↓ Archives ↓

Posts Tagged → Papenfuse

Dave Schankweiler for Harrisburg Mayor

All politics is local, and while it is easy to talk about and pay attention most to the biggest political issues that play out on a national scale, the fact is, at the end of the day, much of our political life is determined by local government.

Therefore, David Schankweiler should be Harrisburg’s next mayor.

Because he is a successful entrepreneur with a fresh approach to solving Harrisburg’s seemingly intractable problems, Dave deserves a shot at contributing to Harrisburg’s seemingly endless recovery. Recovery from what, you ask?

Well, for many years Harrisburg has been dominated by just one political party that has implemented a disproven, debunked, and obviously failed set of ideas and practices. This nonstop assault on the citizens of Harrisburg has driven it deeper into financial and social failure, driven the best wage earners out of the high tax city, and made corruption a way of life among the political elites.

When Eric Papenfuse was a candidate, I asked him at a forum if he would get the $100 million criminal Harrisburg incinerator situation sorted out legally, and he said Yes, People Will Go To Jail for that. And then eight years later….Papenfuse failed to deliver. He did and said nothing. Nothing happened, there was no accountability. Why? Because Papenfuse craves to be part of the Harrisburg inner circle that pulled off that illegal scam heist in the first place. Papenfuse is not a reformer, or an agent for change, or an agent for the rule of law. He is a paid lackey, a hired gun, an enabler of criminal insider dealing.

Papenfuse has been questioned about some of his own real estate investments since he was elected mayor. Like using his office to damage local businesses so, it appears, he can buy up their property for cheap. He did the same thing with Mike Brenner, who leased a property to the City of Harrisburg Public Works Department. In that case, Papenfuse was over two years behind in rent, and then he refused to pay any rent, and then he tried to steal Brenner’s property through eminent domain. But a county judge stopped him in court. A mayor who doesn’t believe in the rule of law, who uses his mayor’s office for personal gain…this is not what elected office is about.

Frankly, Papenfuse is a crooked thug whose greatest claims to fame are reducing the number of road lanes for daily commuters into the city, so that bicyclists have their own lane….Right next to a pre-existing bike lane that was also in dis-use for lack of regular bicyclists. This has caused more car accidents and greater daily commuting delays, but Papenfuse has mindlessly punched that politically correct “green” box on his hit list against the citizens of Harrisburg.

While Harrisburg’s school district remains a national disgrace and catastrophe, there is not a whole lot that any mayor can do about it. The citizens and parents of that school district have to want it to be better, and they have to force the issue. A good mayor can help rally those parents and families of school children, but why would Papenfuse do that? He is in lockstep with the white liberal-run unions that have repeatedly burned the city’s school district to the ground for decades.

Schankweiler represents a breath of fresh air, a positive and professional face, voice, and an experienced hand. He is not an incumbent, he has no history of being owned by the various power brokers in the city, and being mayor of Harrisburg is not a lifetime appointment. Harrisburg needs a change for the better, and Schankweiler is it.

Please vote for Dave Schankweiler in the upcoming primary election.

Malcolm X warned us all about Harrisburg School District’s spectacular failure

Harrisburg School District is such a phenomenal, record-setting disaster that I will not repeat here even the barest and yet really most unbelievable facts involved with America’s worst school district. If you do not believe me that our local school district is really so bad, such a catastrophic failure, then go ahead and do an Internet search yourself. Type in “Harrisburg school district,” and you will find plenty of mind-bending substance about it, even in the teacher-union-friendly mainstream media, like the local Patriot News/pennlive.com.

Even Mayor Eric Papenfuse is joined by the very partisan, very liberal Pennsylvania Auditor General in targeting the city school district and its partisan teacher unions. For the uninitiated, across America teacher’s unions are the political henchmen of one political party, and they have destroyed countless public school systems in the pursuit of converting their dominance in the class room into a political power dominance. Using little black kids as sacrifices on the altar of political power, white liberal-dominated teachers unions have spread more destruction to American black families than any other single political entity or force. So when political partisans like Mayor Papenfuse and AG DePasquale, and their partisan media chums, go after one of their own, then you know it is really, really bad. And thus, by any measure, the Harrisburg School District is in really, really bad shape.

