News

Medicine men

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:08:36 GMT

Two Boston poets use their art for the good of the tribe
What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness?

What if a poem were a social force? Forget for a moment everything you know about poetry: forget the marooned beatnik at the open mic, and the tiny thoughts tattooed on white space in the New Yorker, and the voice reading something nice about apples on NPR. What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness — to leap between people in a kind of curative, relational flash? Imagine. Your average Red Line car at 4 pm is a laboratory of human estrangement: what if poetry could do something about that?

Boston poets Rafael Campo and Franz Wright are divergent, even contrasting, poetic animals. One is a doctor; the other has been, for significant stretches of his life, a patient. One writes metrically, with an appetite for form; the other brings up chunks of almost-unphraseable psychic experience. One is a lapsed Catholic; the other is a Catholic convert.

But both of them, through their work and their relation to the world, have laid bare a live wire between poetry and isolation — physical isolation, social isolation, spiritual isolation. Campo practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, specializing in HIV-related conditions. As a gay man, he has trodden the stations of suffering from fearfulness to compassion, right through "the body's caves and slums."

"The AIDS ward where I worked was like a shipwreck," runs his poem "Night Has Fallen," "on some lost, quarantined island . . ."

Wright, a veteran of mental illness, delivered himself in part by mounting his own low-key ministry among the saddened and the lost. Who are, lest we forget, everywhere: "Someone in Hell is sitting beside you on the train./Somebody burning unnoticed walks past in the street" ("The Choice").

Tonally distinct, their poems are united in a common attempt to abolish separateness, to identify wholly and indivisibly with the other — be that other Jesus Christ, a homeless man with AIDS, or both. Campo, the physician, does it with expertise and quiet self-revelation; Wright, the patient, does it via a sort of reckless, illuminated hazarding of the ego. The un-heroic designation "local poet" is appropriate to neither of them — in our city, these two are a couple of medicine men.

The patient
Franz Wright buzzes me out to the Lincoln woods in his jaunty black Honda Civic Si, the car he bought with the Pulitzer money he won in 2004 for his collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard. "I don't do interviews anymore," he says. "Things always get distorted. But I like the Phoenix. I've always liked the Phoenix."

From Russia, with vlog

PETER PIATETSKY — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:17:06 GMT

It's a Small World Dept.
Wearing a crisp blue suit and tie in his first video blog post, Medvedev, jokingly referred to as geek-in-chief, talked about his agenda for the Evian political conference in France.

VIDEO: President-elect Barack Obama's first video address

Russia, a country not exactly renowned for its press freedoms, has prosecuted bloggers in the past, but last month, the country acquired a new uncensorable voice online — President Dmitry Medvedev’s. Wearing a crisp blue suit and tie in his first video blog post, Medvedev, jokingly referred to as geek-in-chief, talked about his agenda for the Evian political conference in France. Vlogging, is a natural step for the president, who reads the domestic and foreign press online, uses a Russian version of classmates.com, and is even fluent in Russian Internet slang. The president got more comfortable in his latter two videos, where he lost the tie, discussed the financial crisis, blamed America for it, and then explained how his state-of-the-union speech is drafted.

Reactions to the Russian-language (with English subtitles) vlog have been mostly positive, with videos and commentary of them circulating widely throughout the Russian blogosphere. Discussions have focused as much on form as on content, with one blogger saying that "the Kremlin is getting more media-conscious."

Others have lampooned the initiative. One blogger edited pornographic images into Medvedev's video address and another mocked the idea, saying: "Who says democracy is dead in Russia? How many presidents talk directly to the people through their very own video blog?"

Surprisingly, a lot. Germany's president Angela Merkel has been speaking directly to the people in her vlog since 2006. Criticized at first as being "a study in stiffness" by WIRED magazine, the chancellor quickly learned how to use the medium and soon began answering online questions during her weekly address.

Merkel may have been a vlogging pioneer, but the first world leader to have a blog, albeit without video, was the very quotable president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Launched to much fanfare in the summer of 2006, all posts are available in Farsi, Arabic, French, and English and charmingly signed: "Written by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." But sanctions must have taken their toll, as the blog has not been updated in nearly a year.

