Kmareka.com

David Segal’s Party—Way Too Crowded

I got an internet invitation to a fundraiser for David Segal. I vaguely remembered that he had once belonged to the Green Party. I have to say that any politician who tries to get my vote by naming his party after me gets an ‘A’ for effort. Too bad I didn’t live in his district.

But it sounded like a good excuse to check out Nick-A-Nees bar, and the What Cheer Brigade was promised to be there. I’ve wanted to see them again ever since they showed up for the massive pro-immigration rally at the statehouse two years ago.

I have to say that the party was less than a success. It was hard to find a place to stand, the bar was so crowded. And I kept being distracted by running into people I knew. This kept me from getting to the boxes of Fellini’s pizza in time to get a slice.

Going out onto the patio, to get a breath of air in the unseasonably mild, gentle dusk as the neon lights flashed up and down the street and seagulls wheeled above the electric plant, I was again bothered by encountering old friends who wanted to hug and talk. Then the What Cheer brigade started doing stuff that was distracting, because it’s hard to talk when you are laughing that hard. When they started to play, my date embarrassed us by dancing, and—I blame the band–I danced too. This made my legs tired.

We planned to get something to eat, but ended up somehow staying far longer than we had planned. It was all those people wanting to talk, and that music I guess.

So unless you want to get into a crowd of people you know in a cool bar with amazing music on the sweetest night in May so far don’t ever go to one of David Segal’s fundraisers.

(PS from Kiersten: Here’s a fun video of the What Cheer Brigade performing.)

--Nancy Green

Help Cranston Plan a Better Future

Next Tuesday, May 13, the city of Cranston’s planning department will hold a meeting to get public input on the Comprehensive Plan. The meeting will take place in Cranston City Hall, Council Chambers, at 7 pm. This meeting will focus on updating the 5-year comprehensive plan, particularly in the areas of Housing, Natural Resources and Open Space and Recreation.

Rachel McNally of Save Cranston’s Open Space stresses the importance of public attendance at these meetings. The city needs to know what people care about in order to plan effectively. From SCOS:

The Plan is supposed to be updated every 5 years, but the current plan is dated 1992. The OPEN SPACE component of the Comprehensive Plan will be discussed and it is imperative that there is a large number of residents there to show that we are concerned as a City about Open Space, including the land at Mulligan’s. Below is the portion of the existing Comprehensive Plan that refers to the Mulligan’s land (the Cornfields) and if that is changed, then it could pave the way for future development proposals if it is not protected by the City!

The Comprehensive Plan was completed in February 1992 by Mayor Michael A. Traficante and City Plan Commission Walter McGarry Jr., Chairman and Kevin M. Flynn, Planning Director. Here are excerpts from it that refers to this issue:

“…the ‘Cornfields,’ is not recommended for major economic development initiatives because of its proximity to nearby residential areas and a recreational site.”

“…The results of this survey, public hearings, and the meetings of the Citizens Advisory Committee were instrumental in establishing the overall major themes for this Comprehensive Plan.

THEMES

1. Sound growth management in Western Cranston based upon the preservation of significant tracts of open space through land regulatory techniques and other means. Open space in Western Cranston should be viewed as an important natural resource, worthy of preservation, for all of Cranston’s residents-those here today and those who will live here in future generations.

2. Enhancing quality of life opportunities within the more urbanized environment of Eastern Cranston-through rediscovery of the potential use inherent along natural resource corridors, such as rivers and urban ponds, and through creative adaptive reuse and improvements within the already built environment.”

--Kiersten Marek

Sister Mary Voteless

Amazing that Barack Obama did so well in Indiana despite the Rev. Wright ‘scandal’. Despite Sen. Clinton, who I had respected for supporting the Million Mom March against gun violence, re-creating herself as a hard drinker and scourge of ducks everywhere. Despite a supreme court ruling that disenfranchised Indiana voters disproportionately Black, young, handicapped or elderly. This ruling came so late that there was no time for these citizens to obtain the state-issued, expensive, official I.D. card. What, no papers? Tough luck — no vote.

At least 10 retired nuns in South Bend, Indiana, were barred from voting in today’s Indiana Democratic primary election because they lacked photo IDs required under a state law that the supreme court upheld last week.

John Borkowski, a South Bend lawyer volunteering as an election watchdog for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said several of the retired nuns had been voting all of their lives but were told they lacked the required identification cards and could only file provisional ballots.

