The gulf of Maine Senator Collins votes the Bush line 77 percent of the time; her challenger, Representative Allen, weighs in at 18 percent. Will thes

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Maine is a Democrat-leaning state that has — at least for now — two Republican senators. With a massively unpopular Republican president leaving office, this year’s Senate election is as much a contest based on a candidate’s real and perceived alignment with George W. Bush as anything else.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is making hay out of John McCain’s record of voting with Bush 90 percent of the time, and Maine Democratic US Representative Tom Allen is trying to do the same as he works to unseat incumbent Republican US Senator Susan Collins. One of his most recent TV ads blames the present economic meltdown on Bush’s efforts to deregulate the economy, and then says “Susan Collins supported the Bush economic policies that hurt Maine and created a national crisis.” For her part, Collins is trying to distance herself from Bush: A recent ad avoids the word “Republican” entirely, calling her “an independent voice for Maine.”

Collins is more independent than most Republican senators, opposing the president more often than all but one of her upper-house GOP colleagues — Maine’s other Republican senator, Olympia Snowe, who was elected to her third term in 2006.

But there is a gulf between Collins and Allen, and it becomes very apparent when looking at how their positions align with Bush’s (or don’t). Congressional Quarterly, a nonpartisan news organization covering Congress, has calculated a “presidential support score” for every member of Congress, looking at how often they voted with or against President George W. Bush’s wishes throughout his term to date — Collins voted with Bush 77 percent of the time; Allen just 18 percent.

On a broad range of Phoenix-selected key topics — including the USA PATRIOT Act, foreign trade, economic and tax policy, environmental issues, energy, stem-cell research, the Iraq War, the minimum wage, immigration, warrantless wiretapping, abortion and reproductive rights, education, open government and free speech, the Farm Bill, Congressional ethics and campaign-finance reform, homeland security, same-sex marriage, Supreme Court justices and key Cabinet officials (in the Senate only), AIDS/HIV, prescription-drug prices, military Base Realignment and Closure Commission issues, and treatment of terrorism detainees — Allen has sided with Bush 17 percent of the time, while Collins backed the president 64 percent of the time.

That’s a lot of difference right there. And by looking at just a few specific issues of great national importance, the contrast between Allen and Collins becomes clearer.

Iraq
COLLINS voted with Bush on Iraq-related issues 72 percent of the time, including supporting both “use of force” resolutions (the one on September 14, 2001, authorizing the use of force against whomever had attacked the United States on 9/11, and the specific 2002 authorization of use of force in Iraq), and repeatedly opposed troop-withdrawal timetables. Only in 2007 did she begin offering any real opposition to Bush’s efforts in Iraq, voting to begin debate on opposing the surge, but without retracting her opposition to a withdrawal timetable.

ALLEN voted with Bush 27 percent of the time on Iraq-related questions, supporting the vague 2001 “use of force” authorization (which led to the Afghanistan war), but not the Iraq-specific one in 2002. He has supported several war-spending bills, though not all of them. He went against the president in his votes opposing the Iraq troop surge and supporting timelines for withdrawal. He also supported Bush-opposed efforts to prevent money appropriated for Iraq and Afghanistan from being spent on actions against Iran.

SNOWE supported Bush on Iraq even more than Collins, agreeing with the president’s Iraq policy 77 percent of the time, as compared with her overall support score of 73 percent. But she opposed the surge, and has sponsored a bill for prompt withdrawal from Iraq.

Democratic US Representative MIKE MICHAUD took Bush’s side 21 percent of the time, mostly on war-spending bills. (Michaud supported the president 19 percent overall.)

Civil Liberties
COLLINS agreed with Bush’s positions on civil liberties 82 percent of the time. Not only did she vote to confirm the appointments of John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, and to confirm John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court, but she voted for the USA PATRIOT Act and its reauthorizations, and for a constitutional amendment that sought to ban flag-burning. She supported Bush’s positions on treatment of terrorism detainees, the creation of military tribunals to “try” terrorism suspects (while barring the creation of a commission to oversee those tribunals, which largely have been ruled unconstitutional), and suspension of habeas corpus. She also voted to support warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, and to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that had participated in warrantless wiretaps before the practice was formally legalized. In the process, she voted to dismiss a federal lawsuit filed by Maine residents seeking information on the government’s warrantless-wiretapping program. Collins opposed a Bush-supported constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage, and voted against Bush to declare that Attorney General Gonzales “no longer holds the confidence” of the Senate.