The problem is not just that the failed Harrisburg School District is “bad,” it is all of the avoidable collateral damage that surrounds it that makes it such an evil experience. Yes, as the school district has failed ever more spectacularly over the years, the taxes have similarly gone up and up while the few redoubts of sane living within the city proper have real estate values that correspondingly fall with those rising taxes. That then leads to white flight to safer, less taxing suburbs with successful public schools. Yes, there is open corruption. Yes, there is open, unmitigated professional incompetence. Yes, there is open self-serving political football by city council members, the teacher unions, and the city administration. Yes, there is open fraud and waste and abuse by everyone involved, from the janitors to the highest school officials.

But more than anything, this monumental failure of what should be the simplest public education is a symbol of one of America’s biggest failures: The domination of American black voters by white liberals.

No greater threat to Black success exists than the American white liberal. No greater racist against American blacks exists than the swarm of white liberals thrumming hive-like around every single black community, feasting parasitically off the automatic voting that American Blacks reflexively do for the one single political party of the white liberal.

Harrisburg school district is a symbol of what ails American blacks, because Harrisburg is like nearly every other major American city school district across our great nation: Black, broke, and Democrat.

That last factor, the Democrat part, is what has destroyed everything positive that emancipated slaves once brought to American industry, culture, and science. It is as if American blacks could not get enough abuse from their former Southern Democrat slave owners and Klansmen, and decided to throw in with their intellectual successors, the white liberals of the 1960s.

White liberals and their Uncle Tom capos have been selling poisonous snake oil to American blacks for well nigh 60 years now, and despite that long trail of failure, abject poverty, cultural deprivation, high crime, and misplaced anger, all nicely summed up right here in Harrisburg’s school district, American blacks continue to vote for the very people and the same failed ideas and philosophies that have led them to this incredibly bad place.

Malcolm X said it 55 years ago: American blacks who reflexively vote for the Democrat Party and for white liberals “are the biggest chumps in America.”

Malcolm X was no Republican, no political partisan. He fiercely wanted success and every sort of freedom for his fellow ex-slaves. What he warned them against was being used and dominated by the parasitic white liberal that right now infests the heart of every single failed black community across America. He wanted blacks to stop giving away their votes to people who promised them the rainbow and who yet delivered them ever increasing poverty and failure.

The first step to fixing the Harrisburg School District disaster is for Harrisburg’s black community to cease giving away their votes to the same people and philosophies that created this disaster in the first place. Clean house politically, look around for new ideas, and new voices to implement those new ideas. It will take time to fix, we know that, because sixty years of unwarranted loyalty to white liberals has sown a lot of poisonous seeds. To my fellow Harrisburg citizens, let me ask you this: What have you got to lose by trying something different? You have already lost just about everything  by voting for one political party and one failed philosophy. Give another party and philosophy a try.

Do it for yourself, do it for Malcolm X.

Malcolm X would have predicted the failure of Harrisburg School District, as he called American blacks who reflexively vote for white liberals and Democrats “the biggest chumps” and “traitors to your race.” White liberals own the Harrisburg school district debacle, and Malcom would have told us to expect that.

 

 

 

Eric Papenfuse, you owe Robert Ford an apology

The following story is found at http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2015/06/harrisburg_artsfest_veteran_st.html#incart_m-rpt-2.

The other day, a Harrisburg Police officer aggressively harassed an old Marine dressed in his uniform, accusing him of stolen valor.  That is where people wear military uniforms and medals they are not entitled to wear.  They do it to make themselves appear better, cooler, tougher.  Turns out, the old Marine, Robert Ford, was in fact honorably discharged from the US Marines a long time ago, and the uniform he proudly wore was given to him by the US Government.  He had just finished performing “Taps” at a Memorial Day ceremony and decided to walk over to ArtsFest along Front Street and the Susquehanna River.

