HOW BAD DOES PUGH STINK?

The Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland is – or at least has been up to now – Catherine Pugh.

Mayor Pugh succeeded Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who, er, declined to run for re-election after the Freddy Gray fiasco…and a week after Gray’s family was awarded a $6.4 million dollar settlement (For WHAT??????).

But now Ms. Pugh is on indefinite leave – which comes, cooincidentally enough, at a time when a major scandal has erupted over sales of the  “Healthy Holly” children’s book series she supposedly wrote.

From Nicole Darrah’s article at foxnews.com:

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh announced on Monday that she’s taking an indefinite leave of absence from office after it was revealed she received $500,000 from the University of Maryland Medical System in critics have called a “self-dealing” book sale.

In a letter released earlier Monday, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, called on the state prosecutor to investigate allegations of self-dealing by Pugh. State Comptroller Peter Franchot, a Democrat, urged the mayor to step down immediately.

Hogan and Franchot’s calls came hours after health care firm Kaiser Permanente disclosed to The Baltimore Sun that between 2015 and 2018, it paid $114,000 for roughly 20,000 copies of Pugh’s self-published “Healthy Holly” children’s book series.

Since 2011, Pugh has received $500,000 for selling the books to the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS), The Associated Press reported. 

Pugh, who sat on the system’s board since 2001, became Baltimore’s mayor in 2016. The next year, Baltimore’s spending board, which is controlled by the mayor, awarded a $48 million contract to the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States Inc. Kaiser previously held that contract.

Does this book “deal” stink?

How about it stinks so bad that I can smell it right through my computer monitor.

Given the condition of Baltimore under Pugh and her predecessor, Rawlings-Blake, I hope, for the city’s sake, that she removes the “de” portion of “indefinite leave”, and that Baltimore finally elects a Mayor who can start to bring it back from the criminal, violent, murderous depths to which it has descended.

Don’t bet on it happening, though.  Baltimore is another of our one-party-rule cities in which Democrats have overseen its descent.

How one-party is Baltimore?  It hasn’t had a Republican Mayor in 52 years and has never had a Republican City Council President in the city’s history.

It is exactly what then-candidate Donald Trump was talking about when he asked Black voters for their votes, because “what the hell do you have to lose?”

Well, at least, for the time being, Baltimore is “losing” Catherine Pugh.

That’s a start.