ALLEN agreed with Bush just 12 percent of the time on civil-liberties matters. He supported the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001, but has opposed its renewal ever since. He has opposed Bush’s efforts to block same-sex marriage, to weaken Net neutrality, to legalize warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, and to defend abuse and torture of detainees suspected of being terrorists.

SNOWE agreed with Bush 74 percent of the time on civil-liberties matters, aligning with Collins in every way, except that she was at a family funeral and missed the votes on military tribunals and suspension of habeas corpus.

MICHAUD aligned with Bush 16 percent of the time, including support for efforts to weaken Net neutrality and for the creation of military tribunals for terrorism suspects. He was not in the House to vote on the original USA PATRIOT Act, but has opposed it since taking office.

Economic Policy
COLLINS has supported Bush’s economic policies 88 percent of the time, backing his tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, agreeing with his efforts to abolish the estate tax, and supporting both “economic stimulus” bills (in 2001 and 2008). Her only significant opposition to the president was on the 2001 “bankruptcy reform” bill, a credit-card-company-supported measure that made it harder for individuals to reduce their debts through bankruptcy protection. She voted for the Bush-backed financial bailout proposal that passed the US Senate and was signed into law last week.

ALLEN supported 13 percent of Bush’s economic efforts, including the 2008 “economic stimulus” package (though not the one in 2001) and extensions of previously existing tax credits for children in taxpaying families. He voted against Bush’s tax breaks for the rich, and against the abolition of the estate tax, and in favor of a Bush-opposed increase to the minimum wage. He too backed the Bush-supported financial bailout, during both votes in the US House.

SNOWE supported Bush’s economic policies 54 percent of the time, including backing both “economic stimulus” bills, and most of his tax cuts (though not reductions in taxing dividends). Like Collins, she opposed the president on “bankruptcy reform,” but supported the financial bailout.

MICHAUD aligned with Bush 38 percent of the time economically, diverging from Allen’s position primarily on class-action lawsuits. (Michaud voted in favor of a bill called the “cheeseburger bill” because it blocks customers at fast-food restaurants from suing the chains’ owners for contributing to the customers’ obesity.) He opposed the financial bailout both times it was voted on in the US House.

Environment and Energy
COLLINS voted with Bush’s energy initiatives 24 percent of the time. She supported his efforts to increase logging as a way to try to prevent forest fires, as well as the controversial 2005 energy policy revision that increased federal funding for alternative energy sources but preserved massive oil-industry subsidies. (She also supported the 2007 expansion to offer even more incentives for the electric-generating industry to reduce environmental impact.) She has opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has supported clean-environment legislation Bush has opposed, such as limits on mercury emissions.

ALLEN has supported six percent of Bush’s environmental initiatives, voting in favor only of preserving snowmobilers’ access to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. He opposed almost all the Bush energy-policy proposals (including the major revision in 2005, though he supported its expansion in 2007), as well as oil drilling in ANWR, and supported Bush-opposed efforts in the areas of renewable-energy generation and public transportation.

SNOWE’s 24-percent agreement with Bush has been exactly the same as Collins’s.

MICHAUD supported Bush 13 percent of the time, when it comes to the environment, differing from Allen only in his aggressive support for logging — he supported a bill that allowed federal agencies to suspend the Endangered Species and Clean Water acts, and even the National Historic Preservation Act, when granting permits to log forests recently affected by fires or hurricanes. The bill passed, under the guise of allowing the harvest of dead timber that would decay and become unusable if the usual, slower regulatory process were followed.

Health Care
COLLINS supported Bush’s healthcare efforts 40 percent of the time, backing the creation of the Medicare prescription-drug plan, and supporting efforts to find “alternate” ways to do stem-cell research, without using embryos. She opposed Bush’s efforts to curtail embryonic stem-cell research. And Collins worked against the president to try to allow price negotiation on Medicare-purchased prescription drugs, and also supported importing prescriptions from certain other countries that were deemed “safe.”

