News Features

Menino's mosque

DAVID S. BERNSTEIN — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:49:22 GMT

The bizarre story behind the construction of Boston's most controversial building
Most locals concede that getting anything of substance accomplished in Boston is a Herculean task.

More on the Mosque:

>The PTech connection?
>Free pass on gay hatred?

Full coverage:
thephoenix.com/mosque

Most locals concede that getting anything of substance accomplished in Boston is a Herculean task. Residents have all but embraced the principle of civic inaction with a perverse kind of local pride. In the end, who you know is probably more important than what you are trying to do. And there is no doubt that little is accomplished without the approval and support of the mayor, Thomas M. Menino.

So it is with the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) near the intersection of Tremont Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard. Better known as the Roxbury mosque, the ISBCC has been in the works for more than 20 years. A few weeks ago it finally opened its doors for prayer — five years late, millions over budget, and still far from complete.

While the story of the building of the Roxbury mosque may not be worthy of a Hollywood epic, it does contain the stuff of a good television drama: community intrigue, religious conflict, media controversy, foreign money, suspicions of extremist ties, and once-cocksure public officials who have since retreated into a zone of silence.

Mayor Menino, in a fit of multicultural ecumenicalism, approved the sale of city-owned land to the mosque for the bargain basement — and still controversial — price of $175,000, plus the promise of in-kind services, including upkeep of nearby parks. The predictable uproar that arose in the wake of not only selling land well below market rates, but also selling it to a religious institution in contravention of the supposed separation of church and state, was supposed to be muffled by making the complex available for community use. But oops — that never happened.

The promised community facilities for non-congregant use still have not been built. An entire second phase of the project, meant to contain most of those functions, will not happen at all in the foreseeable future. The failure of the mosque project to conform to its original plans represents a broken promise between the mosque developers and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA).

The PTech connection?

DAVID S. BERNSTEIN — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:06:49 GMT

Between late 2002 and early 2003, the now defunct Fleet Bank in Boston attracted the attention of federal anti-terrorist investigators.

Read more:
thephoenix.com/mosque

Between late 2002 and early 2003, the now defunct Fleet Bank in Boston attracted the attention of federal anti-terrorist investigators. The investigators were seeking to disrupt the flow of cash to Islamists suspected of plotting violence.

Over the course of three months, 20 Fleet Bank accounts were shut as part of that effort. One of those belonged to Aafia Siddiqui, a 1995 MIT graduate well-known among many in Greater Boston's Muslim community.

The Pakistan-born Siddiqui has since achieved international notoriety. Siddiqui was captured this summer in Afghanistan and was this week found mentally unfit for trial, where she faced a staggering array of charges. In plain language, those charges allege her to have been a kingpin of international terror finance. FBI Director Robert Mueller called Siddiqui an al-Qaeda operative. The CIA said her arrest was "the most significant capture in five years" of the war on terror.

Siddiqui's Boston ties, and the allegations that she was using Fleet Bank to finance and arm terrorists, made local headlines.

The identities of most of the other targeted Fleet customers remain unknown — except for reports that at least five of those accounts were held by employees of a small Boston-area software company called PTech. PTech itself was raided by federal authorities on suspicion of terrorist-funding ties in December 2002.

One PTech employee was very public about his allegations that federal investigators had shut down his and other PTech workers' accounts unfairly, and from purely anti-Arab motivations. He is Hassan Aljabri — now the president of the Roxbury mosque's board of directors.

Aljabri gave nearly $50,000 to the mosque between 2000 and 2002. He was one of several PTech employees who were actively involved with the mosque, including the company's CEO, who donated more than $10,000.

PTech's chief architect, Suheil Laher, is the long-serving Muslim chaplain at MIT. Although he holds no title with the Islamic Society of Boston or the Muslim American Society of Boston (MAS-Boston), Laher is active in both. He is also closely related by marriage to Anwar Kazmi, who has been the mosque's primary local fundraising coordinator, and Salma Kazmi, who until last year was the spokesperson and assistant director for the project.

Also working at PTech, as network administrator, was Saladin Ali-Salaam — son of Muhammad Ali-Salaam, the Boston Redevelopment Authority employee who played a key role in the mosque's development.

The Impeachinator

HARVEY SILVERGLATE — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:08:36 GMT

Watchdog Fein
From Caligula to Bush...er Obama: Bruce Fein watches them all.

