L ife is good. My friend Chill Will from beatbikeblog called me Friday afternoon and said "Hey, I have a pair of tickets to go see Salman Rushdie at 5:30 at the Wallace Stevens Theater at The Hartford. Do you want to go?"

 

Hell, yes. Rushdie is a genius, at least according to State Representative Andrew Fleischman, who we ran into at the Hartford. Rushdie has been in movies, written a song for U2, converted one of his many novels into a play, and survived a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini.

 

And last night, Rushdie, on his first stop promoting his new book The Enchantress of Florence, was funny, despite his interviewer. Chill Will asked why he never listened to moderator Diane Smith on her morning show on WTIC 1080-AM. That's why, Will.

 

RJ Julia Booksellers out of Madison, highlighting the need forindependent booksellers, teamed up with the Connecticut Forum to bring Rushdie to town.

 

The highlight of the evening: Rushdie told a true tale from Persian history about an emporer who chopped up his enemy from his eastern frontier. He literally sent pieces of the vanquished foe's body across his empire. His servants boiled the skull clean, and encrusted it with jewels and gold. The conqueror drank wine from the skull, and enjoyed it. One day, he got an idea that he would send the skull to the Ottomans, his enemies on his western frontier, to show them how powerful he was, and to remind them of their fate. The Ottomans wanted none of it, and they soon invaded and our skull-cup drinking king met a similar devlish fate.

 

Rushdie simply concluded, "This is the kind of species we are. These are the kind of things that we do to each other."

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A high school-themed column containing reasons I find for hope and disdain about the future.

 

Hope: That a former Echoes from the Streets’ student who called me the other night, asking for help, but needed to meet me in person because she feared talking about it on the phone, makes the right choice.

 

Disdain: That she even got herself into the situation she is in. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write about it in the future. Trust me when I say it’s a doozy.

 

Hope: Listening to arguments at a moot court from future lawyers at Watertown High School last week, I said to myself, there are some smart kids navigating their way through the underfunded public education system.

 

The moot court gathered lawyers, principals, a judge and state representative Sean Williams to act as the Supreme Court, and students argued the Seattle Community Schools case about voluntary desegregation.

 

Our Supreme Court voted in favor of racial integration and diversity as a compelling interest in high school, whereas the real SCOTUS voted against it. Whatever the case, it was fun to watch students ably approach difficult Constitutional law concepts.

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Thanks Ned Lamont. I've never said it before, but I feel I need to pay you some gratitude.

 

Thanks, Ned, for reminding how valuable Habeas Corpus is. You spent $15 million or so of your own money - a sum that boggles my mind. You could have bought yourself a 100-foot sailboat and run it with a full crew for four years or so. You could have bought a bunch of houses out of foreclosure and made a mint flipping them.

 

Instead, to speak for the Constitution, you put yourself through hell. And you survived. Anyone who doubted your sincerity should eat their hats. I heard you on Jon Dankosky's Where We Live Wednesday not once, but twice. I tuned in at 9 a.m., driving to New Haven. I even called in, and asked a question - 275-4266.

 

On my way home at 8 p.m., I tuned in again. I wanted to hear my question, and I wanted to listen to David Sirota again. I agree with him. You are a revolutionary. I'm sorry I didn't see it sooner.

 

You bought a platform, and you took a huge defeat. You invested $15 million and you lost, yet you stood back up, dusted yourself off and jumped back on your horse. You demonstrate self-confidence and maturity.

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Sometimes, the universe blesses us with access into foreign worlds we normally can't see.

 

For example, when you google "Mayor Eddie Perez" - my website - the40yearplan.com - is one of the top ten hits. And it seems that people mistake my content critical of Perez for that of the Mayor’s own site.

 

At first, I though some jokester, trying to have a good laugh, sent me various e-mails from the “Contact Us” page of my site, pulling my leg about my page being the Mayor’s.

 

I mean, after Jon Lender this month broke the hidden story from a few years back about lawyer Maureen Duggan’s “anonimus” whistleblower parking attendant letter to state ethics chair attorney Rosemary Guiliano about Alan Plofsky at the Ethics Commission, I don’t put anything by anyone.

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Mass media personalities have a responsibility to hold people in positions of power accountable. WPLR morning show hosts Chaz and AJ continue to land great interview subjects, yet they continue to grant deferential treatment to these public officials.

 

And the big picture - particularly on transit - flies right by. Let me say that I think Chaz and AJ have the best morning show in the state. But they still don’t meet the standards that our democracy should demand on its airwaves.

 

Consider this critique of their 50,000 watt press releases not just in the interest of deflating hot air bags, but in the interest of improving what is already good to become better.

 

For example, Tuesday morning, Chaz and AJ gave outgoing Speaker of the House Jim Amann at least 30 minutes of air time, where he answered live listener calls.

 

Compare that to the time they gave my attorney, Norman A. Pattis, last week. Not only is Norm funnier than any politician I have ever met, but he actually attempted to discuss a potential ethical lapse of a state cop who landed his fiancé by getting her phone number in exchange for not giving her a speeding ticket.

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Websites I like and am adding as permanent links:

 

Scary Bunnies - For the Hartford Lovers, the Hartford Haters and Everybody Else

 

Beat Bike Blog - they're even getting free schwag now. Hopefully, some of it will go the alley cat we are scheduling for July 26, 2008. Save the date. Hartford.

 

1,000 Friends Connecticut - an effective smart growth group.

 

Mira! Hartford - musings, photos and video clips from Helder Mira at Rabbit Ears Media.

