Ed. Note: This is my print column, written on Feb. 5, run on Feb. 6 in the Hartford News.

 

Yep. I pulled the lever for Obama this morning. In the pouring rain, I moseyed to Grace Lutheran Church, filled in the appropriate bubble, and cast my vote for the freshman Senator from Illinois.

 

As I took pictures in the Hartford Civic Center Monday evening and listened to Obama, I was skeptical. I understand it is likely that Teddy "Camelot, Jr." Kennedy knighted Barack and brought him to the Round Table because of a personal grudge against the Clintons.

 

I understand that most of what Obama promises – affordable college, universal health care, regular raises in minimum wages, raises for teachers, an end to the Iraq War, an end to the War in Afghanistan, 40 mpg fuel standards - he may never deliver upon. But he's talking a language that isn't perpetual warfare, terror and fear.

 

I also understand that once the primary is over, and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party - the Democratic Leadership Council – assumes control of the Dems' platform, his rhetoric may change. Although Obama is not a member of the DLC, he has taken campaign contributions from them.

Link...

 

"I grew up with guns and I like 'em," isn't a sentence you normally hear from a Democrat.

 

But former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. is not your regular Democrat. He's a Blue Dog Democrat from Memphis.

 

And Wednesday night at Quinnipiac University's Alumni Hall in Hamden, CT, Ford professed his love for guns and God in front 200 students, faculty and community members.

 

As part of Quinnipiac's Black History Month celebration, Ford, who lost a hotly-contested 2006 Senate contest to Republican Robert Corker, addressed the challenges facing America, namely, energy independence, creating global peace and stability and restoring America's brand image abroad.

Link...

 

This morning I did not want to get out of bed. I had a nightmare about police surveillance, them hacking and tracking my cell phone. Yikes.

 

Sitting in law school this morning, I looked at the faces of studying people, and said to myself, yeah, I want to be here and not the Maldives. But when it is this rainy, for this many days, shoot, it doesn't hurt to think of sunny places on the equator. Or in Jamaica.

 

Yes, places like this exist.

In fact, I read much of the Three Musketeers (of whom there are really four) sitting under a palm tree here.

And Nick the Engineer knows how to waterski.

Link...

 

Obama has just left the building. I'll have some thoughts on it later, but here are some pix for the time being.

Clearly, it was emotional, hopeful and uplifting.

And I hope this conveys some of the magnatude of the event. He rented the Civic Center, and more than 16,000 people showed up to see a presidential candidate. It was impressive. Families, children on shoulders, the elderly, the disabled, heck - I even saw one campaign volunteer on his way to emptying a bed pan, carrying a full little portatoilet across the floor of the civic center.

 

It was dedication and certainty, belief in something large. Barack's rhetoric is convincing. He says all the right things, like withdrawing the troops from Iraq, energy independence, funding education, etc etc.

 

I could sit here and nitpick with his policy proposals - I think college education should be free - he wants to make it affordable. Paul Krugman in the New York Times today said that Hillary's health care plan was better than Barack's. But Hillary is well funded by the health care industry she purports to regulate.

 

Nor does Hillary have a story like Obama's - child of a teenaged mom, raised by her and grandparents - and she died at age 53 of cancer. The crowd responds to that. He's one of us, or so it seems.

 

Hillary, on the other hand, spoke in front of a select audience at Yale today. Could she have filled the Civic Center? I don't know. It seems like she packed people into the Learning Corridor last week. But this was something different. Does she generate this kind of excitement? I don't believe so.

 

Listening to him talk about my country in terms like he employs - this language of hope, previously the domain of Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie - makes me want to like him, even if he is going to go back on his promises (some of them, for certain, which ones, it remains to be seen).

 

Obama's biggest applause of the night came not from talking about health care, constitutional restoration, 40 mpg cars, or ending the war, but about humanitarian intervention to end the genocide in Darfur.

 

I have been thinking alot lately about linear history and how we judge events too swiftly after they just happen. I want to sleep on this one, and think about how this fits in with what has come before, and what will follow it. Symbolically, how do we interpret this?

 

In the coming days, many will weigh in on it. I saw tons of journos there - everyone from John Murray at the Waterbury Observer to blogger CTBob, to Ken Dixon of the CT Post, Chris Keating, Rick Green and Mark Paz from the Courant, the Yale Daily News, and a ton of others. Ctnewsjunkie and the New Haven Independent will have stuff, too.

 

Link...

The life of a deckhand, continued...

 

10:30 p.m. – Congratulations, you have finished helping the chef clean the galley. And your day is just about done. The People are still sitting at the table, drinking bottles of wine.

 

10:45 p.m. – The People have finally gone to bed. Cover the table that they were sitting at, make sure the Marshall Islands ensign (flag) is taken in (it should have been done at sunset). Shut out the lights on the deck, and make sure that the doors are all locked.

