The third act of the tragedy of John Rowland – a short act of revenge - played itself out in the stage of American politics this week.

 

As the curtain rises, the audience sees a barren economic landscape. Our hero, a down on his luck politician with a federal corruption conviction on his record, sits in his easy chair reading a newspaper. He is trying to get his mind off the fact that his post-prison career as a motivational speaker isn't paying for his expensive tastes.

 

The headlines scream "Stock Market Plunge." It seems as if the Federal Reserve Bank can't utter a peep without sending stock markets across the globe into a tizzy.

 

Below that story, he scans another story about Congress and the President, a man who used to call him Johnny Boy, talking about an economic stimulus package that must be "timely, targeted and temporary."

 

Our tragic hero frowns when he gets to the third graf in the story and understands that the stimulus package hailed by the Bush administration – tax refunds to the citizen body - is stealing a page out of Johnny Boy's democratic laboratory book.

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Ed. Note: Heather Brandon blogs on Urban Compass about Springfield and Hartford, and this is a decent post about Mayor Eddie Perez and the silver bullet theory of economic development.

 

A few months after a recommendation from the Urban Land Institute to develop an existing and possibly outdated sports and entertainment arena in downtown Hartford, now known as the XL Center, Mayor Eddie Perez offered up last week a new report from consultant HOK Sport that recommends razing the old center and building a new one at a possible price tag of $400 million.

An article in the Courant today by Jeffrey Cohen reported:

The future of the center has been a hot-button issue since 2005, when the arena’s steward, the Connecticut Development Authority, decided to study its options. In the process, the authority’s consultants—which included the consultants hired by the city—told it that the center was outdated, too small and not right for major league professional sports.

In contrast, Perez’s study wasn’t as much focused on the health of the center as it was on the feasibility of building a new arena downtown. That study said that the Hartford area has the right demographic mix to support major league professional sports and a new arena.

But its corporate support is uncertain, and an “NHL franchise may struggle to generate sufficient revenues from the corporate sector.”

The article also notes that, as promised in his inaugural address, Perez is “assembling a task force that will gauge whether there is enough corporate support to pay for suites, seats, and advertising to make such a venture worthwhile.”

Click Here to go to Urban Compass...

 

Tongues have been wagging across the city the past few weeks about the curious hiring of Andrea Comer as council aide for newly-elected Councilman Matt Ritter.

 

It piqued my interest, too, so I set out to learn a bit more.

 

I'll start with Comer's political history. She used to work for Mayor Eddie Perez, campaigning for him in the fall of 2001, and then joining his mayoral staff. She left his office in August 2002 and claims there was no bad blood between them.

 

She transferred to the school system for a short period of time, exiting her job as spokeswoman when former Superintendent Tony Amato departed. Comer then went to the city's Health and Human Services Department.

 

In October 2005, Comer took a leave of absence from HHS to care for her father, Thomas Burton Jones. Shortly after that, she was elected in November 2005 to the Board of Education, chaired by Perez.

 

When Mr. Jones passed away in December 2007, Mayor Perez attended the funeral and issued a proclamation commemorating Mr. Jones' passing.

 

Comer has also been president of the North End African American Alliance, worked for New Haven mayor John DeStefano and before serving Ritter, she was a project manager for the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven.

And last year, she launched an ill-fated primary challenge for City Council. After she was disqualified on petition technicalities, Comer volunteered for the campaign of I. Charles Mathews in his quest to unseat Perez, and she was a vocal critic of the Mayor and his management style.

 

So, in the loyalty-oath climate fostered by Perez and his chief of staff Matt Hennessy, astute watchers have characterized the hiring of a former staffer turned Mayoral opponent as an overtly hostile act against Perez.

 

Yet while the Mayor never issued an ultimatum, Ritter acknowledged that Perez expressed reservations about hiring Andrea Comer as his council aide.

 

"He mentioned the Board of Education thing," Ritter said. "He did mention not only her running for Council, but that she worked against him. But he never gave me an ultimatum. We had an honest conversation and he ultimately said 'It's your decision.'"

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How does one follow up a year in which one visited Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Giza, and the Hartford Police Department lockup?

 

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that 2008 will be interesting. For years, my travel bug begged me to England and Egypt. As a child I sang both "London Bridge" and "KingTut," and this past year, I stood in front of both.