HAIL TO THE CHEATS: Whether it’s George W. Bush, Teddy Roosevelt, or FDR, Bruce Fein says presidential abuse of power has been a problem.

This past summer, the daytime drivel of ABC's The View was briefly interrupted by some actual substance. Their guest was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and her appearance, on July 28, came just days after fellow Democratic representative Dennis Kucinich had introduced legislation to impeach President George W. Bush. Pelosi, whose ascendancy was based largely on anti-Bush sentiment, was asked why, for the past two years, she had consistently opposed impeachment. Her response: it simply would be too divisive for the country, but "[i]f somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story."

While some moderate Democrats agreed with Pelosi, her centrist appeal incensed the party's left wing. It sparked more than just liberal ire, however. Former Reagan-administration lawyer and lifelong Republican Bruce Fein also took strenuous issue with Pelosi.

Fein has spent the past two years rallying citizens (and their representatives) to push Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney out of office — a message he shared in an impassioned lecture to a gathering of ACLU of Massachusetts (ACLUM) members on November 12. When a self-described conservative speaks for 90 minutes — without a single note or teleprompter — and leaves a (mostly) liberal room spellbound, one can't help but pay attention.

Fein's arguments, which he's been making on Capitol Hill and around the country to whomever will listen, have been collected in a small but power-packed volume that has just hit the bookstores, Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan).

Process, not personality
A Bush impeachment is now moot, of course, as a new president prepares to assume office in January. But impeachment was never to be, notes Fein, not because it lacked legal underpinnings (they are clear and numerous, as methodically delineated in Constitutional Peril), but because the members of Congress needed, as he put it to his ACLUM audience, "a backbone implant."

Fein has been a particularly prickly thorn in Bush's side, precisely because of his impeccable conservative and Republican credentials and the widespread respect he is accorded on both sides of the aisle. He voted for Bush and Cheney twice, before the revelations of abuse of power began to leak out. He also supported the appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, as well as the previous nominations of Justice Antonin Scalia and the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He loyally served Ronald Reagan in a variety of capacities, believes that the Supreme Court's opinions protecting abortion and homosexual sodomy "created wretched constitutional law," and opposes affirmative action, although he supported, in his words, "the color-blind civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s."

Timeline of events

DAVID S. BERNSTEIN — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:57:41 GMT

How the ISBCC turned from a place of worship to a symbol of controversy

Free pass on gay hatred?

DAVID S. BERNSTEIN — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:32:25 GMT

Turning a blind eye
Outside observers have been quick to criticize any signs of anti-Semitism connected to the new Roxbury mosque.

Read more:
thephoenix.com/mosque

Outside observers have been quick to criticize any signs of anti-Semitism connected to the new Roxbury mosque. But there has been little or no public comment about the virulent homophobia that can be found within the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) and the Muslim American Society of Boston (MAS-Boston) communities.

BU's Stephen Young surveyed 50 local ISB and MAS-Boston members for a just-published dissertation on the ISB. They were asked on a numerical scale how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statement: "Homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought to be severely punished." Rather than rejecting this extremist sentiment, the average response fell in the middle. The Arabs among those surveyed were most likely to agree.

"These things are settled in Islam," says Talal Eid, an imam in Quincy who is considered relatively moderate. "No Muslim group is going to say, 'We are going to teach that it is okay for people to be gay and lesbian.' That is not going to happen."

City Councilor Chuck Turner of Roxbury equates the Koranic defense of homophobia to the Biblical interpretations used by Southerners against blacks — "all that Noah and Ham bullshit, that was a thin veil to justify their racism."

Yet Turner and other local leaders strongly supportive of gay rights — including Mayor Thomas Menino and State Senator Dianne Wilkerson — have said little to condemn the astonishing bigotry that's being taught at the Cambridge ISB, and that might well be expected to find its way into the Roxbury mosque.

These pols further back away from criticizing even what they recognize as wrong. "What right do we have to say to a religion, 'Your practices are not appropriate,' " says Turner, adding that political dialogue is where gay rights should be addressed.

But just as Southern churches' "Noah and Ham bullshit" fueled the success of Jim Crow oppression, fundamentalist religions' sermons against homosexuality have underpinned the recent political juggernaut against gays and lesbians.

