WPB race bitterness; Trump-Kim nothingness
Rick Christie
From the Opinion Zone blog ...
After Palm Beach Post staff writer Tony Doris reported last week that West Palm Beach “took another step Wednesday toward encouraging Okeechobee Boulevard office construction all the way to the waterfront, despite continued criticism for the plan’s potential to block roads and views,” the question raised in the following June 4 post once again became relevant:
Follow the money
It’s been nearly three months since challenger Christina Lambert unseated West Palm Beach Commissioner Shanon Materio by a mere
183 votes in a heated, and increasingly controversial race.
The city hadn’t seen the likes of this kind of nastiness since Mayor Jeri Muoio defeated former Commissioner Kimberly Mitchell in a knockdown, drag-out, no-holds-barred mayoral brawl back in 2015.
And Materio is back for Round 2. According to
The Post’s Tony Doris, she has filed three complaints with the Florida Elections Commission alleging that three shell companies were created to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for political purposes without declaring themselves political organizations — which are required to identify contributors.
The political purpose? Electing Lambert.
The contributors? Voters don’t know. But shouldn’t they, for the sake of transparency?
The proposed One Flagler tower was rejected by the West Palm Beach City Commission last September by a vote of 3-2.
Lambert, a newcomer with business community ties, managed to knock off the more seasoned Materio mainly because she had the money. She also had in her corner Rick Asnani, one of the county’s top political consultants.
That’s all good. Lambert won the seat, and is ensconced on the commission. Ready to vote, among other things, on a rejuvenated plan to create the Okeechobee Business District (OBD). Yep, the same OBD that would allow the construction of the 25-story One Flagler office building pretty much on Flagler Drive.
That’s not all good. A number of city residents — vocal city residents — don’t like the idea of building the tower on an already traffic-clogged Okeechobee Boulevard. They especially don’t like the fact that the issue seemed dead after it was defeated when it came before the commission in September.
But what a difference an election makes.
Shanon Materio, former West Palm Beach city commissioner.
Materio has been accused of some stuf,f too.
“Ms. Materio used a campaign committee that was established in the month of February 2018, just one month before the election, and ran $23,000 in donations through the entity to help her campaign while hiding the donors,” Asnani told The Post. “Prior to that, Materio used a different political committee to send out a mailing that is being investigated by the Florida Elections Commission for potential illegal donations.”
Political operative Bill Newgent, for his part, filed complaints about a series of alleged misfilings and a missed deadline regarding Materio’s campaign documentation, Doris wrote.
Election campaigns laws exist for a reason. The primary one being so that voters know who is influencing or attempting to influence candidates that are vying to represent constituents.
We know that transparency is a good thing ... and “democracy dies in the darkness.”
But this long after the election, is there value in Materio’s insistence on knowing the names of the people or entities that contributed to those three mysterious shell companies created by Asnani?
The big photo op
And as post-mortem after post-mortem confirms that the long-anticipated, and much-hyped summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean “Chairman” Kim Jong Un yielded little more than the most expensive photo-op in history, the following June 12 blog posted hours before the meeting strikes a prescient
chord:
UPDATE: President Trump and Chairman
Kim signed an agreement to move toward denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula some time in the next “3-15 years.” Something the North Koreans have agreed to before, by the way. Details are sparse, but Trump apparently wants to stop U.S.-South Korea training exercises — or “war games” — as a precursor to removing U.S. troops altogether.
Also, future meetings could be held in Pyongyang and the White House. Bottom line: The only thing historic about this summit right now is a big photo op between a U.S. president and a brutal North Korean dictator.
By the time you read this Tuesday morning [ June 12], the longawaited, much-hyped summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has come and gone.
The days of pomp and circumstance that led up to the hours-long meeting of East and West, socialism and capitalism, ego and ego-prime, young and old, basketball and golf is over. There’s nothing left but the Twitter storm to follow.
Well, actually there was to be a 4 a.m. (ET) news conference Tuesday with Trump, sans Kim.
Kim is on his way back to Pyongyang; and later to Russia to meet with president and fellow dictator Vladimir Putin, who also happens to be a favorite of Trump.
We can speculate that Putin, in fact, could serve as the future facilitator of a summit between Trump and Kim — a la President Jimmy Carter with Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Although that didn’t turn out too well in the end for Sadat.
As of 7 a.m. Tuesday (ET), Trump is already on his way back to the U.S. aboard Air Force One.
The schedule, as of Monday night, has him back at the White House by 8 a.m. Wednesday.
By the time the meeting arrived Monday night (9 p.m. ET), the expectations for the historic face-toface had already been set so low it is hard to gauge what would likely happen.
Even NBA great (and Kim BFF) Dennis Rodman was talking down expectations.
“People should not expect so much for the first time,” Rodman said as he emerged from the baggage claim area at Changi airport around midnight Monday.
“Hopefully, the doors will open,” he said.
He told reporters he wasn’t sure if he would meet Kim in Singapore.
White House officials have said Rodman will play no official role in the diplomatic negotiations. Trump said last week that Rodman had not been invited to the summit.
We’re kind of left to wonder then whatever happened to the lofty goals set for this “historic” summit months ago when it was first mentioned.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been saying as late as Sunday that President Trump’s goal is nothing short of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
But try to find one
Korea expert that would give that even a remote possibility from this summit. Most said that Kim won’t even entertain talk of such a thing unless the U.S. and other nuclear-powered nations do the same. (Yeah, like that’ll happen.)
Ending the Korean War — basically a paperwork issue — by signing a formal peace treaty was also out there as a major goal. Kim would basically have to do what Republic of Korea President Syngman Rhee wouldn’t do 65 years ago, which is sign the armistice agreement officially ending hostilities.
Of course, it’s not that simple.
The 1953 agreement calls for all sides to hold a political conference “to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea (and) the peaceful settlement of the Korean question.”
That summit, the Geneva Conference of 1954, ended in spectacular failure. Not only did it not produce a peace treaty ending the Korean War, but negotiations over France’s withdrawal from its colonies in Indochina set the stage for the Vietnam War.
It still could happen.
But since China and the U.S. were both major combatants on both sides of the war, both would need to be there for an official ending. (Right, there’s no China in Singapore.)