Senator Kennedy No sooner had I posted the Kerry link when I clicked on the news that our other Senator, Ted Kennedy has been hospitalized with stroke-like symptoms.

Hopefully this is less serious than it sounds.  ¶ 1:27 PM 0 comments

  Senatory Kerry He is evidently in town for the next couple of hours to press the flesh with Berkshire Democrats. He's at Taylor's Fine Dining 'til 3pm.  ¶ 1:20 PM 2 comments

  Cleaner Plates It is a post like this that make me believe that Ali Benjamin might just be the best blogger in the area.  ¶ 3:53 PM 1 comments

  For the Flamingo Guy

Yeah, yeah,.. the Sopranos were so 2007, but Mad TV is still funny.  ¶ 10:42 PM 1 comments

  A New North County Food Blog I don't think I know who Fran is but she's over at Plate to Plate and she knows how to forage in the local underbrush and then cook up a storm. Granted the blog only has two viable posts but they sure look good.

Hmmmm. Wild ramps. I've seen some growing just off of Reservoir Road. Maybe I'll go for a short hike this weekend.  ¶ 9:20 PM 1 comments

  It was 20 years ago today.... About 20 years back, I was repeatedly told that my age demographic, Generation X, was going to be the scourge of American civilization. This guy is selling books saying its the millennials that will cause the fall of the American Empire.

On the other hand, we have Bob Herbert claiming in today's column that the millennials are a force to be reckoned with.

Heck, I remember being a kid and listening to the "adults" gripe about the "me generation." Guess who's griping now?  ¶ 8:37 AM 3 comments

  Define "Amateur" If I put up an anti-McCain site, it probably could be considered amateur, but...

In fact, [the internet based Obama slurs] tend to be the work of committed political amateurs.

One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name.

In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants — half-jokingly dubbing his group "The Crusaders" — to learn about Obama's background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

He assembled a dossier on Obama, including allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in his youth in Indonesia.

Then the retired spook tried to get Israeli intelligence officials interested in his Obama dossier. They weren't, to his chagrin. He also shopped it to some foreign reporters. Again, no luck.

He wound up posting some of it on a blog — and where it went from there in the vast world of cyberspace is anybody's guess.

But a few months after the man began his work, the allegation that Obama was educated in a madrassa appeared in an anonymous article in Insight Magazine, an online publication of the Unification Church, in January 2007. It also claimed that Clinton operatives had dug up the information. The article was cited by several conservative commentators, including on Fox News, before it was debunked.

I don't think amateur means what McClatchy thinks it does.  ¶ 3:51 PM 1 comments

  Not a Good Idea While I agree with the sentiment that wealthy colleges sometimes act more like hedge-fund managers than institutions of higher learning, taxing their endowments is bad policy:

Legislators have asked state finance officials to study a plan that would impose a 2.5 percent annual assessment on colleges with endowments over $1 billion, an amount now exceeded by nine Massachusetts institutions. The proposal, which higher education specialists believe is the first of its kind across the country, drew surprising support at a debate on the State House budget last week and is attracting attention in higher education circles nationally.

I *would* support a bill forcing these colleges to waive tuition for all students who qualify for financial aid. Or, maybe, if a tax is inevitable, having the revenues go to a trust fund to pay for scholarships state wide. But tossing it into the general budget would simply be a money grab and piss off a lot of philanthropists.

Here's the money (pun intended) quote of the article:

"The Williams indoor golf nets are paid by all of us through federal tax policy," said Sloane, a Williams College graduate. "These institutions have brought this upon themselves."

That's gonna' leave a mark. Somehow I doubt Mr. Sloane is coming back for reunion week.  ¶ 7:55 AM 3 comments

  It's Easy to Forget When You Don't Want to Remember War is hell. These are VERY graphic, never-before published photos of the Hiroshima atomic aftermath .

It is not my intent to whip up a debate. This link is just a reminder. As a nation and society that tends to get its imagery from sanitized news outlets, we must never forget that even in the name of good, the consequences of war can be horrific.

Wisdom dictates that we have respect and reverence towards our capabilities.  ¶ 11:30 PM 1 comments

  A Strange Place for one of Life's Crueler Lessons So here we are at the Hot Dog Ranch, me and two 8 year old boys. Things were getting a little exciting as the Kentucky Derby was put on all but one of the overhead TVs. The sound had been turned up so that the call of the race was the only thing anyone heard in the place.