Perhaps people would speak up more were they aware of the extent of the gay hatred, examples of which can be found on Web sites like islamonline.net. That Web site is one ISB leaders most frequently point members to for advice on Islamic questions, according to Young and others — and it is full of extraordinary, almost obsessive, condemnation of homosexuality.

Two many Americas

MIKE MILIARD — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:55:16 GMT

Could an Obama administration mean an end to the red-state/blue-state divide?
It's worth reminding ourselves that when the Republicans are out of power, they go apeshit.

In North Carolina, a man electrified his John McCain campaign sign so it delivered a nasty shock to the nine-year-old neighbor trying to steal it. In California, a man hanged a Saran Palin effigy — stylish black pumps swaying softly in the breeze. In Pennsylvania, at a Palin rally, a corpulent man gleefully toted a stuffed monkey, a Barack Obama sticker wrapped around its head like a turban.

The interminable months of this election just past were marked by some strange and ugly behavior. It seemed at times to be the concentrated distillation of the past eight wildly partisan years — years in which the so-called red-state/blue-state dichotomy has become ingrained in America's fabric.

So, now that we're getting a new president, what happens?

That a number of rightward-leaning folks — Colin Powell, Christophers Buckley and Hitchens — endorsed Obama was encouraging. They believed something legions of rabid rightists do not: that the only way forward for this country is to elect a man of decency and competence with an inclusive vision for the country. Still, no one's naïve enough to suggest that the entire nation will dissolve into a big melty goop of purply bipartisanship the second Obama takes office.

But 10 days on from that momentous election, with the map seemingly redrawn (even vermillion Indiana turned blue) it's worth asking whether or not we might expect some changes in our national character.

McCain, in the gloaming of his candidacy, presided over one of the most disgracefully divisive campaigns in US history. The language and insinuation employed by his ticket and its supporters should be abhorrent to anyone who cares about the promises of liberal democracy: "the real America" . . . "traitor" . . . "the other folks."

Meanwhile, Obama — worldly, biracial, unbeholden to baby-boomer hang-ups, born in a blue state but with red-state roots — showed throughout the campaign that he means to offer something better. A cease-fire (or at least an abatement) in the culture wars. A sense of unity and common purpose. A general appeal to our better natures.

But what can we realistically hope for? Can "the first truly 21st-century figure in American politics," to borrow Washington Post op-ed writer E.J. Dionne's words, actually bridge these deep national divisions? Will the end of the Bush years signal the simultaneous end of interstate rifts? Or will the antipathies between the government and its malcontentsonly calcify further?

Short answers, in order: we'll see; no; and potentially, but hopefully not.

Divide and be conquered

BY STEVEN STARK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:57:04 GMT

The GOP relied on talk radio to carry its water, but votes are worth more than ratings
Things do indeed look bad for their Grand Old Party. Actually, it's even worse than they think.

What with their decisive loss in the presidential election and the party's distinct minority status in the House and Senate, the Republicans could be forgiven for being pessimistic. Things do indeed look bad for their Grand Old Party.

Actually, it's even worse than they think.

Since the dawn of the 20th century, guess how many times the incumbent party has failed to succeed itself in the White House after one term. Once in 11 tries — in 1976 when Reagan took out Jimmy Carter. Statistically at least, the odds are not good for a Republican in 2012.

On top of that, counting last Tuesday, the Republicans have now failed to win the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections. And in the fifth, they barely got by John Kerry. So despite appearances (owing to Washington's high neocon profile), it's actually been 20 years since the GOP was a dominant force in presidential politics.

There are plenty of theories circulating about how the GOP got itself into this mess, but one prime suspect clearly isn't getting its due — conservative talk radio.

The partisans will howl in protest, but while certainly not the only culprit, the relentless stream of invective from the right side of the dial has undeniably been a major contributor to the GOP's demise. It's no coincidence that the Republican eclipse began just when conservative talk radio found its audience.

Rush Limbaugh's show was syndicated in 1988. It's been a steady climb toward the top of the ratings for him and his imitators ever since, but pretty much downhill for the party they all support. Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the others are enormously successful media performers and they may have single-handedly rescued AM radio from financial oblivion over the past two decades.

But while wildly popular with their devotees, these partisan bloviators are enormously unpopular with the electorate as a whole. Limbaugh, for example, has about a two-to-one unfavorable rating nationally, according to a Rasmussen Poll.

