July 23, 2008
In this week's Phoenix, Mike Miliard ponders the first post-Hunter S. Thompson presidential election:
In Gonzo, Thompson’s first wife, Sandy, rues his suicide. It was not a “courageous act,” as some called it, she says. It was cowardly. And it robbed America of an inimitable voice at a crucial moment. “This is a time when a together Hunter Thompson could make a difference in this country.”
Could he? Thompson was deeply invested in the idea of the American dream. (Even if he never did quite figure out what it was.) He was an idealist who learned the hard way how to be a cynic. And he could write, right until the end. But his best work, arguably, was behind him. His celebrity and outré personality had long since prevented him from reporting the way he did in works such as his stone classic Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Most of his latter writing issued forth from the kitchen of his Colorado compound — “Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop” as the subtitle of The Mutineer, the third and final collection of his letters (due out next year) puts it.
What would the “Sage of Woody Creek” make of this year’s election? Would his words have resonance in this blog-besotted age? What, ultimately, is Thompson’s legacy? Who, if anyone, could take up his mantle? And what could a hypothetical young and hungry Hunter S. Thompson achieve in this corporatized, consolidated-media climate, anyway? Contemplating these questions, all McKeen can say is, “It’s very difficult to get through an election year without him.”
July 23, 2008
Via Halperin:
GettyAn organized effort is underway to get some big-name Republicans to come out for the Land of Lincolner.
Maybe some of them will even speak at the Democratic convention in Denver.
Many are long-time friends of John McCain; click here to find out why they might cross the aisle to vote for Obama.
Developing...
July 23, 2008
How are those $2500 seats in the new place going to work out for you when you can't bring in your own sun sauce?
The Village Voice reports:
The [New York] Post today has a story about the ban on sunscreen at Yankee Stadium. The reasoning? That good ol' T word: "terrorism."
The brilliant reasoning here is the same one behind the liquid ban on flights, but here's the kicker: security allows you to put on sunblock before throwing it away. So, if you apply the lotion on your skin, essentially confirming it's not liquid explosive, you still have to throw it away. Yankee Stadium sells a 1-oz. bottle of SPF 15 for $5.
The best part of the story is this exchange between a fan and security:
Seeing the giant bag full of confiscated sunscreen Saturday, one steaming Yankee fan asked whether he could take one of the tubes and apply it before heading into the park.
"Absolutely not," the guard told him. "What if you get a rash? You might sue the Yankees."
July 23, 2008
Before the McCain campaign gets too self-satisfied about what it calls the media's infatuation with Obama -- done up in a handy video and set to the lyrics of "I Can't Take my Eyes Off You" -- let's remember a few things:
1. The media meme changed in the Democratic primary, with Obama getting less media favor and more scrutiny, as Hillary sharpened her chops before ultimately dropping out.
2. If the media is so enamored of Obama, why have topics such as his controversial former pastor gotten so much more attention than, for example, this or this, which were arguably of much greater importance?
2. The media rolled over for George W. Bush until Hurricane Katrina made plain the shortcomings of his presidency.
3. The media rolled over for Ronald Reagan in a much more sustained way than it ever has for Obama.
4. The "liberal media" myth is just that.
July 23, 2008
The blogosphere and politics are merging in Cranston, with Kiersten signing on with Cynthia Fogarty's Democratic mayoral campaign.
The Fogarty for Mayor campaign is pleased to announce that it has hired Kiersten Marek as its campaign coordinator. Kiersten is a Cranston resident and clinical social worker who owns and runs the blog Kmareka.com, which follows Cranston community issues, particularly issues related to education, finance, and zoning.
"In taking this position as coordinator for Cindy Fogarty's campaign, I hope to bring more Cranston residents into the process of electing the best possible Mayor for our city. I firmly believe Cindy's record as a city councilmember, business woman, litigator and citizen advocate are the strongest indicators of how she will lead Cranston in the right direction."
