jim Moran’s campaigns, is involved in the development of the Sursum Corda neighborhood, a black neighborhood in Washington, DC, in which those of relatively low income like teachers’ aides and clerks have always steadily rented their homes. While their incomes are relatively low, these people work hard and now their apartments are being replaced by multimillion dollar development.
The modest projects in “Nauck” which is what the County calls Green Valley, a solidly middle class African American neighborhood in South Arlington, is where the county replaced low income housing with overdeveloped minimansions that are across from a cement factory owned by Virginia Concrete.
While most people, both Caucasian and African American would most likely prefer a home in nearby McLean, VA, or Old Town Alexandria, to a minimansion a small lot across from a cement factory, as P.T. Barnum once said, “There is a sucker born every minute.”
But what about a county board that approved or condoned those minimansions? Isn’t tearing down affordable housing in Arlington to build minimansions both racist and not the holy work of professional environmentalists? Why does Chris Zimmerman insist he is an environmentalist?
While Chris Zimmerman pretends to be a radical environmentalist and transit advocate, someone who is a developer must be the money man or woman for this totally off the wall clown.
Why assume that very, very rich “trophy husbands like Jim Moran who are married to rich lady developers like LuAnn Bennett immune from the blandishments of Big Money when it comes to their careers? Couldn’t Moran have stayed with his less wealthy wives rather than go wife-shopping to end up with a rich widow who has millions of dollars from her former developer husband?
Does everyone here know that Jim Moran lives in a mansion owned by Najeeb Halaby, John F. Kennedy’s head of the FAA, whose daughter, Queen Noor, married the King of Jordan?
Perhaps he was thinking of other rich Democrats who were Arabs when he made the tasteless comment about Jews wanting war in the Middle East. He said that the Jews wanted the war in Iraq, a statement worthy of the late Adolf Hitler.
In fact, a Jewish man who was a Democrat was motivated to challenge Jim Moran for his Congressional seat a few years ago based on that remark.
Jim Moran is an embarrassing, off the wall character whose ridiculous antics have become a running joke among Democrats who think he is hilarious. And he does not even remain true to his own political base.
While the soon to depart the White House Rahm Emanuel would tell reporters that it was those Liberals and those Progressives who were obstructionists to their wonderful healthcare reform legislation, it was in fact those Liberals like Moran who supported Obama in his election campaign, and who, in turn, immediately went into lock step and supported this multimillion dollar unworkable piece of legislation. Healthcare reform is a Democratic shakedown of the healthcare industry for campaign contributions in order not to have real reform but to replace it with a bill that benefits the bottom line of the healthcare industry. Healthcare reform is merely a vehicle to enable Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus to threaten the healthcare industry with regulation in exchange for the $4 million a year in campaign contributions he gets from that industry to pass legislation that it favors.
The implication is that the healthcare industry better pay up or it would face regulation. So is the healthcare reform bill really going to cut healthcare costs? Latest studies say that it is not. It is in fact not going to cut healthcare costs but raise them. Is this something a lover of the people does?
Jim Moran may be a lover, not a fighter, but one wonders if that love extends to what Democrats used to call “the common man.”
Jim Moran went into lock step to vote for a bill that his liberal and progressive base of supporters was opposed to.
Any reforms the Democrats managed to pass were vetted by Big Pharma, the health insurance industry itself and an array of corporate interests which have always supported the Democrats and will continue to do so because that is who throws them government subsidies that benefit them, not the patient, not the taxpayer. They also benefit bureaucrats in cities and counties who administer government sponsored healthcare with exorbitantly high salaries and huge budgets which they proceed to raid to pay their salaries.
Do you know what happens when Medicaid is expanded? Poor people don’t go to doctors, they go to government sponsored clinics which charge them exorbitant rates, not for actual medical care, but for the salaries of bureaucrats who administer that medical care?
Look at an analogy. In public universities, professors don’t make that much money. It is the bureaucrats who are administrators who siphon off all the money. In public schools it is the same, an array of bureaucrats who run the school system make all the money, not the teachers. Ask any teacher.
And thus with public health. The bureaucrats who run “social marketing” programs get all the money. They are the ones who award multibillion dollar bilingual advertising programs that tell people not to have unprotected sex with strangers because one might indeed contract a venereal disease if one does so.
Common sense reduced to a feeding frenzy for public opinion polling firms like Gallup and PR firms like Ogilvy who get multimillion dollar government contracts for “social marketing,” a hungry ad man‘s term for what used to be called “public health campaigns“ in which nurses used to hand out pamphlets on what to do if your child gets measles.
