New Bedford’s loss, Middleborough’s gain

My first choice is no casinos anywhere in Massachusetts. My second choice is no casino in Middleborough. It’s my hometown, the process has been an utter disgrace, federal and state investigations are under way, and I don’t want to see the rural character of the town destroyed.

So even though I believe the proposed Middleborough casino is good and dead anyway, I’m pleased to see that both the Cape Cod Times and the New Bedford Standard-Times (sister papers) report that Gov. Deval Patrick’s plan for three state-approved casinos could further harm the Middleborough bid.

Stephanie Vosk reports in the Cape Cod Times that the troubled Mashpee Wampanoag tribe could find its Middleborough property wedged between casinos in New Bedford and Boston, which would make its own plans dubious at best. In the Standard-Times, Curt Brown and Steve Decosta write that New Bedford officials are ready to rock with a waterfront site, and that there are indications Patrick wants one of the three casinos in that city.

The Boston Herald and the Boston Globe round up Beacon Hill reaction. In an editorial, the Globe opines: “Massachusetts lawmakers who have opposed casino gambling in the past, including House Speaker Sal DiMasi, must come to terms with Patrick’s proposal or provide revenue ideas of their own.”

Well, actually, no they don’t. Doing the right thing does not require you to deal with the cost of sticking to your principles. The state’s revenue needs are a different subject that can be dealt with at another time.

But I’m certainly pleased that state officials, at least, seem to be leaning toward New Bedford rather than Middleborough. If the Mashpee tribe pushes for federal approval to operate a casino outside of state regulations, it’s likely to find itself competing with venues that are already up and running. That’s good news for my hometown.

My standard disclosure.

Patrick’s corruption tax

The Boston Globe’s Frank Phillips reports that Gov. Deval Patrick has decided to support three Massachusetts casinos. Under his plan, the state would put them out to bid, and the Mashpee Wampanoags would receive no special consideration. Given the avalanche of trouble under which the tribe’s proposed venue in Middleborough has fallen, I’ll stick with my prediction that that particular casino will never be built.

(Update: Or should I say backdate? Boston Herald reporters Scott Van Voorhis and Casey Ross had essentially the same story yesterday. An alert commenter called my attention to it, but for some reason Blogger ate it when I tried to post it.)

But this isn’t just a tragedy — it’s a tragedy foretold. Patrick and the officials around him have been watching as the Middleborough proposal has dissolved into corruption, investigations and recriminations. Three of the five selectmen who support the plan face a recall election, and the other two, also casino supporters, would if they hadn’t been elected too recently. Patrick knows exactly what he’s getting into; his eyes are wide open. He’s putting his entire governorship at risk, and he’s doing it strictly for money.

Will House Speaker Sal DiMasi stand in Patrick’s way? He’s a longtime opponent, and Phillips reports that DiMasi’s recent conciliatory rhetoric on the issue is nothing more than an attempt to avoid embarrassing Patrick. It shouldn’t take a huge amount of backbone on DiMasi’s part to stick to his principled position. He’ll have Cardinal Seán O’Malley, former attorney general Scott Harshbarger, former John Hancock chief executive David D’Alessandro and a host of other good people in his corner.

The governor must be stopped. Together we can!

My standard disclosure.

Beyond the FBI’s casino probe

First, an anonymously sourced blockbuster from a man who’s amassed an admirable track record in getting to the bottom of the mess involving the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and the proposed Middleborough casino. Cape Cod Today blogger/ reporter Peter Kenney posted an item earlier this morning saying that the new tribal council president, Shawn Hendricks, and council member Desire Hendricks Moreno may resign this afternoon. This, of course, comes in the wake of news that the FBI is investigating the tribe’s finances, about which more below.

Now, then, back to my regularly scheduled post. The proposed casino — which would be the largest in the world, according to the Brockton Enterprise — has been dead since Aug. 23. That’s when Kenney confirmed his earlier report that Glenn Marshall, president of the tribal council, had lied about his military record, and had been convicted of rape in the 1980s as well.

The next day, the story was all over the media, and by the following week Marshall was gone. But only the casino’s most ardent supporters, joined perhaps by a few political naifs, failed to realize what had happened. The lid had been lifted off a barrel of sleaze, and practically every day has brought a new story. And there is still plenty more to come.

Now comes word, in today’s Boston Globe, Boston Herald and Cape Cod Times, that the FBI is investigating the tribe’s finances. Once again, I’m in awe of Kenney’s sources. He first got wind of this on Wednesday, and posted a more detailed story yesterday morning.