Cindy Fogarty adds, "I have known Kiersten since my first days on the City Council. She was a volunteer member of the Cranston Financial Review Board and has been active on many school and community issues. Kiersten's willingness to serve her city during a challenging financial period is indicative of her community commitment. She has continued to be involved on the major issues facing not only Cranstonians, but all Rhode Islanders."
July 22, 2008
I'm late in getting to this news about Progreso Latino, but I haven't seen it reported elsewhere -- and it seems like a novel response to concerns about global warming and growing utility costs.
Central Falls, R.I. - Due to rising fuel costs and an increase in energy prices Progreso Latino announced it will switch to a four-day work week for the summer beginning Monday, June 23. Progreso’s 25 employees will not work on Fridays.
“Progreso Latino is stepping up and taking measures that will help to improve the quality of life in Central Falls,” said Ramon Martinez Progreso Latino’s CEO. “This measure will not only benefit the organization to reduce its costs, but will also address rising concerns of global warning caused by gas emissions.”
Ramon Martinez also said that more than more 80 percent of U.S. workers commute alone in their cars. If all companies reduced the workweek to four days then the gas consumption would be reduced by 20 percent.
“This is just a small step towards helping the environment, but Progreso Latino is convinced that taking this measure will set up a trend in non-profit organizations throughout the United States,” said Ramon Martinez.
Progreso Latino Inc. is a resilient organization that empowers the Latino community providing knowledge, skills, training, continuum of services and opportunities for well-being, self sufficiency, human development, prosperity and a flourishing community. Progreso Latino also wants to take a step further and think about the environment in our communities.
July 22, 2008
Here's the word from Chris, major domo of the local faction of Drinking Liberally:
DL Providence -- A Nation of Wine-rs
Hey folks,
John McCain's cronies already believe we're "a nation of whiners," so why not come raise a glass of pinot or merlot and join in some political ferment!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NVjq2py7BA
See you TOMORROW NIGHT, Wednesday, July 23 at 8pm at The Wild Colonial, 250 S. Water St., Providence.
All the best,
The DL Providence Team
July 22, 2008
In the latest installment of the long-running debate over the future of the Providence Public Library, the Library Reform Group has an action planned later this week:
PRESS CONFERENCE:
PPL PROPOSED AGREEMENT with CITY is FLAWED!
THE MAYOR AND PPL NEED TO
GO BACK AND FIX IT!
On Thursday, July 24, at 5:00 p.m., the Library Reform Group will hold a press conference outside the former Washington Park Branch Library building at 1316 Broad Street to bring to public attention the provisions of the Agreement for Library Services approved last week by the PPL Board of Trustees THAT NEED TO BE CHANGED before the Providence City Council ratifies this multi-year library services contract between PP Library and the City.
1 The PPL-City proposed Agreement potentially commits taxpayers to REDUCED SERVICES and BRANCH CLOSURES following the 2008-2009 program year. Yet the Agreement obligates the City to provide PPL with the SAME AMOUNT OF PUBLIC MONEY regardless of reduction in services or branch locations!
DOES THIS MAKE SENSE? NO! GO BACK AND FIX IT!
2 Also, demand that the Washington Park Branch Library is immediately reopened at its original location, (recently renovated), with full library services! The property sits un-used, ready for program use and PPL has made no effort to return its library programs to the building this year.
THE CURRENT PROPOSAL FOR LIBRARY SERVICES IS DANGEROUSLY FLAWED AND DOES NOT SERVE THE BEST INTERESTS OF LIBRARY PATRONS, STAFF OR PROVIDENCE TAXPAYERS AFTER 2009!!
Press conference organizers include:
Mount Pleasant Friends of the Library, Smith Hill Friends, the Rochambeau Friends of the Library and the Library Reform Group.
July 21, 2008
Jack Reed's participation in Barack Obama's trip to Afghanistan and Iraq has fueled resumed speculation about whether Rhode Island's senior senator will take a post in a new Democratic administration.