I had just told the two boys that Aunt Kate had proclaimed Big Brown one of the best horses she had ever seen and that we should cheer him on. When Big Brown pulled even around the fourth corner I found myself being the guy who pounds the table encouraging an athlete a thousand miles away as though I were trackside. When Big Brown ran away from the field to win, all three of us at the table were hooting and hollering. For 15 or maybe 20 seconds it was a lot of fun.

And then the TV camera swung quickly back to a horse lying on its side.

I knew it was bad but tried to explain to the kids that it might be something minor.

"Maybe the horse fainted." proclaimed one of the boys.

"Maybe...." I said.

The bald headed man who had been standing behind the NBC correspondent on the last trackside report had put his walkie-talkie down and now was facing the camera. His eyes were red. He was introduced as the head veterinarian at the Derby. His manner was professional and he spoke in a very matter of fact terms, but when he said she had broken both ankles and was "euthanized immediately" you saw the angst on his face and you seemed to hear an audible gasp from those immediately around him.

Most of the restaurant patrons, including my two young guests, missed this bit of news. The TV hosts kept trying to figure out what they should say, how they should act and just how they should balance the simultaneous stories of a victory circle while another horse was being put out of her misery.

Eventually one of the boys asked, "What's euthanized?"

I told him as gently as I could.

"You mean they killed her?"

"Yeah. She's dead." I bluntly confirmed, acting brave even though I felt my own eyes stinging over an animal I had only seen for a few second on television.

"Does that happen a lot in horse racing?"

"No, but more often than you might think." It struck me that I was opening a can of worms.

We paid. We left.

About five minutes later, one of the boys piped up. "Sometimes it is more polite to kill an animal when it is in pain."

"Polite isn't the word I would use, but you've got the right idea about what happened."

I left it at that.  ¶ 9:20 PM 1 comments

  Derby Day A family member in the horse business says she has never seen horse perform quite like Big Brown did in the Florida Derby. If I was a betting man, which I am not, I know where my money would go to day. I'll definitely be watching, though.  ¶ 10:52 AM 0 comments

  North Adams Pizza Company Chris Tremblay from the comments:

june 1, 2008 will be the last day of the north adams pizza co.....my wife and i have decided to close down and focus on our next money pit...our beautiful baby boy....thanks to all who gave us a try...like it or not....hopefully the space can be taken over by someone who will see the potential in north adams....a nice hibachi/sushi place??....it was fun but as they say...how do you make a small fortune in the restaurant industry?...start with a big one.....

Sad, but lots of interesting rumors about what's going to happen there next.....  ¶ 9:32 AM 6 comments

  One of Three Home Depot announced today that they are closing their Brattleboro, VT store. I am not sure if this is a good sign for the pending Lowe's here in North Adams because of a little less competition, or if it is a bad omen about the over-saturation of home improvement centers in the region.

Never the less, as far as I can tell, our Lowe's will be the only "Lowe's" inside a rough-drawn triangle cornered by Albany, NY, Springfield, MA and Rutland, VT. This might give Lowe's a little market leverage. By comparison, Home Depot has 3 stores (soon to be 2) in that same triangle.

All I know for now is that I'm gonna head out to Brattleboro for the liquidation sale.  ¶ 12:14 AM 1 comments

  County Restaurant News

• The previous report of the demise of Kneebones in Pittsfield was inaccurate. Through one means or another, they are back up and running. There aren't too many second chances in this business. Hopefully they'll make the best of this one.

• Another North Adams eatery will soon be voluntarily closing its doors. More later once the details have been publicly announced.

• There's a big unconfirmed rumor floating around from two sources speculating that The Alley's hassle with the North Adams Planning Board has stalled their bid for a critical loan. **If** true, this info would really piss me off.

That's all for now.  ¶ 3:31 PM 4 comments

  Crisis Management 101 I saw all the old Toyota trucks in the lot and wondered what in the heck was going on. Thanks to Glenn, now we know.

Over the past two weeks since Toyota Motor Sales announced an extended warranty for Tacoma pickups built between June 1995 and September 2000 because of a rust problem that rots their frames, the local shop has been inundated with customers.

As of Thursday, K & M had accepted 58 Tacomas that had the rust problem and has had to postpone any more inspections, be-cause there's no more room for the pickups in the parking lot, according to Leroy Burns, service manager.