Since 2005, Indiana’s toughest-in-the-nation law requires every voter to produce a state or federal photo ID card. The supreme court, after weighing scores of legal briefs from conservatives who backed the statute and liberals who opposed it, upheld the law by a 6-3 vote, saying there was little evidence that it was unduly burdensome for voters.

Borkowski said Sister Julie McGuire, one of several nuns on poll duty, wasn’t pleased to turn away the nuns, some of whom were in their 80s and 90s and no longer had driver’s licenses.

“Here’s the supreme irony,” Borkowski said. “This law was passed supposedly to prevent and deter voter fraud, even though there was no real record of serious voter fraud in Indiana. Here you have a bunch of nuns whose votes can’t be accepted by a bunch of nuns … who live with them in the polling place in their convent because they don’t have an ID.”

At least six other people also were relegated to filing provisional ballots at the polling place on the ground floor of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, said Amy Smessaert, a spokeswoman for the convent.

Among them was Lauren McCallick, an 18-year-old freshman at St Mary’s College in South Bend, who said she got “teary-eyed” and then angry at being rejected the first time she was old enough to vote.

“The nuns and this young woman are the face of the supreme court case,” said Jonah Goldman, who directs the Lawyers Committee’s Campaign for Fair Elections.

I have a strong suspicion that the nuns were going to vote for Hillary, but still. I’m glad I live in Rhode Island, where your signature counts.

--Nancy Green

Paula McFarland May Run for School Committee

The Projo is reporting today that Cranston city council member Paula McFarland is considering running for school committee. From the Projo:

CRANSTON –– Forced out of office by term limits at the end of the year, City Council Vice President Paula B. McFarland says she is weighing a run for the School Committee.

McFarland, who is hosting a fundraiser next week, said she hopes to reshape a school district budget she characterized as often maligned as confusing and bloated.

“I really feel strongly that someone needs to take the bull by the horns,” said McFarland, a Democrat.

But if she wins a seat on the school board, McFarland said, she may not be there for long.

An occasionally sharp critic of Mayor Michael T. Napolitano, she said she is already considering a run for the city’s top office in 2010.

In an interview yesterday, she said she doesn’t believe in “the philosophy” espoused by the mayor, also a Democrat.

McFarland suggested the mayor was not being “honest and straightforward” when he proposed an election-year budget that avoids a tax increase but dips into the city’s reserves to the tune of $2.7 million.

If Napolitano’s 2008-09 budget passes, she said, the city will have to seek a large tax increase in the 2009-10 fiscal year, given the fiscal crisis facing the city and state.

McFarland, who backs a modest property tax hike for the year that begins July 1, also criticized the mayor for accepting campaign contributions from city employees.

Ernest J. Carlucci, the mayor’s director of administration, said Napolitano does not solicit the contributions and argued that employees have a “First Amendment right to donate.”

He also defended the mayor’s budget, arguing that the city must find ways to trim and restructure government, rather than seek more money from the taxpayers.

McFarland, who is caring for her mother, who has cancer, said she considered sitting out the elections this fall.

But she said a continuing concern about the direction of the city will probably keep her in the public arena.

And while she is leaning toward a School Committee race, she said she might test the limits of the city ordinance that requires council members to step aside after five consecutive two-year terms.

The council includes one member from each of the city’s six wards and three at-large members.

McFarland, 42, has represented Ward 3 for the past 10 years. And she says the term limits may not apply if she leaves her ward seat and runs for an at-large seat.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Paula for considering running for school committee. Someone with her experience and abilities could help clarify and improve the budget process for the schools. The results could be better communication and cooperation with the city and less money spent on adversarial litigation.

Also, our thoughts and prayers will be with Paula as she cares for her mother who has cancer. Having gone through the experience of losing my father to cancer 10 years ago, I know how difficult this can be.

--Kiersten Marek

Steven Bloom Responds on Cranston’s Budget

Steven Bloom provided this response, with attached spread sheets:

I appreciate all of the comments and criticisms regarding my proposal and would like to specifically address some of the comments. I’d like to reiterate them for clarity:

1. It generally seems as if he targeted the highest-paid city staffers and suggested their elimination, but took no such position toward the school department. Without addressing the costs of the upper administration in the school department, it looks like the city will take the brunt of the cuts. Why is he allowing the school board to get away with their continued bait-and-switch tactics?