The senator has steadily disavowed any interest in such a place.
Yet Dan Yorke is using the prominent photo of Reed and Obama, published on the front of today's ProJo, as a peg for discussing succession.
In the last legislative session, Senator Paul Jabour and Representative David Segal led an effort to take the succession choice away from the governor:
Legislation sponsored by Jabour and state Representative David Segal (D-Providence) would require that a special election be held to fill US Senate vacancies, unless such a situation happened after July 1 of an election year. The vacancy in that instance would be filled through the normal election cycle.
In a statement, Segal says, “In the last 100 years, 151 US senators have take office without being elected. Incumbency affords great electoral advantages, and it is exceedingly likely that once appointed to office, a senator would readily achieve reelection. The only legitimate vehicle for ascension to a body as powerful as the Senate is popular support — only the passage of this legislation would ensure that the electorate determines its representative.”
Adds Jabour, “Here in Rhode Island, we have legitimate cause for concern about this issue, since Senator Jack Reed is a strong candidate for a Cabinet appointment. If that were to occur, allowing voters to choose a replacement would be a much more democratic avenue than having one chosen solely by the governor. Regardless of whether the governor is a Democrat or a Republican, he or she shouldn’t have the only vote in choosing who will represent our state in the US Senate.”
You think we would have heard if anything had happened with this.
July 21, 2008
Was it payback for that controversial cover?
Rachel Sklar thinks so:
Forty journalists, including such leading correspondents as Dan Balz of The Washington Post, will be aboard his plane for next week's swing through Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and England.
The campaign received 200 requests for press seats on the plane.
Among those for whom there was no room was Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent of The New Yorker. The campaign, which was furious about the magazine's satirical cover this week, cited space constraints in turning him away.
Wow. So it's gonna be like that, is it? Retribution for unfavorable coverage is a chilling thing to contemplate — literally, as in, it carries with it the very real risk of chilling bold, outspoken coverage. Whatever one thinks of the New Yorker cover — that it was clear satire that clearly lampooned ridiculous rumors, that it went way overboard, that it was a comedic misfire — a robust press can't operate under threat of reprisal for unwelcome items.
July 21, 2008
There's a fairly widespread view across partisan lines these days that, regardless of what happens in November, the conservative movement is running on fumes.
On a related note, Robert David Sullivan looks in today's Boston Globe at the staying power of the Reagan realignment, and he points to a few bellwethers that will help determine our next president.
IN 2000, Republican strategist Karl Rove often speculated that a victory by George W. Bush could bring a long-term realignment of American politics, similar to the way William McKinley's win in 1896 began 36 years of GOP dominance in Washington. Rove was being immodest in a lot of ways, but the most startling aspect of his boast was that a Republican realignment already took place in 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. Bush's win 20 years later was pretty much a piggyback victory.
Since Reagan was nominated for president, no Democrat has won a majority of the national vote, though Ross Perot helped Bill Clinton win pluralities twice. During this period, the Democrats have consistently fallen short of a majority in 26 states and in 1,750 counties (out of 3,108). Many of the latter, including the counties of San Antonio, Texas; Tampa, Fla.; Spartanburg, S.C.; and Terre Haute, Ind., gave majorities to both John F. Kennedy and Carter but have snubbed Democrats ever since. I'd say the Reagan realignment was holding up pretty well before Rove came along.
What makes a "Reagan County"? One definition is a county where the Republican vote jumped at least 3 points in 1980 and where that gain was still present in the Bush vs. Kerry race. This does not include places like Las Vegas's Clark County, suburban Atlanta's Clayton County, and Fort Lauderdale's Broward County, where Reagan made dramatic gains that have since been erased. For the most part, these "ex-Reagan counties" are urban areas that have trended Democratic as they've become more crowded, as noted in a previous column. ...