 

Once you've reached goals you held for decades, what do you do? I have some ideas. The first and foundational one comes from an evening I spent at Dublin's Malahide Castle with a friend named John and the Artic Monkeys, the alt-rock sound of June 2007.

 

John, a Connecticut businessman visiting his wife, a law prof, in Dublin, happened upon free tickets to the show. While on the train to Malahide Castle, he asked me what the 40-Year Plan was.

 

Well, I answered, it's not going to happen overnight. Social change takes time.

 

What social change? He inquired.

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Fresh from an email I sent to a professor at Quinnipiac Law today, the latest outrage (Prof's response posted at end. Also QUSL Black Law Student Association has taken an interest in this):

 

Dean King -

 

I am doing some reading for class tomorrow, examining problems, and on page 62, problem d presents a case about a lost watch. The answer is presented in the form of Barwick v Barwick 33 NC 80 (1850). Unfortunately, the answer does not discuss a lost watch, but it deals with slaves as property. * (see below for some of the offending language.)

 

Understanding that in 1850 in North Carolina, the holding of slaves was legal, and that contemporaneously, this was good law, yet I am hoping you can help me understand how despite the outlawing of slavery, this case is good law. According to Westlaw, there are no red flags on this case, therefore, it has not been overruled.

 

Whether or not it is good law, how it is in good taste for a textbook to be using it as an example?

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Okay, this is a brainstorm blog. I'm trying to suss out good ideas from bad for a dead tree media column this week, and these topics have been itching my brain.

 

In New York state, good old Gov. Eliot Spitzer in his state of the state address recently proposed free college tuition for returning vets serving in the War on Terror; the Empire State's version of a G.I. bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

It's a start. Next step would see Gov. Spitzer exercise his constitution to block the construction of Broadwater, Shell Oil's much-sought-after LNG regassification plant slated for the middle of Long Island Sound.

 

Friday afternoon, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the corporate monster's construction, pending New York State environmental approval. Spitzer has until Feb. 12 to nix the plan. Pundits (not pollsters) recently predicted he would say no, but a year ago, the Conventional Wisdom had him greenlighting the energy infrastructure project.

 

But now, times are different. In an angry press release, Gov. M. Jodi Rell raged at how the FERC fucked up by approving Shell's permit application.

 

"Governor M. Jodi Rell today utterly rejected the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s environmental impact study of the proposed Broadwater liquefied natural gas facility, saying FERC’s conclusion that the project would have little effect on the
Long Island Sound is ludicrous. 'We will challenge this absurd and indefensible agency decision in court,' Governor Rell said."

 

Hooray, Jodi! We'll see you on the picket flotilla. Next up: massive conservation efforts, starting with hiring a manager to oversee the state Office of Brownfield Remediation and Development.

 

This office is mandated by new legislation, which probably emerged from a December 1998 Legislative Program Review and Investidgations Committee report titled Brownfields in Committee (hey, government may be slow, but it shows some signs of life).

 

According to this report, Connecticut has between 622 and 950 brownfields. 1,000 Friends thinks the number is much higher.

 

And props to Bryan over at the Mac store in West Farms. Saturday afternoon, that place was hopping like a Maldivian fish market.

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I'm stateside again. After my exhausting first full day on the North American continent in which I went to law school, work, Mickey Allen's wake and a fundraiser for the Working Families Party, I felt downright thrilled about Hartford, CT, USA.

 

Maybe it's the optimism of the new year, maybe it's warmth of friends and family that I have missed, maybe it's the fun of seeing an old place with new eyes.

 

Maybe it's that I am not freezing, and I was okay landing in JFK airport in just shorts, a t-shirt and flip flops (don't ask, but the next time you're passing through Bombay and want to spend the night in town, make sure you get a visa beforehand.)

 

So by the time I expired Monday night, I felt a sun shine more powerful than that I left in Florida in August.

 

The day started with an NPR debate about the inability of ironic cynicism as delivered by late night comics like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to handle the politics of hope, like that supposedly represented by Barack Obama.

 

Maybe it was Obama's Iowan triumph, which I learned of in the airport in the Maldives Friday, that sparked this smile for country and future.

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On a rare day off in southern Egypt back in November, before we set off for Oman, I wanted an authentic Egyptian experience.