American citizens cannot be expected to put up with this kind of over-reach and abuse of power.  It is official malfeasance, which is actionable. Harrisburg City has real crime problems.  This is Bad Government, Exhibit A. My God, what is happening here?

Questions about this videotaped and photographed event abound:

a) Will Detective (!) John O’Connor offer an apology to Ford?

b) Will Detective (!) O’Connor be demoted or terminated for his wildly unprofessional, threatening, bullying behavior of a free citizen?

c) Will Mayor Papenfuse have anything to say? Will he do anything?

d) Will Harrisburg police Captain Deric Moody also apologize, or be demoted? Moody’s behavior is almost worse than O’Connor’s, because he compounded the initial antagonistic behavior and then tried to cover it up.

Folks, Harrisburg is in trouble, deep trouble, and unless elected officials are quick to get these kinds of situations under control, a festering culture develops.  Recently I discovered that yet another city agency is once again making bad decisions in a vacuum.

Mayor Papenfuse, an apology from your police officers is Job #1.  Other elected officials should chime in, too.

 

Harrisburg City makes legal mistake after legal mistake

I am a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Mayor Eric Papenfuse and Harrisburg City, over his unwillingness to comply with longstanding state law and remove anti-gun ordinances from the city laws.

Papenfuse is a 1960s-1970s-style liberal, for whom ignoring the law, subverting the law, abandoning the law, undermining the law all represent some vague “Yeah, man!” hippie stand against laws he personally believes are wrong.

The problem with this approach is that once elected to office, a mayor cannot pick and choose which laws to follow or ignore.  The rule of law requires that all laws be upheld equally, or changed through the political process.

Being an elected leader means that you accept the legal and law-making process.  But then again, Papenfuse is an adoring fan of Obama, who also believes that he is a Government of One, able to do whatever he wants, rule by fiat, contrary to democratic norms.

Under Papenfuse’s hippie-fist-in-the-air don’t-have-a-care approach, Harrisburg City is making huge legal mistakes right and left in this lawsuit.

Two days ago, our attorney, Josh Prince, scored a default judgment against the city for $21,000 plus additional costs.  The city lawyers failed to file the correct paper work, failed to correctly fill out the paper work they did file, and missed key deadlines, and so the city failed on many counts to respond in court to legal documents presented to them.

While Papenfuse struts and preens to prove some undemocratic point, the city taxpayers are on the hook for ever increasing amounts of legal fees and judgments.  Eric fails, and the taxpayers here pay for his arrogant attitude.

If this is not failed government, then nothing is.

The day after

The day after Netanyahu’s historic speech before the US Congress, people who care about real things, for good or for bad, are doing 180-degree analyses of its impact, the merits of the policy he advocated, the audiences he addressed, the politics behind, surrounding, and in front of him, and implications of a nuclear Iran for America.

Shocking was the news blackout by the major TV networks and NPR/PBS.

While Netanyahu was speaking, I dialed into WITF, the local NPR affiliate here in Harrisburg.  Instead of listening to Netanyahu speak, as any listener would normally expect if any other head of state were addressing Congress, I was treated to a sarcastic discussion about health care by advocates for ObamaCare.

NPR is already an especially egregious mis-use of taxpayer money, and this one latest example serves to illustrate how corrupt and intellectually bankrupt NPR, PBS, and their affiliate stations are, despite couching themselves as sources of real debate and substance.

NPR’s news blackout of Netanyahu is done for one reason: To serve the interests of the Obama Administration, which itself not only did not attend the speech, but also issued empty, juvenile statements immediately after Netanyahu finished.

If you are NPR and you are blacking out Netanyahu’s speech, then you are not a real news organization.  Rather, you are a political activist, an advocate, far from some kind of fair-minded arbiter of plain fact that you represent yourself to be.