Karl Rove notwithstanding, 1980 will remain the template for presidential politics as long as Reagan's victory continues to echo in counties that include almost half of the American population. Butler [Ohio], York [Pennsylvania], and Chesapeake [Virginia] counties will be three prime indicators of whether Obama can succeed in bringing the Reagan Era to a close.
July 20, 2008
Dan Barbarisi today describes the pro and con on a proposed reformulation of the Providence City Council, a topic I wrote about here, as well as how the matter could be decided this week:
WHEN THE 12-3 GROUP met in [Steve] Durkee’s office on Wednesday, possibly for the last time, there was a sense of urgency in the room. A City Council public hearing on the plan is scheduled for tomorrow night, with the hope of getting the proposal on the November ballot. The council’s ordinance committee will hold the hearing at 6 p.m. tomorrow at City Hall. Then the ordinance committee will decide Thursday whether to send the proposal to the full council.
If the committee doesn’t pass it to the council, the change won’t happen this year. The deadline for submitting ballot measures to the state is Aug. 6.
And with several longtime council members expected to retire in 2010, the feeling around the table was that it’s now or never. It is unlikely the council would vote to redistrict the city and force existing council members to face one another to hold onto their seats, unless several council members planned to leave already.
Separately, the ProJo editorial board endorses the rejiggered 12-3 concept, although its assertion that "hundreds of local residents" seems subject to dispute.
July 19, 2008
Given Governor Carcieri's steady emphasis on illegal immigrants, it's interesting, isn't it, that it took a chance event to reveal the extent to which undocumented workers were helping to clean state offices?
Tucked into Kathy Gregg's coverage today is the question of whether politics was also at work:
DOCUMENTS PROVIDED by the judiciary list Anthony DeSimone Jr. as the contact for TriState Enterprises at 1270 Mineral Spring Ave., North Providence, and Vincent D’Elia as the contact for Falcon Maintenance at 160 Winsor Ave., Johnston.
DeSimone’s father practiced law with the late Joseph Bevilacqua, a former chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. His brother is state Rep. John DeSimone, the Providence Democrat who tried to unseat House Speaker William J. Murphy in 2004-05 with the backing of House Republicans.
While denying that Carcieri instructed the House Republicans how to vote, the governor’s then-spokesman Jeff Neal acknowledged the governor urged them to “support whichever candidate is willing to work” with him. On that basis, Neal said: “Governor Carcieri supports the House Republican decision to endorse Representative DeSimone. From all accounts, Representative DeSimone is willing to work with House Republicans on Governor Carcieri’s reform agenda.”
Asked last night if the Republicans’ one-time political allegiance with DeSimone had any bearing on TriState’s successes in the state contract arena, there was no immediate response from the governor’s office.
As of yet, however, there has been no detailed explanation — or documents provided — that explain how TriState and Falcon won contract after contract, when they were first hired by the state to provide cleaning crews, who else bid, and why contracts were yanked away from Falcon and given to TriState in recent years, even when it was not the lowest-price bidder.
In the year that ended June 30, the court system paid TriState a total of $493,325 and Falcon $261,643. The state paid TriState an additional $732,891 and Falcon $579,456 under the non-court cleaning contracts, according to DOA director Williams.
July 18, 2008
While talking this week with Christine Lopes, executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island, I asked her -- just for fun -- whether she had any bright ideas to stop the bleeding that's rampant in the newspaper industry.
This is a matter of no small import for Rhode Islanders, and even the ProJo-haters among the commenters on RI's Future and Anchor Rising. While blogs can take up some of the slack from newspapers and do some fine work of their own, they generally can't replace the serious investigative reporting done by newspapers. Here in the Ocean State, the ProJo has long led the way in rooting out official wrongdoing and fighting for the public's right to know.