US President-elect Barack Obama has announced that, in addition to the weekly radio address presidents have recorded since Franklin Roosevelt was in office, he will also upload videos to YouTube. In a first, the weekly Democratic radio address that he delivered on Saturday, November 15, was videotaped and is now available online.

The Chuck Turner conspiracy?

CHRIS FARAONE — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:09:49 GMT

Unheard Voices
Sure, some news outlets have competently covered City Councilor Chuck Turner's recent arrest for allegedly accepting a cash bribe in exchange for a liquor license — and then lying about it.

A gay day off

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:03:17 GMT

Striking Out
A day without gays sounds like a Christian Right wet-dream come true, but it's actually the idea behind a 24-hour nationwide strike and economic boycott in support of gay marriage for all Americans.

A moral dilemma

EDITORIAL — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:47:59 GMT

State and local politics is paralyzed by fear
We need serious action and strong leadership — and a public trust that is unlikely to be given.

Even by the relatively forgiving standards of Massachusetts politics, these are pretty disgraceful days. House Speaker Sal DiMasi and three of his associates are under criminal and ethics investigations relating to a large software contract and favorable legislation for companies for which DiMasi's pals were allegedly lobbying. John Rogers, House majority leader, has had to pay a $30,000 fine for campaign-finance violations relating to mortgage payments on a Falmouth beach house. Former state senator Jim Marzilli is facing charges of assaulting women, and was recently caught taking a junket to Germany when he was supposedly getting treatment for mental illness. He has resigned his seat, as has former state senator Dianne Wilkerson, who, after a career filled with transgressions and misdeeds, has now been charged in federal court with extortion.

The latest to join this list of scandal-plagued elected officials is City Councilor Chuck Turner, arrested last week and accused of accepting a $1000 bribe in connection with the Wilkerson investigation.

Our political officeholders — those who are suspected of some sort of wrongdoing, and those who have enabled or excused them — seem to have lost their common sense.

Their problems are threatening to stall the workings of local and state government — not because those already accused have been taken out of the game, but because so many other politicians are now frozen in fear and uncertainty over what these investigations will uncover.

This is no time for a leadership vacuum in the state legislature. We have very serious challenges to address, and significant recent turnover has produced a promising but inexperienced batch of officeholders. When the new legislative session begins in January, a quarter of all the state representatives, and nearly a quarter of the state senators, will have been in office for two years or less.

We need serious action and strong leadership — and a public trust that is unlikely to be given while so many questions remain unanswered. It would be nice to see our public officials demanding those answers — but that requires political courage, a quality clearly in low supply.

Which is why, for example, DiMasi can brush off the Ethics Commission's demands for documents — not to mention demands for explanations from the general public. Apparently DiMasi can thumb his nose at transparency and accountability, and still not fear losing his Speakership. This is both outrageous and pathetic.

Menino's mosque

DAVID S. BERNSTEIN — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:26:34 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 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:11:50 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.

She's back - almost

EDITORIAL — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:15:21 GMT

Why Clinton's appointment is good for Obama. Plus, better Boston graduates.
Why Clinton's appointment is good for Obama. Plus, better Boston graduates.

As the Phoenix goes to press, the news is that lawyers are beginning to vet Democratic New York senator Hillary Clinton to serve as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of state. It appears as if the only bump in the road to her ultimate approval could be evidence of potential irreconcilable financial conflicts on the part of her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

Before his wife's appointment becomes official, Obama's vetting team will likely look into President Clinton's current international business deals, his foundation's activities, and the names of his library's donors.

President Clinton is, of course, a political wild card. He is irrepressible and, on occasion, cantankerous. But as in-your-face as the Clintons are — as individuals and as a couple — it would be hard to imagine their letting Hillary Clinton's candidacy for the cabinet's signature position go forward were there fatally compromising dirt to be dug. After all, Senator Clinton came close to winning her party's presidential nomination. If she had clinched it, the public scrutiny of her husband would have been extreme.

Media analysis of Obama's bold and, in most quarters, welcome move has been extreme. And it is hard to imagine that there is much new light to shine on the situation, absent fresh developments. It is, however, worth reconsidering the most clear-eyed observations, because they suggest the outlines as to what is on Obama's mind and what Senator Clinton's appointment implies about the future.