Healthcare PR for government bureaucrats is big business for the PR industry.
Health department and public health bureaucrats also run the neighborhood clinics where social workers charge $72 for a 15 minute phone call with a patient in order to determine their next appointment.
Do private physicians normally get away with billing private health insurance companies $72 for a 15 minute conversation about their next appointment in order to discuss how they are doing?
No. A secretary talks to the patient, looks in the book or on a computer and makes an appointment. Health insurance companies do not charge the patient fees for short conversations with these patients in an attempt to conduct managed care, but cities and counties regularly bill insurance companies to make appointments and for what they call “case management.” This is a crock and a hoax.
If the government subsidized the hairdressing industry, the shampoo girl or boy who goes to high school would be making $72 every fifteen minutes by billing the government every time they answered the phone to make an appointment.
In fact, I am all for the government subsidizing the hair dressing industry so that clowns like Chris Zimmerman would get rid of that billiard ball head and maybe get a hairweave so we won’t be blinded by all that glare. That’s not a halo we are looking at there. That is his bald pate, folks.
I am sick and entirely tired of these clowns and how they operate as pseudo liberals and champions of the poor when they are not. Many Democrats are on to Jim Moran and Chris Zimmerman. Obama is no longer going to resonate with liberals and progressives who have been vilified and scorned by Rahm Emanuel going to the Washington Post and telling the reporters that it was this political base which got him in his undeserved job in the first place who were obstructing healthcare reform. If they did try to obstruct it, then bravo! Somebody had to do it for some reason. How can a bill that is opposed by both the Republicans in Congress as well as the progressives and the liberals out there be any good for the people?
Was it Lincoln who said, “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time?”
Chris Zimmerman says he is a humble servant of the people. A humble servant of the people would have a more effective solution to the massive management problems at Metro than throwing more money at it.
People are not going to be saved from the jaws of death in yet another transit accident like the one that killed 10 people a few years ago under Chris Zimmerman’s tenure by throwing more money at Metro.
Do you know what Chris Zimmerman said when he was asked for a solution to Metro’s safety problems? More “investment.”
“Investment” translated from Zimmermanspeak means that Metro needs more money to invest. How is that going to happen? The only means possible are the riders paying higher fares for decreased service and by the various cities and counties paying more in taxpayer funds to the subsidies extracted from them by Metro to keep Metro operational .
It means, not Chris Zimmerman’s money or leadership, not Metro changing its wayward and unsafe ways, but instead soaking the poor who ride buses with higher fares and the commuters who ride Metro rail with higher fares while facing even more dangerous and overcrowded conditions. It also means raiding the coffers of local cities and counties of the tax dollars they collect in real estate property taxes of increasingly exorbitant amounts of money to deliver very little.
It means that Chris Zimmerman keeps getting reelected year after year after year to waste more and more money on the Metro board and the county board to fight more and more exorbitantly expensive lawsuits against the state of Virginia. It means Chris Zimmerman keeps getting elected over and over and over again to spend money on a trolley car line to Falls Church on Columbia Pike. It means Chris Zimmerman spending money on a 3,000 square foot ballroom in Rosslyn so the area developed by the Pomponio Brothers in the seventies can attract drunks and other night life lovers to carouse in Rosslyn rather than in Georgetown.
Do you think that the military, State Department and other government tenants there are going to appreciate this? Do you think their workers who burn the midnight oil in those buildings they are leasing are going to stay? Think about it. Use your common sense. Would you?
The Arlington County Board in its indiscriminate policy of turning a nice, quiet and rather beautiful area into a form of Times Square in New York City has inspired many government as well as commercial tenants to do the opposite of what the board promised taxpayers. It has inspired these tenants to leave.
Why don’t we get this dangerous clown to leave Arlington? If he wants to live in a big city let him go back to the one he came from. Let him return to the big city he left to come to Arlington to pretend to be a leader. I say this about most Washington self-styled leaders. If they were so successful back where they came from, why did they come here? Because Chris Zimmerman is an opportunist who couldn’t cut it wherever he was from. He came here like a locust or a grasshopper to raid out coffers and grab power. He came here to help Chris Zimmerman period. Chris Zimmerman is not a Democrat, he is not really an Arlingtonian, he is a rank, power-hungry opportunist who runs virtually unopposed due to sheer apathy by the Arlington voters.
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