The funny pages have not been the same since Berke Breathed quit the daily Opus routine almost 20 years ago.

 

I wish I could see what story lines he would cook up around the Obama-McCain campaign. McCain talking into a dead cell phone line for 18 minutes the other day takes the cake for me.

 

The Sunday-only version of Opus or Outland or whatever Breathed calls it now lacks the daily wit and topical humor of the old Bloom County.

 

Take, for example, this prescient cartoon panel from 1988, when Frank Jones, the father of Oliver Wendell Jones, accurately predicts the political leaning of the first black American president.

 

Did Frank think it would be two decades before America saw a black man even come close to the White House? Who knows the recesses of Berke Breathed's imagination?

 

In 1988, Obama has just entered into Harvard Law School. He was just beginning his storied rise to the top of the law review to community organizer to U.S. Senate seat. But did he know he would someday be an American dauphin? As a conservative?

 

If I am a liberal, then Obama looks more and more like conservative. I wouldn't expect any other analysis of him at Counterpunch, especially from a civil rights attorney whose son is three-time national Ralph Nader presidential campaign staffer.

 

Yet when the Nation goes after Obama's economists, and the critique is reprinted at the Huffington Post, Obama's rightward tilt isn't a figment of the leftist imagination:

The economic advisors who are assisting Senator Obama's campaign are helping him stake out a position on the subprime lending crisis 'to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.'

Link...

 

Mail Call! The spam filter works exceedingly well on the e-mails, but I still find plenty of strange items of communication in my snail mail box.

 

I've gotten one magazine subscription too many, and they sold my name to various lists. And so I get address labels garnished with orangutan photos, letters from Walter Cronkite pitching drug legalization and flat Earth brochures arguing against Copernican heliocentric models of the galaxy.

 

The information delivered by the postman is sometimes utilitarian, like the Hartford 2000 meeting minutes (they always thank Joe Barber for bringing refreshments!). Other times, I see sophisticated messaging, like the Americans United fundraiser stumping for a separation of church and state.

 

The most consistent mail campaign, after the credit card offers, is the onslaught of print materials from the Democratic Party. First, Al Gore sent me a plea on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "We must not fail in that mission" to save America from the clutches of evil Republicans, Gore beseeched in the first graf.

 

"On November 4, we must end this assault on reason," Gore wrote, underlined. Sorry, Al, you had your chance to oust the Republicans eight years ago, but that’s another bag of apples.

 

Then the money ask envelope fell out, and while, I don't trust the senate to do anything of import, I sent them a little note back that said war creates greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s end it now.

Link...

 

Angel Carrion wanted to celebrate his nineteenth birthday – July 2 – with his family.

 

After that, he would turn himself in his alleged role in shooting three people on Shultas Place in Hartford’s south end April 23.

 

At least that's what a former Echoes From the Streets writer told me about Carrion. She called one night, sounding pretty serious.

 

"I can't talk about it on the phone," she said. We met at Sully's. She pulled me to a remote part of the Tiki Bar, and spun a tale I found too fantastic to believe.

 

"He's not armed and dangerous like they said on tv," she said. She flashed a cell phone photo of him – 5-8, 207 – trying on a too-small blue dress, smiling for the camera.

 

"He wants to go outside, but he can't," she said. If he went out during the day, he feared the cops might get him. At night, he was afraid that the posse he was beefing with wanted to kill him.

 

"I brought him lunch today," my friend said. "He wants to turn himself in, but he's scared there's a hit out on him in jail. And he can't afford the $30,000 retainer lawyers want."

 

His May 9 arrest warrant carried a $1 million preset bond.

 

"Could you help us?" she asked.

 

Link...

 

Of all the great things I love about publishing online are the interesting emails I get. One day I might even get a comments page on this site.

 

But today, I got an email from someone looking to see some of my photos from Syria. Since I don't feel like reading, or writing, I figured I'd play with pictures.

 

St. Simeon Stylites: pictures from an ancient site of a crazy saint who sat atop a stone pillar for decades. He had a cult of followers. Wild. Just a bunch of rocks high on a desert plain.

 

Abu Kamal: Life goes on 10 KM from the Iraqi border.

 

Damascus: The capital city, vibrant and stunning.

 

Damascus 2: It's such a great city, I made two pages of photos.

