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21st Delegation Gets an ‘F’, But Wait..

If you  follow the local politics at the MD State legislature level,  this news might have already caught your attention..

Legislators representing a portion of the county who had the lowest scores were Dels. Joseline Pena-Melnyk, D-College Park, Ben Barnes, D-College Park, House Speaker Michael E. Busch, D-Annapolis, and Sen. Jim Rosapepe, D-College Park. Dels. Barbara Frush, D-Beltsville, and Virginia Clagett, D-West River, were tied for the fifth slot.

But wait, this is only one side of the coin, to see the other side, please read on..

First, let’s all be frank, we all like score cards. Like our kids get scorecards at their schools, politicians get theirs too. They get at the national level, and now we see they are getting at the local level too.

This political scorecards got me interested mainly because it’s the MD election time and average voters like you and me would be interested to know how to vote for their incumbent candidates.

I also wanted to know how they measure politicians’ performance. To that end, I think the poll takers I’ll mention shortly did a fairly good job by defining the way they took the poll.

The ratings card I just mentioned above, was given by Maryland Business for Responsive Government (www.mbrg.org). Many consider MBRG as a conservative advocacy group, who have generally favored Republican candidates in the past. For example, in 2006,  local conservative lawmakers earned high marks from MBRG.

On the other side of the spectrum, if you want to see high marks for Democratic candidates, go to advocacy groups such as Progressive Maryland Education Fund ( www.Pmef.org ). PMEF did their score cards for 21st Delegation this week as well, and guess what, all 3 Delegates and the Senator have received A+ grades.

I wish there could be a more independent poll takers in our local politics; but I doubt that will ever happen when independence is a scarce thing to find - even in our mainstream national media outlets.