ALLEN voted with Bush on healthcare 10 percent of the time, supporting Bush’s efforts to ban “fetal harvesting” (in which embryos would be created for the sole purpose of harvesting organs or other tissue for transplantation), as well as supporting permission for research on stem cells derived from donated blood from umbilical cords. He opposed Bush’s limitations on embryonic stem-cell research, drug importation, Medicare prescription price negotiation, and human cloning for research and medical purposes. He also voted for a Bush-opposed bill that provides more coverage for mental-health conditions in private insurance plans than were previously required.

SNOWE ’s 40-percent alignment with Bush has been exactly the same as Collins’s.

MICHAUD voted with Bush 31 percent of the time, differing from Allen in his support for banning human cloning for all purposes (including medical research), and in voting to oppose researching ways to develop stem cells other than destroying embryos.

John Cranford at Congressional Quarterly generously shared CQ’s tabulation data.

Calculating scores
Congressional Quarterly tracks all of the roll-call votes in the US House and US Senate, and how members of Congress vote. It also researches the president’s position on the votes, noting “any vote where the president expressed an opinion about the vote beforehand,” as CQ national editor John Cranford explains.

In the US House, those are normally votes on important bills — or, at the very least, votes on significant changes to bills, such as those in which representatives from both houses have conferred and agreed on compromises.

In the US Senate, votes included in the scoring also include those on confirmations of presidential appointments (which often result in even hard-core lefties voting “with the president” to confirm a judge, undersecretary, or even a major cabinet officer). And Senate scores include some procedural votes, such as “cloture,” by which the Senate votes to end debate on an issue. But cloture and other procedural votes are only included in scoring when they are the final positions lawmakers take on a bill, Cranford says.

Not included on CQ’s scorecard are any votes whose results are determined by “voice vote” or by “division,” when individuals’ positions are not recorded in the outcome.

CQ uses those results to determine a legislator’s “presidential support score,” the percentage of times a member casts his or her vote in alignment with the wishes of the president. The publication’s staff also track the positions of party leaders in Congress, to calculate a “party unity score.” That information is available online at www.cq-politics.com.

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On the Web:

• Presidential Support during the Bush years through 2007: http://www.cqpolitics.com/cq-assets/cqmultimedia/flash/votestudy/index.html
• Presidential Support during 2007 and 2006: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=57
• Presidential Support preliminary 2008 scores: http://www.cqpolitics.com/cq-assets/cqmultimedia/flash/votestudy/index2008ytd.html
• Allen’s voting record: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/a000357/votes/
• Michaud’s voting record: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/m001149/votes/
• Collins’s voting record: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/c001035/votes/
• Snowe’s voting record: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/s000663/votes/

Out for a spin: One week, one limited-edition Porsche — what to do?

