Milk money

Paul McMorrow has a highly entertaining roundup of this week’s casino news at Boston Magazine’s blog. I especially like a description of the brochure Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration distributed to legislators:

Loaded with incongruous clip art, impressive leaps of logic, half-truths and downright sloppy research, the brochure (PDF) is one of the most dubious — not to mention unintentionally hilarious — public documents to see the light of day in quite some time. Print this thing out, take it on your lunch break, and try to read it without having milk squirt out your nose. We dare you.

I’m fascinated by the administration’s retreat from promising 30,000 jobs to “tens of thousands.” Is 20,000 “tens of thousands”? I suppose. But when I hear a phrase like that, I think of, oh, 50,000, or 70,000. “Tens of thousands” is not only deliberately vague; it’s deceptive.

Casino supporters support casinos

The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce study on casino gambling (PDF) generally supports the numbers put forth by Gov. Deval Patrick in his three-casino proposal, according to the Herald and the Globe. Patrick’s numbers are largely based on studies by UMass Dartmouth economist Clyde Barrow. And, yes, the Chamber of Commerce study relies in part on Barrow’s research.

I have not read the Chamber study, and probably won’t. My opposition to casino gambling is not based on whether it will or won’t bring more revenue to the state. Still, you can see from following the Barrow connection that the Chamber study can be easily dismissed by casino foes.

Believe it or not, the Chamber study also incorporates some numbers provided by Harrah’s, a casino operator that would like to do business here. Some independent study.

Last September, the Weekly Dig detailed the eerie parallels between Barrow’s work and Patrick’s proposal. In the current CommonWealth magazine, Phil Primack has more on the Barrow-Patrick connection.

In the Cape Cod Times, Stephanie Vosk reports that state Rep. Dan Bosley, D-North Adams, a leading casino opponent, is circulating a position paper disputing another claim made in the Chamber study — that the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe may move ahead with its plans to build the world’s largest casino in Middleborough with or without state approval.

In fact, as casino opponents have pointed out repeatedly, the tribe may not operate a gambling casino if casino gambling is illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, it could open the world’s largest bingo hall. But with federal regulators preparing to crack down on video bingo, that’s really not much of a threat.

As the Phoenix’s David Bernstein writes of the Chamber report, “on balance it should boost the pro-casino side, while not dampening the enthusiasm of the antis.”

Nice recorder, lousy software

Does anyone have an Olympus DM-10 digital voice recorder? I’ve used one off and on for a little more than a year. It does what I need it to do, but I can’t stand the Mac software that comes with it. Any advice on reasonably priced third-party software that can handle the DSS audio files? Or that can convert the DSS files to MP3 or AIFF?

Problem solved: Thanks to the Media Nation brain trust.

Spam is raging out of control

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, too, but it seems to me that the quantity of spam has increased exponentially over the past several months. What worries me is that I’m losing the ability to read through the contents of Gmail‘s spam filter to see whether anything important got caught by mistake.

Right now, I’m looking at 3,671 — whoops, 3,672 — messages trapped by the filter since last Wednesday. Even if I quickly page through them all, am I going to notice if one or two valid messages are in there?

The Gmail filter does a good job, but I’m a little frustrated. On a few occasions, I’ve noticed messages in my spam folder from e-mail addresses that are already built in to my address book. That is never supposed to happen. Am I alone in experiencing that? Am I doing something wrong?

Now up to 3,673.

Making a statement

Nothing is going to stop the ongoing transmogrification of the Boston Globe into a smaller, mostly local newspaper. Still, the Globe really makes a statement about its national relevance today, leading with a Farah Stockman story on Halliburton’s use of a tax-exempt subsidiary in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes for its employees in Iraq.

Halliburton is no longer the parent company, but the scam continues, costing taxpayers perhaps $100 million a year, and cheating the employees out of Social Security benefits they should be earning. And just to show how sleazy this all is, it turns out that when Iraq-based employees tried to sue over alleged exposure to hazardous chemicals in Iraq, the subsidiary claimed immunity on the grounds that they were working for an American company that was working with the military.

Ideally, the Globe will continue to break occasional stories of national interest, as it did with Charlie Savage’s Pulitzer-winning reporting on President Bush’s use of signing statements to get around provisions in legislation that he didn’t like.

New math

From the Weekly Dig’s “Media Farm” column:

The Metro was widely ridiculed last month for erroneously reporting that “hundreds of layoffs” at the Globe were imminent. The Globe labeled the report “factually incorrect,” saying, “There are no plans for a staff reduction of the size cited in the Metro.” The Metro stuck by its story, and it turned out to be almost kinda correct. Or at least more correct than anyone gave them credit for (ourselves included).

The Globe is eliminating 60 jobs, which, the last time I checked, was somewhat less than “hundreds.” And while I’m being technical about it, there may not be a single layoff.