The crucial issue here is whether the probe is aimed at Marshall alone, or at the entire tribal leadership. Based on a preponderance of what we know, it would seem to be the latter. That, of course, would include Hendricks, Marshall’s handpicked successor, who would be removed if a recall effort being led by tribal elder Amelia Bingham and her son Steven succeeds (unless he resigns, of course).

For instance, here’s what Kenney reported yesterday: “Presented to council chairman Shawn Hendricks, treasurer Nelli Ramos and council member Desire Hendricks Moreno were formal demands for the council’s financial records as well as personal financial records from all three officials.”

In the Herald, reporter Dave Wedge has the same information and attributes it to an on-the-record source, tribal spokeswoman Amy Lambiaso. Lambiaso does describe it as “an investigation into Glenn Marshall,” but obviously the feds are seeking information that could reflect on other tribal leaders as well.

In the Globe, reporters Sean Murphy and Christine Wallgren offer a slightly different interpretation, writing:

Amy Lambiaso, a spokeswoman for the tribe, said the investigation focuses on Glenn Marshall, the former tribal chairman….

“It’s our understanding it is an investigation into Glenn Marshall and not any of the other tribe members,” she said.

Fair enough. But again, it does not appear that the feds can do their job unless they’re also looking at what the other tribal leaders knew and when they knew it.

The most detailed overview of what’s going on right now is provided in the Cape Cod Times by reporters George Brennan and Stephanie Vosk. Not only do they report on the FBI probe, but they also get into a separate IRS investigation of Marshall, as well as an inquiry launched by the state attorney general, Martha Coakley. Not to sound like a broken record, but Kenney has been all over these developments as well.

Also not to sound like a broken record, but how can Gov. Deval Patrick step up and offer his support for casino gambling given what’s going on in Southeastern Massachusetts? This is what you get when you embrace gambling. Nothing that’s happened is surprising, except that it all came out so quickly following the two votes by Middleborough town meeting (yes to a casino deal; no to a casino) on July 28.

This week The Pilot, the weekly paper published by Boston’s Catholic archdiocese, runs a terrific editorial on why casino gambling needs to be stopped, whether it’s in Middleborough, Palmer or East Boston. (Media Nation trivia: I worked as the production manager of The Pilot for a few months in late 1990 and early ’91.) A Middleborough resident who’s worried about the possible destruction of his town called it to my attention. Here’s a highlight:

Casino advertisements frequently depict casino gambling as a fleeting, joyous experience amidst a wonderland of entertainment and excitement. However, what is portrayed as an occasional weekend getaway all too often becomes an uncontrollable compulsion that can lead to broken families, bankruptcy and even suicide.

Studies show that instances of crime, prostitution and bankruptcy increase around casinos. Those living on fixed income, particularly the elderly and the poor, are easily lured by their promise of quick money and often spend money needed for essentials on gambling.

Gambling addiction is a self-destructive behavior that has dire consequences.

The fight against the Middleborough casino isn’t about mindless NIMBYism. The best possible outcome is to keep casino gambling out of Massachusetts — period. If people want to gamble in Connecticut or Rhode Island, let them. That’s not a reason for us to lower our standards.

My standard disclosure.

What Patrick meant

Gov. Deval Patrick did a decent job yesterday of deflecting criticism over his 9/11 remarks. “Let me be clear: I don’t think America bears any fault for the attack on us in 9/11, and I don’t think that any of the family members with whom I spoke that day heard it or saw it that way,” he said on the “Eagan & Braude” show on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM). The Boston Globe covers the story here; the Associated Press here.

Lest you forget, here is the section of Patrick’s speech that brought him to grief:

Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other.

At the time, those words struck me as odd, and he obviously opened himself up to accusations that he was being insensitive to the victims of 9/11. But it’s an exercise in intellectual dishonesty to suggest that he really, actually meant to say that Al Qaeda wouldn’t have attacked us if only we had demonstrated love and understanding toward the terrorists. Naturally, the Massachusetts Republican Party and the usual suspects on talk radio nearly injured themselves from the speed with which they leapt to that conclusion.

The Phoenix’s David Bernstein digs deeply, and shows not just the context in which Patrick made his remarks on Tuesday, but on other occasions as well. Here, most tellingly, is a long excerpt from the commencement address Patrick gave this past May at Mount Wachusett Community College:

The events of September 11, 2001 were horrific, you know that. They disrupted individual families and our collective sense of security and well-being. It was a “wake-up” call to our own vulnerability. And it represents a catastrophic failure of human understanding. In its wake, I believe we have been governed by fear.