What's more, these figures are all rabble-rousers — high intensity, "hot" performers whose appeal is based on energizing their base. That's all well and good for radio — it works, after all. But it's becoming increasingly apparent that it's a terrible way to structure the energy of a mainstream political movement that seeks to win more than 50 percent of the national vote.

A meme deferred

RICHARD BECK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:53:48 GMT

Michael Eric Dyson changes the subject at Harvard
Nobody knows exactly what Obama means yet, but Dyson is having a great time figuring it out.

Photos: Election night at Copley

CHRIS DEMPSEY — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:12:36 GMT

Our photographer snapped photos around Copley, as Boston celebrated President-elect Obama

Election night 2008
Fairmont Copley Plaza
Photos by: Chris Dempsey

Half-baked Alaska

KARA BASKIN — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:07:00 GMT

Why is the coldest state such a hotbed of corruption?
Until a couple months ago, did the state of Alaska ever cross your radar? Its chief exports were cute polar-bear screen savers and Northern Exposure .

Until a couple months ago, did the state of Alaska ever cross your radar? If it did, it was likely in the context of some woodsy news-of-the-weird story about a lumberjack mating with a spotted owl. Its chief exports were cute polar-bear screen savers and Northern Exposure.

Those, my friends, were the days of innocence. Little did we denizens of the Lower 48 realize how truly sleazy it is up in the great wild North. Thankfully, the Zeitgeist has since foisted upon us two specimens from the frosty Frontier State: one who looks like she failed a Hooters-trainee program and one who looks like he escaped from a meat locker. Please welcome Sarah Palin and Ted "Pruneface" Stevens, the toxic tundra twins, worse advertisements for Alaska than the Iditatrod.

Palin's instability has been well-documented, from the innocuous (the Tourette's-like repetition of the word "maverick"; debating skills gleaned from the How to Be Miss USA 1959 handbook) to the pathologically disturbing (a grudge-holding capacity on par with Richard Nixon).

Stevens is scarier, if only because he's been swindling people since before Palin shot her first moose. The 84-year-old hottie (suggested campaign slogan, "I make John McCain look spry!") is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate — ever. How's that for an epitaph? He is the type of guy who'd discuss turn-of-the-century hookers with Henry Hyde; the sort of crusty windbag who just kept getting elected over and over again, becoming richer and richer and more and more arrogant. He was an expense-account-loving, pork-barrel-spending, back-slapping hypocrite for whom morals and hubris, after a fashion, simply didn't apply. Unchallenged power will do that to you. That and senility.

Taking care of business
Stevens has been frozen into the Alaskan landscape for eons (and I do mean frozen: the man's facial expressions change less frequently than Joan Rivers blinks) having served in the Senate for 40 years. Stevens once told an Anchorage reporter that "if a man took care of himself," he could live to be 120 years old. Apparently, "taking care of himself" meant free home renovations, sled dogs, stained-glass windows, and, um, a $2695 massage chair. All gifts from his friends in Big Oil. All unreported. Live long and prosper, Ted.

So now what?

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:00:16 GMT

The time for obsessive-compulsive election monitoring has come to an end. Cupcakes, anyone?
I have an election hangover.

I have an election hangover.

No, not because I was drunk with the power of voting on Tuesday, or even because I celebrated historic political victory with fistfuls of booze. Rather, I've consumed way too much election coverage for way too long and, now that it's all over, my head feels fuzzy and my stomach is churning, as I rack my reeling brain and ponder how I can possibly occupy myself with equally obsessive fervor from now on.

I liken this post-election mourning process to the same anticlimax that rocked Red Sox Nation in 2004, a few weeks after our beloved idiots shattered the curse that haunted this city for 86 years. Boston's collective inner monologue went a little something like this: "We won! We won! Holy shit, we won! I've been waiting my whole stupid life for this moment, and it finally happened! Woooo, Red Sox, woooooooo!!! WOOOOOOOOOHELLYEAHSUCKAS! . . . So . . . now what?"

Hell yeah, suckas, "so,now what?" is right.

