BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Friday, November 15, 2002
The creeping Poynterization of
Romenesko's MediaNews.org. During the past few years, Jim
Romenesko's MediaNews.org has established itself as the
virtual water cooler for media news and gossip. Romenesko's terse but
cheeky style even survived his transition from entrepreneur to
employee of the Poynter Institute a couple of years ago.
This week, though, Poynter has
unveiled a major redesign of MediaNews. It's attractive, and includes
some long-needed features, especially links to individual items. But
there's also a greatly increased Poynter presence on the page. Gone
are the weird little tidbits on the left-hand side of the screen;
they've been replaced with links to other Poynter pages. On the
right-hand side, a "New on Poynter" feature takes up so much space
that you have to scroll down before encountering Romenesko's
invaluable links.
This may be fine. It may, overall, be
an improvement. But the creeping Poynterization of MediaNews is
something that bears watching.
posted at 10:17 AM |
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Censorship by other means.
White House budget director Mitch Daniels wants to save taxpayers
$70 million a year by transferring authority over the publication of
public documents from the Government Printing Office to individual
Cabinet agencies. At least that's what he says. But according
to this editorial
in the Los Angeles Times,
the real effect would be to make it far easier for the executive
branch to edit out anything it finds embarrassing or inconvenient.
(Thanks to PB for the link.) Here's how it would work, according to
the Times:
Currently, a federal agency
such as the Pentagon can't delete an embarrassing passage from a
historical document without first going through the hassle of
asking each reading room to obscure the passage with a black
marker.
If Daniels gets his way, all an
agency will have to do is call up the document in Microsoft Word
and quietly hit Control X to delete the passage for
eternity.
It amounts to the perfect censorship
scheme: take a system that has worked since the era of Thomas
Jefferson and trash it in the name of budget-cutting and efficiency.
And do it in such a low-profile manner that few people other than the
most inside of insiders have any idea of what's going on.
posted at 9:25 AM |
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Brian Golden, no-tent
Democrat. GM writes that I missed the best part in
my
11/12/02 item on
Allston-Brighton state rep Brian Golden's beef with Democratic State
Committee chairman Phil Johnston:
When I was in West Palm
Beach, Florida in November 2000, helping Al Gore on the recount, I
was shocked to see Brian Golden acting as an observer in the
recount for George Bush. It's one thing to publicly endorse a
candidate of the opposing party, but it was entirely different to
join the die-hard Republican Brooks-Brothers rioters in helping
George Bush steal the election. I agree that the Democratic Party
should have a big tent, but I don't think that tent should include
partisan Republicans. One other thing -- Dave Friedman, Golden's
primary opponent -- was in West Palm Beach helping Al Gore while
Brian Golden was on the Republican side helping George
Bush.
Here's a Town
Online article from last June
-- republished on Golden opponent Friedman's website -- verifying
GM's recollection.
posted at 9:25 AM |
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Don't ask, don't tell, don't
translate that terrorist threat. You can't make up stupidity like
this. The AP
reports today that the Army
has discharged nine linguists, including six trained in Arabic,
because they are gay. "The soldiers' dismissals come at a time when
the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and
interpreters for the war on terrorism," the report notes. Last week's
New Republic goes into this
absurdity in some detail. And
the whole issue of the consequences engendered by the military's
ridiculous don't-ask/don't-tell policy is followed by the
Servicemembers
Legal Defense Network.
posted at 9:25 AM |
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Thursday, November 14, 2002
Donut delirium and animal rights.
I'll be on the road today, personally investigating
Congressman
Ed Markey's claim that
Boston's winning the 2004 Democratic National Convention has created
"a delirium that is breaking out at every Dunkin' Donuts shop across
the state of Massachusetts that would be hard to capture."
But I don't want to let the week go
by before urging you to pull last Sunday's New York Times
Magazine out of the recycling bin and read the cover story,
a
critique of the animal-rights movement by Michael
Pollan. Pollan does a
masterful job not just of describing the moral, environmental, and
health-related evils of factory farming (that's easy), but also of
showing why vegetarianism is unnatural, harmful to the environment,
and even bad for animals. Important, counterintuitive stuff that's
left our family wondering where we can buy organic meat.
posted at 7:12 AM |
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Romney's not Weld. That's bad --
but maybe good, too. Bill Weld exemplified the kind of Republican
who can thrive in Massachusetts: he was fiscally conservative, tough
on crime, but libertarian on personal-freedom issues such as
reproductive choice and lesbian and gay rights. I suspect
Governor-elect Mitt Romney would have doubled his margin over his
Democratic opponent, Shannon O'Brien, if he had done a better job of
assuring voters that he's not a social conservative. Certainly
Romney's retrograde stand against civil unions -- never mind same-sex
marriage -- didn't help.