"Most of the people are sad to see their vehicles go, but at the same time the money's making it worthwhile," Burns said. "It's a very popular truck, and with what Toyota's offering, people are taking advantage of it."

And Toyota's reaction to the poor corrosion prevention is textbook 'turning lemons into lemonade.' I am beginning to look at buying a truck as my trusty little Pontiac approaches its 11th birthday and Toyota definitely has my eye.  ¶ 1:25 PM 7 comments

  Capitalizing on MoCA or The Planning Board Knows Best I missed this little item last week. It seems the planning board, in all its wisdom, has stifled a big chunk of the upcoming restaurant and entertainment venue, The Alley's, plans:

The Alley, owned by Jack and Keith Nogueira, did not receive a full approval as a restaurant with weekend entertainment. The board opted to allow the restaurant to "get of the ground" with an approval of a restaurant with hours until 11 p.m. It requested the owners return when plans for entertainment were more solid.

"Do you define yourselves as a restaurant with entertainment or a nightclub with food?" Kyle Hanlon, board member, asked.

Keith Nogueira said the establishment would offer "table service" lunch during the day, with a pub-feel during the evening. He said entertainment and hours past 11 p.m. were needed to appeal to crowds flowing out of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art on the weekends.

"Part of the problem with the entertainment end is that we'd rather be restrained by decibals, not by music type," he said. "We're not talking rock 'n roll or making a ruckus, but we don't want to be res-trained to an acoustic setting or jazz."

Board member William Schrade Jr. said he thought "pieces" of the entertainment plan, including a liquor license, were missing and that he supported the pair returning at a later date with more finalized plans.

Where to begin?

First off, it has to be noted that Keith Nogueira left his position in the performing arts department of Mass MoCA to open this restaurant. There is no one, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, in this city that has a better chance at exploiting the crowds departing shows and events at MoCA. To close him down just as things SHOULD BE getting hopping is just about the most asinine thing I've heard in a long time.

One thing that the article does not mention is that it granted The Hub, a place that claims simply to be a restaurant, a plan to stay open until 12 midnight. The Alley, a place that openly says it wants to have entertainment and serve late night food and drink.... 11pm.

Why the difference? According to a source, one board member even asked that same question but was met by silence.

I have heard time and time again that the planning board oversteps it bounds by meddling in actual business practices. It is one thing to make sure that a new or expanding business conforms to existing codes, laws and neighborhood norms, but it is wholly of another cloth to force those who are trying to help this city by investing equity and sweat to conform to some nebulous vision of what a business and our downtown should be. As far as late night downtown dining and entertainment goes, I believe the planning board is batting .000 in the past 5 years.

For the love-of-pete... get the hell out of the way.  ¶ 11:19 PM 10 comments

  Pink Fleshed Fish I've been watching this one for the better part of a year and it keeps getting worse. Just a couple of weeks back I was tooling around the commercial fishing docks of Bodega Bay, CA and the number of commercial boats for sale caught me off guard:

But last week, state Department of Fish and Game officials voted to ban salmon fishing in state waters, which extend out three miles from shore. Five days before, the Pacific Fishery Management Council had banned salmon fishing in the 200-mile-wide swath of federal waters off California and Oregon.

Federal and state biologists believe closing the season for virtually all the West Coast before it even revs up is the only way to boost the number of chinook salmon returning from ocean waters to spawn in the Sacramento River this fall.

Last year was the second-lowest spawning season on record along the Sacramento River and its tributaries. Just 90,000 chinook returned from the sea to complete their life cycle in the freshwater – a 90 percent drop from five years earlier.

90%. Oy.

If you think this will not affect you, you are incorrect. All fish, including farm raised salmon and trout to Alaskan Halibut, will be going up in price to fill the gap in supply. And as such things go, it will likely have a slight ripple effect throughout all meat and proteins.

I'd say go vegan, but those prices are going up too.  ¶ 9:11 PM 0 comments

  Rationing Drudge (I feel dirty) linked to this story about Costco limiting rice purchases and I realized that last month I faced the exact same thing at the wholesale level trying to purchase flour for the bakery. I, along with all of the other bakeries served by this particular supplier, was told I would only be allowed to purchase the same number of sacks that I had bought in previous weeks to prevent hoarding and speculation.

Wow. I hadn't thought of it in terms of rationing, but that is exactly what is was.