Which is why anyone concerned about civic culture should read this Eric Alterman piece in the Nation. An excerpt:
Corporate responses have also included: asking an already dispirited staff to take a 10 percent pay cut (the Boston Globe); raising the newsstand price by 33 to 50 percent (Gannett, the Wall Street Journal); drastically reducing the newspaper's news/advertising ratio (all Tribune papers); turning the paper's Sunday magazine over to the business staff (the Los Angeles Times); reducing the physical size of the newspaper and cutting down on the news hole (everyone); buying out experienced, knowledgeable staff members and replacing them with underpaid novices (everyone); and closing foreign and national bureaus (almost everyone).
Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.
The dearth of decent ideas designed to save newspapers -- or reinvent them for the digital age in ways that preserve their crucial democratic functions -- is curious and depressing. It's curious because some of the smartest, most ambitious and most civic-minded people in America are deeply engaged with the problem. It is depressing because the only ones with the self-confidence to undertake radical measures appear to be completely off their respective rockers.
Take the example of the Tribune Company's new owner, Sam Zell. Leaving aside his penchant for potty-mouth rejoinders for those who question his judgment, Zell has done nothing to slow the slide in the company's fortunes and much to accelerate it. Scrambling like mad for cash to service the company's debt, Zell sold off the profitable Newsday and borrowed $300 million against future earnings, a clear sign of panic. To advise him on long-term strategy, he has appointed as "chief innovation officer" Lee Abrams, a man who was apparently surprised to learn that reports datelined "Baghdad" are actually produced by reporters in Baghdad. His suggestion: "photos of the reporter with Iraqi kids" to advertise this fact.
Writing on his blog, Abrams mused that newspapers were "TOO NPR," (caps in original), which he found "a bit elitist." He would rather have newspapers "study the feel of a well honed All News Radio station," which he defines as "being INTELLIGENT... not intellectual."
The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry, the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper -- the primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating instrument of American democracy -- is going to have to come from somewhere else. Sure, the blogosphere makes some invaluable contributions and a few foundations are rising to the challenge of funding investigative journalism. Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian recently suggested to me that universities might attach a small fee to their students' tuition -- like an activities fee -- to pay for the newspaper subscription of their choice. This would improve the newspapers' bottom line, give their advertisers access to a coveted demographic and, if successful, would inculcate in the students the habit of newspaper reading as they approach maturity as voting citizens. It's a great idea, and unlike most of what one hears at these conferences, it is on scale with the problem. Unfortunately, young people do not appear to want to pick up a newspaper, even for free. They often leave them lying around, even at journalism schools, where they are distributed gratis.
In response to my question, Lopes didn't have much of an answer -- not that she should (it's not her job). But it remains a concern for all of us. The ProJo is getting ready to roll out a much ballyhooed and perhaps dubious "women's intiative." If it can help RI's big daily to make money, maybe that's not a bad thing. The bottom line, though, is that the erosion of newspapers hurts us all.
July 18, 2008
Some of us remember how George H.W. Bush, back in 1988, characterized Michael Dukakis as a card-carrying member of the ACLU. It was a thinly veiled attempt to associate the Democratic presidential candidate with liberalism and everything else wrong with America.
We knew it wouldn't take long for similar gems to find their way into this year's presidential campaign, and John McCain doesn't disappoint, as described by the Kansas City Star (h/t Halperin):
“I think we should change (Obama’s slogan) to ‘no, we can’t,’ ” McCain told the crowd.
He also said Obama had the “most extreme” record in the Senate.
Asked later if he thought Obama was an extremist, McCain said: “His voting record … is more to the left than the announced socialist in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.”
Does McCain think Obama is a socialist? “I don’t know. All I know is his voting record, and that’s what people usually judge their elected representatives by.”
Obama’s campaign, in a statement: “John McCain squandered an opportunity to talk with Missourians about solutions to our economic problems and chose instead to launch the same old tired political attacks that the American people are sick of.”
Strap on your seatbelts. We can expect a lot more of this kind of back and forth.