Fear is what drove us to round up people of Arab descent, many of them American citizens, and to hold hundreds without cause or charge.

Fear led us to lose focus on a known enemy in Afghanistan and invade Iraq instead.

Fear justified what I believe to be the greatest assault on personal freedoms (in the Patriot Act) and the greatest aggregation of Presidential power in much of our history.

Fear created the Guantánamo detention center, where the very rule of law that has made our democracy an envy of the world has been set aside.

Just a few months ago in a radio interview, a senior Pentagon official, Charles “Cully” Stimson, named some of the law firms providing free representation to the Guantánamo detainees and suggested that corporate America make those law firms — and I quote — “choose between representing terrorists and representing reputable firms.” He attempted to mark these lawyers as enemies of society. There was no subtlety in his message.

Speaking about this post-9/11 phenomenon, former Vice President Gore observed that, “Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.” He quoted former Justice Brandeis, who said that, “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

The Vice President, I think, captured the spirit of the active citizen in the heat of danger when he said, “The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hanged as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk. Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.”

Like me, he wonders: “Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol?”

Fear is treacherous.

Now, I’m sure there are some conservatives who would disagree with those remarks, but they pretty much reflect what most liberals believe has happened during the post-9/11 era. Certainly no one would consider them to be particularly controversial. (Indeed, they’re now four months old and no one has said a thing.) Too bad Patrick didn’t express himself as clearly on Tuesday as he did in May.

Finally, have a look at Jay Fitzgerald’s post in which he links criticism of Patrick’s remarks to the idiotic brouhaha over MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times. Jay — a conservative, or at least someone who passes for one in Massachusetts — correctly notes that President Bush’s defenders are going berserk over these two issues because they can’t offer substantive arguments over everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq.

Personally, I thought Patrick’s remarks — or at least that one excerpt — were tone-deaf, and that MoveOn’s ad was silly and misdirected. But offensive? What’s offensive is the right’s knee-jerk response in attempting to turn everything into a attack on the other side’s patriotism.

If Patrick is guilty of anything, it’s failing to understand how the game is played. Too bad it’s a game, isn’t it?

Photo of Patrick (cc) by DoubleSpeakShow. Some rights reserved.

Kenney does it his way

After a slight lull, action is heating up once again on the casino front. Today’s highlights:

— In the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly profiles Peter Kenney (photo at left), the Cape Cod Today blogger/ reporter/ activist who was a key player in bringing down Mashpee Wampanoag president Glenn Marshall, and who continues to break important stories. I think Adam gets a little too hung up on whether Kenney is a “journalist,” but he’s got a lot of insight and some great quotes from the colorful Kenney. Here’s one: “Did I do it the way a traditional journalist would? According to journalistic ethics, if there are such things that are taught in school? No. Was I correct in what I said? Yes.”

— What will Gov. Deval Patrick say about casino gambling? We’re still waiting. Kenney himself writes that a source tells him Patrick has decided to punt and let the Legislature handle it. That would be good news, as House Speaker Sal DiMasi is a casino opponent. In the Cape Cod Times, Stephanie Vosk reports that whatever happens, casino gambling is likely to be the subject of a referendum on the state ballot.

— In the Brockton Enterprise, Michael DeCicco reports that the selectmen in Berkley have voted unanimously to fight against the building of a proposed casino in neighboring Middleborough. “We’re talking about transforming this area into something that will be unbelievable,” said chairman Robert Anctil. “It’s bad growth, not good growth.”

— In the Boston Globe, Sean Murphy looks at the plans for the proposed Middleborough casino and finds that it’s intended to “draw a national tourist clientele because of its proximity to Cape Cod and would be crammed with 4,000 slot machines, 180 table games, and amenities like a 10,000-seat auditorium for sporting events and shows.” Not that it would harm the rural character of the town or anything.

My standard disclosure.

The “Surge Twins”

There’s a lot about Maureen Dowd’s column (sub. req.) in today’s New York Times that I don’t like, but never mind. I love her description of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, whom she has dubbed the “Surge Twins”:

The Surge Twins seemed competent and more realistic than some of their misbegotten predecessors, but just too late to do any good. They’re like two veteran pilots trying to crash land the plane.

Exactly.

Peace, love and (mis)understanding

It looks like Gov. Deval Patrick is going to have a rough couple of days over an unfortunate (but not unfair) implication some critics are drawing from his 9/11 speech yesterday. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first I want to establish the context, so here’s the full text of his brief remarks (link now fixed; plus I’ve added paragraphing to make it easier to read):

We meet today to honor the lives and memories of the 206 sons and daughters of our Commonwealth who were lost six years ago in the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 and with them the thousands of others from across our nation and across the globe, who were lost in that tragedy as well.