Published in the Portland Phoenix
Driving a 2008 Porsche Boxster RS 60 Spyder Limited Edition is an exercise in ridiculous, indulgent impracticality. But it’s fun — and it might get your name written on the inside of teenage girls’ pants.
Through no effort of my own, a man I had never met drove that car — number 296 out of 1960 ever made — into the office parking lot last week, and handed me the key. When he had called out of the blue offering the car as part of a Porsche marketing and promotion effort, all I’d done was tell him I’d drive it and return it in one piece. I made no promise to write about it, and only a vague verbal assurance that I could drive a stick-shift car. (For the record, my regular car, a 1995 Subaru Impreza wagon, is a stick-shift. So I wasn’t lying.)
On the very first night, it failed utterly as a utilitarian object. My wife and I were slated to pick up a friend (who was in town on business) at her hotel and take her to a restaurant for dinner. But the Boxster has just two seats, so within hours of receiving the key to a $65,000 car, one of just 800 in North America, I had to leave it parked in the garage while we picked up our friend in my wife’s 2000 Subaru Impreza Outback wagon.
That was the first of a few downers. Other low points were general paranoia about police officers — my uncle, a genuine “car guy” — had reminded me, when I called to gloat, that “a ticket is wasted money.” And then there was the horrific downturn the nation’s economy took, almost from the moment I received the Porsche’s key. At various points I drove past the panhandlers near the Deering Oaks Park I-295 on-ramp, and along the social-services end of Congress Street, in a car I did not own, could not afford, and could never imagine myself ever actually owning, even if one day I do have that kind of money just sitting in the bank. Don’t ask me what they thought of me — I was studiously avoiding their eyes.
Let’s move on to the high points.
Some of the people I took for rides surprised me, and even themselves. A freelancer who normally bums around in a 1980s-era Volvo with more than 300,000 miles on it turned out to also own an ancient sports car he keeps in good repair. And an utterly grounded, down-to-earth college friend became totally flighty upon sitting in the passenger seat, and spent much of the ride extolling the just-discovered virtues of expensive cars (except when she was feeling guilty for being so materialistic).
Better than enacting my high-school fantasy of driving the coolest, fastest car on the block was giving someone else that feeling — a guy in a Pontiac Firebird spotted me in Cape Elizabeth and tailgated me for a while, hoping to race. Eventually he gave up and roared past me, earning the right to truthfully tell his friends how he totally dusted a Porsche.
My sister’s boys — ages 5 and 3 — had a total blast, even without going for a ride. They clambered all over the car, hid in the trunk and under the dashboard, got me to put the top down and up and down again, and pretended they were driving to Vermont to see their grandparents. The older one even managed to yank on the gearshift enough to make the car move just a little — before I intervened with the emergency brake.
The biggest high point of all had to be the spin a friend and I took out to Kettle Cove in Cape Elizabeth at sunset on a Friday night. As we drove through the parking lot, checking out the scenery, I heard someone woman shout, “Hey! Wait! Can I take a picture of your car?”
Sure, I thought, no problem. I pulled around and parked, and we found ourselves surrounded by a screeching group of teenage girls. I’ll let one of them tell you how it went, in an account posted on her Facebook page. But first, I have to explain (before any accusations of impropriety arise) that four of them share a pair of pants — a sort of “sisterhood of the traveling pants” — and wear them to special occasions, after which they write about what happened at the events on the inside of the pants, in laundry marker. With that, here’s the story, with spelling and grammar intact from the original:
So today was the best day of my life!!!! I was at my BFF’s sweet 16 and it was towards the end of the party and out of the cornor of my eye i saw the most beautuful site ever.....modle number 296 Porche!!!! Good lord it was the most beautiful thing I have scene!!! it was silver with a red interior!!! so of course being the very subtle person i was i yelled out to the driver....” CAN I TAKE A PICTURE OF YOUR CAR!!!!!!!” And to my suprise he came and rove over!!!! I was like salavating over the beauty of the car....and then he said something that made my whole year....” well do you want to take a picture in the driver’s seat...?” I almost dropped to the floor in praise, exclaiming...YES!!!!!! It was the most amazing experience of my entire life!!!!! My firends and I took sooooo many pictures that I think we could have gone through 2 memory cards!!! I think that the driver of the amazing car was more entertained with the fact that ther where like 10 screaming girls around his car than we where!!! He was just as giddy as us...not to mention that he was very gratious to let us take turns taking pictures in his beloved porche!
Well that was my day and i can’t believe that it happened to me!!! thank you soooooo much for making my day amazing!!!! “you will forever be in our pants!!!” hahahahahahahahah!!!!!!
I did indeed let the girls sit in the car, and they took tons of photos, many of which are now also on Facebook. And when I found out that it was a Sweet Sixteen party, I offered the birthday girl a spin. Her eyes lit up and she jumped in the car. Just before she closed the door, she said quietly, “It just occurred to me how sketchy this could be.” But she got in anyway, and off we went for a quick trip around the parking lot.
I showed her the same stunts I showed all the folks I drove around — its snap-your-head-back acceleration, growling exhaust (complete with a button on the console that makes it louder), stick-to-the-road cornering, tight turning radius, and snap-your-head-forward braking power. She was quiet but had a huge grin on her face. Her friends were more vocal, squealing away on the sidewalk. One of them called it “the Porsche that changed my life.”
The bottom line, though, is that it’s a silly car. Yes, it is a convertible, which is one of the key attributes I dream of in a car. It shows you on the dashboard your real-time miles-per-gallon performance (which I think every car should have), what the tire pressure is, and how many miles before you’ll need to stop for fuel. It has heated seats, which extends the top-down time period by a few weeks in the spring and fall. There’s a button to extend the rear spoiler if you think the silver car with red-leather interior doesn’t look cool enough as it is.
For all of those things — and for a week — I could overlook the biggest frustration, which was that I couldn’t get the racing timer to work. Mounted very prominently atop the dashboard, in a car that is in its entirety a tribute to racing, and there was no way to get it to start. I also could ignore its 19-26 miles-per-gallon fuel “economy,” those ultra-bright halogen headlights (I hate being blinded by them in oncoming vehicles, and I hate even more being that oncoming vehicle to other drivers), and slick tires that I wouldn’t trust at high speeds in the rain.
It’s entertaining to drive, though. If you’re on vacation somewhere sunny and have some extra cash to blow, rent the Porsche instead of the economy mini-compact you might otherwise choose. And if someone offers to loan it to you for a week, say yes.

