This certainly seems to have been an unnecessary, self-inflicted wound. I don’t know if it is corruption, but it was obviously very poor judgement. (It isn’t as if Baltimore doesn’t already have a reputation.) Who sells $500,000 worth of copies of a children’s book to a hospital that receives public funds, and thinks that is entirely above suspicion?
Witch hunt! Hoax! Complete exoneration!!!
Dear AP,
Thanks for including the mayor’s full name in paragraph 1, so we’d know the reference just to “Pugh” in the rest of the article.
No, wait. You didn’t do that, nor did the editor catch it.
Well, thanks anyway.
I always feel book publishing is underrepresented in the world of scandals. No longer! This one’s pretty weird, though
The more typical scam of this sort is that some conservative writes an utterly unreadable book, which magically sells enough copies to make the NY Times bestseller’s list, but is really just a slightly concealed kind of graft since all of the copies are bought by the same Think Tank or PAC.
I’m convinced that being a crooked politician is very hazardous to your health.
see: stratemyer syndicate
Not hazardous enough as far as I am concerned.
Just out of curiosity, is the book any good?
You can buy a copy if you like: https://www.amazon.com/Health-Holly-Exercising-Catherine-Pugh/dp/B005RSAU3W
That image of the mayor makes her hands and forearms seem to belong to someone else. Gee, maybe if Alex Jones is around I could get a conspiracy theory going.
Amen!
We’ll know that it has become sufficiently hazardous only when there are no longer any crooked politicians.
Copy editing - across all formats - has become embarrassingly slipshod. Including TPM. Stuff a sharp ninth-grader should spot goes uncorrected far too often. Indeed, this very post is begging for a blue pencil. If you spot my errors of grammar or style you win the GRAND PRIZE!
The grand prize is smug self-satisfaction.
Seriously, though, careless errors like that are way too fcking frequent.
Of course, I cannot help noticing that we are very likely to see the resignation of a mayor for this scandal, while the President of the United States remains in office in spite of far greater offenses. That doesn’t mean that the mayor should not step down, but the contrast is stark.
I guess they were using new math. I’m having a hard time figuring out how to sell and buy 100,00 copies in good faith when the company printing the book only produced 60,000.
C’mon, that’s easy - you sell the first 60,000 and 50,000 people donate their books back to you, You can then sell another 40,000 and still have 10,000 left in stock! Easy Peasy, you just have to “think” like a Republican… 