In April 2007, I reported on how Erica Sagrans, a Brown alum and former Phoenix contributor, isn't the only staffer in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office with a Rhode Island connection. The speaker's press secretary is Brendan Daly, the brother of Channel 12 newsman Sean Daly.

Yesterday, Politico reported on how Brendan Daly is among those featured in a new book on some of DC's players:

THE GANG'S ALL HERE: Today marks the publication of the political talker of the year, "Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Background Power," by John Harwood and Gerald F. Seib. Get hungry - a FULL CHAPTERS each on Ken Duberstein, David Rubenstein, Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Tom Cole, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Karl Rove, Hilary Rosen, Lea Berman, Eli Pariser and Kyle McSlarrow, Ed Rogers, Billy Tauzin, Elliot Abrams, Brendan Daly, Jim Jordan and Terry Nelson, Sam Brownback and Pete Wehner, Mara Vanderslice and Jim Webb, Bernadette Budde and Andy Stern, Charlie Rangel and Jim McCrery, and Robert Strauss and Ken Mehlman.

With photos of all of them, including Hilary Rosen whispering to the late Jack Valenti, Lea Berman in the White House, a besweatered Brendan Daly at his computer, Jim Jordan with laptop and Starbucks, Senator Brownback looking like a leaning cardboard cutout as he stands on a tractor, and a smiling Ken Mehlman standing next to a seated Robert Strauss with a big globe behind them.

Jonathan Martin's précis: "The intro on how the Dubai Ports World blow-up came about is great behind-scenes reporting. A cool tick-tock. Also cool reporting on Lea Berman grappling with the China visit. There were some protocol incidents — new details on all the craziness that went down that day and leading up to visit. At one point, she had to literally tell the Chinese translator to get up from chair so the American-preferred translator could sit. Good inside buzz on how Brendan Daly dealt with the Speaker's Syria trip, with juicy details about a private Pelosi heads-up to the President followed by Dana Perino dinging Pelosi publicly and Daly then sending her a what's-up e-mail. Great bookend chapter about Strauss and Mehlman, the old and new guard at the same firm."

Except J-Mart's bitter that Hampden-Sydney is misspelled. (Jordan's alma mater!)

Gordon Johndroe on page 169, on Speaker Pelosi's assertion that "the road to Damascus is a road to peace": "National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe, a veteran of both Bush presidential campaigns and of the First Lady's staff, noted acidly that the road to Damascus is littered with victims of terrorism."

(Aboard Air Force One: "Unfortunately, that road is lined with the victims of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the victims of terrorists.")

Brendan, here's the Amazon link.

Kudos + congrats to my friend Matt, an occasional Phoenix contributor, who graduates this week from Roger Williams Law School.

The RI Populist was today among the winners of the Metcalf Diversity in Media Award (named for former ProJo publisher Michael Metcalf), which are presented for public-interest reporting by Rhode Island for Community and Justice:

Matt Jerzyk and the Rhode Island's Future blog for "Papitto Whistleblowers Punished"

 

Demonstrating the power of the internet in advocacy, Matt used his blog to influence change at Roger Williams University. The Rhode Island's Future website consistently addresses human rights issues and advocacy in a medium for the new millennium. 

Ardent Democrat Matt has also been selected to go to the DNC in Denver:

PAWTUCKET - Rhode Island Democratic Party Chairman Bill Lynch congratulated RIFuture.org founder Matt Jerzyk [yesterday] on being named to the Democratic National Convention's "State Blogging Corps." One blogger was selected by the DNC from every state to accompany the local delegation to the August nominating convention and offer their unique perspective to online audiences that will be closely reading and watching from home.

 

"Matt's done a great job helping to bring new people and new ideas into our party. His site has become a must-read for people who follow politics in Rhode Island, and his sincere passion for social justice and equal rights is truly representative of what the Democratic Party has always stood for," Lynch said.

John McCain has gotten so little critical press coverage in recent months that it's easy to forget he's the Republican nominee. Now, as the media turns to the general election contest, my Boston Phoenix colleague Adam Reilly has suggestions for 10 topics worth covering. Here's a taste:

1) It’s the economy, Senator
This past January, the Huffington Post reported that, in a meeting with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, McCain said he “doesn’t really understand economics.” McCain denied the report. But as his then-rival Mitt Romney noted in a subsequent press release, McCain actually has a long history of such remarks. (One example, drawn from a December 2007 Boston Globe story: “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should. I’ve got [former Federal Reserve chair Alan] Greenspan’s book.”) How does McCain assess his economic knowledge now? And what concrete steps, beyond a wide array of tax cuts,  would he take to keep America’s economic woes from worsening?