2. Cutting maintenance and building maintenance laborers is, to me, not the answer. Again, consideration of the school department’s spending in these areas is missing. A more prudent approach would be to bring school building maintenance under the city’s purview and eliminate most of the school building staff positions. I would argue that it would save far more than 3 full time salaries.

3. Mr. Bloom also counts on the sale of the old police station ($2 million) to reduce debt service — why didn’t he apply this as revenue that, by the way, would take the place of half the proposed tax increase? The debt service increase in the FY09 proposed budget is $500,000 — not $2 million. There’s no pressing need to earmark more than we’re scheduled to pay, in other words.

4. I don’t see a once-a-month furlough happening, particularly since the city is still operating under existing contracts.

5. I agree with Oblomov regarding the proposed library and inspection cuts. You can’t just lop off a couple of positions without considering the potential harm to services.

My responses are as follows:

1. The focus of my budget is cutting expenses on both the City and School sides. To avoid / minimize a tax increase in this and in future years, we must get spending under control. Although the Mayor claims to have cut spending, the numbers don’t add up. In fact, the Mayor has not cut costs, and only achieved a minor spending reduction of $500K, by defunding the schools another $1.0 million. (Please see the attached schedule #1 for a reconciliation of the Mayor’s spending cuts.)

On the other hand, I have proposed the following: cutting staffing ($1074K), leaving positions unfilled ($360K), reducing general expenses ($212K) and instituting a City furlough ($540K) in order to save approximately $2.2 million. In identifying potential personnel cuts, I tried to target departments that have payroll growth that has exceeded the rate of inflation, indicating personnel additions, not wage increases. Attached is a schedule #2 of the City’s departmental payroll (excluding taxes and benefits); I’ve highlighted the high growth departments.

I’ve recommended cuts from these high-growth departments or ones for which services are lagging based upon discussions I’ve had with others. Both high and low paying positions have been targeted with annual salaries ranging from as much as $90K to as low as $38K.

The specifics are laid out in the budget proposal. This being said, I am not committed to these cuts specifically, but rather to the overall goal to reduce payroll by about $1.5 million. With these cuts and the furlough, the year on year increase for City services since 2006-2007 can be limited to 1%; otherwise it will remain at 2.5%. If city services are better serviced by cutting personnel in another department, I’m all for it, as long as we can achieve $1.5 million in city-side personnel cuts / unfilled positions. In short, I believe that we have a choice to make: do we want higher taxes with existing services, or do we want lower taxes with equivalent or lower services. I am willing to try the latter; we can always bring people back.

2. Regarding cuts to the School, it does APPEAR that the majority of the cuts are falling on the city, since I’ve proposed an increase in the allocation to the School District. Upon further analysis, however, the School District is also sharing in the pain. According to my budget, the city cuts of $2.2 million represent 2.9% of the City’s budget per my alternate proposal (see the attached spread sheet #3 for a reconciliation), excluding the School District, Debt Service, and Unfunded Pension liabilities, while the school district will sustain personnel cuts of almost $5.2 million representing about 3.9% of the School District’s final alternate budget.

Although the School Committee cut approximately $8.0 million from the School Districts proposed budget, approximately half of these represented the elimination of new spending or cost avoidance by bring special education tuitions in house. Most of the personnel cuts are in the School District’s adopted budget and do not show up as a spending cuts in the alternate budget, because they’re already there.

3. Regarding consolidation of services between the city and the Schools, such as building maintenance, I agree. If we can save more, it will only result in lower taxes now and in the future.

4. Regarding the Sale of the Police, it is my understanding that all capital assets sales must be applied against debt service. That being said, it would appear that the comments above are double counting the sale. If the sale was included in revenue and taxes lowered by the same amount, debt service would be $2 million higher, necessitating another $2 million in cuts to balance the reduction in tax revenue. I am not keen on including capital sales in the operating budget. However, it is my understanding that the law requires it and furthermore it puts pressure on the City to get the building sold.

5. Regarding a furlough, it is my understanding that the Mayor already has the authority to institute a furlough under the existing contracts.

6. The School Department is not as transparent as the City Budget, actual staffing (FTE) by department are not available. Furthermore, the 2007-2008 school numbers are difficult to interpret since many costs have not been allocated to the proper department. I’ve attached two documents analyzing the schools, the first is a department payroll analysis (#4), the second is a reconciliation (#5) of the School’s additional requirements from the 2006-2007 baseline, identifying the sources of the School’s need for an additional $6.25 million in funding from the Mayor’s proposed budget.