It is a given that Senator Clinton's consideration is a unity move, both within the Democratic Party and among women of all political stripes. If Clinton decides, for whatever reasons, to decline the job or further consideration for it, Obama scores a political win. (Hey, he tried.)

That does not mean it is not a shrewd policy choice.

Whoever serves at the State Department must be able to work with the vice-president. And Vice-President-elect Joe Biden has immense foreign-policy experience, which is one of the reasons Obama chose him.

In the Senate, Clinton has enjoyed an easygoing relationship with Biden. It's certainly not as long-standing as that between Biden and Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who also has been mentioned for the post. But neither is it tinged with the air of fraternal competition that is said to characterize Biden's dealing with the Massachusetts senator. (It is interesting to note that all three voted to support Bush's decision to wage the Iraq War.)

The Impeachinator

HARVEY SILVERGLATE — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:07:40 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."

Photos: Menino's Mosque

PHOENIX STAFF — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:55:08 GMT

Photos of the mosque in Roxbury and people involved in its creation

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 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:25:28 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.

Missed the bus

BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:01:57 GMT

Letters to the Boston editor, November 21, 2008

As someone who was active in the anti-forced-busing movement, I have neither regretted nor apologize for my opposition to court-ordered busing between two groups of people both suffering from bad education. To pit South Boston against Roxbury served neither community well. It took the focus off the product being delivered by the Boston Public Schools and focused it on race.

As I read Adam Reilly’s “Racial healing” article, I saw the same stereotyping that took place back in 1974, when Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. enforced the court order that nearly destroyed a whole generation of young people caught in the cross hairs of liberal revisionist history.

I am tired of seeing working-class families branded as racists because they wished their kids to be schooled near home.

I remember the 1983 mayoral election as an election between ideas on how to move forward in the post–Garrity Jr. age.

Yes, we’ve come a long way since Brown v. Board of Education, and since 1974 in Boston. However, neither Flynn nor King was viewed as symbols of warring community factions, as Reilly implies.

Boston, despite what some liberals believed, was never pushed over the edge, or even close to it, by racial antagonism. All that parents wanted in Roxbury or South Boston was a safe and viable public education for their children.

Flynn and King showed in 1983, and again in the pages of the Phoenix, that there is always more that unites us than divides us.

Sal Giarratani
Roslindale

Oil slick politics
Your article on Alaskan politics may have taken a bit of an aggressive tone for some. But let that not cover up the muck that the article covered. Here’s some food for thought — or for frying, if you have access to a drill on Alaska’s northern coast: nations, regions, and locales that thrive off of the exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources, as opposed to human intellect and ingenuity, tend to produce stinking, greasy political systems the world over. So why should we be any different?

One look at Middle Eastern oil “producers” and a resurgent oil- and gas-exporting Russia should be enough to make most of us cringe. I thank God that beautiful and invaluable Alaska is nothing like the rest of the nation’s Main Street when it comes to politics. Let’s hope this dichotomy holds up for Wall Street as well, or we’d be in for a long, long ride.

Eran Segev
Cambridge

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.

Fair is foul

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:45:12 GMT

What's the fuss over the Fairness Doctrine really about?
These are scary times for far-right conservatives.

These are scary times for far-right conservatives. Everywhere they look, there's another doomsday scenario to ponder: President-elect Barack Obama is a closet Communist! Another Hitler! A race warrior who's going to ban guns, kill newborn babies, and just might be the Antichrist!

Most of these dark anxieties simmer on the right's outermost fringes. But one — the conviction that Obama's win and Democratic gains in Congress mean the impending resurrection of Fairness Doctrine, a defunct policy aimed at creating a balance in broadcasting — is tormenting both the wing nuts and conservatism's grownups.

Consider: Jay Severin, a host on Boston's WTKK-FM (96.9), recently accused Fairness Doctrine supporters of "standing by watching while fascists come to my house, burn it down, and kill my family." Yikes. Meanwhile, back in September, Washington Post columnist George Will warned that "Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood, and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio" — by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine, natch.