2) His Islam problem
McCain is going to argue that Obama is dangerously inexperienced on foreign affairs. He’s already hammered Obama for his willingness to meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But there’s reason to question McCain’s foreign-policy aptitude as well, especially regarding things Islamic. In 2006, McCain said he’d deal with ongoing problems in Iraq by sitting down together Sunnis and Shiites and telling them to “stop the bullshit.” This year, he’s confused Sunnis and Shiites on multiple occasions. Understanding Islam and the Middle East is absolutely essential to America’s national security. Does McCain grasp them well enough to be president? And can he demonstrate this understanding while speaking off the cuff?

3) Money and politics as usual?
Vague hints of an extramarital affair notwithstanding, the aforementioned Times story contained a kernel of a valid question: does McCain’s reputation as a reformer dedicated to reducing the influence of money on politics — a reputation McCain assiduously cultivated after he was implicated in the Keating Five scandal — square with his own actions? Consider this passage from David Brock and Paul Waldman’s recent book, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media (Anchor):

For his 1998 Senate run, McCain took $562,000 in contributions from the communications industry. . . . Before his next reelection campaign, he received $900,000 more, lagging only five senators among telecom beneficiaries. Between 1993 and 2000, McCain collected $685,929 from media companies, the most of any sitting member of Congress. What do these companies have in common? They all have interests before the Senate Commerce Committee, which McCain chaired at the time.

So: does McCain’s reputation as a campaign-finance reformer pass muster or not?

4) Taken-on faith
Obama’s lengthy history with Reverend Wright was his biggest weakness in the primary, a role it will probably reprise in the general election. But McCain has pastor problems of his own. During his 2000 presidential run, McCain thrilled liberals by calling Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance.” This time around, however, he’s cozied up to assorted figures on the religious right — including the late Falwell (McCain spoke at the commencement ceremonies of Liberty University, which Falwell founded, in 2006), Rod Parsley (an Ohio minister who’s urged the eradication of Islam, and whom McCain called a “spiritual guide” this past February), and John Hagee (a televangelist who, among other things, has called the Catholic Church the “Great Whore”). On the one hand, McCain has said that he doesn’t share all his endorsers’ views. On the other, he hasn’t condemned any of these individuals in the emphatic way that Obama eventually repudiated Wright. What does McCain actually think about the most problematic views of Falwell, Parsley, Hagee, et al.?

UPDATE: The gov's office says the appearance is being rescheduled by the program, with no further immediate details.

From the gov's office:

Governor Donald L. Carcieri will be taping a brief interview tomorrow with Bill O’Reilly of Fox network’s O’Reilly Factor, for broadcast later that evening. The topic of the conversation will be the Governor’s Executive Order on illegal immigration, which was issued on March 27, 2008.  The interview is expected to air at 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Thursday night.

As I've written, the ProJo's SoxBlog is among the paper's best new-media efforts. There's a lot of content and a steady effort to try new things, such as a daily recorded interview with Sean McAdam, far and away the ProJo's best baseball writer. The downside? McAdam, speaking from some sort of phone while on the road, sounds like he's trapped in a metallic can. Isn't there a way to get better audio for this?

Meanwhile, as someone who has long had an unusually high level of interest in squirrels (due to how a relative had once dubbed a hyper co-worker "the Squirrel"), I appreciated this post from ProJo blog savant Sheila Lennon:

Squirrel for dinner?

Journal / Kris Craig

The ultimate ethical meal: a grey squirrel The Guardian (U.K.) coos,

It tastes sweet, like a cross between lamb and duck. And it's selling as fast as butchers can get it.

That's in England, where the North American Eastern grey squirrel is overrunning their beloved red squirrels. So it's almost patriotic to eat them to help cull the species, at about $6.82 per cleaned squirrel at the butcher shops.

I'm thinking depression-era protein, if things get bad here. Lord knows we have enough grey squirrels eating our tulip bulbs and all the pears from our tree every year.

Texas A&M offers instructions for harvesting acorns, squirrel, opossum and raccoon "(for traditional community coon suppers)", "dressing" and cooking them,:

Squirrel is one of the most tender of all wild game meats. The rosy pink to red flesh of young squirrel is tender and has a pleasing flavor. The flesh of older animals is darker red in color and may require marinating or long cooking for tenderness.