 

11 p.m. – Crack yourself open a hard-earned beer and sit back and relax in the crew mess with your co-workers for a beer or more. But don't stay up too late. You have to be on deck at 8 a.m., because with guests aboard, the boat has to be shiny spotless before they wake up.

 

The boat runs in three different modes: Delivery, Charter (guests) and Yard Work. The transition days between Delivery and Charter are the hardest, often involving 18 or more hours, for the whole crew.

Link to Day of the Deckie, Page 3

The life of a deckhand, continued...

 

1p.m. – Lunch. Since breakfast was late, lunch is served an hour after its normal time. Today, the chef has treated us to toasted cheese sandwiches, with meat on some for the omnivores, and tomatoes for the vegetarians among us.

 

1:45 p.m. – Return to the washdown.

 

5 p.m. – Finish putting away the hoses, soap, buckets, chamois cloths, deck brushes and wash mitts. Two of the deckhands will have the night off, one of them stays on for watch. Normally, that only consists of emptying trash, turning on and off lights, stocking refrigerators with beverages and locking doors.
But since the owners are on board, guests are meeting the boat at 6 p.m. for dinner, despite the fact that we just pulled into town today and none of have had a day off in five days.

The unlucky man on watch not only deals with the above duties, but now assumes the role of bus boy and sous chef as well.
Change back into khaki shorts, belt and polo shirt. By this time, your feet are thoroughly pruned. If you want, put on a pair of shoes designated expressly for the boat, and they cannot be worn off the boat. Otherwise, the boat is a barefoot vessel. No shoes allowed on board.

Link to Day of the Deckie, Page 2

 

Midnight – Report to the bridge for four hours of watch duty. We've been on delivery for three days now. We should arrive at our destination by 10 a.m.

 

1 a.m. – Perform a visual engine room check, on the odd hours. On the even hours, we do a written engine room check.

 

Walk down two flights of stairs from the bridge to the engine room, swing open a massive 150-lb watertight door and inspect the engine's health. Look at the engine oil pressure gauges, the fuel level in the day tank, the fuel centrifuge that primes the engines, and the stabilizer, which prevents us from rolling left to right too much. Finally, make sure the blowers are feeding fresh air into the engine room, and take a second to check the generator is running.

If anything is amiss, contact the engineer immediately. Usually, it is fine because the engineer is on the ball.

 

2 a.m. –Watch partners change. Our captain has instituted staggered watches, so for the first two hours, we have one watch partner, and the second two hours, we have another. It makes it interesting conversation wise. Everyone has two four-hour watches daily while on delivery. Mine were 12 to 4, midnight and noon.

Link...

 

This is cribbed directly from a postcard I got in the mail this week:

 

"Emmy-award winning director Fran Rzeznik of Guilford has created a provocative, edgy film about Connecticut couples and their struggle to win the right to marry. A must-see!"

 

This 40-minute documentary will play across the state three times in the next two weeks, and admission is free:

 

Friday, Feb. 8, 6:30 PM

ACES Center for the Arts

Arts Hall, 55 Audobon Street

New Haven, CT

 

Sunday, Feb. 10, 6:30 PM

Central Connecticut State Univeristy

Vance Academic Building 105

1615 Stanley Street, New Britain

 

Sunday, Feb. 17, 6:30 PM

Triangle Community Center

16 River Street

Norwalk, CT

 

RSVP to charmane@lmaf.org or call 860-525-7777 x 301.

Link...

 

W hat marks professional graphic design? A photo and text interplaying to convey trust and confidence in a particular candidate's ability to lead.

 

The designer did just about everything right here - Barack's million-dollar eyes face the text, a solid facial expression projecting "Constitutional Law Professor," and simultaneously says "Trust me with my finger on the nuclear button."

 

The photo screens out nicely for textual legibility. A subtle drop shadow highlights the red pull out box to the left.

 

Yet the combination of word and image here makes me a little uncomfortable, not like Dukakis-in-a-tank anxiety, but a kind of unacceptable incompetence, a misunderestimation, as it were, of mettle that residents of 1600 PA Ave. can't reveal.

 

With change being the central focus of the Obama campaign, couldn't they at least get the whole word on the page?

 

It's new, because on the front, a January 3, 2008 quote from Barack appears on the front, so I imagine they had thousands of images to choose from for this particular four-color piece.

 

It seems to be a national distribution because of the way the Connecticut for Obama online addreses are printed in. And of course, it features a union bug.

 

But would Hillary's campaign send out a direct mail piece with "C" missing from "Change"? I doubt it. I've gotten Hillary mailers. I thrown them out, but I've never seen anything so poor.

 

And no, I'm not making too big a deal out of this, considering the work that goes into stage managing the executive office. It would be like if the famous photo op said "Ission Accomplished."

 

Link...

 

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.

Link...

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.'"

Link...