re: Uh oh. Looks like we have a heavyweight battle of Baton Rouge blogs

Now, Gary Chambers is a moron and he doesn’t understand what “progressive” actually means. That said, there is little confusion as to the sentiment he’s talking about – what he wants is for Broome to continue taking tax dollars from the southern part of Baton Rouge and redistributing them somewhere else, but instead of the downtown area as previous mayor Kip Holden did, he wants that wealth redistributed in North Baton Rouge. Which is a message Broome herself has echoed throughout the campaign.

This isn’t Africa and you can’t dispossess people of their real estate, but you can certainly tax them off their property, provide them corrupt government and poor-quality services in return and therefore send them packing for the suburbs. That happens all the time in urban America and it’s more than likely going to happen in Baton Rouge. Chambers says racism is the cause, but he fails to recognize that the black middle class is decamping for Ascension and Livingston Parishes just the same as the white middle class is, and for the same reasons – crime, lousy schools, declining property values in middle class neighborhoods.