Author: Dan Kennedy

(Not) banned in West Roxbury

Anti-gay activist Robert Joyce is trying to get my old paper, the Boston Phoenix, banned in West Roxbury, the Roslindale Transcript reports. Joyce says he doesn’t like the Phoenix’s adult-oriented classified ads, although he adds that it would be OK if escort services offered chicken dinners.

One of Joyce’s targets, liquor store owner Gary Park, says Joyce threatened him if he continued to carry the Phoenix. Jessica Smith writes:

“He [Joyce] walked in here and instead of talking like a gentleman, he started making threats and giving me ultimatums,” said Park.

The threats include promises of a protest. Joyce said that while the group has yet to apply for a permit to protest, his organization was looking for volunteers to hold signs and to organize such an event. Still, that did not sway the man who owns Gary’s Liquors.

Park said he does not intend to stop carrying the publication that he has had in his store for years and is available for free all over the commonwealth.

“Mr. Joyce has way too much time on his hands. He should be helping homeless people and the elderly. If he doesn’t like the paper, then don’t come pick it up,” said Park, who stressed that his business caters to individuals who are age 21 and older.

Someone should tell Joyce that picking up a copy of the Phoenix every week is not mandatory. Although I recommend it.

By the way, the name of Joyce’s organization is the delightfully Orwellian Support Community Decency Inc. (Via Universal Hub, which also links to this story in the West Roxbury Bulletin.)

More bad news for casino proponents

Another day, another round-up of news suggesting that Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposal to build three gambling casinos in Massachusetts, and a bid by the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to construct the world’s largest casino in Middleborough, are as happening as Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign. This morning we consider four developments.

1. In the Herald, Dave Wedge reports that revenue from three casinos in Detroit is dropping like a rock, with tax money for the state of Michigan falling by $10 million over the past year. Wedge quotes a Detroit autoworker named Mark Hauswirth thusly: “They ruin the city. People blow all their money. It don’t help nobody but the people who own them.” Hauswirth knows whereof he speaks: Wedge interviewed him at, yes, a casino.

Are analogies fair? I don’t know. Building three casinos in a depressed city like Detroit is hardly the same as spreading them out in a relatively prosperous state like Massachusetts. But local casino critics like state Rep. Dan Bosley have been warning us that casinos don’t generate anywhere near as much money as proponents like to think. The Detroit experience definitely falls in line with that.

2. House Speaker Sal DiMasi disses Patrick big-time in today’s Globe, telling reporter Matt Viser that he’s endorsing Hillary Clinton for president because Barack Obama is too inexperienced — just like Patrick.

“I think Massachusetts will look at it to find out what they can see in Obama with respect to what they did with their vote for Governor Patrick,” DiMasi is quoted as saying. “To be perfectly honest, I really don’t want my president to be in there in a learning process for the first six months to a year. It’s too important.”

I’ve heard the Obama-Patrick comparison many times, and I find it borderline offensive. What do they have in common other than a political consultant (David Axelrod) and, oh yes, the fact that they are both African-American? But Media Nation is in tea leaf-reading mode today. And the leaves tell me that DiMasi has decided to take the gloves off after a period of relative calm. Since DiMasi has already made it clear that he opposes Patrick’s casino plan, his outspokenness suggests that he won’t mind killing it once and for all.

3. The Globe’s Frank Phillips informs us that Patrick “has set up a novel political fund-raising system that allows him to skirt the state’s campaign finance law by channeling big contributions through the state Democratic Party, which, in turn, has paid off hundreds of thousands of dollars of the governor’s political expenses.”

If this were a big deal, I’d expect that Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts, would be upset. Instead, Phillips writes that Wilmot “found nothing about Patrick’s strategy that prompted alarm.” Still, it places Patrick on the defense once again, hampering his ability to move his agenda forward. When it comes to casinos, that’s a good thing.

4. Finally, it turns out that the proposed site of the Middleborough casino may be the home of a rare species of turtle called the northern red-bellied cooter. Gladys Kravitz explains why it matters — although Alicia Elwell, writing in the Brockton Enterprise, reports that maybe the turtle doesn’t live there after all.

Much wrangling ahead, you can be sure.