Many of my friends and colleagues have, like myself, restructured the last year and a half of their lives around keeping up-to-the-minute on political coverage. We trolled the Internet like rabid news-junkie hyenas, searching for plump and juicy info nuggets, monitoring blogs and stats and statements. RSS feeds served us a constant stream of political morsels. Daily Kos and fivethirtyeight.com held us at rapt attention. And the TV coverage, oh, the TV coverage, ensured that, whenever we had a spare 15 minutes of couch time or were too zonked on weekend mornings to drag our asses to an overpriced brunch, we could mesmerize our gluttonous selves with more election coverage, more candidate tidbits, more Sarah Palin gaffes, more, more, more!

Now, the election is over, and I think we're all at a bit of a loss.

Whenever an entire nation collectively gears up for anything, à la China for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, or Germany for the 2005 release of the latest David Hasselhoff album, it's easy for its residents to get swept up in the frenzy. This election captivated Americans and the international community, not only because of its historic implications but, perhaps, because of the wealth of information that's at our fingertips at any given second. Our latent OCD gets rattled by the instantaneous accessibility of election information, thanks to laptops, Blackberries, Twitter. Four years is a long time for technology to develop, after all, and each presidential election sees spankin' new information-gathering and -transmitting tools.

Racial healing

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:09:43 GMT

Former mayoral opponents Ray Flynn and Mel King discuss how far their city’s come, and how far it hasn’t, since 1983
To be sure, racism still exists. But the distance our culture has come in 50 years — from blacks fighting for basic civil rights to a black man running for the White House — is remarkable.

OLD RIVALS: Mel King (left) and Ray Flynn (right) had more in common than voters acknowledged. Today, they can look back on their role as a joint accomplishment.

Outtakes from the Phoenix's interview with Mel King and Ray Flynn. By Adam Reilly.

Barack Obama's presidential candidacy was a seminal event in American race relations. To be sure, racism still exists. But the distance our culture has come in 50 years — from blacks fighting for basic civil rights to a black man running for the White House — is remarkable.

Twenty-five years ago, Boston had its own politico-racial catharsis. In 1983, a mayoral battle pitting black against white seemed like the last thing Boston needed, but that's what it got. Following Judge Arthur Garrity's 1974 court order to integrate Boston's public schools, the city teetered on the brink of all-out race war for years. In truth, few people liked the busing solution or the logistical disruptions that came with it, but anti-busing sentiment quickly turned so ugly — epitomized by the infamous 1976 attack on black lawyer Ted Landsmark by a flag-wielding protester — that most African-Americans and liberals felt compelled to defend Garrity's ruling.

By the time four-term incumbent mayor Kevin White decided not to seek re-election, the tension surrounding busing had been toned down, but the issue remained on everybody's mind. That year's mayoral contest — between candidates too easily adopted as symbols of the warring community factions — could have pushed simmering racial antagonisms over the edge. Ray Flynn, a populist from South Boston, the epicenter of anti-busing sentiment and working-class Irish anger, who'd once publicly opposed busing, faced Mel King, the imposing, charismatic, African-American progressive from the South End.

In the end, though, the potentially volatile contest proved to be a good thing. To say it healed race relations in Boston would be an overstatement. It did, however, facilitate the healing process. Flynn and King had their differences, but they also had significant affinities, including an intense interest in public education and a penchant for grassroots politicking. And rather than playing dirty — or getting incendiary — they waged a professional, mutually respectful campaign.

These things alone would make the '83 mayor's race noteworthy. But factor in the slate of high-power candidates — including Boston City Council President Larry DiCara and former Boston School Committee president David Finnegan — whose names appeared on the preliminary election ballot, and the huge level of public participation (nearly 70 percent of Boston voters came to the polls on Election Day that year, the most since 1949), and a strong case can be made that that election marked a high point in Boston's storied political history.

Obama redraws the map

STEVEN STARK — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:29:04 GMT

But the electoral shifts may not last
Barack Obama has made history. The next question is whether his victory has sparked a lasting electoral realignment.

Barack Obama has made history. The next question is whether his victory has sparked a lasting electoral realignment.

In truth, we won't know the answer to that for at least four years — perhaps longer. But the odds are that, as decisive as Obama's victory was, it won't result in a permanent realignment of the Electoral College map, unless our current economic situation drastically worsens.