There are recipes for squirrel, although I wouldn't expect much meat from these scrawny city critters.

Here's a recipe for Braised acorn-fed grey squirrel with roasted loin and squirrel pie, garlic mash by Craig James, head chef, at Butlers Wharf Chop House, near Tower Bridge, London.

There's even a review of Butler's squirrel specials in the Evening Standard by restaurant blogger Charles Campion:

During May there is a “squirrel and rook” season. When I visited only the squirrel element had kicked in - and the menu listed “Grey squirrel and rabbit terrine with piccalilli” – the terrine had a good texture, the sweet close-textured squirrel meat ends up pretty much indistinguishable from the rabbit – this would be a great dish for nervous squirrel sensation seekers. On the main course list there is “braised Grey squirrel and Guinness stew with carrots and horseradish dumplings” – very rich and discernibly squirrel, the meat falling from the bones of those long back legs – the dumplings need work, they are a little solid (which need not be a bad quality in a dumpling but can be taken too far) and they also need a bit more of the promised horseradish bite.

UKTV Food offers a recipe for squirrel pancakes, pictured at right.

Other squirrel recipes.

There are reports of prion disease -- Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- in five people from Kentucky who all ate the brains of diseased squirrels. (Hard to know how the squirrels might have acquired it on their diet of nuts and berries, though, so the link may be tentative.) Don't eat the brains if you're being fastidious. (Of course, if you're being fastidious you wouldn't be anywhere near a dead squirrel.) Rabies is rare among squirrels.

How to: Squirrel hunts are great ways to enjoy fall days and teach new hunters field skills. - Wisconson Natural Resources magazine

[The brigade in action, just not last night]

Jagged contrasts in sharp proximity are part of what can make cities interesting and vibrant, and Providence -- relatively small though it may be -- was a case in point last night.

At Prov, WPRO morning talker John DePetro was holding court, celebrating a recent professional accolade as RI talker of the year. Those making the packed scene included Steve Laffey, Joe Trillo, Bob Watson, Nick Gorham, Lou Pulner, Donna Perry of the RI GOP (who is John's sister), Deputy Police Chief Paul Kennedy, John Ghiorse, Charlie Hall, Frank Carpano, radio moguls Joe Lembo and Paul Giammarco, and others.

Down the street at Nick-a-Nee's, it was time for Segal Fest '08, a slightly more free-wheeling event, what with the superlative What Cheer? Brigade playing in the outdoor patio/parking lot, and a cast of thousands, including Councilors Luis Aponte, Terry Hassett, Seth Yurdin; Representatives Moura, Watson, Gorham, Gallison and Sullivan (among others); unionists, enviros, hipsters, liberal activists (Sara Mersha, Ari Savitzsky); bloggers and newsies (Ariel Werner, Beth Comery, Peter Wells, Scott MacKay, yours truly), and many more.

A good time for all, times two.

A prominent RI liberal tipped me off to this piece by the conservative Washington Post columnist, which pokes at Hillary Clinton not just for not wanting to face the music, but for being a Yankee fan.

Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a U.S. Senate seat, she adopted New York state as home sweet home. She may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of "fairness," because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.

Unfortunately, baseball's rules -- pesky nuisances, rules -- say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.

After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code. ....

Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that every military defeat can be explained by two words: "too late." Too late in anticipating danger, too late in preparing for it, too late in taking action. Clinton's political defeat can be similarly explained -- too late in recognizing that the electorate does not acknowledge her entitlement to the presidency, too late in understanding that she had a serious challenger, too late in anticipating that she would not dispatch Barack Obama by Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), too late in planning for the special challenges of caucus states, too late in channeling her inner shot-and-a-beer hard hat.

Most of all, she was too late in understanding how much the Democratic Party's mania for "fairness," as mandated by liberals like her, has, by forbidding winner-take-all primaries, made it nearly impossible for her to overcome Obama's early lead in delegates. If Democrats, who genuflect at the altar of "diversity," allowed more of it in their delegate selection process, things might look very different. If even, say, Texas, California and Ohio were permitted to have winner-take-all primaries (as 48 states have winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes), Clinton would have been more than 400 delegates ahead of Obama before Tuesday and today would be at her ancestral home in New York planning to return some of its furniture to the White House next January.

[Note: I regret my earlier slapdash description of RI Monthly, which didn't do it justice, and which, as someone affiliated with the magazine points out, is similar to how some might draw a simplistic description of other publications, including the one for which I write.]