And I should mention that a 50 lb. sack of good flour has gone from $14 to $35 since last summer. When you consider that bread prices have only gone up around 30% you can figure out who is being squeezed the most. It is not the end consumer..... yet. Get ready for $4 - $5 bread. It's coming.  ¶ 8:43 PM 0 comments

  Ike was Right The story from the New York Times tying media-darling military analysts to the Pentagon and contractors is not really surprising at all. The fact is that many retired upper-level military brass still have financial interests within the spectrum of military spending. What's disturbing is the fact that this effort to spin the press appears to have been so coordinated and purposeful. It smacks of the payola mini-scandals of Armstrong Williams being secretly paid to propagandize No Child Left Behind and of the Iraqi journalists who were bought and paid for. It is worth noting that it is illegal for the government to propagandize to the American public. There are legal issues as well as ethical ones involved here.

But the reason that this sounds so eerily true to me is a second-hand story from the winter of 2003 that I was told while I lived out in Tacoma, WA, the home of Ft. Lewis. Let me start with the basic facts that are not hearsay and second-hand:

A friend of mine and my wife is the daughter of a retired Army officer at Ft. Lewis. Her father worked alongside of a very famous military figure when he was the C.O. of Ft. Lewis. The two men were, and remained, quite close. The families were so close many years ago that our friend, when she was a teenager, was the regular babysitter of the children of the famous General.

The above is pretty much fact. I have seen the mementos and met enough of the people involved to have no doubts about the relationships.

Skip forward to early 2003. The famous General was interviewed in the Washington Post questioning the Bush Administration's run-up to war with Iraq. If you've figured out who I am referring to, you might remember the shockwaves that this interview sent through the flag waving, lapel-pin-wearing press. The criticism was doubly compounded by the role that this particular General had played in the recount of Florida presidential ballots in 2000. This guy was supposedly a Bushie through and through.

This is where the hearsay comes in. You can believe me, or you can think I am full of crap. That's up to you.

Our friend told us that, according to her father, the day the article appeared, the famous General got a call from the highest ranking civilian in the Pentagon. This person, who was becoming as much of a media darling as the General had once been, told the General in no uncertain terms, that if he expressed his opinions via the media again, he would have all of his clearances revoked and his professional consultant career would be over.

And that is where this second-hand tale and the story currently in the Times cross paths - Retired military brass who disagree with policy decisions are evidently biting their tongues out of fear of losing lucrative income. The consistency between these two stories leads me to give even more credence to both.  ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments

  Paddling If anybody has a decent canoe gathering dust nearby, let me know. I'm looking for a fiberglass or aluminum canoe suitable for cruising down the Hoosac and small lake fishing with a kid.  ¶ 7:32 PM 0 comments

  You've probably already seen this... ... but it is probably the best political ad I've seen in a very long time!



And the candidate is campaigning on one of my two most personal pet issues. ya' gotta' like it. My sister and her family, who live in Oregon, had best vote for Wyden or there will be hell to pay at the family reunion.  ¶ 4:01 PM 1 comments

  Plugging Holes in the Dike This is an interesting idea. A seemingly very cheap way to keep disadvantaged kids/young adults in college and hopefully in the commonwealth:

THE NEW IDEA: Many residents in their 40s-60s have homes with empty bedrooms because their own children have graduated, married, moved on.
Foster care and DSS services basically end at 18. For that reason among others, young people in the 18-24 year range who have aged out of foster care often lack homes and adult guidance. These are state-created "legal orphans".

Additionally, some young adults who have been adopted are never successfully integrated into their adopted families and also find themselves without support during the "normal" college and trade school education period.

Massachusetts is poor in manufacturing and entry level work as well as having very high housing costs. For this reason, many of these young adults may start a community college, perhaps with tuition assistance, but cannot keep a roof over their heads, and may move to a "cheaper state" to survive and drop out.

Even without being made into legal orphans by the state, many other young adults must support themselves fully with no help from a kinship system. Many work very hard, taking one or two classes a semester for years while struggling to survive in the harsh Massachusetts economy.

Why limit it to community colleges? There are probably plenty of qualifying people barely hanging on in four-year institutions. I work with a couple of them.

What are the drawbacks to creating a state sponsored incentive for renting out rooms to poorer college kids?  ¶ 12:51 PM 0 comments

  Healthcare Around the World Last night's Frontline report on the best practices of universal healthcare from other countries is extremely informative. It puts the many lies of the free-marketeers up front and central without being combative.