It generally takes a gut-wrenching crisis to trigger a radical shift in our politics. Outside events set off wide-ranging swings in voter loyalties; good candidates (such as Franklin Roosevelt) merely take advantage of the crises. But in the past 150 years, only three such tipping points have produced that kind of earthquake — the Civil War, which gave birth to GOP dominance in the mid-19th century; the Great Depression, which led to an era of Democratic supremacy; and the considerable fallout from the civil-rights revolution and the Vietnam experience, which initiated the Republican era that began in 1968 and was solidified by Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Historically, recessions are bad for incumbent parties — as this one was for the Republicans and John McCain. But even serious economic woes don't cause permanent shifts in the electorate unless they are so severe that they define the life experiences of a whole generation.

In fact, the demographics of the Electoral College confirm that while the Democrats right now have a built-in lead, it's not necessarily enduring.

Yes, Obama carried Virginia for the Democrats for the first time since 1964, and Colorado for only the third time since 1952, as well as North Carolina and Indiana. The Southwest also leaned more toward the left than it has in the recent past, turning those states into toss-ups in future elections.

Obama's victory in some formerly red states is the culmination of long-standing demographic shifts that have seen more liberal voters move into traditionally conservative territory, such as northern Virginia and parts of North Carolina. So the Democrats seemingly have begun to secure footholds in these regions.

The problem for the Dems is that the 2010 census and the re-drawing of the political map that follows are likely to nullify some of these gains. It's estimated that Texas is likely to pick up three electoral votes in the next census; Florida could increase its total by two, and Arizona, Georgia, California, Nevada, and Utah may each gain one. The loser states are likely to be New York and Ohio, dropping two each, and Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Pennsylvania each losing one.

Images: I read the news today, oh boy

PHOENIX STAFF — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:01:20 GMT

How the Web reported Obama's win

State council snubs artists

GREG COOK — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:06:19 GMT

Okay, Define 'Creative'
On October 8, Governor Deval Patrick signed into law a bill establishing a first-in-the-nation state-level Creative Economy Council.

On October 8, Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill into law establishing the first state-level Creative Economy Council in the US. The formation of the 25-member board to support businesses "providing creative services" is a victory for a movement that's lobbied for government support for the arts, because they are an economic engine — not just a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

But the legislation, which was sponsored by its long-time House backer, Democratic representative Daniel Bosley of North Adams, left something out — any guaranteed seat for the architects, artists, filmmakers, computer-game creators, designers, and advertising folks it defines as the creative part of the creative economy.

The council's landmark status, people fear, could make the exclusion of creative workers a national model.

The bill stipulates that the council's membership will include members of the legislature and leaders of the Massachusetts Lodging Association, Massachusetts Restaurant Association, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, regional tourism councils, and "an owner of a sole proprietorship in the creative economy" ("creative economy" is defined so broadly that this is not necessarily a creative maker). This line-up may confirm the fears of many creative types who suspect that the creative-economy movement is more about supporting hotels and restaurants than artists or designers.

"The instinct on this was to put together the advocates and the policy people who could make things happen," says Dan Hunter, executive director of Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which is guaranteed a seat on the board. "There was no intention of excluding the views of anyone. It was to raise the profile of the creative economy." Hunter says he will push for artists to be on the council's subcommittees.

Bosley's own definition of the sector is broad. "We tend to think of the creative economy as culture and the arts — the creative economy spans really almost every industry in Massachusetts," he says, linking it to Massachusetts firsts, from the computer to fully-paid-for public schools. "What has always driven this economy is our ability to innovate." Bosley aims to cultivate this sort of creativity.

Democratic representative Eric Turkington of Falmouth, who chairs the legislature's Joint Committee on Tourism, Arts, and Cultural Development, says, "People who are actually in the business of design and creating art, if I had my way, there would have been more room for them, but I think the sponsor thought it was getting unwieldy."

"There will be artists on the thing," says Bosley, predicting that the governor will use his discretionary appointments to name designers or artists. "If it doesn't work out and they don't get a seat at the table, we can always enlarge it."

Another Bush lie

JULIA RAPPAPORT — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:20:38 GMT

Online history lesson

HOME TOWNIES . . . NOT: The Bushes adopted Crawford for its folksy cachet.

It took three years and $100,000, but when his documentary film had its online premiere earlier this month, local boy David Modigliani made history and became an overnight success in fewer than 12 hours.