Skatepark design picked

Published in the Portland Phoenix

An online poll coordinated by the Portland Phoenix has given Portland’s Skatepark Committee the people’s wishes for Portland’s new skatepark. It will be option three, a layout with a clover bowl and more greenspace that was designed to fit fairly naturally its setting in Dougherty Field, off St. James Street.

City Councilor Dave Marshall says he expects the committee, which met Tuesday night, after the Phoenix’s deadline, to accept the results of the poll and recommend that design to the full City Council. He says the committee may make some changes to the design based on online comments, but expects the general overall design to remain largely true to the original. Some requests included a half-pipe and some additional ramps and rails.

The park, which is expected to cost $325,000, will replace the one on Marginal Way that was torn down in 2007.

Press Releases: Post-daily

Published in the Portland Phoenix

After leaving daily newspapers, where do journalists go?

Kevin Wack, who had spent four and a half years at the Portland Press Herald, left the paper this summer, but is doing what he might have done had he stayed — covering the Senate race between incumbent Republican Susan Collins and Democratic US Representative Tom Allen. The difference is that he’s covering it online, for his own blog, TheMaineRace.com.

Even in its first couple weeks, Wack’s blog is earning its stripes, uncovering the fact that a pro-Collins TV ad was paid for entirely by the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying group. That and his other findings are attracting attention — including responses from commenters on TurnMaineBlue.com and AsMaineGoes.com. Unfortunately, Wack took a long weekend off to travel out of town, and missed the first Collins-Allen debate (so there’s a bit of a delay for his insights on that, but we’ll look forward to more timely comments on the remaining nine).

Of his departure from the PPH, Wack says he could see the writing on the wall: fewer reporters was going to mean less time to do projects and investigations. Since those were his primary interests, “It was a good time to leave,” he says.

Armed with a few weeks’ pay and some solid time on his hands, he entered the blogosphere as a way to build his “online resume.”

Turning his political reporting into blogging was a natural choice. But many of the political blogs he read were “identifiably partisan,” and some offer not much more than a “link and snarky comment” treatment of important topics.

“I wanted to do something that was non-partisan and had original reporting,” Wack says. He hopes his blog will combine “the best of traditional journalism” — which he describes as the on-the-ground reporting effort, or “actual-fact-gathering” — with more “voice” than is customary in daily newspapers.

He might be regretting his choice of coverage, though — while Allen is closing what was a 20-percentage-point gap in the polls, the Senate race “looked like it might be a little closer than it is right now.”

After Election Day, he’ll head to DC to start a nine-month paid fellowship with the American Political Science Association. He will study how Congress “works,” and ultimately will spend several months working as a staffer on Capitol Hill, assisting either a member of Congress or a congressional committee. He expects that will give him additional insight into the machinations of the federal government, which will in turn — he hopes — allow him to better explain those processes to his audience at a future media job.

