Radioball

The Holden Landmark Corp., publisher of the Landmark, the Millbury-Sutton Chronicle, the Leominster Champion and four other publications has bought alternative weekly Worcester Magazine from Worcester Publishing Ltd.

According to Gareth Charter, Holden Landmark Corp. publisher, Landmark initiated acquisition talks. Charter and Worcester Publishing, which is owned and published by Allen W. Fletcher, “have been actively working on this for much of this year,” Charter said. “We initiated this, and we pushed it in the final stages,” he said.

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Apparently I’m not the only one seeing more smart© cars on the road each day, if your not familiar with these adorable little things imagine a shopping cart mating with a Japanese motorcycle; that’s it, but smaller.

I really do like these things and if I didn’t need to travel more than a few miles everyday would probably consider buying one. But I don’t have that luxury, I do however have a confession for current owners. I want to push your car on its side. Bad. I know it sounds terrible and you must trust that I wont act on this impulse, but every time one of these little guys zips past I get the nearly uncontrollable urge to break into a sprint and just tackle the thing. I figured I must be the only one, really how many people could have this problem? Well it seems a few, a quick google search shows the earliest report of this new urban form of cow tipping dates back to spring of 2005.

I’m going to make a prediction here, that by 2018 car tipping will be so prevalent insurance companies wont cover righting tipped cars.

According to a Suffolk University poll, 72% of Massachusetts residents look forward to beginning the process of decriminalizing marijuana.

Of the three questions on the Massachusetts ballot this November, only one question — #2 the decriminalization of marijuana — appears all but certain to pass, according to a poll analysis released today by 7NEWS/Suffolk University. Seventy-two percent favored the proposed law, which would replace the criminal penalties for possession of up to one ounce of marijuana to a civil penalty of forfeiture of the marijuana and a fine of $100. Twenty-two percent opposed the proposed law.

“The public may be signaling that pursuing small-time marijuana users is a waste of taxpayer resources,” said David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University. “This issue suggests that there is a Libertarian streak in the thinking of Massachusetts voters.”

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Tickets to see Cheech and Chong at the Orpheum in Boston

So a good friend who happens to catch all the things I miss in the daily T&G just shot me this nugget from yesterdays NYT wire.

White minority is likely by 2042
Census projections see speedup in switch to new proportions

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than was anticipated just a few years ago.

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The story itself is forgettable, scaring the ‘native’ population has been a pastime in the US since a few hundred thousand of my closest relatives piled onto a boat off the coast of Ireland and started sailing West. What is absolutely amazing yet totally predictable is the 64 (and counting) comments.
My favorite and one of the erliest in the thread:

I got news for you we don’t have to wait untill 2042. We whites are already the Minority , all you have to do is drive through downtown Worcester or any large town in America. Either that or just look at the Court records . We need to start enforcing deportation laws NOW.
-In Auburn

OK, I don’t have time to personally educate every mildly retarded, white trash buffoon who thinks the Worcester suburbs are some sort of cultural high water mark. So if any of you happen to cross paths with one of these douche bags can you please inform them that Worcester is 77.6% white according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 American Community Survey. So if you have a problem with anything in Worcester, blame 77.6% of it on Whitey and the rest on District 2 City Councilor Phil Palmeri.
Thank You.

A few people have asked me recently both here on RBDN and in the real world where they can find out things like the number of people the City of Worcester employes or what they get paid. There’s no easy answer to that with out a course on public records requests, but a quick and dirty solution has been available for awhile from the Boston Herald.
Have fun kids.

Worcester Payroll

The continued discussion of how to regulate Worcester street vendors Tuesday may have been the most exciting City Council meeting Worcester has had in some time, but not in a good way. It was a ridiculous exercise in just how juvenile, provincial and poorly informed some of our elected and appointed officials are. In particular, Mayor Lukes and Councilor Palmieri went out of their way to embarrass themselves and the City of Worcester. The eye rolling, face making and insults hurled at colleagues and constituents, you have to wonder if these two even realize people actually watch the meetings at home. Foolishness aside, the opposing armies in this debate have defined themselves and in effect, speak for themselves. It’s actually quite interesting when you look at the lists, as they break out into rather obvious personality types.

