End game on casinos

A group of Deval Patrick supporters, on the day of a House hearing on the matter, is circulating an open letter denouncing the governor’s proposal to build three casinos in Massachusetts. Only a few names are attached at the moment, but as you can see from the comments at Blue Mass. Group, there’s a lot of interest starting to build. Here’s a highlight from the letter:

Resort casinos are a mechanism for transferring money from poor and middle class people to wealthy corporations. Any revenue that leaks out to the state via taxation along the way is far short of the amount necessary to ameliorate the social and economic damage that the industry causes.

Resort casino gambling would involve our state government in condoning and encouraging behavior that has led in far too many cases to personal financial ruin, the breakup of families, domestic violence, and child neglect. In addition to these social costs, resort casinos draw money away from local restaurants, stores, and farms, compounding the injury. So presenting resort casino gambling as a source of revenue that would benefit our communities is misleading. The academically documented experiences of other states suggest that resort casinos damage, rather than boost, local economies.

Gee, sounds exactly like House Speaker Sal DiMasi, who denounced casinos in his strongest language yet this morning in a speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. Unlike DiMasi, the Patrick supporters can’t be characterized as basing their opposition on personal animus toward the governor.

Also at Blue Mass. Group, Ryan Adams posts new polling data showing that two-thirds of respondents are opposed to seeing a casino built in their community. No surprise. As readers of this blog know, residents at the Middleborough town meeting last summer voted overwhelmingly against an advisory question asking whether they wanted to see a casino built. Unfortunately, most of the attention was given to town meeting’s approval of a deal the town had reached with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in case a casino is built despite that opposition.

Finally, Matt Viser reports in today’s Globe what casino opponents have been saying all along — that there is nothing inevitable about the Mashpee Wampanoags building a casino in Middleborough or anywhere else.

Globe op-ed page gets bloggy

I’d think this was a good idea even if Media Nation wasn’t featured in the debut. The Globe op-ed page today unveils “VoxOp,” a round-up of opinion from outside sources such as local blogs and student newspapers.

One suggestion: It would be more useful to online readers if the items were attached to the permalinks of the actual blog posts rather than to the home pages.

By the way, the Herald has been quoting bloggers in its “Monday Morning Briefing” for quite a while, though none this week.

E-mail request

OK, here’s the latest. I have come to the sad conclusion that I may have to phase out my longtime personal e-mail address, dan {at} dankennedy {dot} net. I’m receiving hundreds of spam e-mails a day, and just under 95 percent of them are associated with that address. It’s been hopelessly compromised after years of being out there on the open Net.

The problem wasn’t with Gmail. The problem was that Gmail’s spam filter was being forced to more than it should.

Perhaps I’ll find a way to revive it. For the time being, though, I suggest that if you want to reach me, you do so through my Northeastern account, listed in the right-hand column of this blog. Most of you are already doing that anyway.

Barnicle may be WBUR-bound

The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly has some rather startling news. Apparently Paul La Camera, general manager of WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), is thinking of bringing in former Globe and occasional Herald columnist Mike Barnicle to do commentary.

La Camera has done a great job of bringing stability to ‘BUR and of adding some local focus to a station that has long been admired for its national reach. But he’s just wrong when he tells Reilly that Barnicle was done in by “wild accusations.” Barnicle left the Globe in 1998 after he was caught plagiarizing and making stuff up, but those were only the latest in a quarter-century of similar, very credible complaints.

La Camera and Barnicle have a history: Barnicle is a contributor to “Chronicle,” a magazine show on WCVB-TV (Channel 5), the station La Camera used to run. It was La Camera who decided to keep Barnicle on “Chronicle” after his meltdown at the Globe, a decision that played to mixed reviews internally.

Barnicle already does commentary for WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) and MSNBC. His grumpy-old-man shtick does nothing for me, but if he’s good for ratings, then fine. But ‘BUR and the National Public Radio system are news organizations that take credibility and ethics very seriously. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.

E-mail update

I think most of my problems stem from the fact that my personal e-mail address, dan {at} dankennedy {dot} net, has become so compromised over the years that it’s practically useless. I’ve been isolating those messages at the source, and it seems like there’s two or three good messages for every 300 spam messages. Worst of all, robots have grabbed hold of it and are using it to try to spread spam to the four corners of the earth.

My Northeastern address, da {dot} kennedy {at} neu {dot} edu, seems to be relatively unharmed, as does my actual Gmail address, which I try not to use.

Occasionally I’ve seen services that allow you to set up the Berlin Wall of spam blocks: If someone isn’t already in your address book, he can’t get through unless he answers a question or fills out a form or something. Does anyone have any experience with that?

Although even if I set up such a trap for my personal address, it presumably wouldn’t do anything to stop it from being used as an outgoing address by spammers.

Thoughts?