Wack swears he’s not following the journalism-into-government track that has been well paved in Maine by former journalists who became spokesmen and -women for some of Maine’s leading politicians (David Farmer and Crystal Canney for Governor John Baldacci, Kevin Kelley for Susan Collins, and Dennis Bailey for Angus King, among others).

But after he’s done with the fellowship, he’ll be back on the job hunt. “I’m fairly pessimistic about going back to work for a daily newspaper,” he says, noting that both the economy at large and the daily-newspaper industry in specific are struggling mightily. But with new connections in Washington, he’s optimistic about finding a job with an online media outlet, or possibly a journalism-like job with a think tank or research foundation.

“I hope that I am able to stay in journalism,” he says. He sounds as if he means it, and if the choices of AJ Higgins and Josie Huang (who left their papers and joined the Maine Public Broadcasting Network) are any indication, he may just get that chance.

Will FairPoint run out of money?

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Wall Street’s melt down could burn consumers throughout Northern New England — especially those in Maine.

The flashpoint is FairPoint Communications, the state and the region’s principal phone company.

On Monday, FairPoint borrowed $200 million in cash for fear its major lenders might collapse and make that money unavailable.

FairPoint’s financial positions have been under scrutiny since the January 2007 announcement that the North Carolina-based company would buy Verizon’s northern New England landline operations (see “We Told You So,” by Jeff Inglis, July 4).

But the company’s financial struggles worsened Monday, when Lehman Brothers, a major lender to FairPoint, filed for bankruptcy protection.

Lehman was one of a group of lenders who collectively had offered to loan FairPoint $400 million. Of that total, Lehman was responsible for 30 percent, or $120 million, according to financial statements from the publicly traded FairPoint. (Spokesmen for the company did not return phone calls before the Phoenix’s deadline.)

Before this week, FairPoint had already borrowed $170 million of that group’s $400 million. Monday’s loan, also from those lenders, maxed out one of its largest available lines of credit and gave FairPoint $200 million more cash on hand. A company spokesman told CNN that he expected the $30 million in remaining credit to become unavailable due to the financial market problems. (It may sound like a lot of money, but it’s really small potatoes in the context of corporate financing. FairPoint, for example, borrowed most of the $2.3 billion it paid Verizon for the land-lines.)

Maine utilities regulators say having a cash reserve that the company spends down over time is better than not being able to pay for investments because money isn’t available from loans. But it’s a sign of how much FairPoint is relying on credit — rather than revenue from customers — to keep its finances afloat.

Making that sign more ominous is FairPoint’s admission to CNN that this move is more expensive than borrowing cash as the company needs to spend it, because the interest FairPoint earns on the funds it hoards will be less than the interest it owes on the loans. So FairPoint will be losing money just sitting still.

Also Monday, the company announced it would sit still longer, delaying its full takeover of telecommunications land-lines in northern New England until at least January 2009. In the meantime, FairPoint is paying Verizon $16 million a month to run the phone systems in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Outside consultants hired by the three states’ regulators reported on Monday that while FairPoint had made “substantial progress” toward being ready for the takeover, some software systems aren’t finished yet. As a result, training programs haven’t been finalized, and workers haven’t been taught how to use the not-yet-ready software.

Fred Bever at the Maine Public Utilities Commission and Bill Black, the deputy public advocate (a state agency tasked with representing the public interest in utilities-regulation cases), both say the delay is a good move. In Bever’s words, it’s “better than the risk of widespread service problems.”

Black says it’s too early to tell whether the postponement will cause any more problems for Maine consumers, but promised to keep an eye on things. But then again, Black admitted that, a day after it came out, he hadn’t yet read the report that forced yet another delay in finalizing the largest utilities deal in Maine history.

World without end: After we're gone

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Will the Earth miss us when we’re gone? It’s unlikely, suggests Alan Weisman, author of the best-selling 2007 book The World Without Us. Weisman, who stops by Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Friday for a reading and book-signing, takes us to places people have abandoned and shows us how nature is reclaiming even urban landscapes.

He visits, among other places, the area around Chernobyl (still recovering from the 1986 nuclear disaster), and the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea (whose wildness is watched over by heavily armed soldiers), speculating on what will happen if, and when, people vanish (whether, Weisman cannily teases, by mass extinction, evacuation, or indeed Rapture) and leave the planet to its own devices.