The ProJo reports today on the unusually sharp reaction to a Rhode Island Monthly story about teen drinking in Barrington, including an explicit threat to the author of the piece, Massachusetts-based contributor Gretchen Voss.

The article, with a cover headline “Fatal Attraction: How kids, cars and drinking are tearing Barrington apart,” has sparked hundreds of reactions on the Internet, many from a new Facebook group called Boycott Rhode Island Monthly and many more on the Web site of the magazine itself, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Providence Journal.

Editor Sarah Francis said she wrote Police Chief John LaCross last week after one writer on the Facebook site suggested that the author of the story, freelance writer Gretchen Voss, should be sexually mutilated and then forced to watch her family being slowly killed. The individual suggested how to keep a body from being discovered, adding in a second post: “Remember, if there is no body there is crime.”

Missing from Gene Emery's article is any irony about how a story rather typical of its genre -- in a magazine which mixes serious reporting and lifestyle features from which readers usually seek tips on a plastic surgeon or a trendy restaurant -- has inspired unusually tough tactics from the denizens of an affluent suburban enclave.

At least on the surface, the situation is vaguely reminsicent of how Adrian Nicole LeBlanc encountered a harsh case of blame-the-messenger when she wrote, for the now-defunct New England Monthly, about a wave of teen suicide cases in her native Leominster, Massachusetts. 

Matt has the details:

Attention political junkies!

There will be a screening of THE WAR ROOM, the 1992 Clinton campaign documentary on Wednesday, May 7th at 700pm at Local 121's speakeasy (downstairs).  Marti Rosenberg Yours truly will be moderating the post discussion with Scott MacKay, Ian Donnis, and Kate Coyne-McCoy. 

This event is free and open to the public.

David Brooks has a good op-ed read in today's NYT on the fundamental differences between Barack and Hillary:

Hillary Clinton went on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” incarnating her role as the first Democratic Rambo. The Clinton campaign seems to want to reduce the entire race to one element: the supposed masculinity gap. And so everything she does is all about assertion, combat and Alpha dog dominance.

A few questions in, Clinton rose from her chair and loomed over Stephanopoulos. The country hasn’t seen such a brazen display of attempted middle-aged physical intimidation since Al Gore took a walkabout on the debate stage with George Bush. It was like watching someone get elbowed in a dark alley by their homeroom teacher.

But her attempt to take over the show was nothing compared with her attempt to dominate the truth. For the first 30 minutes, she did not utter a single candid word, including, as Mary McCarthy would say, “and” and “the.”

She peddled her sham gas-tax holiday and repeated her attempt to blame Indiana’s job losses on outsourcing and Nafta. Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Paul Krugman, a Times columnist, has raised doubts about the plan, Clinton lumped Krugman in with the Bush administration and said she wasn’t going to listen to the people responsible for the last seven years.

This wasn’t just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn’t going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn’t going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader — helping one’s own.

Barack Obama gave off an entirely different vibe on “Meet the Press.” His campaign has been in the doldrums for the past few months. He’s never come up with an explanation about how he would actually transform politics, and his conventional substance is beginning to overshadow his unconventional style.

But, as Sunday’s contrast made clear, Obama still seems like a human being. He still seems to return each night to some zone of normalcy where personal reflection lives. He wasn’t fully candid when answering questions about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but there are some inner guardrails that prevent the spin from drifting too far from the truth. Thoughtful and conversational, he doesn’t seem to possess the trait that Clinton has: automatically assuming that critics are always wrong.

Obama still possesses his talent for homeostasis, the ability to return to emotional balance and calm, even amid hysteria. His astounding composure has come across as weakness in the midst of combat with Clinton, but it’s also at the core of his promise to change politics. He vows to calm hatred and heal division.

Tim Schick, administrator of the Providence Newspaper Guild, the main union at the ProJo, appears to have piloted a winning campaign in a national Guild election (h/t E&P, via Romenesko):

NEW YORK Challenger Bernie Lunzer will win The Newspaper Guild presidential election, according to voting data obtained by E&P that indicates he has a lead of more than 900 votes with only some 600 potential ballots left to be counted.

 

Sources within the guild revealed that out of 6,420 votes tabulated so far, Lunzer, the longtime secretary-treasurer, has 3,648, while incumbent Linda Foley has just 2,722.

 

"We are pleased with the results we have seen this far," said Tim Schick, campaign manager for Lunzer and administrator of the Providence (R.I) Newspaper Guild. "That is about as far as I want to go."

 

Schick declined to comment on the specific data, but several sources said that the votes tabulated so far gave Lunzer an insurmountable lead.