Very rarely do I feel ashamed of the values put forward by our political leaders. Healthcare is one of those times.  ¶ 9:31 AM 1 comments

  Marathon I thought I've seen her running by the store a few times.  ¶ 7:25 AM 0 comments

  Whipsaw It appears that the managements of Delta and Northwest Airlines have illegally whipsawed the respective pilots unions against each other. Delta's pilot union, knowing that there are many more senior pilots at Northwest, agreed to a new contract just hours before the merger that will pay them more and the Northwest pilots less as long the Delta pilots did not oppose the merger.

It must be noted that the Delta pilots refused to go to arbitration with Northwest pilots to have an independent 3rd party determine the fairest way to create a joint seniority list. I think that the Delta pilot union action qualifies, in John Stewart's new favorite phrase, as a "dick move."

Considering that the Northwest pilots are making about 1/2 of what they did prior to the airline breaking it's previous contracts in bankruptcy, I have a feeling that this is going to get very, very ugly. I think I'll avoid both airlines, if I can, for a while.  ¶ 10:59 AM 4 comments

  Shakedown
This is the meritocracy of the free market?

Hahhahahhaahha!!

This may be the best argument for the inheritance tax since Paris Hilton.  ¶ 8:12 AM 0 comments

  Topical Games Folks in Silicon Valley have too much time on their hands. Click on the image to play.  ¶ 8:13 AM 0 comments

  NYTimes Covers our Local Primary Care Crisis

The share [of primary care physicians] who accept new patients has dropped, to barely half in the case of internists, and the average wait by a new patient for an appointment with an internist rose to 52 days in 2007 from 33 days in 2006. In westernmost Berkshire County, newly insured patients are being referred 25 miles away, said Charles E. Joffe-Halpern, director of an agency that enrolls the uninsured.

The wait to see my physician for a non-acute issue is over 4 months.

Regular readers may recall my rant about my wife's inability to get an appointment with a primary care doctor after our long-time family physician left the state. I was party to another similar conversation with a friend just last week when she called Williamstown Medical for an appointment and was told that her doctor had too many patients (4000+) and she had to find someone else.

If the legislature wants to do something that's relatively cheap yet incredibly effective and popular, pass a Family Practice Incentive package with student debt and tax relief. Weight the benefits to encourage physicians to locate in areas with high patient-to-doctor ratios. And make it a stipulation that if a practice takes advantage of this program, they MUST accept Mass Health and Medicare patients.  ¶ 11:49 PM 2 comments

  Wrong side of history David Brooks is a disengenous twit when he writes things like this:

Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public. If Barack Obama’s presidential campaign represents anything, it is the triumph of King’s early-60s style of activism over the angry and reckless late-60s style. King was in crisis when he was gunned down. But his inspiration is outlasting his critics.

The New Republic's Spencer Ackerman gets it just about right when he comments on Brooks' column:

Forty years ago today, a madman from David Brooks' America murdered our prophet. For a variety of reasons I obviously wish King had lived. But one of them is so we would have seen the right unmasked. Had King not been martyred, the right would treat him like it treats Jesse Jackson -- as nothing more than a "hustler" or a "huckster." You know, all those two-syllable words that are supposed to mean a different two-syllable word that starts with an N.

If you don't believe me, check out this thread at the always entertaining far-right site, Freerepublic.com:

To: pinochet

King was a communist agent who worked to implement slavery worldwide. He was elevated to “sainthood” by the left, much as algore and obambi are today.

6 posted on 04/04/2008 7:31:42 PM PDT by Eagles6 ( Typical White Guy: Christian, Constitutionalist, Heterosexual, Redneck)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies | Report Abuse]
To: tired1
King belonged to two dozen identified Communist organizations which were, at that time, identified by J Edgar Hoover.

Today they are called "progressive" organizations.
7 posted on 04/04/2008 7:45:34 PM PDT by oldtimer
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies | Report Abuse]
To: pinochet

If we have to put up with saturation media coverage of MLK every April on the anniversary of his assasination can we please do away with his holiday???

8 posted on 04/04/2008 7:46:41 PM PDT by blue state conservative
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies | Report Abuse]

There's plenty more where that came from. If King had survived to modern times, I could just hear the Rush Limbaughs of the world mocking him and doing Al Jolson-esque impersonations on the radio.