More powerful than Googlezon!*

One of my favorite bomb-tossers, John Ellis, has uncorked a doozy. In a column for the Web site RealClearMarkets, Ellis proposes that Google make an offer to the New York Times Co. that it can’t refuse. Ellis’ arguments:

  • Mega-wealthy Google could easily afford to buy the Times Co., the price of which will only keep dropping.
  • Even though the Times Co.’s controlling stock is owned by members of the Sulzberger family, who don’t want to sell, there’s a point beyond which the family can no longer screw other shareholders.
  • Rupert Murdoch seems determined to transform the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor to the Times on all kinds of news, not just financial — and he can afford to run the Journal at a loss.
  • Google, like Murdoch, doesn’t need to turn a profit with a small investment like the Times — but may make money anyway if it can leverage Times content across multiple platforms.
  • Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. isn’t getting it done, and has been in charge for so long now that it seems clear that’s not going to change.

Ellis, a former Boston Globe columnist, offers some provocation for us locals as well, suggesting that Google could get the price down to a mere $3 billion or so by selling off the Times Co.’s other properties, including the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and its share of the Red Sox and of New England Sports Network. (If the right buyer for the Globe can be found? Go ahead, make my day. But that’s a big if.)

Ellis’ piece is a suggestion, not a prediction. Still, it’s worth noting that in October 2006, when it looked as though a group headed by retired General Electric chairman Jack Welch might buy the Globe, Ellis wrote: “Mr. Sulzberger would be a fool, of course, to sell the Globe to anyone at this juncture.”

He was exactly right. Which raises the question of whether Times Co. executives now would be fools not to sell the Globe.

Ellis’ proposal is logical, if unlikely to happen. But given that all of our great news organizations are going to have to find new, once-unthinkable ways of surviving, I can imagine a worse fate for the Times than landing in the arms of Google, which generally, though not always, lives up to its “don’t be evil” philosophy. Better Google than Murdoch, certainly. (Via Romenesko.)

*Click here for reference.

An ugly Democratic split

My former Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano, on leave from the Narco News Bulletin, has been blogging the presidential campaign this winter. He’s got a particularly detailed and perceptive post on the Nevada Democratic caucuses, in which he offers some thoughts — backed up by first-hand reporting — on the increasingly ugly split between pro-Obama African-Americans and pro-Clinton Latinos. Giordano writes:

Now, I’m a connoisseur of ugliness in all its forms, I find it mostly entertaining, but the part of yesterday’s caucus that was so ugly as to be distressing was to see the Hispanic and black communities so polarized: The Clinton caucusers were predominantly Hispanic-American and the Obama caucusers were predominantly African-American — most on both sides were women — and they shouted and taunted each other with boos, cat-calls, hisses, thumbs down, and at one point one man on the Obama side began chanting, “I did not have sex with that woman!”

He concludes: “Frankly, unless events conspire during this 2008 Democratic primary process to reverse those truly ugly developments, any Democrat that thinks that November is already won is a fool that is not to be taken seriously from here on out.” (Thanks to Media Nation reader C.M.)

News as community

Good news for North Shore and Merrimack Valley news junkies. Starting Feb. 1, the Eagle-Tribune papers will open up their Web sites and provide all content for free. Currently, you have to be a paid subscriber to the print edition. The papers include four dailies, the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, the Daily News of Newburyport, the Salem News and the Gloucester Times.
Here’s the announcement.

What’s interesting about this isn’t that you’ll no longer have to pay. It’s that company executives have embraced the open Web, and now understand that there’s more value to be had — and more money to be made — by building online communities around their journalism.

They’ve been moving in that direction for some time with projects like RallyNorth.net, a separate site dedicated to high school sports and, more recently, the addition of Witches Brew, the Salem High School newspaper. Add in the blogs and multimedia features that are being integrated into the site, and you have a pretty good example of the “news as a conversation” model.

The Eagle-Tribune model is regional, as befits the four papers’ mission. GateHouse Media, which publishes weeklies in just about every community in Eastern Massachusetts (as well as a few dailies), takes a more hyperlocal approach with its Wicked Local sites. Here is the chain’s site for Danvers, which also happens to be one of the towns that the Salem News covers.

Slowly but surely, the news business is reinventing itself.

Good deed, unfortunate twist

Michael Paulson reports in today’s Globe that billionaire developer Thomas Flatley has sold a $14 million office building to the Archdiocese of Boston for less than $100. It’s a feel-good story about a dedicated Catholic giving back to his church.

