Um, huh? The News - that’s the ANN ARBOR News - has endorsed Bush.
In case you didn’t get that, The Ann Arbor News has endorsed Bush.
We defy Jay Nordlinger, who’s been very careful not to make an A2 reference since our second installment of Nordlinger Watch, not to say anything about this latest head-scratcher from the newspaper he likes to call “Pravda West.”
Arbor Update has an excellent summary of the urban planning mayoral debate Friday night. As you can probably tell, it was a long debate, and the candidates seemed more similar than different most of the time. The one pivotal moment was an exchange about accessory-dwelling units (ADUs). Lumm characterized the council’s decision to drop the issue as one of “no courage.” Hieftje replied, “I don’t think you should force things down the throats of the neighborhoods,” and argued that only five or six apartments per year would be created under the ADU ordinance that had been considered.
At this point, a member of the planning faculty asked the only question of the night that got applause - essentially, is there a point at which the city needs to tell “the neighborhoods” (his own included) that they’re wrong? Lumm took the question first, reiterating that she thought that the ADU issue should have at least been discussed publicly in council. She even made good use of an old debate standby, the ordinary citizen’s story, by describing the situation of a 67-year-old woman she knew who could hardly afford to keep the house she’d lived in for 63 years without being able to rent part of it out.
When it was Hieftje’s turn to answer, he seemed slightly annoyed for the only time, saying that he’d already answered that question. Debate moderator Matt Lassiter pointed out that this was a different question from the first one that had led to the ADU discussion, and then Hieftje repeated something he’d said in response to that question, that both Democrats and Republicans on council supported letting the ADU resolution drop.
If this was supposed to make Lumm appear outside the mainstream of A2 public opinion, we can’t think of a better place to be. Throughout the rest of the evening, we found very little to disagree with from either candidate, and we’re not sure if it’s fair to define Hieftje by this exchange, but in a debate that was genteel to the point of one candidate (Lumm) apologizing for getting “political,” we’ll take our defining moments where we can.
We’re hoping to see a lot of you at the urban planning mayor candidates’ forum tonight - except for the out-of-town and out-of-state students, who have no business whatsoever trying to impose their Hamtramckian or Ohioan views on the long-term-resident Engineering freshmen of Ann Arbor.
Goodspeed attempts to quantify local blogs as a measure of cool-city-ness. His first stab at it puts A2 at #18 in the nation in “online civic culture.” (Which is as good of a description of it as we’ve ever heard; could those who view blogging and the Internet in general as “isolating” be missing the point any more?) When he refines his methodology a little and puts together a “highest blogging per capita” list for metropolitan areas, Detroit, with which he’s now included Ann Arbor, comes in fourth, and Chicago doesn’t even make the top 20. We’re not sure what to make of all this, except we like the asterisk across from Ann Arbor in the “‘Coolness’ Rank” column. A2: not a significant source of cool.
Oh, yeah, and, RED SOX!!!!!
One could be forgiven for missing the MSA-sponsored mayoral debate between Mayor John Hieftje and opponent Jane Lumm last night - we had no idea it was going on, and the Daily didn’t even have a story about it today, except for two sentences at the bottom of a story about an MSA vote against Proposal 2. All we have to go on is an e-mail summary that was sent out to an urban planning list. (All quotes are from the summary, not from the candidates’ words.)
Hieftje acknowledged that he “does not have a very good relationship with” the News when asked about the paper’s endorsement of Lumm. Lumm, on the other hand, said she hadn’t expected to receive the endorsement.
When asked about MIP citations of students, Hieftje said that he “wants the police to back off of students.” Lumm said something about the police having to enforce laws.
Then there was a question about some incident with Lumm asking for voters’ IDs at Mary Markley two years ago. We thought we followed this kind of stuff pretty closely, and we’ve never heard anything like this before. Lumm’s response, as described in the e-mail, was that “asking for ID’s is not allowed, she was just checking to make sure people were at the correct voting site.” This sounds like a denial of sorts, but we can’t really figure it out from this description. Hieftje said that her actions were “intimidating” for voters.
