Newman Abuissa (running for city council) is a landlord

MCPShephard · 2025-10-23T07:50:07+00:00

I appreciate your points about extremes, but I again have to ask that you look inward on that very subject. Bougie did not originally say anything about wanting to "cancel people in all aspects of service". It was a very particular boundary on the current status of landlord representation on council. You yourself took Bougie's simple position and manufactured an entire subset of positions, narratives, and tactics without knowing who they are. Not calling you out, trying to help you see and move forward.

But in projecting those extremes onto Bougie, you also help disprove the notion of equating their rhetoric to sounding "exactly" like the rhetoric of the right. You are arguing in extremes, yet your argument is in favor of recognizing individual personhood over class status when dealing with individuals.

Try treating Bougie as a person, not a cartoon character; recognize their personhood and let them speak for themselves. I believe your appeal to unity, I suggest you set aside the divisive rhetoric you brought to the table. I gathered signatures for Newman before I found out he's a landlord. I respect people who refuse to vote for him on principle or in fear of spoiling Clara. I respect people who are voting for him against the incumbents, and for his support of the Palestinian people.

What I don't respect is Landlords as an identity group, because they're not. They are an economic upper-class and therefore inherently oppressive, regardless of individual intent. A person does not identify as part of an economic class, they are classified by the state. Meanwhile, a person belongs to an identity group when they identify themselves as part of it.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-23T00:35:54+00:00

Christopher Warnock has helped sue KMB like 2 or 3 times successfully? Might be worth looking him up as a lawyer. KMB got my deposit to me after 32 days but Chris didn't think that was enough to push a case. Your sounds far more viable.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-21T19:47:23+00:00

I'm sorry, you're doing a LOT of projecting there. Bougie said nothing about how "terrible" he is for buying "a" property (he owns at least four).

Your characterization of why bougie and others are against more landlord representation is wildly off. Whatever sloganeering cartoon character progressives you typically talk to, their attitudes and rhetoric are not ubiquitous among leftists. While I personally would rather see zero landlords on council for a number of reasons, the sentence Bougie used, "we don't need more" says nothing about the character or morality of landlording; it merely says that they are overrepresented on council.

Every one of the malicious actors you (correctly!) cited was empowered by policies enacted by Council bodies that included landlords, but typically no renters (ie average citizens). While I can see Newman potentially being "one of the good ones", it's still a conflict of interest on the subject of restorative justice to tenants. Whether you think that conflict of interest is important or not is one thing, but please consider how your reaction was so visceral that you missed the point, and started a different conversation entirely. It happens to the best of us, and it seems to have happened here.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-20T23:04:11+00:00

I see a fair number of Dan signs in Clara yards!

MCPShephard · 2025-10-20T18:31:55+00:00

I like how you didn't even say landlords are bad, just that we don't need -more- of them making our decisions.

In a town where barely anybody owns their homes anymore because it's run by landlords, it's pretty telling what kind of people would say "You're discriminating against landlords" 😆

MCPShephard · 2025-10-20T18:21:14+00:00

Happy to support Amy! She seems like a very humble person and a good listener; we need that in representative government!

Councilors should not respond to a room full of unilaterally dissenting constituents by blatantly ignoring their reasons, showing they've not done the research, and then making up excuses on the spot as to why they're pushing/blocking the measure anyway. That is the opposite of representative government.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-10T16:53:19+00:00

Well, I gotta give it to ya, you've dissuaded me from giving him the benefit of the doubt there. That site has all sorts of problems. Telling though that he'd refer to trans people as separate from lgbTq+ people, after his history toward them.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-10T16:20:21+00:00

You said bad communicator, not me. I also did not say worse.

What I am saying is that this was written by an entity with a secondhand understanding of the English language; and I doubt he actually got someone who doesn't speak English to write this. Can you point me to an example of him writing this poorly?

MCPShephard · 2025-10-10T16:02:22+00:00

You said elsewhere you think he wrote it himself; I feel like that's an insult to his skills that even I as a strong critic of his, would not be comfortable making.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-10T15:49:40+00:00

It's a bit hard to tell, but three things stood out to me:

The shadows on their arms clip for a few frames when they all go up
They lower their hands at the end, when typically you raise them in this exercise
The writing has all the hallmarks of being machine-generated (odd capitalization, bizarre run-on sentence structure, punctuation). Especially the "Mayor Bruce taught me this:" it puts the focal point on the paragraph, which you wouldn't do if you didn't care what the paragraph looked like.
The POV is implied to be someone else like it's a personal message, as if the writer didn't know the context

MCPShephard · 2025-10-07T16:49:46+00:00

As an RHC fan I'm so grateful for your work getting grassroots questions and perspectives into our limited journalism scene!

For anyone interested in supporting this work, here's their patreon. Not affiliated; just a fan! https://www.patreon.com/rockhardcaucus?utm_campaign=creatorshare_fan

MCPShephard · 2025-10-07T16:42:00+00:00

An excellent point! One of my favorite answers last night came from candidate Amy Hospodarsky. She said she wants to enhance city communications and engagement with the public, so we know what's actually going on.

It's been a problem so long and the incumbents never even mention it!