But if I lived in Braintree, I might have a different reaction. Though Paulson’s story doesn’t say, I would imagine that the property will now become tax-exempt. With an assessed value of $14 million and a commercial tax rate (MS Word) of $18.97, the building has been bringing in some $265,000 per year in tax revenue. So that’s a pretty big hit.

Time for DiMasi to just say no

House Speaker Sal DiMasi can save Deval Patrick’s governorship. He can do it by sending the governor’s casino-gambling plan to the floor as soon as possible and then killing it once and for all. Patrick will thank him some day — say, in 2010, if he chooses to run for re-election.

Patrick’s obsession with casinos and the money they will purportedly bring has reached a dangerous stage. As Frank Phillips reports in today’s Globe, and Casey Ross in the Herald, Patrick made longstanding rumors come true by including non-existent casino revenue in his budget proposal for the fiscal year that will begin next July.

I am not going to get into a debate over whether or not the state needs the money. Casino gambling’s social ills have been well-documented, and would be exceedingly bad news for the state. DiMasi has dropped numerous hints that he wants to defeat Patrick’s three-casino plan, but has been wary of acting too abruptly — perhaps sensitive to comments he made early in Patrick’s term that were seen as disrespectful. Well, it would be better for all concerned, including Patrick, to put this sorry chapter behind us once and for all.

If there’s a budget gap, some combination of spending cuts and tax increases will take care of that. It is not up to those of us who oppose casino gambling and the crime, addiction, divorces and suicides they create to solve the state’s fiscal problems. The state and local tax burden in Massachusetts is in the middle of the pack nationally, so the problem can’t be so horrible that reasonable people shouldn’t be able to solve it.

I also had to laugh when I read that Patrick proposes to use gambling revenues to offset an anticipated shortfall in state Lottery receipts. Casino gambling will almost certainly do considerable harm to the Lottery, making this nothing more than a shell game.

Mr. Speaker, just kill it now.

Last Republicans standing

It is with some amazement that I find myself thinking of Mitt Romney as one of the last two Republicans standing — and as the person who might at this point be the favorite to win the nomination. Yes, just last night I said that John McCain probably had a clearer path than anyone else. But I’ve been rethinking that.

First, let me deal with the also-rans, all of whom are pretty much done at this point.

  • Mike Huckabee. It ended last night for the good reverend. If he can’t ride the Confederate flag and his bizarre equation of homosexuality and bestiality to victory in South Carolina, he certainly can’t do it anywhere else.
  • Fred Thompson. Dead man walking or dead man withdrawing — it’s up to him.
  • Rudy Giuliani. Wasn’t he supposed to be running for president? Of the United States, not just Florida?
  • Ron Paul. He’ll keep getting whatever he’s getting.

So we’ve basically got a two-man race between McCain and Romney, which was pretty hard to imagine after Romney lost New Hampshire. I didn’t hear any squawking last October when Ryan Lizza wrote in the New Yorker that Romney’s only chance was to win Iowa and New Hampshire, then hope for momentum. He lost both, of course, and has won only one competitive state — Michigan. Yet he’s very much alive.

Consider that McCain has won two hard-fought primaries, New Hampshire and South Carolina, but has yet to win a plurality of Republicans anywhere. As Adam Nagourney observes in the New York Times today, many of the upcoming primaries are for Republicans only.

Consider, too, that conservatives have been split among Romney, Huckabee and Thompson. Not anymore.

Add to this Romney’s personal fortune and his willingness to say absolutely anything to get elected, and he may very well have the edge.

Finally, check out Jeff Jacoby’s column in today’s Globe. Jacoby, a conservative who’s been mocking Romney since 1994, is appalled at Romney’s attempt to don the cloak of Ronald Reagan.

Photo (cc) by Joe Crimmings. Some rights reserved.

A GOP frontrunner?

John McCain certainly looks like one tonight. His speech was much more passionate and direct than the one he gave in New Hampshire, and, for Republicans, there is no more important a prize than South Carolina.

Anything could happen, but right now the least surprising outcome would be McCain’s winning Florida and then wrapping up the nomination on Super Tuesday or shortly thereafter. Certainly Mitt Romney seems to be the only obstacle still standing in his way.

I know, I know. Pretty obvious stuff, eh? Well, at least I’m only giving you 15 seconds of it. The cable nets have been at it all night.