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Mayor Martin O'Malley, a charismatic white man elected twice in a predominantly black city, is a Democrat with a future - a rising star nationally, and perhaps the party's best bet to take back the governor's mansion in Maryland in 2006. And that clearly worries the Republicans. Demonstrating that the GOP already has O'Malley in the crosshairs, a Republican official was fired Tuesday by GOP Gov. Robert Ehrlich for spreading rumors on the Internet that the 42-year-old mayor had an extramarital affair with a TV reporter. On the same day, Republican officials pounced on O'Malley after he drew a loose comparison between President Bush's cuts in urban aid and the Sept. 11 attacks. The initial assessment by some political observers was that this week's events would probably not have much effect on O'Malley's future. But they may have offered a preview of what could be a bruising governor's race. Patrick Gonzales, president of a Maryland polling and consulting company, said that with O'Malley already the clear Democratic front-runner, ``Republicans are focusing their energies on the person they perceive to be the biggest threat.'' [more]

O'Malley's Right About Bush Budget's Impact on Cities
It appears that Mayor O'Malley's remarks about the Bush budget, insofar as funding for cities is concerned, has been taken out of context by his detractors, political opponents who are often prone to take things out of context, abstract them, and make them appear to mean something entirely different from their meaning in context. The Mayor is not so foolish as to have tried to conflate the 9-11 disaster with the devastation visited upon American cities by draconian cuts to social programs. After all, the bin Laden-sponsored attacks of 9-11 were aimed at New York and Washington only, and were deemed to be reactive (as concluded in the 9-11 Commission report) and symbolic in intent, since bin Laden has no army or navy or air force to launch a real attack on America. The Bush budget, on the other hand, is purposeful, real, offensive, ideological, and, possibly, racial. It is also aimed at all cities. O'Malley was perfectly right to point this out. [more]