Likewise, here in Harrisburg, the staff of the Patriot News has fallen all over themselves to protect Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse from the legal fallout of his decision to hold onto illegal anti-gun ordinances.

I am a plaintiff in a suit against the city over these illegal ordinances.  Yesterday our attorney Josh Prince scored a default judgment against Harrisburg City.

When people like Mayor Papenfuse engage in official lawless behavior, it’s not some sort of hip civil disobedience, it’s tyranny.  Government must absolutely live by its laws.  Papenfuse believes he is above the law, and that deserves a broadside by newspapers everywhere.  But like NPR and the mainstream media’s blackout treatment of Netanyahu, the Patriot News serves a different master – liberals at war with the foundations of Western Civilization. So Papenfuse gets away with legal murder.  Iran readies to commit nuclear genocide.

That is a hell of a thing to confront first thing in the day.

 

Central PA is a fantastic place to live, work, play

Today the Dauphin County Planning Commission held its second annual awards ceremony for outstanding development projects around the county.

Held at the historic Fort Hunter barn, and funded in large part by engineering firm HRG and other private donors, the spartan but hard-hitting event showcased how advanced central PA really is, and why it is that way.

At one point in my life, I lived in the Washington DC area. Few people there actually liked living there, and the few pockets of satisfied residents were limited to historic areas with parkland and small downtowns with attractive antique homes. Northern Virginia and some of the old, well-planned communities along the major roads into Washington come to mind. I myself hated the heck out of the area, because its dominant feature was suburban sprawl, a sterile hybrid of city and country.

Happy was the day when I returned to my beloved Central Pennsylvania, and for many good reasons: Little to no real traffic, nice people, beautiful landscapes, lots of protected open space to hunt, fish, camp and hike in, low-cost housing and low cost-of-living, and many other amenities.

At today’s award ceremony, the audience was reminded again and again by speakers just how great a place this area is to live in, raise a family, work, and play, as in camp, canoe, hunt, fish, picnic, hike, etc. That is true. Having traveled extensively, my heart and mind always return to central PA. It’s a great place to live.

On that note, a personal note to new Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse: Good luck. Our city has been in trouble. Signs are everywhere that a lot of hard work lies ahead to get it out of the rut it is stuck in. But early signs of Papenfuse’s administration are positive; not so much statements, but actions, like hiring competent staff to serve the citizens.

Harrisburg is PA’s capital city and the regional hub. Ten years ago, everyone wanted to move into the city. I hope that the awards handed out today for hard work, exciting vision, and high standards are an indication of Harrisburg’s new-found success.

and then there is that political aftermath…

Well, ya win some and ya lose some, right?
My hope is that Harrisburg mayor-elect Eric Papenfuse will deliver on his promises, although the gun control stuff is a waste of time. I am no fan of Harrisburg losing its assets and still not being out of debt. My opinion is that Harrisburg’s investors made a bad investment, they were sold a bill of goods by the bondsmen, and the accountability for rectifying that goes back to the guys who issued the bad bonds. Taxpayers should not be on the hook for the municipal debt debacle. This race was marked by the impact of tons of cash, artificial legal shenanigans, and the purposeful delay of justice so that the one candidate standing in Eric’s way could not get his footing, until just weeks before Election Day.
That’s not good for democracy.
In Susquehanna Township, one again hopes that outcomes will not be as bad as they appear to be. Voters who vote against their interests intrigue me. The township school district appears headed toward even worse infighting and more losses of good staff. Property values correlate with public schools, so….. Good luck!
And finally, congratulations to judge-elect Bill Tully, a highly qualified, hard working, earnest man who will be an outstanding judge for all citizens of Dauphin County.
Vic Stabile won his seat on the PA Superior Court, congratulations!
And I am so pleased that the election season is now behind us, so I can get out and do some more hunting and fishing.
–Josh

Harrisburg Mayor’s Race & More

Dauphin County, PA, Election Round-Up: All Politics are Indeed Local, So Vote & Protect Your Property Values

By Josh First
November 4, 2013

Voters tend to get most excited about, and participate most in “big” presidential elections, but three local political races are about to be decided in two days, and each one has a direct impact on home values in Dauphin County, on your taxes, your kids, on businesses and your friends’ and families’ jobs. Here they are.