Representing Team Bat Shit Insane:

Mayor Konnie Lukes
At-Large Councilor Joseph Petty
District 2 Councilor Philip Palmieri
District 3 Councilor Paul Clancy
District 4 Councilor Barbara Haller
District 5 Councilor William Eddy

Two things jump out here. First and most obvious, all but one of the district councilors are in favor of eliminating street vendors from Worcester. These are the people whose entire voting constituency could fit into your average elementary school auditorium. And there is also some overlap between the district councilors and the other demographic at play in this group, people who are likely to be found at an early bird special. If we were to only focus on food vendors here, the group that want’s to get rid of vendors using a late night public safety argument is also the group that hasn’t seen last call in 20 years, if ever. Think about who that, these are the folks defining how you should be allowed to enjoy your city and they’re also the people who are least likely to experience your city outside of normal business hours. The one unexplained exception is my district councilor Bill Eddy. I still can’t wrap my head around what he’s doing on this side of things. Best guess, a bad sausage at the St Patrick’s Day parade in ‘93 and he’s holding a grudge.

Representing people who get out of the house every now and then:

At-Large Councilor Michael Germain
At-Large Councilor Gary Rosen
At-Large Councilor Frederick Rushton
At-Large Councilor Kathleen Toomey
District 1 Councilor Joffrey Smith

Oh look, the one district councilor in this list is the one district councilor who you’ll actually see out in the city after the sun goes down. What’s most interesting about this crew, none of them seem to be against regulating street vendors. They’re just asking someone, anyone to explain the what and whys of regulating street vendors. An important distinction and one we don’t see enough in Worcester. Simply going to the Chief of Police and asking him if there is a Public Safety component to street vending is not the same as getting a fully fleshed explanation of what exactly that public safety component is. Any idiot could come up with a heat map of arrests for a given area and make an argument there is a risk to the public in said area. Explaining how they got to that conclusion takes a little work. Which brings us to our final waring faction…

People who don’t actually have anything to say but are more than willing to talk into a microphone:

Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme
City Manager Mike O’Brien
City Solicitor David Moore

These guys were astounding on Tuesday night, collectively they took up a majority of mic time but literally said nothing. No numbers, no statistics, no maps of affected areas and even reports requested by the Council for this meeting were nowhere to be found; they came with nothing. Nothing but continued assurance that they actually do know how to redevelop an urban area. The Chief gets an extra special prize for the quote of the week…

“The city of Worcester changes after midnight.”

Yes Chief, it actually changes into a city in more than population designation. A place where people actually get out of their cars, off of their couches and interact with other citizens for better or worse; the city is starting to come to life. We’ve been waiting over two decades for that change, please stop fucking that up.

T&G coverage
Womag coverage

I always believed technology was going to redefine what it meant to be politically active. Lower bars for entry, give voices to the disenfranchised and reintroduce entire demographics to the electorate.
In some ways it has. But mostly it’s just accelerated American national politics progression to full fledged side show.

Case in point, President Obama is using twitter to make sure you (and at least 57,882 others) are the very first to know who his VP pick is. Sweet! But all I really want to know is what Michelle had for breakfast.

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Here are just a few of the completely nonsensical arguments laid out in todays Telegram and Gazette by Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme regarding the cities new and ‘improved’ police detail policy for drinking establishments.

A bar or club may pay a couple of hundred dollars for one police officer to work a detail for four hours, but the city can face hundreds of thousands of dollars in liability if the officer has to use force to subdue an unruly patron and/or is injured while doing so, the chief said yesterday. The new policy should address that issue as well, he said.

So the obvious and immediate result of this policy will be either rebate checks to city taxpayers or increased funding to other city services? I can’t wait to see the savings during next years budget hearings.

“Think about it from this perspective; an officer is hired for $200 and the bar gets the officer, but the city has the liability if the officer is sued or if the officer is injured,” Chief Gemme said. “There is much more liability for the city than there is on the bar owner.”

This is similar to the broken logic the city of Worcester is using to attack street vendors. Somehow in the Chiefs mind the city is under attack by businesses and law enforcement officers should never worry about having to subdue or arrest an individual. Isn’t that a rather basic component of the job description?

The chief said yesterday that when his department noticed a spike in assaults and other crime around bars in May, June and July, and when he found officers had to strike people with their batons while at bar details in the first weekends of July — a new policy was needed for safety reasons. He did that while the policy announced yesterday was still being crafted.

“We looked at the data and what was taking place and we knew we had to make a decision,” he said. “The decision behind the two police officers working the bar details together was for officer safety first and foremost.”

‘We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.’
This is a city built on a foundation of logical fallacies. Worthy of note, this is the same broken logic being used to justify putting the military on the street in Italy, today.

Chief Gemme said since Jan. 1, four out of the nine times an officer had to strike someone with a service baton it was at a bar or alcohol-serving establishment. In July, officers on two different occasions had to defend themselves with their baton and accidentally struck a person on the head during a struggle. Striking someone in the head is not authorized, but it occurred during the struggle, he said.

