Year: 2009

Gov. Patrick’s weird putdown

I was appalled yesterday when I read Boston Globe reporter Matt Viser’s account of how Gov. Deval Patrick had publicly put down Worcester Mayor Konstantina Lukes at a speech before the Massachusetts Muncipal Association on Friday. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

At one point, the governor had a frosty exchange with Worcester Mayor Konstantina B. Lukes, after she appeared to smirk while the governor answered her question.

“Before you make a face, mayor, let me finish my answer, all right?” Patrick snapped.

Once he finished his response, he glanced over at her again and said, “Is that clear? OK. Now you can make your face.”

Later, WBZ-TV (Channel 4) posted video of the exchange. And though Viser got Patrick’s words right, I’m not sure about “frosty” — it seems more light-hearted than that. As Jon Keller suggests, it’s hard to know what to make of it.

Given that Patrick was announcing a $128 million cut in local aid, maybe the governor ought to work on his timing if he had intended his remarks as a joke.

Fun with math

New York Times columnist David Brooks used phony numbers yesterday to raise questions about the proposed stimulus package. “A study by the Congressional Budget Office found that less than half of the money for infrastructure and discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010,” he wrote.

Trouble is, Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post learned that the study Brooks cites does not exist. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

Social networking and the news

Social Networking and the News

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On Thursday I had a chance to take part in a panel on “Getting Started with Social Media: Lessons from the Front Lines,” sponsored by the Mass Technology Leadership Council.

It was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot from the other panelists — Perry Allison of EONS.com, Pam Johnston of Gather.com and Brian Halligan of HubSpot. The moderator was Debi Kleiman of Communispace in Watertown, whose Fenway Park-theme meeting room was where we held our presentation.

I’ve posted the slideshow that accompanied my talk. Slideshare appeared to choke on embedded links, so I’ve listed them below in case you’d like to check any of them out.

Imagine if he weren’t reluctant

Ron Rosenbaum is a first-rate writer, but he’s really outdone himself in his shredding of Billy Joel. (I know. Why bother? Still.) The best part is near the top, where he pulls off a hilarious 180:

Which brings me to Billy Joel — the Andrew Wyeth of contemporary pop music — and the continuing irritation I feel whenever I hear his tunes, whether in the original or in the multitude of elevator-Muzak versions. It is a kind of mystery: Why does his music make my skin crawl in a way that other bad music doesn’t? Why is it that so many of us feel it is possible to say Billy Joel is — well — just bad, a blight upon pop music, a plague upon the airwaves more contagious than West Nile virus, a dire threat to the peacefulness of any given elevator ride, not rock ‘n’ roll but schlock ‘n’ roll?

I’m reluctant to pick on Billy Joel.

Oh, yeah, it’s just killing him.

Invitation to an assassination

Check out this entry from the Conservapedia on Democratic senators from states with Republican governors. See, the governors could replace those senators with Republicans if anything were to, uh, happen to any of them, hint, hint.

Via Wonkette, which you should check out if the link to the Conservapedia has changed by the time you click. Wow. Does the Secret Service know about this?

Conservative wistfulness over Obama

At Human Events, D.R. Tucker posts a thoughtful reaction to my Guardian commentary on conservatives who are willing to give President Obama a chance.

Tucker detects wistfulness on the part of conservatives who wonder how things might have turned out differently if the Republican Party hadn’t spent two generations driving away African-American voters. He writes:

Obama and other post-civil-rights-movement black leaders came of age in a time when they were told, in ways direct and subtle, that the GOP wasn’t really interested in them. Perhaps if the GOP had attempted to attract black support in those days, charismatic and gifted figures like Obama would have become conservative Republicans instead of liberal Democrats.

There’s a missing ingredient here. The Republican flight from empiricism, embodied in such divisive figures as Sarah Palin and George W. Bush himself, has at least as much to do as race when it comes to the GOP’s failure to attract people who like their politics reality-based.

But there’s no doubt that the Republicans have finally shrunk their tent to such an extent that it can no longer hold a majority — at least not as presently constituted.

Gaddafi to Israel: Drop dead

In the endlessly depressing category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” the New York Times today runs an op-ed by erstwhile Boston Globe columnist Muammar Gaddafi, the terrorist-coddling, human rights-abusing dictator of Libya.

Gaddafi has a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: wipe Israel off the map. Funny, but I somehow knew he was going to say that.

The Globe’s Kevin Cullen weighs in usefully on Gaddafi today, and Universal Hub wraps up the whole miserable affair.

Note: Gaddafi, Qaddafi and Khadafy are all the same person. I’m going with Gaddafi because that’s how the Globe recently spelled it.

Why Caroline Kennedy dropped out

Looks like the truth is starting to come out about Caroline Kennedy’s now-ended bid for the Senate. The New York Post reports that Gov. David Paterson is letting it be known through an unnamed spokesman that he never intended to choose her. Among other things, it appears that she may have tax and nanny problems.

The New York Times is catching up, but according to the Politico’s Glenn Thrush, the Post is “lead sled dog on the Caroline exit fiasco.” No gold star for the Post, though, as it adds some entirely unsupported sleaze to the mix.

The future of the Christian Science Monitor

Sometime this April the Christian Science Monitor, one of our most venerable daily newspapers, will cease to be a daily newspaper. Instead, the Monitor will embrace a Web-first strategy, providing news and analysis online on a round-the-clock basis and unveiling a weekly print magazine.

In my latest media feature for CommonWealth Magazine, I interview Monitor editor John Yemma about the transition, what it means for the future of Monitor journalism and how we all might learn from this experiment.