 

Dier Ez Zor: Eastern Syria, oil country. The Russians come here, the Armenians escaped here, and the French hang out.

 

Speaking of the French, Robert Fisk today lamented that dictator Bashar Al-Assad will sit on the dias with French President Nicolas Sarkozy to review a French military display. Fisk is a bit upset that torturers and tyrants get a welcome in the West. But then, he notes, that the West has its own brigands and thugs in government.

 

 

Burlington, CT – Free speech poster child Avery Doninger graduated from Burlington's Lewis Mills High School, Friday June 20, but Principal Karissa Niehoff apparently continues to flex the authoritarian grasp of the school on the internet ether.

 

In a stuffy, hot packed gymnasium, among the flower print dresses, the high heels, and the state cops with the german sheperd, Doninger's conspicuous absence from the program as class secretary seemed small compared to the privacy concerns that loomed large, especially in the minds of parents like John Talarski.

 

Talarski watched one of his daughters graduate with Doninger, while he has another heading to Mills as a ninth grader in the fall.

 

He lamented the lack of privacy students have. He said sometime in the past two weeks, Niehoff caught wind that students published pictures on the social networking site of themselves drinking alcohol. Talarski claimed Niehoff sent letters home to students, and those kids got punished.

 

"It's absurd," Talarski said. "Somebody got into Facebook. It's another episode where kids are drinking, but they opened it to the school. Someone turned in names."

 

The comparison with Doninger's situation is easy. Former superintendent Paula Schwartz's son googled his mom's name in Spring 2007, and discovered that Doninger called central office administrators "douchebags" on her website. Niehoff punished Doninger by removing her name from the ballot for class Secretary. Doninger won a write-in campaign, and Niehoff suppressed those votes.

 

Doninger sued for an injunction to be class secretary, the perk of which was giving an address at graduation. She lost in the Second District Federal Court of Appeals in New York City in May. The judges said the Niehoff could reasonably forecast that Doninger's comments would result in a material disruption of class. Doninger's separate First Amendment claim for damages will go to a full trial.

 

Shortly after Niehoff's court victory, Neihoff's boss, Region 10 Superintendent Alan Beitman, suspended Niehoff because she wrote e-mails to complete strangers revealing undocumented and unsubstantiated allegations about Doninger, in violation of federal privacy laws.

 

Annie Nodwell, a long-time Burlington resident who sent daughters to Lewis Mills and Friday night sat in the stands waiting to watch her granddaughter graduate, said she normally trusts the federal courts. But after seeing them back the principal over the student, then to have the principal get punished is difficult.

Read more, and See Principal Niehoff Stare Down Avery...

 

Officer Jim Barrett is a good cop, as close to a beat cop as Hartford's Asylum Hill neighborhood will ever get.

 

Technically, he is our Community Service Officer, going to neighborhood meetings, handing out his cell phone number and listening to our concerns. But one can easily find him on the streets, too.

 

The last time I attended an Asylum Hill NRZ meeting, I saw Barrett give a crime report. The gritty portrait he painted differed from the rosy picture pitched by the higher-ups in the Mayor’s Office, the Superintendent of Schools and the Hartford Police Department.

 

I’m sure he took some heat about this, and he didn’t deserve to. That night, before the meeting, I managed to ask him a few questions about his two tours of duty in Iraq with the Connecticut Army National Guard’s 1048th Light Truck division.

 

Grant Barrett his reticence because the stakes that his statements about Iraq could be misconstrued are much higher. Upsetting Chief Daryl Roberts and Mayor Eddie Perez is one thing, pissing off Gen. David Petreus and George W. Bush is another.

 

Barrett says he remains neutral about his service in Iraq.

 

“I don’t have an opinion about the war,” Barrett said. “I don’t follow the politics of it. I care about my soldiers and the mission and I want them to be safe. My concern is bringing my guys back home safe. I do what I have to do.”

 

Read more of the Adventures of Officer Jim Barrett ...

 

Have WPLR Morning Show hosts Chaz and AJ learned nothing from Scott McLellan, the former Bush/Cheney press secretary?

 

McLellan just wrote a book, undertitled at What Happened. You helped unleash the dogs of war is what happened, Scotty. When we finally prosecute the Iraq War Crimes Tribunal, McLellan will get less prison time for his mea maxima culpa.

 

After admitting to lying to the press and manipulating the media to march to the pro-war beat, McLellan in his book criticized complacent reporters for kowtowing to the Bush/Cheney putsch.