So now simply by an officer yelling “I COST THIS BAR 1/25th MORE THAN PREVIOUSLY, CITIZEN” all training issues involving use of force will be rectified. Color me unimpressed.

Since 2006, the city has paid out $300,000 in settlements because of incidents that were directly or indirectly related to bar details. Chief Gemme said one of the problems was the bar details did not have any supervision.

“I felt we were completely vulnerable in terms of bar details because of lack of supervision,” he said. “This policy will now allow us to address our supervision and police officer safety.”

On more than one occasion I’ve made snarky admittedly churlish comments about oversight for the overseers. Apparently they were neither snarky or churlish, but in the eyes of the City Administration spot on. Unless my public school reading comprehension skills are on the fritz again, Chief Gemme is telling the city of Worcester his officers can not be trusted to make good, rational decisions under stress. I didn’t say it, the Cheif did.
Think about that next time you interact with the police in our city.

Excellent piece in The New Republic regarding population shifts in American cities. Some of the comments are as interesting as the actual story.

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be “demographic inversion.” Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.

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This is the sort of sophomoric, thin blue line bullshit that fosters distrust of authority within the general public. When it comes from the Chief of Police of the second largest city in New England, as opposed to the Sheriff in a small mid-west county, you’re pretty much screwed.

This may be difficult to comprehend if you never wore the uniform and pinned on the badge, but given the choice between the viability of a business and public safety, I will first and foremost address police officer safety.

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State Rep John Binienda makes news today with a plan to track who’s buying pre-paid cell phones in an effort to show criminals we’re tough on crime. Apparently by showing criminals we really don’t understand technology.

“There has always been a concern that prepaid services in general enable anonymity in wireless usage and that’s in part a concern because it lends to its use by criminals,” said Fedor Smith, an analyst who monitors the prepaid cellphone industry for Boston-based consulting and research firm Atlantic-ACM. “If you’re calling other prepaid wireless costumers, there’s a completely anonymous network of people.”

Government has officially become your mom, searching through your sock drawer every day after you leave for school because Phil Donahue convinced her you were smoking dope.
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This comes only a week after Governor Patrick signed into law H. 4811, Massachusetts version of Jessicas Law, which along the way picked up this amendment (which has nothing to do with protecting kids) while nobody was looking:

SECTION 3. Chapter 271 of the General Laws is hereby amended by striking out section 17B, as so appearing, and inserting in place thereof following section:-
Section 17B. Except as otherwise prohibited under section 2703 of Title 18 of the United States Code, whenever the attorney general or a district attorney has reasonable grounds to believe that records in the possession of (i) a common carrier subject to the jurisdiction of the department of telecommunications and energy, as defined in paragraph (d) of section 12 of chapter 159; or (ii) a provider of electronic communication service as defined in subparagraph (15) of section 2510 of Title 18 of the United States Code; or (iii) a provider of remote computing service as defined in section 2711 of Title 18 of the United States Code, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, the attorney general or district attorney may issue an administrative subpoena demanding all such records in the possession of such common carrier or service, and such records shall be delivered to the attorney general or district attorney within 14 days of receipt of the subpoena. No such common carrier or service, or employee thereof shall be civilly or criminally responsible for furnishing any records or information in compliance with such demand. Nothing in this section shall limit the right of the attorney general or a district attorney otherwise to obtain records from such a common carrier or service pursuant to a search warrant, a court order or a grand jury or trial subpoena.
Notwithstanding the provisions of this section, a subpoena issued pursuant to this section shall not be used to obtain records disclosing the content of electronic communications, or subscriber account records disclosing internet locations which have been accessed including, but not limited to, websites, chat channels and newsgroups, but excluding servers used to initially access the internet. Nor shall the recipient of such a subpoena provide any such records accessed, in response to such a subpoena.

For those of you whose legalese is a little shaky, let me translate ‘In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the AG and DA can get your phone, internet and email records with nothing more than a hunch and a strongly worded letter‘. No really, that’s what it says.

A good week for freedom and capitalism all around. Surely now, with these exciting new tools, we’ll capture that pesky Emmanuel Goldstein!

This week Worcester Magazine reports the closing of the Alta Café at the hands of the Worcester License Commission. A mixed blessing for the neighborhood to be sure, as they’re slowly running out of people to blame common bad behavior and terrible public safety oversight on.

As expected, local curmudgeon Billy Breault wins the “I’ll eat my hat” award with this line:

“I think it will make for a much safer area.”

Glad you went on the record with that Billy, now when the area is exactly the same a year from now we can completely discount you and your inane opinions.

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Here are just a few of the individuals Mayor Lukes and Councilor Palmeri insist pose a serious threat to the city of Worcester.