 

Kung-Fu Monkey - Your monkey's kung fu is not strong, so says the tagline. Writer John Rogers has one of the great all-time posts, and his links are awesome, as are his Warren Ellis references. And I dream of being a television writer when not in law school

 

The Angry Arab News Service- listen to the other side for a while.

 

And it's Memorial Day. Send any soldier a package of love and care.

 

My four year old niece caught a pigeon in Bryant Park last week. Does anyone know of anyone who has ever captured a pigeon? Witness Auntie Rubi described it thus:

"She refused to let the pigeon go, claiming she won it, she was the fastest, it was too slow and as she had been chasing birds for years this one was her prize to keep. Any attempts to ply her with ice cream and carousel rides, or to appeal to her sense of humanity wouldn’t get her to release the struggling bird from her tiny glorious fist. Threat of bird poop, however, was enough to get her to unhand her victory."

Race humor: Stuff White People Like: Bumper Stickers. Grammar. The Wire. The Ivy League.

 

I'm taking a summer class at QUSL called The American Legal History of Race Relations, taught by CT Superior Court Judge Barry Stevens.

 

This past week, we discussed how the Founding Fathers not just acknowledged but perpetuated and sanctioned slavery with Constitutional protections at the founding of the nation.

 

The first week, we talked about racism. When the political debate in America focuses on racism, it often means many different things to many different people. But if we all agreed on the definition, perhaps we could move forward with the issue.

 

For the record, Random House Unabridged:

Racism: a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

Why am I in law school? Not just because I like learning, but because years ago, I and many others foresaw doom in the newspaper industry. I heard at the CT Society of Professional Journalists' annual dinner the other night that people lamented a downturn in submissions for awards. Geez? I wonder why.

 

Paper Cuts is a handy map of the United States, showing what newspapers are responsible for what portions of the more than 3,000 journos who lost their jobs this year. It might help explain the problem for SPJ. (Note: it does not count the exit from the news industry of one very heroic friend who walked out of his job at the Hartford Courant because management gave him an ultimatum.)

 

Thus, real reporting is now done online. For instance, Andy Thibault at the Cool Justice Report continues to make life difficult for the Douchebags at Lewis Mills High School who dared mess with the free speech rights of Avery Doninger.

 

This round, Thibault won a Freedom of Information Act complaint, and he now has the right to see how much money the school system and the taxpayers are shelling out for lawyers to defend the administrators.

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Luis Cotto, City Councilor extraordinaire, checks in with this post from the Hartford Democratic Town Committee Meeting last night. He calls it "As the World Turns, Hartford Style." I only ask, is our democracy really this pathetic?

 

5th District {drumroll} - by a margin of 8 votes to 5, Abe Giles won the nomination for the upcoming elections. He gave a somewhat forgettable speech but the memorable moment came when madam deputy speaker rose and said “Everyone get ready to pull up your sleeves…I’m not planning on giving up my seat.” The battle has begun. Sources told me that her fall from grace was inevitable when she backed I. Charles Matthews for city Mayor against El Alcalde this past year. This is soooooo Hartford. Let’s wait til one of our elected officials gets a position of leadership where Hartford can just maybe be best served and then kick them out.

More from IONHartford...

 

Yes, loyal readers, it's time for a new quarterly column feature: the awarding of the Franky.

 

The Franky is a booby prize for the worst abuse of taxpayer dollars to promote a politician's career through propaganda. Dear audience, you know I am talking about the dishonest practice of franking privileges. Here at the 40-Year Plan, we have selected an imaginary panel of experts to come up with awards.

Headlines in mass media shout "Another Hartford Shooting" seemingly daily. But there stands Eddie Perez addressing a militaristic assemblage of the latest round of uniformed Hartford Police cadets. The credit-card headline: "Public Safety is Priceless."

 

Ushering in the first-ever Franky for the lifetime acheivement of fleecing taxpayers, it's the Spring 2008 installment of the static Eddie-centric universe known as "The Mayor's Update."

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Vacation done, I finished reading Art Spiegelman’s two-part masterpiece Maus on the flight to JFK from Burbank.

 

Maus describes the amazing survival of Vladek Spiegelman in Auschwitz. Art, his cartoonist son, penned the history, with chilling detail, like Vladek’s nocturnal vision accurately foretelling the precise date of departure from a concentration camp.

 

It was a quick but heavy read, and I needed a walk after I finished. Wandering the airplane aisle, I spotted a headline on a seat back tv: "Edwards to Endorse Obama."

 

I hurried back to my seat for a camera close up of Obama announcing his guilt about the DNC punishing Michigan. As penance, he brought a surprise: John Edwards to drive another nail in Hillary's coffin.

 

Thought Zero: Funny how Clinton warns that Obama will not win the Wolverine State in November because of the Dean sanctions, but there Obama stood on stage, soaking in adulation from the crowds and Edwards.

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If neighborhood revitalization zones have no power as Asylum HILL NRZ chair Bernie Michel claims, then why would State Representative Art Feltman have submitted a bill to strip an NRZ's power to comment on housing projects for persons with developmental disabilities?

 

Feltman’s House Bill No. 5637, An Act Concerning Local Review of Community Residences in Multi-Family Buildings, died on the vine. Nor will it likely be resurrected next year because Feltman is retiring from public service.

 

But the raging storm that Hartford 2000 and its member NRZs kicked up in response to Feltman's proposal reveals that Feltman seems to have reacted poorly to problems he had in dealing with NRZs, and that H2K and the NRZs got bent out of shape for no reason.

 

In short, they all acted with the requisite human folly required of players on the political scene in Hartford.

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