 

Although votes from the York Newspaper Guild in York, Pa., are still yet to be counted, along with some 600 potential votes from a handful of Canadian units, the vote totals from those locations would not give Foley, the 13-year incumbent, enough to win.

In addition to Jack Reed, the late Jack White was among the distinguished Rhode Islanders inducted on Saturday into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame. Those of us who were fortunate enough to know Jack (shown above with his wife, Beth) know how he was devoted first and foremost to his family, to first-class journalism, and to his love of baseball and hockey. During the induction ceremony at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, Beth White spoke eloquently of how she and Jack met at Boston University (not far from Fenway Park) and how his face lit up when he learned that she, too, was from Rhode Island.

The folks at Channel 12 were kind enough to invite me to the induction ceremony, and as I sat talking with some of Jack's former colleagues, including Glenn Laxton and Joan Moran, we were reminded of how much we miss him.

During her comments, Beth White introduced Jack and her four children -- including Tim White, who has admirably carried on his father's tradition in investigative reporting at WPRI. Those of us who knew Jack know how much pride he took in his family, and how he would roll out pictures of his grandchildren with the slightest bit of prodding.

He would be excited, it's safe to say, about the newest arrival, Dylan John White, who arrived yesterday morning. Kudos and congrats to his proud parents, Tim and Melissa.

Just a few days after I took the statewide daily to task for a relative paucity of updates on its politics blog, that particular ProJo site is showing signs of life, particularly with posts from Washington stafter John Mulligan and the estimable Scott MacKay.

See, guys, you can do it!

-- to Brown grad and former Prov Phoenix intern Jessica Grose, now with Gawker's Jezebel, who got some section-front love in the NYT Styles section yesterday.

-- to my Newsmakers colleague, Arlene Violet, whose forthcoming musical was channeled yesterday by Channing Gray in the ProJo.

Providence Daily Dose, although a relative newcomer to blogging, zoomed out of nowhere to win the hearts of Phoenix readers as best blog in our recent Best issue.

Powered by such bright lights as the absinthe-sipping, disc-spinning Eric Smith and David Segal, the coolest guy in the General Assembly (who's having another of his fun fundraisers next week), not to mention Scrabble-happy Beth Comery and the sometimes-salacious Jersey Girls, the Dose is pithy, colorful blog that is well worth your attention. Yeah, they were kind enough to link to my blog story, even though they got but a brief mention.

Here's what Eric had to say in a brief e-mail sound bite:

I'm not really sure how much actual impact our site has had on Providence or history in general, but people seem to appreciate the voice that we're putting out there. I believe we take an interesting slant on politics, local and otherwise and the culture that's out there in this city. We're funny, and there's not much funny and smart stuff out there, really, for folks to get into. Everything is either totally serious or absolutely ridiculous and there's not much in the middle except for us. I'm not sure why that is, people are smart in Providence and they get what we're doing. We're constantly getting complemented on how good our writers are, Ari and Ariel specifically, and I've gotten a few too! People like the Jersey Girls column a lot, and our hit rate has exceeded our original goal and now we need a new goal. I think people just like that we're here, everyday, all day long. Like the Weather Channel.

And here's some of what Segal has to say:

More forums for discussion are necessarily better. Blogs allow for circumvention of the corporate media's filters. I think that they're especially useful at the local -- in RI, without blogs, where would one be able to turn for information, apart from a pretty small number of newspapers and tv stations owned by out-of-state entities?

 

They facilitate a form of point/counter-point that, previously, was impossible --  the ability to link directly to citations, to quotes, to detailed economic analyses, allows for much more rigor.

 

Any open forum -- whether online or at the public square -- will include a lot of static.  And the anonymity of the blogosphere certainly yields a greater propensity for ad hominem attacks and name-calling and misinformation. But it's pretty easy to cut through all of this -- and is almost completely corrected simply by dismissing anything posted under pseudonyms. A regular reader of a particular site is pretty quickly able to learn who's trustworthy and who's not.

As I report in my story on the RI blogosphere, Matt Jerzyk, the leading light of the Rhode Island's Future blog, is looking to sell it. Matt, who is about to graduate from Roger Williams Law School (and as I note in my piece, is a friend and a Phoenix contributor), elaborated this way:

For me, I have given 3 years of my life to getting RI Future off the ground and I am ready to pass the torch sometime in the near future. In fact, I have been talking with interested parties about selling the blog. Ideally, I would like to sell it to someone who will maintain the character and the integrity of the blog. 