The film, Crawford, takes a look at the sleepy town in Texas that President George W. Bush conveniently began to call home in the lead-up to his first presidential run. On October 7, Crawford premiered on hulu.com, the seven-month-old Web site from NBC and News Corp. that streams TV shows and movies in high quality for free. It was the first-ever online premiere of a full-length feature film (history made? check), and in the three days following its debut, the film drew more viewers than either An Inconvenient Truth or March of the Penguins did on their opening weekends (overnight success!).

The reason for this insta-celebrity? After watching Crawford online, viewers can post the film directly on Facebook pages, blogs, and Web sites. “It’s astounding,” says Modigliani. “We’re putting the distribution in the hands of the people.” (Like Facebook videos, this option applies to all current Hulu programming.)

A Brookline native and Harvard alum, Modigliani was living in Austin, Texas, and trying to hack it as a playwright when he decided on a whim to take a trip to Crawford and see Bush’s “hometown” for himself. Always a believer of the Bush-from-Texas story, he was shocked to find a town to which the president had no real ties. “I felt duped,” he says. “He used the small town to create a folksy persona — one that I had bought.” Modigliani spent the next three years interviewing Crawford’s 705 residents and documented how they suffered as the president’s popularity dropped and tourists, media, and money left town. Stores closed, jobs became scarce, and morale plummeted.

The film first screened publicly at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in March. Reviews in Variety and on politico.com and screenings at 30 festivals worldwide followed, but no solid offers came through from production companies. So in August, Modigliani and the film’s distributor, B-Side Entertainment, began talks with Hulu. The site paid nothing to acquire Crawford, but will share in the revenue generated from advertisements that intermittently interrupt the movie.

Tackling the issues

JONATHAN SEITZ — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:32:44 GMT

Brutally funny
When Sarah Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric first aired, people rushed to defend or condemn her. But one man opted for the blitz package instead.

Dear Mr. President . . .

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:40:09 GMT

Redefining ‘Road Trip’
Since March 1, Massachusetts school teacher B.J. Hill has been walking across the country in near Kerouacian fashion — though, unlike Sal Paradise, Hill has a greater mission than apple pie and Mexican trollops.

Since March 1, Massachusetts school teacher B.J. Hill, 32, has been walking across the country in near Kerouacian fashion — though, unlike Sal Paradise, Hill has a greater mission than apple pie and Mexican trollops. He’s collecting messages for the next US president, whoever that may be, from everyday American constituents. After nearly nine months on the road, Hill estimates that he’s collected a few thousand messages, long and short, positive and negative, in a variety of languages. Hill’s cross-country route, a gentle S-curve from west to east via Middle America, began in San Francisco.

“Once I got that first message, on the Golden Gate Bridge, it turned into something that was more than me; it was a responsibility,” he says. “If I was doing this just to do it, I would have quit somewhere in Nevada. But the president doesn’t want to meet the person who almost walked across the country.”

Hill’s self-imposed mission might sound like the delusional musings of a rose-colored patriot, but he’s already completed a similar one. In 2006, he walked diagonally across Massachusetts, from the tippity-top northwest corner to the top of Cape Cod, collecting hundreds of messages for the soon-to-be-governor, Deval Patrick, who accepted the book of concerns and well-wishes and subsequently added it to the government archives.

Political discussions with citizens from all parts of the country might have an influence on some voters, but Hill, who plans to cast his vote for president via absentee ballot, is a registered Independent who remains undecided.

“I can’t say that any conversation has really altered my view at all,” he says. “In Massachusetts, we see the world through a left-leaning angle, and we tend to dismiss the Red States as being too traditional and behind the times — not really understanding the big picture. But after spending so many months walking through places like Missouri and Alabama . . . I don’t want to say that I’ve become more conservative, but I definitely see where they’re coming from. [Conservatives] have a set of ideals they’re trying to live up to, that aren’t necessarily impractical or behind the times.”

Hill’s original plan was to walk the final leg of his journey on Election Day, ending in Copley Square. Unfortunately, unforeseen snafus have delayed his homecoming, and he’ll likely land in Boston closer to December. “Since I’ll be finishing after the election now, but before the inauguration, it will change the messages a little, because now people will know to whom they’re actually writing,” says Hill. “But the only way to get these messages into the Oval Office is to finish the goal. That’s really what keeps me going.”

