Blue Mass Group

Time to rein in the police and support Chairman Costello’s reform efforts

by Kevin John Sowyrda

MySouthEnd.com Contributor

Thursday Feb 26, 2009

So where’s the outrage? In a state which prides itself as the “Athens of America,” not just for cultural reasons but because we claim to cherish civil liberties, barely an eyelid is raised when the cops toss a prominent talk show host in jail because a computer screen in a police cruiser says the subject didn’t pay a lousy car insurance bill in a southern state from which he moved years ago.

How can this lackadaisical attitude toward police excess be so prevalent in the Massachusetts birthed by Sam Adams and governed by a Democratic majority which tells us that the eight years of George Bush and the Patriot Act are dead and buried and constitutional rights are back in fashion?

But I guess I missed the fashion show. Police powers in Massachusetts are completely out of control and each of us has our own, particular horror story to tell about an outrageous cop who seems poised to go postal or whose grasp of the truth is lose at best. And this dilemma is particularly acute given my observation that our elected officials fear the unions representing the constabulary forces more than they respect the voters. Thus, even if conservative gabber Michael Graham is not your cup of tea, you should not find it appetizing that a police officer can throw him or you in jail because the Intel Chips running the registry of motor vehicles in another jurisdiction revoke your driver’s license for a reason of minutia.

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Editor’s note: We’ve already had some discussion along these lines, most recently here and here.  But the blog rally is a worthy idea! –David We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture: We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here’s your chance. Please don’t write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe’s community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you. (P.S. If you have a blog, please feel free to reprint this item and post it. Likewise, if you have a Twitter or Facebook account, please add this url [...]

Jonathan Mann shares his thoughts:

You don’t have to take my word for it. Go to:  http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/… Wade through the Mea Culpa about the sex scandal, until you get to “The Sheriff of Wall Street”. The funny thing is, I happen to agree.  As a taxpayer, I don’t like being blackmailed by robber barons. As for Spitzer’s impulse control issues with sexuality – frankly that is his wife’s business. However, putting MY kids trillions of dollars in debt to China and Saudi Arabia – THAT is my business and I submit – your business as well. Apparently Whole Foods market can be profitable with a CEO who is bound to accept not more than 17x the payrate of their average worker. When did CEOs become the new Duke  of  Buckingham and “regulation” become a curse word [well, regulation was probably always a curse word on Wall Street]. Anyway, the Spitzer interview is worth listening to; try it.

Well, everyone else seems to have good ideas bubbling up about how to save the Globe, the good Professor Kennedy in particular. Now, sometimes blogs get set up as rivals to professional media — as if a bunch of jes' folks with websites were about to replace the legit newsrooms — and all of the professionalism, skill, time, expertise, institutional memory and budgets those newsrooms provide. No, that's not what we do as bloggers. Hell, who links to the Globe more than us? We are citizens. We are media consumers, and therefore sometime critics of the product we so voraciously consume. But we remain very much interested in the survival of media. So, in the spirit of our Save-The-Globe blog rally, we should affirm that the Globe remains an indispensible public institution. It's not all it could be or should be. But it's what we have, and is in many cases still pretty good. And we need robust, local, professional journalism. But a newspaper per se is not necessary for that. The business model for the newspaper is dead, gone, destroyed, literally exploded. We can talk all we want about the “news business”, but news is not really what a [...]

Did you know that in the city of Lowell it is illegal for a 16-year-old to be out past 11:00 PM?

Today, the highest court in Massachusetts heard arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of a juvenile curfew ordinance in Lowell.  Under the ordinance, kids under 17 years old who are out in public streets or in stores, movie theaters and other establishments between 11:00 pm and 5:00 am can be arrested and may face criminal penalties, such as being fined or sent to the custody of the Department of Youth Services until they reach the age of 18.  The defendants in this case — two minors — were picked up for being out past curfew, arrested, held overnight and are facing criminal charges.

The ACLU of Massachusetts as well as other advocacy groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs earlier this year arguing that the ordinance infringes on minors’ fundamental rights.

http://article.nationalreview…. In 2004, the Supreme Court sowed the seeds for a national-security upheaval when it ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that war prisoners held outside the United States had a right to challenge their detentions in federal court. Last year, in Boumediene v. Bush, the justices continued the seismic shift, holding that the right they had invented in Rasul – a right extended to aliens whose only connection to the United States is in waging war against it – was somehow rooted in our Constitution. … Writing in dissent, Justice Scalia presciently observed that, by abandoning American sovereignty as the limit of its jurisdiction, the Court had essentially claimed judicial dominion “over the four corners of the earth.”

http://www.infragard.net/ Who knew this existed? I read the following and thought infraGuard. This has gotta be some form of BS or the invention of a wildly imaginitive mind. Then I thought, why not Google it just to see what comes up. Imagine my surprise. Then I read on and I kinda feel like throwing up my lunch. FBI InfraGard warns of a crescendo of public concern about Obama’s eligibility by DefendUSx April 05, 2009 11:14 Tasked by the FBI to provide “informational analysis” on conditions which could be construed as potentially harmful to civil order and national security, InfraGard, of the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), issued an unclassified Protective Intelligence Communication report in March 2009 regarding the “crescendo” of public concern about Obama’s presidential eligibility. Authored by Dr. Lyle J. Rapacki, Protective Intelligence Specialist and Agent, the report summarizes the substance of legal challenges to Obama on the question of his constitutional eligibility and concludes that if it “should be discovered Mr. Obama is ineligible, a constitutional crisis would ensue attempting to determine which of his executive branch orders should be valid.” It goes on to warn that “if…Mr. Obama fights revealing his documentation, there is growing concern [...]

Obviously, saving the Globe both in the short- and long-term is on lots of people’s minds these days.  But IMHO, the fact that boston.com was in 2008 the 6th most heavily-trafficked newspaper website in the U.S. isn’t going to do it.

Why not?  Because the ad money just isn’t there.  Look, according to the post linked above, boston.com averaged about 5 million unique visitors a month.  Compare that to Daily Kos, which averages close to a million unique visitors a day.  Kos is pulling in something like 20-25 million unique visitors a month, several times what boston.com gets.  Yet Kos is not a rich man.  He’s one of the few people in the U.S. who can earn a living from blogging, but pretty much all he is doing after overhead is supporting his family.  He’s certainly not paying 1,400 employees like the Globe is.

More on the flip.

As you know, a few weeks ago we learned of the existence of a group that is attempting to undermine the will of the voters on Question 3.  Thankfully, it now appears that this group will not only lack support in the legislature, but also among editorial boards. Late last week, the Brockton Enterprise editorialized against the efforts of this so-called “Protection of Working and Handlers, Inc. (P.O.W.A.A.H)”  Their editorial addresses the issue in a forceful and direct manner: A new group called Protection of Working Animals and Handlers Inc. has sent a letter to 1,600 people, seeking funds so it can mount a campaign to “reverse or invalidate” the November ballot question. It is a quixotic quest, at best, and a cynical money-raising ploy, at worst, that raises false hopes and plays on the fears of the remaining track workers who might fall for the group’s propaganda. The president of this group’s board of directors, Linda A. Jensen of Connecticut, seems to know little of Massachusetts’ political landscape and it is hard to take seriously anything in her plea for support. She said the group plans to lobby the Legislature (a lost cause), file an election fraud suit (on [...]