 

So what do Chaz and AJ - the all-star members of Connecticut’s number one morning radio show on WPLR 99.1 FM - do when they land the show of a lifetime, thanks to the vice-presidential ambitions of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman?

 

Chaz and AJ bowed before the masters of war Thursday morning.

 

For more than an hour, live from Lieberman’s DC office, Chaz and AJ played starstruck stenographers for the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, Vice President Dick Cheney, and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R).

Read the thrilling conclusion...

 

If city leaders wanted a realistic attempt at charter reform for November's ballot, when we would have enough voters to reach a quorum, now would have been the time to consider proposals.

 

Of course, the proposals major democratic reforms are too tricky for our democracy, so instant runoff voting (IRV) or publicly financed municipal elections are off the table.

 

Even more pedestrian measures like expanding the size of City Council cannot gain an audience with the powers that be.

 

If Mayor Perez took seriously democracy and people power, he would push the city to expand city council, and assign councilors to district representation. Councilman Ken Kennedy has suggested something similar, but his ideas unfortunately have been ignored.

 

Suppose we made those districts the same as the NRZs, and made the city councilors the paid heads of the NRZs. Understanding that only 13 NRZs service the 18 recognized neighborhoods in Hartford, suppose we created a few new NRZs to deal with those areas, and perhaps, we added a few at large members of council.

 

New Haven and Waterbury, both cities smaller than Hartford, have respectively 29 and 15 people serving on their Boards of Aldermen. Perhaps if we expanded the legislative scope of Council, the elected officials could better serve neighborhood concerns.

 

Most importantly, it could counteract the hoard of executive power in the Mayor's Office. Essentially, City Councilors would not only deal with the decisions of city governance, but their offices could become paid organizing centers for building neighborhoods.

 

An analogy would be community policing, but community governing, and creating centers of political gravity on the streets, not just Main Street. As important, the city would create a farm system of political talent to serve in the legislature, the mayor's office, and other elective seats.

Link to comments from Matt Ritter and Bernie Michel...

 

T he Wayback Machine at Archive.org has chronicled and saved at least a portion of the online morgue for the Hartford Advocate.

 

Does a term like morgue, a dusty old room where newspaper clips sit catalogued in files by subject, by multiple indexes, fit in new electronic media?

 

The stories I wrote for the Advocate almost 10 years ago still seem relevant to me, but then again, anything I write or have written has relevance to me.

 

Since it is pretty clear Sam "I am your Viagra" Zell won't be resurrecting the Advocate archives anytime soon, let's hope that the folks at Archive.org keep up this global service that can have local impact.

 

Like what exactly was Hartford 10 years ago online and in real life (at least through the eyes of me)?

 

Green Power: 1998 Earth Day feature about the Swedish experiment in closed-loop manufacturing and environmental capitalism - The Natural Step. Their mantra of low hanging fruit has started to take hold. Not the wave we thought it might be...

 

Branded: A look at the brainwashing experiment that is modern marketing. Corollary to today: in this age of global warming, how long is it going to be before we determine that we should not waste precious resources on lighting billboards at night?

 

We must create a market, or limit the market, for the use of media at midnight, when no one is looking anyways. Cut down on light pollution, etc.

 

But I digress, Branded is well-researched, and one of my all-time favorite pieces that I have ever scribbled.

 

Huskymania - A four-story pre-season preview package of the eventual 1999 national champion men's UConn Huskies team.

Cheerleaders or Reporters?: Homers, anyone? Do reporters who cover the UConn basketball beat act like fans and cheerleaders, or are they trying to be objective? Is it a natural tension in sportswriting? A first-person piece.

 

Riding the Pine : A solid narrative about life as a walk-on.

 

Republicans seek Latino Vote: Umm, Obama anyone? And what in the world was I doing writing about GOP attempts to woo minorities. I should have been thinking like Thomas Frank in What's the Matter With Kansas?

 

Pot Politics: I couldn't find the Scoop item about Drug Czar Barry McAffrey so angry about the questions I asked him in an interview that White House press secretary and best name ever for a government official Bob Weiner called editor Janet Reynolds to complain.

 

This cover opus is about the fractured Drug Policy Reform movement, circa May 1999. I think it has coalesced much more effectively now.

link...

 

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."

Link...