Judge

Despite performing zero reporting about the incredible primary race this spring for judge, and very little reporting about the general race between Bill Tully and Anne Cornick, Harrisburg’s local part-time newspaper The Patriot News suddenly had the evident deep wisdom and cultivated knowledge to make an “informed” endorsement Sunday. No, their endorsement would never, ever, ever be political ((cough, cough)). While they are both lawyers, Tully is Cornick’s professionally experienced senior by about two decades, has an impressive resume several pages longer than hers, and he is eminently more qualified to be the next judge. Most political races have a Yin and a Yang, a black hat and a white hat, a positive and a negative, a qualified candidate and a foil highlighting the superior candidate’s abilities, and we’ve got that here. Vote for high quality over politics, for quality over the foil, please; vote for Bill Tully.

Susquehanna School Board

How often do we hear of school board races actually meaning more than, at most, how much our property taxes will be rising? Well, this school board race in Susquehanna Township actually means a lot, not only to residents of Susquehanna Township, but to every citizen living around it. Much more than school taxes rides on the outcome of this election. As goes one domino, so goes another next to it. Lower Paxton Township, this is about you, too.

Susquehanna Township was, at one time, the successful Yin to Harrisburg’s painfully struggling Yang of a school district. It was a study of contrasting similarities, shared goals, and an example of multiracial harmony. Not necessarily any longer. The quality of the Susquehanna School District hangs by a thread. It is riven by all kinds of cross-cutting forces, not the least example of which includes last week’s announcement of the resignation of administrator Shawn Sharkey (can a more appropriately named ‘villain’ be conjured in fiction?), reportedly for sleeping with an under-age student. Resignations of high quality administrators and staff, and fierce interoffice politics, have been raging throughout the district for several years. Leadership is needed in this vacuum.

Making it all worse, racialism and apparent racism are at the core of a dangerous and divisive move to segregate the school district. Demands of a group of school board candidates led by Jesse Rawls would divvy up the district’s teaching and professional positions by the representation of citizens’ skin color, not the content of their character or their credentials. Nothing to do with quality, education, or training: Jobs assigned strictly by shades of pink and brown. Sound fair and reliable to you? Making matters worse, Rawls has been alleged to have unrepentantly called one of his opponents a kike, as in the equivalent of The N Word for Jews.

Oh, the sad irony of the magnificent 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, being invoked to establish just another regime of racial control. Are good citizens really going to vote for that?

Property values and much more depend greatly on the quality of the school district. If voters want some order brought to the chaos in the Susquehanna School District, then vote for Bob Marcus and Bruce Warshawsky, whose sole focus is on academic excellence. Imagine that: The simple, basic pursuit of school/ teacher/ student excellence as central to educating the kids of Susquehanna Township School District.

Mayor of Harrisburg

Voters hate making a decision between one mediocre candidate and another. That is probably what Harrisburg citizens face on Tuesday, with the stellar Independent candidate Nevin Mindlin artificially run out of the race and removed from the ballot. Once again, The Patriot News made an odd, nakedly political endorsement in this election that bore no resemblance to the facts surrounding the candidate they endorsed, those same facts reported in their own newsprint.

Candidate Dan Miller is a Certified Public Accountant who has served as Harrisburg’s Controller. He has extensive local government experience, as well as business experience. He also has a persnickety personality and does not always listen well, as my Mom used to say. Collaboratively, and not combatively, is how Harrisburg’s next mayor must run things. Can Miller do that? One hopes.

