Obama shouldn’t have waited

Barack Obama’s transition is of considerably more importance to the nation than U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

So if it’s true that the Obama team has found nothing improper in Rahm Emanuel’s contacts with Blago, then it should have released the news last week rather than giving in to Fitzgerald’s request for a delay.

Fake Rahm Emanuel has his say.

Just say no

The New York Times should have refused to run this crapola — written answers from someone working for Caroline Kennedy, responding to a series of questions about where she stands on the issues. Let her sit down for an interview.

Between Kennedy’s impending coronation in New York and the Rod Blagojevich fiasco in Illinois, I’d say it’s time to get rid of gubernatorial appointments for vacant Senate seats, wouldn’t you?

Jim Boyd retires from Channel 5

How on earth could Jim Boyd be 66 years old? The WCVB-TV (Channel 5) anchor is retiring, according to the Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam.

“I see this less as a retirement and more as a transition,” Boyd says in a Channel 5 press release. “I plan to remain intimately involved in the local community and explore interests that the demands of a full-time career didn’t allow.”

Boyd harks back to a different, better era for local television news. He and his quiet competence will be missed.

Patrick’s snowstorm appointment

Gov. Deval Patrick must be extremely proud of appointing Joseph Aloisi as secretary of transportation. Otherwise, why would he have announced it in the midst of a snowstorm on the Friday before Christmas?

Patrick manages to work in the words “reforming” and “reform” in discussing Aloisi, which is exactly the first thought that springs to my mind upon learning that Aloisi collected $3 million in legal fees from the Big Dig.

At Blue Mass Group, David Kravitz writes:

[W]hen it’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs, two on, and the home team down by two (which strikes me as a fair description of where we are right now), who do you want at bat? Do you want a .205 hitter with a record of not many extra-base hits and a lot of strikeouts? ‘Cause that’s how Aloisi strikes me, based on his history with Kerasiotes, Amorello, and all the rest of it.

I think Kravitz is being kind, but we’ll see. What worries me is that House Speaker Sal DiMasi may be too weakened by the ongoing corruption investgation to act as a counterbalance.

DiMasi saved Patrick (and us) from casinos, and he’s intent on saving us from massive toll hikes as well. But he’s not going to be able to do that if he’s forced to spend most of his time huddled with lawyers.

Boston.com unveils Needham site

Boston.com’s hyperlocal site for Needham has debuted. And there are a ton of links to GateHouse’s Needham Times as well as the Hometown Weekly — but not much Boston Globe content. “Wicked Evil Needham” is how a GateHouse source describes it, a play on GateHouse’s “Wicked Local” sites.

Which brings me back to the video I linked to yesterday, in which Boston.com’s Bob Kempf talks about eventually offering 120 hyperlocal sites. I’m kind of scratching my head over that. In a community where Boston.com can put together a page featuring a decent amount of Globe content and links to local, independent bloggers, a few links to other papers’ Web sites strike me as fine. That’s why I think the Newton site is promising.

But what do Kempf and company plan to do in a community like, say, Danvers, worldwide headquarters for Media Nation? We have two papers covering our town: GateHouse’s Danvers Herald and CNHI’s Salem News. Both do quite a nice job. But there are no local bloggers in Danvers whom I’m aware of. And it’s not very often that Globe North does a Danvers-specific story.

Would Boston.com really put together a hyperlocal page consisting of almost nothing but links to the Danvers Herald and the Salem News?

I realize I’m being ridiculously speculative. So let’s wait and see.

Update: Waltham is up, too (via Elana Zak).

The Warren invitation: Wise, clever or neither?

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I thought we’d begin this morning with Rachel Maddow’s scorching commentary about President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to ask the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation on Inauguration Day. It’s long, but some righteous anger is called for, as Obama — like so many politicians before him — has chosen to make gay and lesbian Americans the targets of his desire for political expedience.

Here’s part of what U.S. Rep. Barney Frank has to say:

Religious leaders obviously have every right to speak out in opposition to anti-discrimination measures, even in the degrading terms that Rev. Warren has used with regard to same-sex marriage. But that does not confer upon them the right to a place of honor in the inauguration ceremony of a president whose stated commitment to LGBT rights won him the strong support of the great majority of those who support that cause.