Neither of them supports a couch ban or a Washtenaw/Hill historic district.
We apologize for the sketchy level of detail here, but since the Daily didn’t cover the debate, we felt we should post something, since it’s rare that Ann Arbor politicos discuss student issues in front of a student audience. If any of you were there, more detail would be appreciated. And if you’re not sick of Hieftje and Lumm yet, there’s the Old Fourth Ward candidates’ night tomorrow, and the urban planning forum Friday at 6.
Daily columnist Steve Cotner inquires after whether his readers have been experiencing any strange symptoms lately, such as a feeling of being constantly underwater, diminished olfactory capabilities, dreams of being called “scoliotic and Quasimodal” and the sense of being labeled a traitor by graffiti drawings of Chuck Berry. Uh, no, you might want to see someone about that.
Bloggers are starting to influence A2 politics…with our SECRET TECHNOLOGY FROM THE FUTURE!!! From an e-mail on the Old Fourth Ward Association’s mailing list that we’ve obtained:
[O]n the couch ordinance that was tabled in September, some council reps indicated that they had received more emails against than for the ordinance. To me, the suggestion that email campaigns can affect council decisions is troubling. Can a group of temporary residents with easy access to sophisticated technology now exert more influence on local decisions that the individual opinions of longer term Ann Arbor residents with less access to technology?…Certainly, email campaigns and blogs have certainly influenced national politics in this way. The question is whether local politics should be influenced in a similar way.
Whew, at least they haven’t found out about our orbital mind-control lasers yet.
The e-mail also promoted the OFW’s Candidates’ Night, at which Mayor Hieftje and challenger Jane Lumm will be speaking. It will take place this Thursday the 28th at 7:30 in Community High School’s Media Center.
We always thought Hieftje was a pretty popular mayor everywhere except the blogosphere, so we were a little floored to read that the News had endorsed Republican challenger Jane Lumm. Unlike a standard newspaper endorsement, which lists each candidate’s accomplishments and then explains why one of them has the edge, the News editorial is a relentless, blistering attack on Hieftje. “Hieftje’s largest failure is not one of vision, but leadership,” the News charges. “Few are willing to publicly criticize Hieftje because they expect quick retaliation and there is good reason for that conclusion.” And there’s more. He “sprints to accept praise.” His reaction to disagreement is “shrill.” He even channeled Bush in the second presidential debate when the News asked him a similar question about mistakes he’d made: “Hieftje could not identify one thing he would do differently in his current term as mayor. He was, however, ready to head down a path of identifying the missteps of city employees until he was reminded that the question pertained to his own actions.” The only way the News could have been more scathing is if they’d accused him of having no buzz and ended the editorial with “Hieftje…mmmWORST.”
This is quite possibly the most bizarre controversy we’ve ever seen on campus - and between the Israel-Pakistan-India-Palestine Daily letter skirmish and “Snobs Slain Outside Rick’s” debacle last year, that’s really saying something. A SAPAC banner featuring a terrible drawing of a face in black felt pen has been interpreted as a depiction of blackface. An anonymous e-mail posted on Arbor Update calls it an “offense to the African/African-American community and…clearly UNACCEPTABLE.”
First, the Greenbelt, now the Greenway? At first we weren’t sure if our suspicion of this Doug-Cowherd-hatched scheme stemmed from our dislike of insects and general distrust of anything that smacks of nature, but now that the real urban planners at Arbor Update have weighed in, we feel better about our reflexive anti-park sentiment. In fact, as much as we appreciate Goodspeed’s Ann Arbor Voting Guide, we have to take issue with his statement in support of Washtenaw Proposal A, in which he declares, and we quote, “Yay for parks and recreation!” From here on out, we’re taking a strict hard line against parks.