Our tribute is for each of them and our condolences are with each of you and the families and survivors so touched by that day. Each of us felt the impact of the incidents of September 11th. But the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, sisters and brothers and friends of those endured perhaps the most profound loss of all. This is your community and your community is with you today and everyday.

We have lived the last six years in the shadow of that tragedy. We carry the vivid reminders of the pain and the anger we felt. But we must also carry the vivid reminders of the compassion and generosity that was shown that day and the days and weeks that followed. The coming together that happened not only in communities that lost a loved one remember them, and not only in New York, Virginia or Pennsylvania and Washington DC or not only in the United States but all across the world.

That is the spirit in which we re-convene today, and that is what must last. Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other. And it seems to me that that lesson and that warning is something that we must carry with us everyday.

Fortunately, for human beings, the human heart is not designed to carry grief forever. Somehow we manage to move on and that might be in some ways our greatest strength. We live in a rare place, where our ideas, our shared goals, and our common humanity will and must be more powerful and must ultimately win out over intransigence and anger and violence and division.

Tempered by these losses, we will emerge a strong and better place. That is how we best serve the memories of those we love. We do that not in anger at the horror of their loss, but in honor of the beauty of their lives. We miss them not because they are gone, but because they were here.

The part that’s causing Patrick problems, obviously, is this: “Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other.”

A Boston Herald editorial today — headlined “Hearts, flowers just aren’t enough” — begins with this sarcastic observation: “If only Osama bin Laden had been hugged more as a child.” The editorial continues:

Unfortunately, the governor’s fuzzy recollection of that terrifying day seems to be in keeping with a certain “blame us” mentality that so many of his supporters embrace, along with a failure to acknowledge the continuing threat of evil that Americans face.

A little while ago, the Massachusetts Republican Party sent out a press release that quotes party chairman Peter Torkildsen as saying, “The only failure of understanding is Governor Patrick’s failure to understand the 9/11 attacks were a cowardly, unprovoked act of war aimed at destroying our democracy and our economy. Terrorists murdered 3,000 innocent people on 9/11, and they were attempting to murder many thousands more that day.” It continues in that vein for several more paragraphs. (So far, the release doesn’t appear to be available at the party’s Web site.)

Bloggers are beginning to react as well, as you can see from this Technorati search.

As you can see from Patrick’s speech, nearly all of it is exactly what you would expect an elected official to say on such occasion. I don’t think his remarks about the human failure to understand and love one another were taken out of context; but I do think they need to be seen within their full context, which was a speech clearly aimed at honoring the victims of 9/11.

As for the part that the Herald and the Republicans are upset with, I’d call it a sloppy bit of rhetoric. I’m all for peace, love and understanding, but Patrick’s words lend themselves too easily to being interpreted as meaning that the attacks came about, at least in part, because we failed to love our enemies.

Look for the inevitable clarification later this week — if not later today.

How false becomes true

Dan Gillmor blasts the media for a recent New York Times/CBS News poll finding that one-third of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He writes:

The continuing scandal is that media organizations are doing so little to correct the record. Because it is not enough to run an occasional story debunking the lie.

I don’t disagree, but it’s also more complicated than that. Last Friday, NPR’s “On the Media” ran a fascinating interview with the Washington Post’s Shankar Vedantam, whose reporting suggests that the harder you try to debunk a falsehood, the more people are likely to believe it. Here’s Vedantam, talking about what happened after the subjects of a University of Michigan study read a flier produced by the Centers for Disease Control debunking myths about vaccines:

[A]bout 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true.

The true statements did not suffer the same kind of deterioration with time. In other words, over time we tend to remember false things as true but not true things as false.

This doesn’t mean the media shouldn’t at least try to educate the public in an ongoing way. But it does mean that it’s likely a significant minority of Americans will continue to believe whatever they like, whether it’s about 9/11 or the (non)-existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

After all, as Vedantam points out, majorities in Arab and Muslim countries continue to believe the United States and/or Israel were responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center. You can only do so much to set the record straight.

Vedantam’s original Post story is online here.

More alleged news

Would the New York Times Co. please, please, please sell its 17 percent stake in the Red Sox? Then, when the Boston Globe publishes a press release like this on the front of the business section, we can attribute it to simple bad news judgment rather than more nefarious motives. Good grief.

Oh, yeah, and this one too — although I suppose it actually qualifies as news.

Update: Boston Daily beat me to it.