Approximately $3.2 million or half of the increase is due to costs outside the School department’s control: unfunded pension liabilities and special educations. All in all, the increase of the School’s controllable budget is limited to a 1.75% year on year increase. The remaining cost increases originate from the last teachers contracts and compliance with unfunded mandates at the state and federal level. Similar to police and fire, the School District must maintain “minimum staffing”, by adhering to maximum class sizes as per RIDE regulation, contract and good practice. This limits the ability of the School’s to cut personnel: Teacher salaries represent almost 50% of the budget.

This being said, I am sure that there are potential costs savings, they are difficult to specify due to the lack of transparency in the budget. I believe that this year the goal should be to limit spending as much as possible and negotiate contracts with the School City bargaining groups that are financially fair, without sacrificing programs like sports, middle school sports, and unified arts.

According to Charter, the City has the authority to request a more transparent document (see section 6.04). Next year, with contract negotiations behind us, the City must request a more transparent document so that the taxpayers can take a hard look at costs.

Thank you for putting all of this information together, Mr. Bloom. I agree that we need more transparency in order to achieve a better understanding of school spending in Cranston.

--Kiersten Marek

Obama HQ Re-opens

Word is out on the internets tubes that Barack Obama is pursuing a 50 state strategy for a Democratic victory in November. Could it be true? Apparently the campaign kept the lease on the office on Westminster St. (where Westminster Mall used to be, next to URI). A grand re-opening is planned for this weekend…

Saturday, May 10 at 10:00 AM - 3 hours
Location: Former Obama for America Office
235 Westminster St.
Providence, RI 02903

Go here for details.

--Nancy Green

Just Wondering…

• …whether Hillary Clinton will be even more determined to stay in the presidential race after witnessing what happened to the runner-up in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday.

• …how a nation that owes its success and vibrancy to immigrants can be so indifferent or cruel to immigrants, even to the point of dismissing their deaths while in U.S. custody.

• …what’s the point of having health insurance, if we’re all increasingly stuck with “higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.”

• …whether President Bush’s recent cameo appearance on the TV game show, “Deal Or No Deal,” will lead to similar appearances on shows such as “Big Brother” or “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?”

--David L. Jaffe

Mildred Loving–Courageous and Sadly Missed

Every time I hear a politician invoke states rights I think of two brave people, Mildred and Richard Loving.

RICHMOND, Va. - Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday…

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” according to their indictments.

The threat of doing time in a Southern jail did not deter the Lovings from standing up for their rights. They filed suit and initiated the court case that ultimately invalidated all state laws against interracial marriage. They had to fight for a right that my husband and I have been able to take for granted–the right to have our marriage recognized in our own country–South as well as North.

I think that some of the deep hostility to ‘activist judges’ stems from decisions that affirm basic rights of citizenship not subject to denial or modification by the state. There are still those who want to turn the state to support their personal morality, and they feel that affirming individual rights takes something away from them. They feel robbed and disrespected, because people who are different from them are equal under the law.

Just eight years ago, the last state law against interracial marriage was voted down, decades after such laws became unenforceable.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) — Alabama voters on Tuesday repealed the state’s century-old ban against interracial marriage, an unenforceable but embarrassing throwback to the state’s segregationist past.

The vote was running 59 percent to 41 percent, with 58 percent of the voted counted.

The vote removed the dubious distinction of Alabama being the only state in the country with such a relic from the segregated South remaining in its constitution.

Alabama became the last state with such language in its organic law in 1998 when South Carolina voters approved a measure to remove similar wording from their state’s constitution. In South Carolina, about 62 percent of voters favored lifting the ban.

Major Cox of Bullock County said he was impressed that Alabama voters officially made his 20-year marriage to Margaret Meier legal. Cox is black and his wife is white.

“I think we are well on the way to removing some of the stigma placed on Alabama. I think we may get to the point where we don’t have to classify ourselves. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking ‘oh my God I’m married to a white person’,” Cox said.

Meier said she had been worried Alabama voters might decide in the privacy of the polling booth to keep the ban.

Apparently, more than a third of the voters did vote to keep a constitutional ban on interracial marriage.