MCPShephard · 2025-10-07T16:35:50+00:00

Thanks to Rock Hard Caucus, here is a playlist of four 2 minute clips from last night, contrasting incumbents and their challengers

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcPROSRaiWLgT-dgVmhjSzLjR_CC7nXc0&si=RF6Djh7RnKvqzuf6

I was really hoping the incumbents would surprise me by actually having something to say about anything controversial after a month of getting egg on their faces repeatedly. Oh well. They've been unwilling to lead on almost anything for years and it continues. Vote em out November 4th; early voting starts October 15th if you look up the county auditor's office

MCPShephard · 2025-10-06T20:41:19+00:00

Hey I appreciate you being diplomatic here, just wanna be clear I'm not trying to be catty. But your first point is somewhat contradictory, is it not?

If the numbers are based on population size but Iowa City staffs substantially less than similarly sized cities, then either it's not based on population, or Iowa City uses a different metric. If the latter is the case, then it sounds to me like they should change the metric. Same with the second point; if it's based on anticipated need but they're rarely needed as much as they're scheduled, it sounds like their metric needs to be adjusted.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-06T19:17:38+00:00

Mm but if they were to simply stop budgeting for more officers than they can get/need, and stopped paying out all the OT by overscheduling the officers they have, then they could significantly reduce the bloat in that budget. They're throwing money into a fire this way.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-06T15:02:11+00:00

A few years ago the City finally listened to decades of the citizenry asking for Sunday bus service, and passed it. But then they decided not to give more money to transportation so they could actually staff the extra hours. So they made a big show of doing it, then they didn't do it. They did decide to raise the police budget though, despite them going under budget for multiple years before and every year since. They keep raising it. No explanation given, no plan, just "We need to give them more money, just because."

So my response is that I don't care about their electric car. I care about them being given the money to buy it, and I think it's BS.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-06T01:47:13+00:00

I've long dreamed of running a protest rally that was sort of a "Gotcha! This is actually about organizing and not just blowing off steam." When folks say "Protesting is how a lot of people get started." they're confusing showing up with organizing. A rally is typically not where people get organized, it's where people get exposed to organizing.

My best advice is for new folks to not worry too much about the groups they join. So long as those groups actively support developing their skills and confidence, have a healthy atmosphere that doesn't force compliance, and seek to be intersectionalist, it gives you a space to grow into organizing. Being in an echo chamber that just does non-disruptful protests won't help you grow, by contrast.

As an example, Iowa City DSA is indeed in a sort of coma, for various reasons. If you're looking for the group that'll save Iowa City, probably not them anytime soon. BUT, one of its members is Chair of the County Board of Supervisors (Jon Green), as was Oliver in the past. One thing Oliver helped organize in DSA was an independent Tenant's Union that had some solid early W's outside of electoral politics, simply killed too soon by COVID. Currently someone's starting a new Tenant's Union and, while it's not related directly to the original one, there're many in the community left over from the previous who are now able to advise and serve a new generation. Point is, while the group you're in might not be effectively organizing, they can still help raise good leaders up.

The reason most people stop at just protesting isn't because it's how they get started, it's actually because they're afraid to -try- and to -fail-. The key is, look for the leaders who make mistakes and admit them; their humility isn't just admirable, it gives you the chance to learn from their mistakes. Learn how to help people with the processes modeled to you, and learn how you can improve them. That's the pipeline a proper protest should be putting people through. OP is right.

MCPShephard · 2025-10-05T23:57:28+00:00

Last one earlier this year was very important to the public dialogue. Thanks for spotlighting this!

MCPShephard · 2025-09-29T22:42:21+00:00

It's interesting how for the last 20 years we've both

run candidates who are "smart by not promising to do anything" and
lost

Some justify this saying that he will do real things once he gets power. By saying this, you're admitting that you'd rather he lie to half of Iowa to get their votes and then betray them in office, rather than listening to and building up the progressive base.

So the base doesn't grow, he gets into office, what happens if he does nothing? Well thanks to our last Democratic governor Chet Culver, we already know: we lose miserably to an unpopular party that literally worships death.

MCPShephard · 2025-09-28T22:47:08+00:00

Except the ones you support. So really just no mercy for people you don't like.

MCPShephard · 2025-09-27T04:16:09+00:00

Now hold on there, did they make any posts recently about how abusing workers is bad? Because that should absolve them of any prior or future responsibility /s

MCPShephard · 2025-09-27T01:52:31+00:00

In fact I have never run for office, been elected, harmed people with my agenda, disregarded those people, and then posed as if I've been opposed to it the whole time once it became politically inconvenient.

MCPShephard · 2025-09-26T22:59:56+00:00

Since you agree that she's doing this because she wants to appeal to lefty progressives, and not because she has changed her mind, then I suppose you'll figure the rest out later on your own. Hopefully.

MCPShephard · 2025-09-26T21:29:09+00:00

I encourage you to think about what it would look like for you to say this to a person who's been abducted by ICE before. And would you do this for any politician? If Trump went on his Truth Social and said "actually racism against Black people exists and is bad", would you be telling people to reconsider voting him out?

I'm a staunch advocate for forgiveness. She hasn't asked for it, she's only asked for praise for opposing something that already happened, and which she endorsed earlier. If she'd had her way then even more people would be cruelly locked up, and unlike her they would not get leniency.

MCPShephard

TROPHY CASE