 

My goal is to be able to leave the blog and to have nothing change. To accomplish this, I have been trying to find new writers who can reduce my posting workload (shameless plug: contact me if you want to write!) . . . .

 

I am open to all possibilitites with regard to the future of Rhode Island's future. I have heard suggestions ranging from an outright sale to another media organization to the formation of a cooperative of current writers and friends in the progressive community to the idea of a young entrepreneur or current blogger who wants to pick up where I left off. I am currently in "listening" mode and trying to figure out a solution that will be best for RI Future and the progressive blogosphere as a whole.

[Above: Anchor Rising's Justin Katz, Marc Comtois, and Andrew Morse]

Thanks in good measure to the pioneering efforts of Rhode Island's Future and Anchor Rising, the Rhode Island blogosphere continues to grow in variety and sophistication. I look at this trend in this week's Phoenix:

There are, to name a few, locally based blogs for tech geeks and entrepreneurs, the legal community, same-sex marriage proponents, industrial designers, the young and irreverent, Democrats, and Republicans, and those concerned with intellectual property.

For communities sometimes overlooked by the Providence-centric media, the presence of sites such as Hard Deadlines, which focuses on Portsmouth, or RI’s Twelfth, which emphasizes that state Senate district, enrich the information landscape. ....

Picking up on a recent New York Times' story about the unexpected death, in one week, of two middle-aged bloggers, Lee Drutman, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley, used an April 15 op-ed in the ProJo to contend that the constant appetite of the blogosphere is bad for the body politic. ....

To be sure, there are shortcomings to be found on local blogs, particularly a periodic excess of personal attacks and a mix of bitchy and moronic comments, the short observations made by readers, that can be variously tasty or enervating.

Ultimately, though, Rhode Island bloggers rise or fall on their ability to present compelling information and trenchant points of view.

Marc Comtois, a regular contributor to Anchor Rising, sums this up well: “For me, writing a blog post helps me to strengthen my own thought process with regards to what I believe. If I’m going to pre-sent an argument for or against something, I had better be clear why I’m taking the stance I am."

To the surprise of no one, the release this week of Grand Theft Auto IV has inspired much media hand-wringing.

Yesterday, AG Patrick Lynch put out the obligatory "consumer advisory" about the pending sale of GTA IV:

“As video games become more realistic and in many cases, more violent, parents must become more vigilant before buying them or letting their children use them,” said Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch. “Also, retailers and salespeople have a responsibility to better inform parents how violent these games actually are. Grand Theft Auto IV is obviously rated M for a reason, and parents need to keep a game like this away from their kids.”

Lynch is advising adults purchasing video games to check the rating symbols on the front of virtually every game package sold at retail. Each package bears one of the following age recommendations, which have been developed by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB): EC (Early Childhood 3+), E (Everyone 6+), E10+ (Everyone 10 and up), T (Teen 13+), and M (Mature 17+). The rating also is printed on the back of each package, along with content descriptors providing information about content that may have triggered the rating or that may be of interest or concern to parents.

Not unreasonable, eh? Yet this became the basis for a prominent story on Channel 10's 11 pm newscast last night, faintly suggesting that this video game is a serious menace to all that is well and good, the denials of the one young person interviewed notwithstanding.

Such coverage hardly hurts Lynch's gubernatorial aspirations, since it caters to the fears of the state's suburban demographic. Yet Lynch, in his mild approach, compares favorably with the most zealous self-styled video watchdogs, as Mitch Krpata wrote in last week's Phoenix:

Florida attorney Jack Thompson, one of the most strident anti-games voices around, described the newest GTA installment as “a murder simulator for violence against women, cops, and innocent bystanders” and promised to bring legal action against the game’s publisher, Rockstar Games, and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, if any copies of the game were sold to minors.

Similarly, in a move reminsicent of how she tried to stoke fears about school violence here in RI, there's this:

In 2005, Democratic New York Senator Hillary Clinton, along with co-sponsors Independent Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman, Democratic Indiana senator Evan Bayh, and Democratic South Dakota senator Tim Johnson, introduced a bill to the United States Senate that would have made the sale of M-rated (Mature) games to minors a federal offense. Although the proposed Family Entertainment Protection Act died in committee, it’s telling that the legislation contained no similar provision for R-rated movies. There seemed to be no doubt in the senators’ minds that games didn’t fall under the aegis of the First Amendment — that it wasn’t up to retailers to decide what they wanted to sell.