With all the talk about ‘special privileges’ there are a good number of people who feel that their marriage loses value if it’s an equal right. There are people who will go to the voting booth and try to keep a law in their constitution that invalidates the legal marriage of their neighbors. No matter that the law can’t be enforced–they want to keep marriage ‘special’. They would keep that law as a relic of when white was right–and pull it out and use it if the day comes when racism can again be written into the law of the land.

We live in a better America today because of people like Mildred and Richard Loving, who took a stand for marriage equality and won a victory for us all. Rest in Peace, Mildred, we won’t forget.

--Nancy Green

Geoff Schoos Analyzes Local School Funding Politics

In his column this week in The Cranston Herald, Geoff Schoos offers some piercing analysis of the social dynamics being enacted in Cranston (and probably elsewhere) as communities scrabble over the dwindling funds for education and other services. From The Cranston Herald:

I’m sick and tired…

Over the past seven years, our schools have been starved of funds. Unfunded mandates, particularly the ineffective No Child Left Behind, come down to local communities from the federal and state governments. Due to the coincident reduction of federal and state aid, municipalities are left on their own to finance with fewer funds an ever increasingly expensive school system. This forces local school departments to juggle and cut program after program until the very core of the system itself is exposed.

Particularly at the local level, the resultant politics cause warring tribes to fight over the remaining scraps of available funding. The interests of municipal workers are pitted against those who work for the school department. The interests of the police and firefighters are pitted against those of teachers. Higher tax levies besiege taxpayers while they receive fewer services. Meanwhile, parents who are concerned with their children’s futures are reduced to appearing before a council finance committee like Oliver Twist politely asking for more gruel.

In response, the council can only listen and mutter comforting platitudes while knowing that there is nothing that can be done that will not offend one or another tribe competing for increasingly scarce resources. Some legislators, notably Cranston’s Hanna Gallo, have been working for years to design a plan by which scarce resources can be fairly and predictably distributed to all Rhode Island communities in order to ensure that each Rhode Island child has the same educational opportunities. [full text]

I was acutely aware of how much financial difficulty we are facing when I received an email reply from Sen. Bea Lanzi saying that, despite our lack of funding for the schools, she would not support a measure for an increase in property taxes to cover education costs. She also commented critically on the school’s decision to pursue a Caruolo actions, saying that this would “cost the schools and city greatly.”

I will be interested to learn what the outcome was of the city council’s Saturday morning meeting to discuss the pending Caruolo action. Anyone who has any news on this, please share.

--Kiersten Marek

Muy Loco Parentis

Why do so many politicians, particularly when they are running for office, feel compelled to treat the electorate like children? Why, when they open their mouths to expound on matters of policy, do they offer us pablum when our guts ache for more substantive fare? Why do they seek to divert our attention from this ache by waggling some glossy controversy or straw man before our unfocused eyes? And why do they believe that our favor or compliance can be had for a cookie or some such empty-caloried treat?

Perhaps there was some confusion. Perhaps, in so zealously pursuing or assuming a role that entails considerable responsibility for the electorate’s safety and well-being, the politicos got carried away and became disoriented. Perhaps their vision blurred and they mistook the crowd at the rally or the reporters at the press conference for their own children. (In a dimly lit room, one might mistake Katie Couric for Chelsea Clinton.)

In fairness, governing and parenting do share certain characteristics. And there is legal precedent for public servants to take on a parental role, of sorts. It’s called in loco parentis (Latin for “in the place of a parent”), and it is most typically applied to school personnel, who bear a certain responsibility for the students in their care. Of course, those who attend school—at least, on the primary and secondary level—are children, so treating them accordingly seems quite reasonable. What excuse do the politicians have?

This past week, as has been widely reported, Mama and Papa Politico (pictured here) offered the oil-glutted citizens of America a petroleum cookie, a temporary suspension of the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax. The fact that “dropping the tax would cost the government around $9 billion, possibly add to the already obscene profits of the oil companies and do little or nothing to actually lower the price of fuel” apparently was less consequential to McCain and Clinton than the prospect of garnering a few votes. Oh, well. They do come across as benevolent parent—and way cooler than that Obama fellow, who thinks such policy is really crazy (muy loco).

It is crazy. Not to mention, foolish and irresponsible. If the politicians insist on treating us like children, then they should at least have the decency and integrity to act like responsible parents. Yeah, a summer vacation from the federal gas tax might be what we want right now (or what we think we want). But it is not what we need and will do little to promote our long-term health and growth. It is muy loco parentis.