Obama shouldn’t have invited Warren. That said, there are some layers and complexities to this that are worth thinking about. In an open letter to Obama, the Human Rights Campaign asserts: “Rev. Warren cannot name a single theological issue that he and vehemently, anti-gay theologian James Dobson disagree on.” And, indeed, Warren was a leader in the fight to pass the loathsome Proposition 8 in California.

But to assert that Warren, therefore, is no different from Dobson is to overlook some inconvenient facts. Obama himself opposes same-sex marriage, though, to his credit, he also opposed Proposition 8. We can’t know what Obama is thinking beyond what he tells us. But I suspect his religious view of the world is rather more conservative than that of your typical secular liberal. In any case, I imagine that most of the very few evangelicals who voted for Obama hold Warren in higher esteem than Dobson, who isn’t just a hate-monger, but who’s genuinely weird.

What makes Warren interesting is that he may be on a journey of his own. (Or he may be talking out of both sides of his mouth. Or he may just be confused.) Earlier this week, Beliefnet.com posted an interview with Warren whose lowlights have gotten a lot of attention — that is, he compares same-sex marriage to pedophila and incest. Ugh.

Yet, at the beginning of the interview, when Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman asks Warren whether divorce or gay marriage “is a greater threat to the American family,” Warren calls the answer a “no-brainer” and says “divorce, no doubt about it.” And, as Waldman notes in the blog entry accompanying the interview, Warren appears to endorse civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, a stance for which a lesser-known evangelical leader just got cast out into wilderness.

But wait. As you’ll see, having seemed to stake out reasonably progressive ground, Warren backtracked (or clarified; take your pick), writing to Waldman that he meant no such thing:

I now see you asked about civil UNIONS -and I responded by talking about civil RIGHTS. Sorry. They are two different issues. No American should ever be discriminated against because of their beliefs. Period. But a civil union is not a civil right.

It gets worse.

Still, I’m reminded of something the late Molly Ivins once said about Ross Perot: “He’s the best right-wing populist billionaire we’ve got in Texas, so if you don’t like him, you’re out of luck.” Warren may be the best conservative evangelical minister we’ve got. So, on a certain level, it makes sense for Obama to have a relationship with Warren, who, as we’ve been told over and over, is fairly progressive on issues such as global warming, poverty and AIDS.

But you can see where this goes, can’t you? All I’m doing here is discussing the politics of it — that is, I’m taking the line that perhaps it makes sense for Obama to disappoint his gay and lesbian supporters and their allies momentarily in order to reach out to an evangelical leader, and perhaps even to push him to the center (or at least to less hurtful rhetoric) on cultural issues. Fine.

And, actually, no, it’s not fine. The problem is that it’s hard to make the case that Obama is taking a principled stand. The danger is that Obama’s outreach to Warren will be seen not as a wise move, but merely as a clever one. If Warren genuinely evolves over time, we may look back at this moment as an example of Obama’s wisdom.

If not, then it will only stand out as a moment that Obama outsmarted himself, and let down some of his most ardent supporters.

Warren photo (cc) by Kevin Cheng and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Murphy (remember him?) is reprimanded

The gate’s still open, the horses escaped ages ago and the barn has burned down to the ground.

Nevertheless, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, at long last, ruled today that Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy committed an ethical violation by sending threatening letters on official stationery to Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell after winning a libel suit against the Herald.

I have written about this case so many times that I can’t muster the passion to do it again. Robert Ambrogi offers a few highlights as well as a link to the full decision. And here’s some Media Nation background.

120 Boston.com hyperlocal sites?

Someone just called this to my attention. It’s a three-minute promotional video made by the Boston Globe to promote its Boston.com Newton hyperlocal site. In it, you will see Boston.com’s Bob Kempf explain that the plan is eventually to expand the Newton idea to 120 cities and towns.

When it comes to news you can use, though, it looks like Boston.com still has some bugs to work out. (Via Adam Reilly.)