50 years from now, when I am hopefully a quick-witted old fart, I expect that some, if not most, of racial polarization in American politics will have diminished. 40 years after his death, MLK's legacy is still evolving. Just ask yourself, would David Brooks have written that column 20 years ago?

Being on the wrong side of history has a funny way of distorting your rear-view mirror.  ¶ 11:58 PM 8 comments

  Jane Swift for McCain's VP Now THERE's a rumor for ya'!  ¶ 6:45 PM 2 comments

  Like Clockwork
Yep, my health insurance premium dollars are paying for world class Public Relations teams to scour the web... AGAIN!

As regular readers know, this is a familiar pattern. BCBS has sent their PR flacks to visit the site before, here and here, and the last time it caught CNN's attention.

I would suggest that every blogger type the words "Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts" into a post, but then my premiums would go up again because BCBS would have to hire more college educated web surfers, so please, no mischief.  ¶ 9:11 AM 1 comments

  Another Day... ... another medical claim denied by my lovely friends at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.

Yes, we had a referral from our primary care doc, and we switched to a more expensive BCBS plan that was supposed to cover more out of network stuff, but, alas, some guy sitting behind a desk, who has never met the patient, never asked her a question nor even called her physician knows that this simple visit to a specialist was 'not a medical necessity.'

Just one more reason why I will laugh a bitter laugh when the major health insurers put themselves out of business by creating such a wave of angry American consumers that congress will have no choice but to create a single payer system. It probably will happen incrementally and take several years, but it will happen. The backlash has begun.  ¶ 12:03 AM 1 comments

  First Place is Not Always Good Vermont:

Statistics compiled by the Associated Press and Department of Defense show Vermont has the highest per capita death rate in Iraq.

Based on population estimates by U.S. Census Bureau and casualty figures compiled by the Department of Defense and the AP -- 3.22 Vermonters have died per 100,000 residents in the Green Mountain state.

Vermont is followed by Nebraska, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota.

This makes four years running that our neighbor to the north leads the list. The thing that is most striking about the states that bear the most burden is that they are by definition "rural." If you look back at other modern wars, such grieving was shared by rural and city folk alike. What does this shift mean, aside from the obvious? I'm not sure.  ¶ 12:56 PM 5 comments

  Waves
As a couple of you know, I am away from the Berkshires for a few days doing some professional development in Northern California. It is a great understatement to say that this region is one of the great culinary areas in America. It may well be the greatest area for the mix of agriculture and food in the world. And don't forget west coast seafood. It doesn't get any better.

I could write thousands of words on this subject, and maybe I will, but this post is simply to declare my affinity for the Pacific Ocean. I don't know why I prefer the Pacific to the Atlantic. Perhaps it is the fact that the wind is always blowing in from the sea creating the always comfortable temperate climate of the Northwest. All I know is that even on a crappy rainy day, sitting atop a cliff watching the waves break over the rocks is possibly the most peaceful thing I've ever done.  ¶ 6:40 PM 0 comments

  Compare and Contrast A reporter for the LA Times gets duped by forged documents about the killing of a Hip-Hop star 14 years ago and then he and his editor write:

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Philips said in a statement Wednesday. "I'm sorry."

In his statement, Duvoisin added: "We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck's. I deeply regret that we let our readers down."

But the reporter who was the single most culpable media dupe in hyping the non-existent Iraqi WMD threat in 2002 and 2003, reporting absolutely false information passed to her by criminal Iraqi exiles says mealy mouthed things like:

Although Ms Miller apologised for the intelligence being incorrect she defended her journalism saying she was right to publish and had done everything she could to verify the facts. She said: "I'm deeply sorry our intelligence community got it wrong.

"I am deeply sorry that the President was given a national intelligence estimate which concluded that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and a active weapons programme."

Ain't society's priorities grand?  ¶ 10:47 AM 2 comments

  Issues of race are not simple. Those who think they are tend to be naive or flat out bigots.

The quotes in the above link are the things I hear all the time and have heard all my life. And the jerk spouting off in those posts is pretty representative of a lot of people I know.

We've got a long way to go. I fear the mountain top is still far away.  ¶ 8:06 AM 7 comments

  Come and Go A couple of things are happening on the Restaurant Front. Sean from the Freight yard Pub has bought the old Christina's and is turning it into a bar and pizzeria. I suspect he will have have another success.