But there was one gaping hole in
Weld's administration, as well as those of his successors, Paul
Cellucci and Jane Swift. And if Romney is willing to fill that hole,
he can improve considerably over the records of his Republican
predecessors. Weld campaigned against the Democratic machine in 1990,
targeting then-Senate president Bill Bulger with the same tenacity
with which Romney went after the "Gang of Three" -- House Speaker Tom
Finneran, incoming Senate president Bob Travaglini, and O'Brien. But
to say that Weld didn't mean it would be quite an understatement.
Weld ended up presiding over an administration as laden with
patronage as any in the state's history. He even made common cause
with Bulger, who, in his day, was as unpopular with the public as
Finneran is in 2002.
Perhaps nothing symbolized Weld's
indulgence of the machine politics that he'd campaigned against as
much as his elevation of David Balfour, a Republican hack whom the
then-governor elevated to be the head of the MDC. On November 4, the
Globe's Stephanie Ebbert quoted an unnamed Democratic
consultant as saying that Balfour exemplified the difference between
Weld and Romney:
"Bill Weld would embrace the
David Balfours of the world and get a kick out of them," the
consultant said, referring to the Republican advance man and
Metropolitan District Commission chief who has been nominated for
a clerk-magistrate job. "Mitt Romney doesn't get a kick out of
them. This is a very political world, so it's hard to know how it
will play."
This morning it all comes together on
the front page of the Boston Herald. David
Wedge and Jack Sullivan report
that Balfour's MDC recently paid $675,000 in public (i.e.,
our) money to buy a tiny slice of land that is now being used as a
parking lot by a Stoneham restaurant where Balfour likes to eat, and
which is sometimes the venue for MDC meetings. Outraged Stoneham
officials, 30 percent of whose town is already owned by the MDC and
is thus exempt from local taxes, are demanding an investigation. "We
feel very, very strongly they are doing something illegal. I just
feel it's wrong to acquire this land with public money," selectman
Cosmo Ciccarello told the Herald.
Balfour is now up for a cushy
clerk-magistrate's job in Suffolk Juvenile Court, a post to which he
was nominated by Governor Swift. The Governor's Council will vote on
November 27.
Romney doesn't become governor until
January. But if he's serious about eliminating patronage abuses, he
should send a loud, public signal that the parking-lot fiasco will be
the subject of a vigorous investigation once he's in office -- and
that the Governor's Council ought to think twice before handing a
lifetime job to someone who will be the principal subject of that
investigation.
posted at 9:54 AM |
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Friedman on Bush and the UN.
It seems lazy and obvious to point out that Tom
Friedman has a brilliant
column in this morning's New York Times, but guess what? He
does. Friedman puts his finger on precisely why the UN Security
Council's unanimous vote to force Saddam Hussein to comply with
weapons inspections is such a hopeful development. Writes
Friedman:
It was the first time since
then [9/11] that the world community seemed to be ready to
overcome all of its cultural, religious and strategic differences
to impose a global norm -- that a country that raped its neighbor
and defied U.N. demands that it give up its weapons of mass
destruction not be allowed to get away with it.
And Friedman gives George W. Bush
just the right amount of credit for standing up not only to Saddam,
but to the "superhawks" in his own administration who tried to
convince him that real men don't ask the UN for anything.
Obviously a lot could still go wrong,
and with a Republican Senate, I worry that Bush will be more inclined
to listen to warmongers such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and
Paul Wolfowitz than Colin Powell. But this has been a good week for
anyone who supports both peace and a vigorous, UN-backed
effort to force Saddam to give up his weapons.
posted at 9:53 AM |
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Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Mitt Romney, defender of the
Constitution. Jay
Fitzgerald has a fascinating
item on Mitt
Romney's inconsistent stand on
patronage (jobs for his
top-level supporters, a meritocracy for everyone else). "He didn't
make that distinction before the election, so he's probably going to
take some heat for it now," writes Fitzgerald. The most interesting
part, though, is Fitzgerald's discussion of a 1990 US Supreme Court
decision, Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois, in which the
Court held that patronage is unconstitutional in hiring government
workers because it violates their First Amendment right to hold the
political views of their choice. The one exception: top-level
appointments, the theory being that elected officials need to fill
the most important jobs with people with whom they agree, and who
will be committed to carrying out their agenda.
The majority
opinion was written by a
liberal, Justice William Brennan, who opens in this vein:
To the victor belong only
those spoils that may be constitutionally obtained. Elrod v.
Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976), and Branti v. Finkel, 445
U.S. 507 (1980), decided that the First Amendment forbids
government officials to discharge or threaten to discharge public
employees solely for not being supporters of the political party
in power, unless party affiliation is an appropriate requirement
for the position involved.