Krpata knows about what he speaks in his thoughtful essay on video games, which treats the subject with the complexity that it deserves, as with this:

The government shouldn’t impose limits on what software parents can buy for their kids. But just because they’re wrong doesn’t mean that anything we do in response is right.

Violence is overblown in some games. Non-whites are underrepresented among video-game heroes. Ironically, Grand Theft Auto is on surer footing than most games in both these regards. It’s true that GTA empowers players to commit violent crimes, but doing so attracts the attention of the police, which in turn makes the game world more perilous for the player. It’s an elegant risk-versus-reward mechanic that makes it much more than a brainless crime simulator. And GTA protagonists since the Vice City installment have been, serially, an Italian-American, an African-American, and now an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern European country. Far from trying to gloss over the diversity issue, Rockstar has embraced it. More developers should be taking this approach.

It's the last day on the job at the ProJo for executive editor Joel Rawson, who has cast a big shadow there for most of the years going back to the early '70s.

G. Wayne Miller's previous report is here, and mine here.

Rawson was feted with a farewell/final teaching moment last week at Local 121.

Good night and good luck, Joel.

The New Republic is griping about a similar Obama-Clinton cover image over at Time:

     

We don't want to say that this week's cover of Time is a rip-off of our HillarAck cover that came out last month, but--oh, whatever--they totally ripped us off! All the way on down to the cover line, too: "There Can Only Be One" vs. "We Have To Choose One." Perhaps we should retaliate by putting a mirror on one of our future covers? On second thought ... no, that's a terrible idea.

UPDATE: Time's cover is derivative (not just of us).

In fact, this kind of thing has been going on for a long time. Face it, guys, we're just not that original. Here's another example, and this kind of thing probably goes back at least to the heyday of new journalism in the '60s.

It's good to see how WRNI (1290 AM), with the benefit of increased staffing, is offering a stronger local news report. GM Joe O'Connor recently sent out an e-mail, touting the public radio station's efforts:

The role of immigrants in Rhode Island history is well established.  All this week, WRNI has been exploring the challenges faced by current immigrants, state agencies and

lawmakers.                                                        

 

Our five-part series explores a variety of topics which shed light on the complexities of the immigration issue.  In our final segment, airing tomorrow during Morning Edition at 6:40am and 8:40am, WRNI's Elizabeth Smick goes in-depth into the economic impact of illegal immigration in the state of Rhode Island.  Specifically, her story will examine the economic impact of immigration on the season summer workforce in Newport. 

 

The rest of the stories from our immigration series are available online at wrni.org.  You can also click on the following story titles to access the audio content on our website.

 

Illegal Immigration

by: Flo Jonic

The issue of illegal immigration has recently moved into the forefront. But, even before governor Carcieri issued his executive order designed to crack down on illegal residents, a flood of bills with the same intent had been filed on smith hill. After years of passive acceptance of a broken federal immigration system, some Rhode Islanders are saying 'enough is enough'. Advocates, however, say they're being made scapegoats for years of overspending and corruption. WRNI's Flo Jonic begins our series with an overview.

 

RIte Care Cuts

By: Megan Hall
Two years before the Governor's executive order to crack down on illegal immigration, Rhode Island's general assembly voted to stop giving health care to undocumented and even some legal immigrants. That was through changes to RIte care - the state sponsored program that provides health coverage to low income children and families. Now the state is considering cutting over two thousand immigrant children who were spared from those cuts.

 

Immigrants and Schools

By: Flo Jonic

Education week magazine recently ranked the state's schools among the most expensive and lowest performing in the country. Educators say the disconnect is due in part to the large number of non-English speaking students. There's no question that many English language learners are performing below grade level and dropping out of high school. But, WRNI's Flo Jonic reports that improving academic achievement is complex and costly.

 

Caring for Refugees

By: Megan Hall

As Rhode Island engages in a debate about how to care for immigrants who came here illegally, there's little talk about those newcomers who came here legally, but would go back home if they could. Over the past five years, Rhode Island has welcomed more than a thousand refugees from war torn countries around the world. Many come from parts of Africa like Liberia and Burundi where medical care is nothing like the American health system. A new program through the international institute and the department of health aims to make that transition a little easier.

Providence Schools: In the Shadow of Renaissance    WRNI takes an in-depth look at education issues by talking with parents, students, teachers and civic leaders about the state of our schools.    This five-part series, by WRNI's Education Reporter Rhonda Miller, will air Monday, May 5th during Morning Edition.