Anyway, here’s what Thomas Friedman of the New York Times had to say on the matter earlier this week:

Dumb as We Wanna Be

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies. [full text]

--David L. Jaffe

Preaching to the Terrorized — An Allegory

It was a lovely day for a wedding at the Full Word of God Church, the church of open Bibles and…well, lots of Bibles. The bride and groom had both been home-schooled, and then graduated with honors from Bible College. He was already making a good living selling Amway, and she looked forward to being a full-time Christian mother.

A guy with a guitar played that Paul Stookey wedding song, and then the guest preacher got up to say a few words to the happy couple. The Pastor, sadly, was in the hospital with a kidney stone. At the last minute they were able to get Reverend Ezekiel Bright.

Rev. Bright said a few words about the importance of faithfulness, and then launched with a thundering voice into these verses from the Bible…

“ Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother:

And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity.

… And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them, and her mind was alienated from them.

So she discovered her whoredoms, and discovered her nakedness: then my mind was alienated from her, like as my mind was alienated from her sister.

Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt.

For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.” Ezekiel 23

The Reverend was winding up to share some more of the Holy Word, and elaborate on the ‘issue of horses’ but he never got the chance. Someone tripped over the microphone cord, and in that moment the choir director signaled the start of the Alleluia Chorus while the Ladies Guild surrounded Rev. Bright and hustled him to the back of the church.

The wedding went on with great festivity, and the Ladies plied him with cake until he fell asleep from sugar overload. He woke up in an empty church with a headache and a raging thirst, and a conviction that he had been greatly disrespected. ‘Tripped over the mike’ indeed. That was no accident.

“Lord,” he cried, “why have they forsaken me?”

“What have I done, but tried to share your sacred word?”

“Have you not told us to be urgent in season and out of season, as St. Paul said?”

Tears filmed his eyes as he stared into the darkness of the empty church, and lo– the Lord appeared to him. Jesus walked up close to Rev. Bright and whupped him on the side of the head.

“Haven’t you ever heard of ‘context’?” asked the Lord. “How can you expect to reach people’s hearts and minds when you’re throwing a holy hand grenade at them?”

“But St. Paul said…”, Rev. Bright stuttered…

“Don’t start with me!” growled St. Paul, materializing at Jesus’ right hand. “I was a Jew to the Jews and a Roman to the Romans. Give me credit for knowing a few things about politics.”

Jesus and St. Paul then stood on each side of Rev. Bright. St. Paul whupped him on the other side of his head and then they rose in a celestial cloud and vanished.

Rev. Bright pondered long and hard after that, but he never figured out what the Lord meant by ‘context’. It sounded too much like ‘compromise’. He ended up in a church that shared his vision, with a small congregation in a compound in Idaho.

He still feels hurt that the Full Word of God church would not hear his message about marital faithfulness, so biblical and appropriate to a wedding.

But sometimes it’s not what you say — it’s how you say it.

--Nancy Green

Olson and Kutner Research Video Games and Violence

(This is cross-posted from the blog on my private practice site.)

In 2004, Lawrence Kutner, PhD, and Cheryl K. Olson, ScD, cofounders and directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, started doing research on the effects of video games. With $1.5 million in federal funding from The US Department of Justice, Kutner and Olson set off on an mission to review all of the literature on the subject and then to conduct independent research in order to discover whether there is any real scientific evidence to back up the claim that violence in video games causes real life violence. Their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do was just released on April 15th. An excerpt of the book is available here from Simon and Schuster.

I have not read this book, but it looks like a good one for parents, educators, and helping professionals concerned about violence in video games and violence in society. Olson and Kutner also share about their personal experiences with video games in the first chapter of the book:

Our Journey as Parents

The prolific scientist and author Isaac Asimov famously stated, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’, but ‘That’s funny…’ ” So it shouldn’t be surprising that our first step into what would become several years of full-time research was our casual observations of our son, who liked to play video games.

One of us (Cheryl) is a public health researcher specializing in media influences on health-related behaviors. The other (Larry) is a clinical psychologist and journalist specializing in child development and parent-child communication. We’re old enough to have been teenagers at a time when the few video games available had titles like Pong and Space Invaders. But we’re young enough to feel very comfortable working and playing with computers and other technology.

