A Dissenting View

By Kleinheider Posted on September 15, 2008 at 10:01 am

The oft-ornery, contrarian Jeff Woods takes a different view of the political demise of Senator Rosalind Kurita at the hands of the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee:

It’s not that the senator voted against John Wilder for speaker. Wilder was part of the Democrats’ problem. With his alliance with Republicans, he held power for power’s sake. He never tried to advance Democratic Party policies. He opposed most of them, in fact. So Kurita could have voted to oust Wilder to elevate a real Democrat to the speakership. Senate Democrats should have banded together and done that many years ago.

But Kurita voted against Wilder and gave Senate control to the Republicans. To a Democrat, that has to be unforgivable. The only way for Democrats to push their policies through the legislature is to impose party discipline. In the Senate especially, that’s been a foreign concept. That’s why every year the House passes Democratic initiatives only to see them fail in the Senate. Kurita’s ouster sends the message that Democrats finally might be serious about getting something done in state government.

permalink | 7 Comments

Tags: gots to be different, if everyone was praising the decision he's be against i, lynching, Rosalind Kurita, State Senate, they stole it, thievery, Tim Barnes  

Where The Boys Aren’t

By Kleinheider Posted on at 9:24 am

Sean Braisted takes issue with the meme that those who executed the political lynching of Rosalind Kurita were “good ol’ boys”:

There are an equal number of men and women on the board of the TNDP. There is a man and woman elected to the committee in each of the state senate districts in Tennessee. The chair is a man, the vice-chair is a woman. And while Sasser didn’t vote either way last Saturday (I don’t think he could as he was not an elected member of the committee), the Vice Chair, Elisa Parker, did vote to throw back the election to the county level, and with a 33-12 vote, more women than not voted to accept Barnes’ side of the story. In Nashville, from what I recall, both Jerry Maynard (19) and Will Cheek (21) voted against the measure.

SEE ALSO: Jerry Maynard explains his vote.

permalink | 5 Comments

Tags: lynching, Rosalind Kurita, State Senate, they stole it, thievery, Tim Barnes  

Thief

By Kleinheider Posted on at 7:25 am

City Paper editor Clint Brewer calls a spade a spade when it comes to what happened to Rosalind Kurita this Saturday:

Tennessee Democrats will have a day of reckoning when it comes to this vote. Sadly, party elders seem to be squandering the leadership of Chairman Gray Sasser, one of the more informed and strategy-minded chairs in recent memory.

Even worse, Tennessee Democrats now appear to care more about politics and holding power than they do actual democracy.

permalink | 1 Comment

Tags: lynching, Rosalind Kurita, State Senate, they stole it, thievery, Tim Barnes  

East Tennessee Progressive Says Kurita Decison Bad For Democrats

By Kleinheider Posted on September 14, 2008 at 3:47 pm

R. Neal weighs in on the show trial at the Sheraton:

As it is, a distinguished state senator with a long and successful record of advancing progressive legislation on education, health care, equal opportunity for women, and more, a senator who represented the interests of military personnel and their families attached to the 101st Airborne in Clarksville during a time of war, and one of the few women serving in the Tennessee Senate, has been thrown under the bus because of some inside baseball and hard feelings over one political misstep.

Her replacement will not yield the same power, and this diminishes the Democrats’ influence in the Senate whether or not they are able to gain numerical control.

Ironically, the 33 to 11 vote by the TNDB Executive Committee gave Barnes a larger margin of victory (22 votes) than Kurita got in the primary. It helps that they were the votes that actually counted.

PREVIOUSLY:
The Reactions

permalink | 4 Comments

Tags: lynching, Rosalind Kurita, State Senate, theivery, they stole it, Tim Barnes