 

I thought about going to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, but I nixed that because I would have needed a day off from my day off. I would have had to get up at 5 a.m. to catch a bus in one of the massive tourist convoys, and would not have gotten back until after midnight.

 

Because of a terrorist attack at Luxor a few years ago, where fundamentalists mowed down a bunch of tourists with machine guns, the police escort massive bus convoys, and it takes forever.

 

Instead, I decided to go north to see an ancient port called Al Quayser. I hitched a ride to the main road out of instacity Port Ghalib (which is apparently financed by casino mogul Sol Kirschner of Bahamian Atlantis and Mohegan Sun fame).

 

The nice trucker dropped me off at a traffic circle where a dozen cabs waited. I haggled with Abu Salam, a cabbie who gave me a ride 45 minutes north to Al Quayser for $7.

 

Desert on the left, and Red Sea to the right, the cabbie and I didn't have much to say. I learned in my weak Arabic that he had a few kids and lived near Al Quayser, and that they don't get many Americans in those parts.

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Watching clouds pass over the western face of the Pyramid of Cheops, I had to pinch myself - was I really here. I've been waiting most of my life to get to the Pyramids at Giza, and there I stood.

 

In seventh grade, I researched and wrote my science fair project about mummification. For the display, I mummified a doll. I built a little funerary catalfalque, with clay Canopic jars, and even had a statue of a priest with a jackal mask on.

 

My obsession with Egypt netted me first prize, and I was as determined then as ever to visit this strange, ancient land. The opportunity presented itself on a Sunday morning. We needed a three hour ride to get to Cairo from Port Said, and since we had to be back that night to traverse the Suez Canal, we had about eight hours in Cairo.

 

In perspective, I helped drive a boat 5,000 miles across the Atlantic and Mediterranean for three months, and the best I can get is eight hours in Cairo. Okay. At least I got to see the Pyramids.

 

And not in a million years did I expect the Pyramids at Giza to be in an urban environment. I always imagined they'd be in deep desert, like years ago, when Teddy Roosevelt made his safari. But now, the city has cordoned off about six square kilometers for nine pyramids and the Sphinx, surrounded by dense city.

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The lights of Egypt glowed faintly on the southern Mediterranean horizon, but much closer shone the beacons of an offshore oil derrick, pumping black gold through the thick salt night.

 

So long as our ship, traversing the Red Sea, doesn't hit the offshore oil platforms that ubiquitously dot the horizon, mark the navigation charts and crowd the radar, they're of no concern, right?

 

Yet the Middle Eastern oil rigs do concern me, the same way a crack handshake in the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Farmington and Laurel does.

 

The sentiment doesn't arise after spotting an oil pump in Pennsylvania, or a field of them in Texas. The Med rigs reminded me of Eastern Syria - it's the Middle East - where those pump fill barrels, something like 50 percent of the world’s supply of them.

 

It feels like that scene in Dune, the Frank Herbert classic sci-fi thriller, where Paul the hero realizes that the massive desert sand worms are the source of the spice which allows his civilization to fold time and space, traveling light years in the blink of an eye.

 

The oil is the energy that helps us travel. The oil is life itself. We eat the oil (the gas that powers the tractors, the phosphate fertilizers which feed the crops, the gas for the trucks to deliver the food to market, etc).

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*Dry means no alcohol. The Maldives is an Islamic country. No booze. Dry does not mean drought.

 

Just a few degrees north of the equator, it rains here often. And when it does rain in Male or the surrounding islands of the atoll, the air thickens with moisture and rain drops swim down from the sky like massive schools of tiny fish.

 

 

These fish are in the fish market in Male - 2,000 square feet of stink and fresh yellow fin for about $1 a pound. That means sashimi, tuna marinated in olive oil for pasta, tuna pan seared in a sesame seed rub, tuna and egg in a peruvian potato salad.

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No posts for almost a month? Such is life on the high seas.

 

I am in Male, in the Maldives right now, sitting at a little internet cafe/juice bar with Lionel Richie playing, and a bunch of Japanese tourists chattering behind me.

 

The Maldives sits 4 degrees north of the equator, just to the west of the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a gorgeous atoll, and supposedly the diving around here is great. But the waters off Male, the main city, are dirty - dozens of dead fish and three-mile long diesel spills dirty.

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