Neither of us were “gamers” a few years ago; one of us is today. (The other can take it or leave it — a sure sign of a generation gap.) Our teenage son, Michael, had first played simple computer games in childcare when he was about three years old. Those games had crude graphics and agonizingly repetitive (to an adult) music. They involved completing simple tasks, such as lining up an animated fire truck with a mark on the screen so that the cartoon firefighters could rescue a cat in distress. [full text]

--Kiersten Marek

The Fine Art of Blogging in Rhode Island

Ian Donnis does us all proud with an in-depth look at Rhode Island’s blogs:

Matt Jerzyk launched his Rhode Island’s Future blog in January 2005 because, after having worked locally in community- and union-organizing, “I saw first-hand how difficult it was to pene-trate the media cabal with progressive stories of hope and change.” After two months of writing about the then-upcoming 2006 US Senate race between Lincoln Chafee and Sheldon Whitehouse, the blog’s audience grew from a few dozen people to a few hundred.

More than three years later, Rhode Island’s Future is established as a must-read for political types, activists, reporters, and others — including the conservatives who welcome opportunities to scorn the blog’s unapologetically liberal bent — and the site claims 67,000 unique visitors, and 250,000 page views, a month.

Jerzyk, 31, who is about to graduate from Roger Williams University Law School (disclosure: he’s a friend of mine and an occasional Phoenix contributor), is now looking to sell Rhode Island’s Future, to a person or entity that, he hopes, will maintain its character and identity.

Borrowing a phrase from the title of a book by two preeminent liberal bloggers, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong, Jerzyk takes some valedictory satisfaction in how bloggers have “used a new and powerful medium and ‘crashed the gates’ to ensure that information — the most important ingredient in a democracy — would be available to anyone who wanted to write, read, or debate.”

Across the ideological aisle at Anchor Rising, which has emerged as Rhode Island’s leading conservative blog since it debuted in late 2004, a handful of like-minded individuals were motivated by a similar desire to provide a broader and more consequential forum for their ideas and philosophy.

In one example of how it has made an impact, Justin Katz, a 32-year-old carpenter who wields a formidable intellect as Anchor Rising’s most frequent contributor, points to Providence Journal op-ed columnist Ed Achorn’s use of his tart description — “the Economic Death and Dismemberment Act” — for a budget plan, the Economic Growth and Fairness Act, put forward by some liberal Smith Hill Democrats. “A couple of weeks later, [Achorn] e-mailed to ask whether I’d coined it, because he found it to be an audience-pleaser in speeches,” says Katz, via e-mail (as the interviews with other bloggers were conducted for this story).

“More generally, one gets the feeling of being part of the public debate,” Katz adds, such as when something written by one of Anchor Rising’s contributors, about healthcare, human-service spending, step increases for teachers, or tax and migration trends, “precedes a change of tack on the other side. In other words, bloggers of modest influence can still disprove talking points, and if the right people are reading, then those talking points have been successfully exploded.”

Seeded and inspired in part by this lefty-righty duo, the Rhode Island blogosphere has expanded and grown more sophisticated in recent years, offering a new layer of media (and of media criticism) at a time when metro dailies such as the ProJo, bedeviled by an industry-wide collapse of newspaper advertising, offer a smaller, less expansive scope of coverage than in the past.

“This is such an important part of community,” says Kiersten Marek, a liberal social worker who blogs in Cranston. “When something concerns you in life and you put out a call, you want a response. This is, in effect, what I do on my blog. It concerned me that a concrete plant was suddenly being built in our vicinity without neighbors being informed, so I started to talk about it on my blog. A community group rose up to fight it and I joined that group. Members of that group used Kmareka to discuss news about the concrete plant, to strategize on how to deal with the problem, to publicize actions and events, and to support one another’s efforts. You just can’t get that from the newspaper or from TV. That’s why blogs are revolutionary.”

Perhaps, but considering how the best-read Rhode Island blogs — including my own Not for Nothing — tend to get roughly 2000 visitors a day, does this situation speak more to the splintering of a common media with broad appeal? And can blogs truly take up some of the slack being yielded by newspapers, or do they represent a new era of limited, self-selecting audi-ences reading sources that mostly reinforce their pre-existing views and biases?
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There is much more to this story, so read on.

--Kiersten Marek

Bitter Religion–What Would MLK Do?