From the BDH:

Brown Student and Community Radio has lost, for now, in its long bid to find a new home on the airwaves.

In one of the longest cases in the history of the Federal Communications Commission, the agency has awarded the low-power FM frequency 96.5 to a coalition of two churches and a Bible college.

Since its 1997 creation, BSR has been broadcasting on 88.1 FM, renting time from a frequency owned by the Wheeler School, the nursery-to-12th-grade school on Hope Street. But the station has been seeking a different broadcast outlet "almost since it began broadcasting," according to its Web site.

In 2000, BSR applied for 96.5 FM, Providence's only low-power FM frequency, in hopes of having its own home. Twelve other groups vied for the spot. The station's hope was that broadcasting from Providence - as opposed to Seekonk, Mass., where the antenna is currently located - would strengthen BSR's ties to the city.

BSR's community relationship has been very important to the organization, General Manager Jenny Weissbourd '08 said.

"Remaining local to Providence is really important to us," said Station Manager Mike Dupuis '08.

The quote of the day comes from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who was targeted with two mostly errant green-colored pies during his address yesterday at Brown University (h/t RI's Future):

Mr. Friedman quipped, "Ten years in Beruit and Jerusalem, who thought I'd meet my end in Providence, Rhode Island."

According to Natalie Garcia's report in the ProJo:

Not everyone agrees with Friedman’s vision that innovation is the path to climate and energy salvation. Just seconds into his speech, he was interrupted by two environmental activists, who stormed the stage shortly after Friedman stepped up to the microphone, tossing two paper plates loaded with shamrock-colored whipped cream at him.

Friedman ducked, and was left with only minor streams of the sugary green goo on his black pants and turtleneck.

He stood in bewilderment and mild disgust as the young man and woman bolted from the stage and out the side door, throwing a handful of fliers into the air to relay the message they apparently were not going to deliver personally.

“Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face…,” the flier said, “because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet, for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand…”

After five minutes, Friedman returned to the stage undeterred, with only faint traces of the green cream on his clothing.

Halperin has a concise media roundup of the reax to yesterday's Pennsylvania primary win for Hillary:

NY Times: Primary highlighted “concerns about Mr. Obama’s strengths as a general election candidate. Exit polls again highlighted the racial, economic, sex and values divisions within the party.”

Washington Post: “Her margin was decisive, but even some of her most loyal supporters privately expressed doubts last night that she can prevail in the long battle against Obama.”

LA Times: “Clinton’s victory Tuesday left in play the same questions that remained seven weeks ago after her 10-point victory in Ohio.”

Time.com: The number to watch: 43 - the percentage of Clinton voters who say they’ll stay home or vote for McCain is Obama is the nominee.

Politico: For all the campaigning and money spent, Clinton won “with the same base of white women, working-class voters and white men that revived her candidacy in Ohio.”

Obama memo also calls race “virtually unchanged.” Read it here.

David Scott (h/t Boston Sports Media) has some news about the Globe's Gordon Edes, whose coverage I've always enjoyed (yet whose "Paw-tucket" pronounciation seems off for a native Bay Stater) and a successor (the previously mentioned Heidi Watney) for Tina Cervasio at NESN:

Multiple sources have confirmed to Scott’s Shots that Boston Globe writer, Gordon Edes, has agreed “in principle” to a job with Yahoo! Sports as a national baseball writer. Edes, according to sources, is committed to going to Yahoo!, but was still hoping to be part of the buyout offer at the Globe that recently lured Jackie MacMullan off the masthead.

The specifics of how Edes will leave - either through the buyout or simply by switching teams - are still being ironed out, according to sources.

Multiple Monday night phone and email messages from Shots to Edes were not returned as of posting time (near 1 a.m. Tuesday). (The differentiation could be important because if Edes leaves through the buyout, there may be legal limitations on whether a new body could be inserted into his place.)

In other baseball news:

-- the ProJo's Jim Donaldson, who, in the past, has rapped the Sox at every occasion, seems newly enraptured.

Steve Laffey makes for entertaining TV, so would he make for an entertaining (and effective) governor? These questions will come front and center as we move closer to 2010.

During an appearance yesterday on 10 News Conference, Laffey repeated many of the talking points that he shared during an interview for my recent story on Lincoln Chafee:

Laffey says Rhode Island could become “a wining place” by bringing state spending on social programs and other needs into line with the average of the other 49 states, and he supports remaking the state pension system as a 401(k) program, creating a more competitive tax structure, and increasing school choice, among other things.

D