Two more Pittsfield restaurants quietly folded up last week. Kneebones and the little Brazilian restaurant are gone, but I have few details as to why.

Finally, The Alley on Eagle St. in North Adams should be opening for business in the next few weeks. I know the cook there and he is absolutely outstanding. It's definitely going to be on my list of places to check out.

This winter has been a weird one for Berkshire restaurants. As Lili von Schtupp said in Blazing Saddles; "They keep coming and going and going and coming."  ¶ 12:09 PM 2 comments

  A local angle on the $100M Starbucks decision This ruling against Starbucks for paying supervisors and managers out of the tip pool is similar to several huge cases that have been won by waiters, bus boys and bartenders in the last few years. I have no sympathy, none whatsoever, for the large corporations that pay their lowest rungs of management so poorly by illegally taking tips from the hourly workers and shifting them up the restaurant food chain.

As of a year ago, there were very similar cases against Cranwell and Canyon Ranch. I assume those stories made the papers when the plaintiff's attorneys fed the info to the press. Since there has been absolutely no follow up, I can only assume that they settled. Lawyers love to play the press.

Is there an enterprising local reporter who can pull up the paper's archives and make a couple of calls to give us the local angle on the "great management tip scam." Just because the parties to the suit are quiet doesn't mean that it is no longer news.  ¶ 2:49 PM 6 comments

  Contradicting his Partner Larry Rosenthal does just that in The Eagle regarding Spice's plans.  ¶ 7:34 AM 3 comments

  Spice I spoke with someone who had been chatting with a member of Spice's senior management and supposedly the restaurant is planning on retooling and reopening. Reportedly there still is money in the bank, but the current business model was hemorrhaging cash during the slow winter months, so the decision was made to stop the bleeding sooner rather than later.

Carrie Saldo has a report on WAMC with an on the record interview with the restaurant's owner Joyce Bernstein that pretty much confirms the main points.

I take all of this retooling talk with a grain of salt (pun intended) but it is certainly possible that "downscaling" the menu and the prices are what's in the works. Who knows? I don't.

What irks me is that if this is truly just a hiatus, why did they close so abruptly, screwing all the employees with no notice? *That* makes me wonder about management's integrity and their honesty with the press.

Are they really planning on reopening or are they simply trying to deflect criticism? Only time will tell.  ¶ 6:36 PM 1 comments

  The Panty Sniffers are Back Not this crap again. Oy. The general public as a whole may care who Britney Spears is screwing (I don't), but in general, we don't give a damn about the dalliances of public figures unless illegality or hypocrisy is involved.  ¶ 5:38 PM 0 comments

  Hypocrites

Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

There are only two ways to interpret the Second Amendment: Either the founders were speaking of a trained civilian-based militia (the current interpretation)or they were saying that everyone should be allowed to keep the arms required for warfare in their home. There is no other valid interpretation.

For the gun rights crowd to argue, as they did today before the Supreme Court, that machine guns and other arms of war can be banned but not handguns is pure malarkey.

If the SCOTUS rules that handguns cannot be banned, I think I'm gonna try to buy a bazooka and sue.  ¶ 5:24 PM 17 comments

  Bear (Stearns) Market It is hard to understate the absolutely remarkable turn of events in the last 24 hours regarding the sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan. The sale amounts to about $2 per share. Depending on when you take your valuation, that amounts to *less* than pennies on the dollar. What JP Morgan's $270 million bought barely covers the cost of Bear Stearn's Manhattan real estate. The Bear business was worth less than nothing.

In other word, Bear Stearns absolutely failed. It imploded in a matter of days. There is no question. Saying they were "bought" or "sold" rather than "liquidated" is only a matter of semantics because the Federal Reserve is in full blown panic mode.

I would like to formally welcome the investor class to the recession the rest of us have been experiencing for the past couple of years.

I have only a second-hand passing knowledge of Bear Stearns and their culture, but of the people I know who deal with them, Bear are was roundly regarded as the arrogant asses of the street. Karma is a bitch. It's too bad that many innocent bystanders are going to get hurt too.  ¶ 8:58 AM 2 comments

  I like him already Soon to be guv of NY, David Patterson:

Asked at a news conference if he had ever patronized a prostitute, Lt. Gov. David Paterson feigned a look of concern and responded, "Only the lobbyists."

  ¶ 8:16 AM 0 comments