Former President Jimmy Carter is an evangelical Christian. It was just lucky for him that when he ran for president in 1976 he had his Jesus credentials in place. All our politicians were suddenly born-again, and the voters were acting as if they were born yesterday. Since then, displaying religion is right up there with ‘being fun to have a beer with’ and dodging ‘gotcha’ moments.

When some inflammatory excerpts from sermons by Senator Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, were broadcast on ABC news this March, Senator Clinton was already doing a ‘gotcha’ on this comment Obama made during a fund-raising speech…

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

What, us bitter? No way, that would be unpatriotic. We always look on the bright side of life. And it sounded like Obama was implying that religion could be a bad thing. What is he, against God? Religion is always a measure of how good a person is — the more religious, the better. Right? Like in Northern Ireland, or Iraq.

It seems unfair to castigate Barack Obama for saying that religion can be divisive and reinforce a siege mentality. He’s dealing right now with a former pastor who offers a mixed message of hope and paranoia, who seems to have become so attached to a conspiratorial vision of America that he is, perhaps unwittingly, undermining the candidacy of the first African-American politician who actually has a chance of winning the presidency.

If Senator Obama had not made this connection before, he’s got time now to reflect on how bitterness can distort religion in the Black community, as in other parts of our society. Bitterness can spark loyalty to deeply flawed leaders when those leaders mix their demagoguery with truths that no one else dares to speak. But the prophetic tradition that inspires in church is not a substitute for debate and process in the state house. Religion and politics is a bad combination.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no stranger to politics. He presided for many years over a powerful church in a large denomination with its roots in American history. The Rev. has not been isolated and is not inexperienced. He could have taken this opportunity to build bridges. But even reading his interview with Bill Moyers, a fellow member of the United Church of Christ , who invited him to explain his more inflammatory sermons, Rev. Wright seemed more interested in justifying himself. If he has become too used to preaching to the choir, he has forgotten how to reach out to people who will not understand the context of his anger. He missed a chance there.

Still, he is not without substance. An excerpt from one of Rev. Wright’s sermons, on the attacks of 9/11, contains a great deal of the kind of truth that politicians don’t dare to speak.

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”

The truth is that the attack on 9/11 did not come from nowhere, but from people who resented our country because of our actions in the Mideast. For generations the US has been politically involved, and we’ve made enemies. If we don’t face that truth, then we won’t elect leaders who are able to negotiate peace. ‘They hate us for our freedom’ was never an explanation.

But there’s a difference between a preacher saying that god will judge, and a preacher who claims that a national disaster was inflicted by his personal god to punish his personal enemies. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright can, like his namesake in the Bible, stand outside the walls and exhort. The Rev. John Hagee was invited in to bless Sen. John McCain with his approval and endorsement.

Here are Rev. Hagee’s words after Hurricane Katrina…

…in September, 2006. During an interview with NPR, he said the devastating storm “was, in fact, the judgment of God against … New Orleans.”
The city, he continued, “had a level of sin that was offensive to God” because “there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came.”

Nice. Rev. Hagee had a recent bout of humility where he conceded that he doesn’t have direct access to the mind of god, but I don’t think it will last. He’s lucky he’s white, because white preachers have been talking appalling nonsense for so long we don’t even hear them anymore.

Such as Rev. Jerry Falwell after 9/11…

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

John McCain also sought Rev. Falwell’s blessings. And votes.

And Pat Buchanan, who isn’t reverend, but has the true religion, gives us his take on how white Christians are such wonderful people that even when they are raping, murdering and slaving god turns it around for the good…

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Gee. This helps me understand why someone would rather listen to Louis Farrakhan.

There’s a lot of bitterness, and misdirected anger, being channeled into religion. Barack Obama was harangued for saying so, but it’s true.

When the first attacks on Jeremiah Wright hit the press, Barack Obama responded with a powerful speech on race. He didn’t toss his old friend and mentor under the bus, like a former president I won’t name. But now the Reverend has left him little choice but to distance himself completely. That’s too bad. Because white America and black America need to understand one another better. It won’t help to retreat into our separate churches. We need to keep talking and listening. (Incidentally, this whole mess is a good argument for respecting the separation of church and state. )

And there is a place for socially-minded preachers. But it’s not a comfortable place. Remember that Rev. Martin Luther King did not run around claiming that his personal god smote people, he didn’t spend all his time attending White House dinners, and he didn’t use the Civil Rights movement to get rich. He was more like that Other Guy who also died young. Follow him if you dare.

--Nancy Green