Why all the fuss? For one thing, despite all the hyperbole, talk of a Fairness Doctrine comeback isn't as loony as it seems, judging from recent remarks by some prominent Dems. But there may be another reason. Outrage over the Fairness Doctrine is becoming a pawn in the fight over Net Neutrality, the principle of all Web content moving freely and equally without discrimination from ISPs — which, given the stakes, should make Democrats drop the former subject altogether.

An outdated solution
For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asserted that the right to broadcast — on scarce, publicly owned frequencies — came with civic responsibility. Broadcasters, the FCC held, should devote some of their programming to controversial matters of public interest. They should also allow divergent points of view to be presented on their stations. That's the Fairness Doctrine in a nutshell. (In one famous case, the Supreme Court ruled that the author of a critical biography of Barry Goldwater had the right to respond to a torrent of criticism directed at him from a Christian broadcaster in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.)

The doctrine's intentions were commendable. But it was vague, and spottily applied, and co-existed uneasily with the First Amendment's right to free speech. And in 1987 — at the height of Reagan-era deregulation — it was voluntarily abolished by the FCC. The FCC's decision was upheld on appeal to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1989, and subsequent congressional efforts to restore it have failed.

Fresh air does wonders in politics

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:49:50 GMT

Green Grassroots Effort
Overwhelming local support for a nonbinding ballot initiative indicates that a push for a greener future may have legs.

One Day you'll learn

CASSANDRA LANDRY — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:29:13 GMT

Second Courses
College students are told relentlessly to enjoy their time in school.

College students are told relentlessly to enjoy their time in school. "Once you're in the work force, that's it," parents and grandparents and teachers warn them. "I would trade with you any day."

That day, as it were, just got a lot closer.

One Day University (ODU) — the ultimate day of college, minus beer pong and homework — is a program that brings together top-ranking professors from some of the country's most respected colleges for one-day programs that recreate an academic atmosphere for those who are, as the hype on onedayu.com puts it, "nostalgic for a time when life was more about learning than job performance."

A day at ODU is relatively affordable — four lecture courses and lunch for $259, a far cry from the wallet-draining cost of a full top-tier enrollment. On top of that, ODU students need not sweat bullets over any standardized tests or submit any applications to bask in the enlightenment. Sessions are held in a dozen cities throughout the country several times each semester. Upcoming Boston-area days are scheduled into 2009 for December 7, January 17, March 7, and May 2. Each day's schedule is devoted to a slate of specific disciplines, such as science, history, music, and economics.

Shawn Achor, professor of positive psychology at Harvard, was approached by ODU directors after his psychology class on happiness garnered national attention for enrolling one out of six students on campus. "I love seeing the attendees make my research come alive. They're listening to the lectures not to get better grades, but to get a better education. It is what college should always be like," he says. "[ODU] students have a lot more life experience, so when I talk about psychology research, they nod their heads and smile, connecting the research to their own experiences in their work life and family life."

Professor of political science Matthew Baum — also at Harvard — is participating for the first time in December with a lecture on media, public opinion, and foreign policy. "My experience with adult education is that I get people who are very attentive and are already well-educated," Baum says. "I think continuing adult education is a terrific thing. Whether ODU is the answer to all continuing education, I don't know, but I do think that this sort of concept is the right idea."

"ODU provides a missing gap in education where we often think that school is over after our last degree," says Achor. "You are getting a higher quality of teachers than even Ivy League students normally get during a semester."

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.

California’s shame

EDITORIAL — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:17:22 GMT

Equal marriage rights suffers a setback, but there is hope. Plus, young voters.
The politics of division as practiced by lame-duck president George W. Bush at the connivance of his onetime Svengali Karl Rove are not dead.

The politics of division as practiced by lame-duck president George W. Bush at the connivance of his onetime Svengali Karl Rove are not dead.

Democrat Barack Obama’s decisive national victory over Republican John McCain certainly dealt a body blow to those who would pit whites against nonwhites, the native born against immigrants, the haves against the have-nots, and those who practice their fundamental right to worship as they choose against those who exercise their equally constitutional right not to worship at all.

But anyone who doubts that the politics of intolerance and inhumanity are alive and well need only to look to California, Florida, and Arizona, which voted to deny same-sex couples the basic human right to marry that couples of differing genders enjoy. The Taliban would be proud.

