Stephanie Rawlings-Blake
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is the mayor of Baltimore, Maryland. She presided over the riots that followed the 2015 death in police custody of career criminal Freddie Gray. She infamously admitted she gave space "to those who wished to destroy."
Cuba
From May 25 to 29 2016, Center for Democracy in the Americas visited Cuba with a twenty-person delegation representing the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). This was the USCM’s second official delegation to Cuba. In 1978, CEO and Executive Director Tom Cochran visited the island with forty mayors during the thaw in US-Cuba relations under Jimmy Carter. Nearly forty years later, Cochran led a delegation which included the current leadership of the USCM: President, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore; Vice President, Mayor Mick Cornett of Oklahoma City; and Second Vice President, Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans. The mayors had high level official meetings, including with the Ministry of Foreign Relations’ Deputy Director of the North American Division Gustavo Machin, to get an update from the Cuban perspective of the current state of relations between the two countries.
The mayors met with their mayoral counterparts, provincial governors, and National Assembly members to have an in-depth dialogue on service delivery mechanisms and the differences in intergovernmental relations in the two countries. The mayors discussed important Cuban advances in bio-genetic research with CIGB leadership and met with various institutions of higher learning including the University of Havana, the Institute of Superior Arts, and the Latin American School of Medicine.
The USCM leadership then shifted their focus to important people-to-people relations. They heard and learned from entrepreneurs about their experiences opening up small businesses and had opportunities to discuss the current social and economic climate in Cuba with artists, academics, diplomats, and journalists. As Tom Cochran declared during a press conference in Havana, “We are anxious to share ideas in the evolution of our relations with the Cuban people and government.”[1]
"Clearing a path" for Hillary"
The Democratic National Committee is 'clearing a path' for Hillary Clinton to be its presidential nominee because its upper power echelons are populated with women, according to a female committee member who was in Las Vegas for October 2015's primary debate.
Speaking on the condition that she isn't identified, she told Daily Mail Online that the party is in the tank for Clinton, and the women who run the organization decided it 'early on.'
The committeewoman is supporting one of Hillary's rivals for the Democratic nomination, and said she spoke freely because she believes the former Secretary of State is benefiting from unfair favoritism inside the party.
Clinton aims to be the first female to occupy the Oval Office, and 'the party's female leaders really want to make a woman the next president,' the committeewoman said, rattling off a list of the women who she said are the 'real power' in the organization.
She rattled off a list of women at the top of the party hierarchy and said two vice chairs helped craft a decision this summer to favor Clinton
'I have nothing against women in politics,' she underscored. 'But it's not healthy for the party if we get behind a woman because she's a woman, and risk having her implode after she's nominated because she isn't tested enough now.'
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with vice chairs Donna Brazile and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake , are part of a female cabal dead set on putting a woman in the White House, according to a DNC committeewoman.
Five of the nine elected leaders of the DNC are women, including chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz – a Florida congresswoman – and a majority of the vice chairs.
Before Wasserman Schultz assumed her post at the DNC, she eagerly campaigned for Clinton during the then-New York senator's 2008 presidential run.
Also mentioned were DNC women like convention chief executive Rev. Leah Daughtry, vice chair Maria Elena Durazo and CEO Amy Dacey.[2]