Tax evasion

CHRIS FARAONE — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:32:42 GMT

There is such a thing as a stupid question

As John McCain and Sarah Palin crisscross the United States accusing Barack Obama of promoting naive proletariat principles, people need to look no further than true blue Massachusetts for proof that Democrats and socialists are distinctly different breeds. Around here, while liberals expectedly defend “tax me” politics, conservatives are the ones who push “share the wealth” rhetoric.

The Committee for Small Government (CFSG) surfaced in 2002 with a mission to eliminate the Massachusetts income tax. That year, committee co-founders Carla Howell and Michael Cloud landed a binding referendum on the statewide ballot that would achieve their goal. The effort ultimately failed, but only after a surprising 45 percent of voters backed the measure. That result inspired CFSG volunteers — who, according to the committee’s Web site, number in the thousands — to return in 2007 and gather nearly 80,000 signatures to set in place Question 1, on which a “yes” vote supports abolishing the state income tax by 2009.

Cloud and Howell, both prominent Libertarians, have had relative success on the Commonwealth’s lopsided political landscape. In 2000, Howell ran for US Senate and received more than 300,000 nods as a third-party candidate. Cloud came even closer in 2004 against Senator John Kerry, winning a notable 19 percent of the vote. In May this year, as the anti-tax movement was gathering steam for its latest run at the ballot, observers including Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (MTF) President Michael Widmer predicted that, with Question 1, the pair could possibly achieve more than just a symbolic victory.

Massachusetts was virtually split over Question 1 until recently. A WBZ-TV/Survey USA poll conducted on September 24 found that 31 percent of voters favored the measure, while 34 percent opposed it. However, the most recent poll — taken three weeks following the aforementioned survey and about two weeks prior to Election Day — shows that only 28 percent of voters remain eager to vote “yes,” while 44 percent are dead against the initiative.

What happened? According to Jamaica Plain–based Union of Minority Neighborhoods organizer Horace Small, the CFSG picked the wrong state, and an even worse economy, to advocate selective socialism. While Question 1 defenders advertise that the proposed cut would save the average taxpayer $3600, people making less than $10,000 annually would only save about $53, while someone earning more than $100,000 would grip roughly $16,300.

Does not compute

MIKE MILIARD — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:34:08 GMT

Will our next president be a geek hero or a guy who doesn’t e-mail?
Though he’s infamous for his aversion to computers, McCain is actually no Luddite.

If members of the voting public, curious about John McCain’s positions, absentmindedly punch “www.mccain.com” into their Firefox nav bar, they’re taken not to the McCain campaign’s star-spangled site, but to the official corporate portal of McCain Foods Limited, makers of Tasti Taters and Pizza Pockets.

It’s beyond his control, sure, that this was one URL the McCain campaign couldn’t snatch up. But it also serves as a metaphor of sorts for a 21st-century politician who’s admitted to being a computer “illiterate,” who has to “rely on my wife” for all his Web-browsing needs, and who “never felt the particular need to e-mail.”

Those quotes led to much bemused guffawing and righteous hair-tugging. Beseeched, one commenter beneath a blog posts at theatlantic.com: “does anyone have a problem with a man who can barely use a computer trying to articulate what is happening in world markets? How could he possibly grasp global economy in this day and age?”

Clearly that man was unaware of McCain’s technological bona fides. That Blackberry in your pocket? You can thank McCain, says his senior policy advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. And, according to a recent New Yorker article, Sarah Palin first crossed the campaign’s radar screen thanks in part to one young Republican who’d learned about her after “randomly searching Wikipedia . . . for Republican women,” and set up a Web site, which was echoed and amplified by the blogosphere at large.

So there’s, uh, that. But what might a potential McCain administration mean for technology issues? Should we maybe expect more from a presidential ticket in this dizzying technological age than a V-P who routinely used a private, easily-hacked Yahoo! account to conduct state business in Alaska? To say nothing of a president who when asked “PC or Mac?” responded: “neither”?

Electoral engineering
Though he’s infamous for his aversion to computers, McCain is actually no Luddite. He’s served on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation for 21 years, and chaired it three separate times between 1997 and 2005, as the Internet utterly transformed the world. (He was on the committee when the Senate passed the momentous Telecommunications Act of 1996, for example.) So he’s been compelled, at least, to keep apprised of technological issues.