The situation in Arkansas is even more dispiriting. Voters in that state went so far as to mandate that only married couples can adopt children or serve as foster parents. Since heterosexual unions are the only couplings recognized in Arkansas, voters removed the possibility that straight singles could adopt in order to bar gays and lesbians from becoming parents or guardians. Pity the children.

While the same-sex-marriage bans in Arizona and Florida (the latter, for good measure, also outlawed civil unions) undeniably hinder the just cause of civil rights, the vote in California was most significant.

In May, the Republican-dominated California Supreme Court issued a ringing declaration establishing that couples of the same gender had the equal right to marry as those of differing genders. “An individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights,” the court ruled.

California voters thought otherwise. Although the state went overwhelmingly for Obama, voters allowed the state constitution to be amended in order to outlaw marriage for gay and lesbian couples. In a predominately multicultural state like California, it is difficult to pinpoint the constituent groups responsible for the defeat. But the effect of African-Americans who approved the ban by a margin of more than 70 percent is difficult to deny.

The irony, of course, is bitter. The same day that a black American was elected president for the first time, his fellow citizens denied the dignity of marriage to same-sex couples. What a country.

Equally undeniable was the opposition of religious groups to same-sex marriage. The Mormon-led movement was joined by Catholics and Evangelicals Protestants who decided that the teaching of Jesus Christ to love your neighbor as yourself need not apply in California — or, by extension, to the rest of the nation.

No chopped liver

JEFFREY GANTZ — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:40:30 GMT

Wait Wait in Boston
NPR's weekly quiz show, Wait Wait....Don't Tell Me , visits the Wang Theatre with some recognizable panelists.

If they’d been handing out chits for Carl Kasell’s voice on your home answering machine, they couldn’t have crammed more people into the Wang Theatre entry a week ago Thursday evening. An “intimate” evening with U2? Miss Saigon with the real helicopter once again? No, for the first time in some eight years, National Public Radio’s weekly news quiz game, Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, was taping in Boston. Forget the Rockettes.

Inside, the crowd cheered host Peter Sagal, official judge and scorekeeper Carl Kasell, and the evening’s three panelists — Boston Globe writer (and former Phoenix staffer) Charlie Pierce, Amy Dickinson of the syndicated column Ask Amy, and “TV personality” Mo Rocca — as if they were rock stars. Saying that this was “the largest paid audience we’ve ever had,” Peter allowed as how Boston was sort of his childhood home and added that, coming back, “It’s different. I got a scent of it in the air. Your sports teams are all winning. Your presidential candidate did pretty well. [Huge applause.] What’s not to like?” That was too much for Charlie: “Have you tried the subway, my son?”

Just two days after the presidential election, everybody was in a celebratory mood. Peter made Hahvahd jokes and used the word “approbation” in homage to Doris Kearns Goodwin. The folks in the balcony shouted down that they couldn’t hear, so the Wang sound system was ratcheted up, which left those of us sitting close hard-pressed to get all the jokes. Soon we were off with Marci from Montana, who made her political allegiance clear with a light-hearted answer identifying Governor Palin as “our Caribou Barbie.” After Peter related a story — perhaps apocryphal — about the governor’s opening her hotel door to McCain aides dressed in nothing but a towel, Mo came up with the movie title: “A Bridge to No Underwear.”

You probably have your own questions about the show. Where does everybody sit? In this case, Peter and Carl stood, next to each other stage right, and the panelists were seated at the traditional table, stage left, with the production team shrouded in darkness behind them. What does everybody wear? Peter and Carl sported coats and ties (for radio!); Mo and Charlie went respectable-casual; Amy wore a bright red party dress. Did the taping sound like what would air on WBUR that weekend? Mostly, yes. It’s as rapid-fire as what you hear; there’s not a lot of hemming and hawing while trying to think up one-liners. (Mo’s going into a prolonged huddle was surely deliberate; Peter had to snap him out with a “Lightning, Mo! This is the Lightning Round.”) Most of what’s different is that some material gets cut and rearranged to fit the show’s 50-or-so-minute time frame. We lost a lot about Big Bird, and a question about political parties in Malaysia, and one about unruly children in Lambeth. A caller mentioned that it was dark outside; you knew that wouldn’t make it on a show that airs Saturday at noon in Boston.