Candidate Eric Papenfuse has very little government experience, and his business experience is running an alternative book store serving organic, free range, expensive teas. As a former candidate myself, I appreciated that his bookstore became a center of official political debates run by Harrisburg Hope, a political group we then learned was designed to support Papenfuse’s candidacy. But he’s still not real qualified to be mayor.

More to the point, two key things really speak to Papenfuse’s likely leadership direction, the first being his 2009 invitation and hosting of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, an extremist now posing as an educational “expert,” at his bookstore. Papenfuse has given varying reasons why he served Ayers’ purposes, including recently telling me on a call-in radio program that Ayers is deserving of “free speech.” Well, lots of evil people also deserve free speech, but what kind of person would actually facilitate giving them a platform? Answer: The same kind of person who is also associated with Occupy Wall Street, Eric Papenfuse.

The second indication is a letter to the editor Papenfuse wrote (Patriot News, January 30, 2010) about his bizarre vision for public education, specifically citing Harrisburg University and Harrisburg SciTech. Advocating for teaching Harrisburg’s disadvantaged inner city students to be “radical thinkers,” instead of “workers,” Papenfuse wants inner city students to be schooled in anger, poetry, street theater, and activism. Forget getting an accounting degree, a chemistry degree, an IT degree, or eventually a law degree. Forget being a constructive, positive contributor to society who can earn a living and support a family. No, according to Papenfuse, Harrisburg’s kids must be cannon fodder in his, and Ayers’ social unrest movement, perpetually living on government handouts, perpetually at war with their fellow Americans. This is an obvious recipe for disaster for Harrisburg’s students and their families. Let’s ask the voters of our great city: Do you want your kids to be Eric Papenfuse’s political cannon fodder? Or do you want them to get ahead in life?

If Miller is a snip-snap, too-smart-for-you accountant, perhaps too assured of his own correct thinking, Papenfuse is on the cusp of introducing radical, ultra-divisive politics to Harrisburg the likes of which we have never before seen. Dan Miller has my vote, not because I am enamored of him, not because I think he is the best thing since sliced bread, not because I think he is the best candidate hands-down. But he is a damned sight better, and better qualified, than Eric Papenfuse. I hope you will vote for Dan Miller for those simple reasons alone.

Stay in the conversation at www.joshfirst.com and on our Facebook page.

In Eric Papenfuse’s own nutty words

http://www.midtownscholar.com/home/billayersfeb5th.pdf 
You don’t see that any group asked Midtown Scholar to host domestic terrorist Bill Ayers in this announcement.
 
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2010/01/why_i_invited_bill_ayers_to_co.html 

Papenfuse says he invited domestic terrorist Bill Ayers because we cannot improve our school system until we encourage students to become poets, artists and naysayers rather than graduates qualified to work for business.
 
Anybody but this guy for mayor.

Eric Papenfuse silence says “I am as guilty as sin”

Eric Papenfuse is a candidate for Harrisburg City mayor. The day after he won his primary race this spring, he talked openly about choosing his staff and the new curtains in the mayor’s office. He had not yet run in a general election race against Independent candidate Nevin Mindlin.

Papenfuse says he’s not behind the flimsy legal assault on Nevin Mindlin’s candidacy for mayor, but Papenfuse sure hasn’t shown himself to be a stand-up guy and advocate for leaving Mindlin in the race.

Papenfuse’s silence about the ridiculously petty nature of this attempt to eliminate Mindlin from the race screams out “I, Eric Papenfuse, Am As Guilty As Sin,” and not innocent, as he claims.

Candidate Nate Curtis said it best about Papenfuse’s claim: “He’s lying.”

Eric Papenfuse represented himself as some kind of stand-up guy, with good values, who believes in good government. Well, here you have it: When the opportunity to really act on those values is presented, he walks away.

Papenfuse’s attempt to disqualify Mindlin is already boomeranging, with many voters I spoke with in the past days saying that they now question Papenfuse’s integrity and commitment to fairness. He looks desperate to win, like he’s willing to do anything to win. That is not the kind of person Harrisburg needs.