Here’s how Clinton could win

If Hillary Clinton is to have any chance at all of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, she’s going to have to make a strong moral claim. By the time the primaries and caucuses are over, Barack Obama is almost certainly going to have won more pledged delegates and more states.

Clinton’s possible arguments — that she’s done better in traditionally Democratic big states like New York and California, or that the unpledged superdelegates should slide her way because she’s somehow more electable — aren’t going to cut it. That’s a profoundly undemocratic case, and the Obama delegates (not to mention general-election voters) would react with revulsion.

But there is one unlikely possibility: she could wind up winning the nationwide popular vote. If that were to happen, then it would be the Obama campaign suddenly having to talk about delegate counts and party rules, the very sort of inside baseball that turns voters off.

Could it happen? Take a look at last night’s results. Clinton succeeded in slicing quite a bit off Obama’s lead in the popular vote. According to the numbers, Clinton picked up 328,589 votes in winning three of the four primary states. The lion’s share — 227,556 — came from Ohio, where she won a decisive victory.

According to Real Clear Politics, Obama as of this morning has won 12,946,615 votes and Clinton 12,363,897 votes, not counting Florida — which shouldn’t count given that a party-rules squabble prevented both candidates from campaigning there. That gives Obama 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent for Clinton, or a margin of 582,718 votes. It also means that Obama lost a whopping 36 percent of his popular-vote lead yesterday.

When you look at the calendar, you can see that it’s going to be very difficult for Clinton to pass Obama in the popular vote unless she starts winning by large margins everywhere. The next big prize is Pennsylvania, which doesn’t vote until April 22.

But let’s say Obama and Clinton go into the convention with Obama ahead in delegates, but with neither having won enough to clinch — a very likely scenario. If Clinton has somehow built a lead in the popular vote, no matter how narrow, Obama’s margin among pledged delegates starts to look like the Electoral College: an undemocratic vestige of a bygone era.

And, at that point, the superdelegates, impressed by Clinton’s rather startling comeback, could award the nomination to her on the grounds that they were merely following the will of the people.

File photo (cc) by Daniella Zalcman and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

How to save $50 million a year

Gov. Deval Patrick plans to spend $50 million a year to treat the gambling addicts he would create if his proposal to build three casinos comes to pass. And his defenders want you to know that’s a good thing. The Herald’s Scott Van Voorhis writes:

Casino supporters say Gov. Deval Patrick’s big commitment to dealing with problem gambling should offset any concerns about “social costs” raised by foes of expanded gambling. The money would come from a 2.5 percent tax on projected daily casino revenues in Massachusetts.

You know, I just figured out how the state can save $50 million a year.

Clinton won, but can she win?

In my latest for the Guardian, I ponder what’s next for Hillary Clinton and the media. She had a big day yesterday, and thus she can claim some momentum as well. But given that Barack Obama’s delegate lead appears to be insurmountable, where does she go from here? And how will the media redefine the narrative?

Patrick’s casino obsession

Someday we may learn why Gov. Deval Patrick has been so willing to risk his entire governorship to fight for a proposal that will lead to increased crime, increased gambling addiction, and rises in the divorce and suicide rates — social ills all well documented by Casinofacts.org.

I don’t think it’s because his wife’s law firm stands to benefit, although that is a pretty blatant conflict of interest. He must know by now that he was sold a bill of goods in terms of the number of construction jobs and the extent of the revenues that would come in. My best guess is that, deep down, he knows he made a terrible mistake, but he can’t publicly admit he’s wrong.

House Speaker Sal DiMasi, a casino opponent who’s been reasonably diplomatic about the governor’s three-casino fiasco, signals that he may finally be ready to bring down the hammer, mocking Patrick’s ludicrous claim that the casinos will create 30,000 construction jobs (Globe story here; Herald story here).

Meanwhile, consider this post at Blue Mass Group by Lynne, who blogs at Left in Lowell and who is the sort of idealistic progressive activist who propelled Patrick to his rousing victory in 2006. Lynne’s anger and disappointment are palpable, as she accuses Patrick of “lying” to advance his agenda. Specifically, she cites his factually incorrect claim that if the state fails to get out in front on the casino issue, Native American tribes will be able to move ahead anyway, with no state regulation or benefits.

As Lynne rightly points out, federal law only allows tribal facilities that are in compliance with state law. If the state does not legalize casino gambling, then the most the Native Americans can do is open a glorified bingo parlor. Lynne writes:

I know that being disappointed in your leaders is par for the course in politics. I just thought this time might be a little different. Patrick has decided to hang his hat on bringing casinos to Massachusetts, ignoring large swaths of objective information, and using fear and lies to accomplish it. But it’s this last part that I may not be able to forgive.

Why is Gov. Patrick doing this? His proposal is guaranteed to end badly: He’ll lose or, much worse, he’ll win. Is there no one who can talk sense to him?