Cleveland Plain Dealer un-endorses Dennis Kucinich! WTF?

[meganmonkey]

Barbara Anne Ferris
The 10th Congressional District deserves representation that is serious and reflective of its residents' priorities
Sunday, April 23, 2006
It is extremely unusual for a newspaper to withdraw its endorsement from an incum bent it has supported for years - the more so when that officeholder is a con gressman with an interna tional reputation, and the race is a primary election that he almost certainly will win.

Nonetheless, that is what The Plain Dealer does today. In the Democratic contest between five-term Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich and his challenger, nonprofit executive Barbara Anne Ferris, this page endorses Ferris as the Democrat more in tune with the community, its needs and its future.

Why? Because Ferris is intelligent, experienced in national and international affairs through her work with the United Nations, the Peace Corps and the International Women's Democracy Center, and puts forth what we believe to be an attainable plan of using the district's remaining resources to help it return to economic health.

Ferris, 52, lacks elective experience. That cannot be denied. In many ways she is a political work in progress - optimistic almost to a fault, as though she believes she herself must provide all of the energy necessary to carry her to what would be a stunning upset victory.

---snip---

Rather than focusing on the real and immediate needs of this district, which encompasses the West Side of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County's western suburbs, Kucinich has been on a quixotic journey of increasingly grandiose proportions. He spent much of 2004 on a one-man campaign for president of the United States, having cobbled together a creaky, left-slanted platform upon which his party would not set foot, but which he would not abandon. And though he says he has no plans to resume that quest next year, he declines to rule it out.

---snip---

But providing good services is the basic expectation of a federal representative. Congress should be measured by accomplishments beyond the hiring of competent staff.

more at link...

http://www.cleveland.com/editorials/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/opinion/114578179182040.xml&coll=2&thispage=1

Pushing out the real progressives to make room for..what - more 'moderates'? Health care and Peace are a bad thing now? Fantastic.

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EDIT: COPYRIGHT. PLEASE POST ONLY 4 OR 5 PARAGRAPHS
FROM THE COPYRIGHTED NEWS SOURCE PER DU RULES.

[Edgewater_Joe]

1. More Proof of the Utter Irrelevance of the PeeDee

Remember, this is the paper whose editorial board was unanimously ready to endorse Kerry -- but their editor, citing an obscure slight because the editor appaerntly backed a totalitarian Eastern European leader he was buddies with or some such thing, forced them to make no endorsement.

The Pee Dee is a joke and has been for at least the last 20 years in Cleveland. I wouldn't sweat it.

[asthmaticeog]

3. Quick nitpick - it was the publisher who nixed the Kerry endorsement,

not the editor.

And that publisher -- long ago nicknamed "The Snake" by his own staff -- is retiring, finally, thank god.

[knitter4democracy]

5. That's true.

Now, if the Free Times switched . . .

[liberalhistorian]

6. Exactly!

I left Northeast Ohio for Rapid City, SD, last summer, and have never for one moment regretted it. I don't miss the Pee Dee, or my local Lake County (OH) repuke rag, one single fucking bit. The Pee Dee had become such a joke that it was almost embarrassing to read. And they wouldn't touch election irregularity reports with a 100-foot pole. And the way it ran off the Cleveland Press twenty years ago, thus making itself the only paper in town, has always soured me on it, anyway.

I was so disgusted with their non-endorsement in 2004 that I almost stopped reading the rag altogether. Think of the difference a Kerry endorsement would have made,a nd the board was preparing to endorse Kerry. But Alex Machaskee, aka "The Snake" wanted his fascist corporatist Great Leader.

OH is going to hell rapidly anyway, and I say good riddance. People bitch and moan about it, but they're so apathetic and they keep voting the same backwoods, backwards idiot repuke yahoos in when they know the tremendous damage they've done and continue to do to the state. The hell with them, I don't ever want to go back there.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. Is Warren Harding the Managing Editor again?

Time for another bout of apoplexy, a-hole!:rofl:

[AndyTiedye]

4. Part of their Plan to Turn Ohio ALL Red. Every Single Seat

[liberalhistorian]

7. God help Ohio if that idiot

repuke fundie Blackwell gets his hands on the governor's seat. You think OH sucks now, wait until he's the "leader." He'll make Bob "worst governor in the nation" Taft look like Franklin D. Roosevelt.

[AndyTiedye]

8. Blackwell is Poised to Steal the Governorship of Ohio

[liberalhistorian]

10. Oh, I have no doubt of that at all.

And the OH African-American community, in general, isn't too thrilled with him, either. The repukes know exactly what they're doing, putting him forth as a gubernatorial candidate to make themselves seem "diverse" (gag), and so they can then smear anyone who doesn't like him as "racist."

[LWolf]

9. What fools.

Hopefully, Dennis' constituents know how well they would not be represented by a "moderate" corporate democrat.