Well, now. Romney must certainly take
comfort in knowing that he can wrap himself in the Constitution as he
goes about rewarding his friends and punishing his
enemies.
posted at 12:29 PM |
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And now, the rest of the
story. With apologies to Paul Harvey, this morning Media Log
points out an inexplicable omission in a cry from the heart written
by state representative Brian
Golden and published on the
op-ed page of today's Boston Herald. Golden, a Democrat (at
least that's what he claims) from Brighton, calls for the removal of
Democratic State Committee chairman Phil Johnston, blaming him for
such allegedly extreme liberal views as believing that lesbians and
gay men ought to have the same rights as everyone else. Such
apostasy, Golden argues, was responsible for Republican Mitt Romney's
surprisingly easy victory in last week's gubernatorial
election.
But this is just boilerplate,
designed to run up the word count so that Golden can talk about
what's really on his mind:
[I]n a highly
unusual move, Johnston interfered in at least two local Democratic
primaries -- one of them being mine.
As a two-term incumbent, I was
shocked to find the state Democratic Party backing one Democrat
over another. Rather than allowing local Democrats to choose their
own nominees, Johnston injected himself into races and places he
didn't even vaguely understand.
Here's what Golden leaves out: in
October 2000, just before Al Gore and George W. Bush held their first
debate -- in Boston, no less -- Golden announced that he had decided
to endorse
Bush because of the
Republican's opposition to the late-term abortion procedure that
opponents label "partial-birth abortion," and because Bush favored
public aid to Catholic schools.
Now, of course, there's nothing wrong
with disagreeing with your party's presidential candidate on the
issues -- even in public. But to endorse his opponent is to call into
question whether you ought to be a member of that party in the first
place. There's a name for Johnston's effort to replace Golden with a
real Democrat: politics. Then, too, if Golden re-registered as a
Republican, his career as a state rep would be over.
"There is no role for differences on
matters of conscience in Johnston's party, no big-tent philosophy,"
Golden whines at the end of his Herald piece. What tent? As
Lyndon
Johnson once explained in
deciding to reappoint the notorious J. Edgar Hoover as head of the
FBI, "It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out,
than outside the tent pissing in." Golden stepped outside the
"big tent" two years ago. And he's been relieving himself on his
supposed fellow Democrats ever since.
posted at 9:33 AM |
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Monday, November 11, 2002
Tony Hawk II. I knew
this was going to happen. It turns out that the Boston Globe
published a 2000-word feature on Tony Hawk last June, on the front of
the Sunday arts section. Although it's long gone from the
Globe's free archives, I managed to find the piece -- by staff
writer Geoff Edgers -- here.
So obviously my argument
that the mainstream media have ignored Hawk was off the mark.
Nevertheless, given Hawk's enormous popularity with teenagers, his
appearance at the FleetCenter last week deserved more coverage than
it got.
posted at 3:21 PM |
link
Patronage, Romney-style. Just
in case there were any doubts, Mitt Romney has said it twice
since becoming governor-elect last Tuesday: his crusade against
patronage was not meant to apply to his political allies, just
to people who have to work for a living.
Here's the relevant excerpt from Rick
Klein's piece in last Thursday's Globe:
Romney, who railed against
patronage appointments on the campaign trail, also sought to
clarify to reporters yesterday what role people with political
connections will play in his administration. He said he expects to
appoint some people with political experience and connections to
top posts in his administration. But for lower-level workers, he
said that ties to political leaders or his campaign will be a
disadvantage, not an advantage.
"I will look for people to get
jobs based on what they know, not who they know," Romney said. "I
want people who are secretaries of the various executive offices
-- some of them -- to have substantial political experience. But
as we look down those organizations, and as we go into middle
management, the people driving the trucks and clearing the snow,
there's no reason to have political association with those kinds
of jobs."
Then there's this, from
Yvonne
Abraham's front-page interview
with Romney published in the Sunday Globe:
He was also reluctant to
discuss what his new administration would look like. The
Republican, who railed against patronage on the campaign trail,
was very specific in his definition of the term on Friday. He said
his top staffers would include some of the people who had worked
on his campaign, people with extensive political experience, and
with whom he had worked for a long time. Nothing wrong with that,
he said.
"Where patronage begins, in my
view, is where you start going down into the positions inside a
government, where that kind of political experience is not
necessary,'' he said. ''And yet where campaign workers and members
of the party and perhaps even contributors find themselves getting
jobs in the courts, or the Turnpike Authority, where it's clear
political history is being rewarded.''
For applicants for those
positions, Romney said, ''a political history, or a relative in
politics, will be a burden they will have to overcome.''
Romney couldn't have been more clear.
If you're an aspiring bureaucrat, especially an aspiring top-level
bureaucrat, you'd better have made your bones getting Romney elected.
But if you're down on your luck and looking for a job as a
toll-taker, a truck-driver, and the like, well, you can fill out an
application just like anybody else, pal.
It's easy to be for a meritocracy
when it only applies to people you don't know.
posted at 8:32 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