Citizen journalism in Tibet

Global Voices Online is tracking the protests in Tibet, which, according to the New York Times, comprise “the most serious and prolonged demonstrations in Tibet since the late 1980s, when it suppressed a rebellion there with lethal force that left scores, and possibly hundreds, of ethnic Tibetans dead.” (Note: Photo depicts a 2006 demonstration in Oxford, London, England.)

Interestingly, what’s coming in via Global Voices — an international blog-aggregation project begun at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society — is not all pro-independence by any means. Example:

When those insane dalais gathered in the street today and surrounded and viciously beat those Han Chinese, while they used lighters to light fire to shop after shop, while they threw molotovs at cars parked on the sides of the road, I really felt afraid, and that this is inconceivable. What you are destroying is the very place that you live in. Aren’t you followers of the Living Buddha? You think this is something your Living Buddha instructed you to do, to destroy the very place that you live in? I think that most of these people haven’t thought about this, and that most of them have been deceived by the words of certain people who would see the motherland split! But if you just think about it, just who was it that made Tibet the developed place it is today? Who set up the bridge between Tibet and the whole world? And who is it that sends qualified people each year from every sector to educate the children of Tibet with knowledge and culture? AND who is it that sends aid from every developed city in the motherland each year to assist Tibet? I think you seem to have forgotten all this……

It could be legitimate, it could be propaganda. But there’s no doubt that many ethnic Chinese live in Tibet, as the Chinese government has encouraged internal migration in order to keep the Tibetan independence movement in check. By this estimate, about 100,000 of the 2.2 million people living in Tibet are Chinese, not counting soldiers and police officers. So despite the Dalai Lama‘s message of peace, reports that Tibetans are attacking Chinese seem credible.

The Times is putting out a call for citizen journalists.

If this keeps building, we’re going to see whether the Age of the Internet is more powerful than the Age of Fax. In 1989, the Chinese democracy movement — fueled in part by mass-circulated faxes — came to a horrifying end in Tiananmen Square. The Internet, though, is a significantly more powerful organizational tool.

The Chinese government can try to shut it down, and it may succeed. That’s what the Burmese government did last year. But now, even more than in 1989, the whole world is watching. And Chinese behavior would seem to be constricted given that it’s hosting the Olympics this summer.

Photo (cc) by nic0, and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

E-mail woes

I’m not quite sure how to get the word out to everyone who needs to know, but I’m struggling with some mysterious Gmail problems. I think I’ve fixed it so that I’ll get everything, but it involves monitoring two other e-mail managers to make sure Gmail isn’t killing anything. I may have to abandon Gmail altogether.

If you think I should have responded to you on something but didn’t, please be persistent.

Charles Sennott to leave Globe

Another first-rate journalist is leaving the Boston Globe. Charles Sennott, best known for his years as a foreign correspondent, will join New England Cable News founder Phil Balboni’s new venture, Global News Enterprises, according to a memo written by Globe deputy manager Mark Morrow and obtained by Media Nation.

Sennott will be executive editor, co-founder and vice president of Global News, according to the memo. Here’s the full text of what Morrow had to say:

We are living in a season of too many good-byes, and this one, like so many, is hard. Charlie Sennott is leaving the Globe after 14 amazing years chasing stories all over the region, nation and world. With his unstoppable — indeed, occasionally overwhelming — energy, verve and passion for our craft, he has been a singular presence among us since the day he migrated north from the mad-cap universe of the New York Daily news to take a job with the paper he grew up with and had dreamed of working for from an early age. From day one, he thought big — and delivered. He has also been, there can be no doubt, one of most intrepid reporters in the paper’s history, time and again taking on risky overseas assignments, right up to his return trip last month to Baghdad. (More about that in Sunday’s paper.) I am really going to miss him; we all will.

It will surprise no one that Charlie will land on his feet, in his post-Globe life. He will be joining, as executive editor, co-founder and vice president, a Boston-based web startup — Global News Enterprises — which aims to be the first American-based website dedicated solely to international news. It is an exciting notion, which has already drawn some impressive financial backers, and will doubtless be an adventure. All of us who know Charlie can be sure he is more than up for that.

He won’t be leaving until early April, but he wanted to get the word out as Global News will be announcing his appointment soon. So there will be some days yet to reflect on Charlie’s years with us, to raise a glass and to pick his brain about what is coming next.

Despite Sennott’s long experience in international reporting, he’ll always be known — to me, anyway — as the reporter who told the astounding story of Claribel Ventura, a welfare mother accused of child abuse, and the 100 or members of her dysfunctional family.

Sennott’s story, which closed with a startling quote from one of Ventura’s sisters when asked what message she had for taxpayers (“Just tell them to keep paying”), had much to do with the passage of welfare reform Massachusetts. In 2004, Sennott wrote a 10th-anniversary update.

Sennott is also the author of “The Body and the Blood: The Middle East’s Vanishing Christians and the Possibility for Peace” (2002).