His most striking example is on Cyprus, where, thanks to political tensions for the past 30 years, Varosha, a city that was once home to 20,000 people has been left abandoned and subject only to the forces of nature. Two years after war forced its evacuation, trees were growing up through what had once been paved roads, and at towering hotels, “10 stories of shattered sliding glass doors opening to seaview balconies now exposed to the elements, had become giant pigeon roosts,” Weisman writes. Four years later, “roofs had collapsed and trees were growing straight out of houses. . . . Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement.”

Now, “Fallen limestone facing lies in pieces. Hunks of wall have dropped from buildings to reveal empty rooms . . . brick-shaped gaps show where mortar has already dissolved. . . . Feral geraniums and philodendrons emerge from missing roofs and pour down exterior walls.”

Backed by extensive research and exhaustive travel, Weisman shows the real long-term effects of what we're doing to the planet — what wouldn’t make it through next week (New York's subway tunnels, daily in danger of being flooded), what would endure for 250,000 years (nuclear weapons' radioactivity), and what would last for millions of years (open-pit mines).

In the process, he offers a kind of hope — much of what we do to our environment can be undone without our help — as well as a warning: the undoing of damage only starts when we stop causing it. And then he ends on what we'll choose to call a happy note. "Around 5 billion years from now, give or take, the sun will expand into a red giant, absorbing all the inner planets [including Earth] back into its fiery womb." Then, the only things that will be left of us — if anything — will be our space probes, wherever in the galaxy they have ended up, and the TV, cellphone, and radio transmissions we have sent out into the universe for the past century. They will travel ever onward, without us.

Alan Weisman | reads from and signs The World Without Us | September 5 @ 7:30 pm | South Church, 292 State St, Portsmouth NH | Free | 603-431-2100

It’s not about the art: Looking behind the effort to paint South Portland oil tanks

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The real goal behind the Art All Around project, which proposes to paint original artists’ designs on several Sprague Energy Corporation oil tanks in South Portland, will be fulfilled even if none of the tanks is ever decorated.

According to Jean Maginnis, who dreamed up the idea and is coordinating the effort to bring it to life, the project is not actually about art for art’s sake. Instead, she says, it’s about forcing “a large public discussion of art.”

Maginnis, the founder, executive director, and sole employee of the Maine Center for Creativity, the “group” that spearheaded the effort, is getting her wish. Five semifinalists’ proposals — all abstract designs — were selected by jury from 560 submissions and made public in the middle of last month (see “Words Over Pictures,” by Ken Greenleaf). And since then, the outcry has been deafening. Though her organization has raised just $200,000 of the $1.2 million needed to actually put paint on steel, hundreds — even thousands — of Portland-area residents are thinking and talking about art, though not exactly the way Maginnis might have hoped. (See sidebar, “Talk of the Town.”)

Good intentions
Maginnis is a passionate defender of her brainchild, initially responding to a Portland Phoenix request for an interview and up-close viewing of the proposals by saying “I’m not going to share my information with you if this is something you’re going to attack.”

She did eventually grant us an interview, in which she explained that she wants her three-year-old organization’s signature project to appeal to several distinct audiences, mostly far from Maine.

-international media outlets, which might cover Maine as an artsy destination;

-art-interested people around the country and the globe, who might travel to Maine if they thought about it as a creative place;

-Google Earth users across the Internet, who might see the painted tops of the tanks on their computer screens, if and when the Web-based satellite-photo database adds new images;

-business owners and leaders everywhere, who might be inspired to use artists’ work or artistic approaches in business applications;

-investors, who might bring their businesses to Maine if they were more aware of how creative our state’s residents are;

-artists, who might benefit from being able “to feel that they are able to make their dreams come true;”

-and, ultimately, the millions of people — mostly Portland-area residents but also visitors — using cars, boats, airplanes, trains, bicycles, and even just their feet on routes from which they can view the tanks.

These are, indeed, positive intentions — efforts to “put Maine on the map in the national and international markets,” and even trying to get people who bad-mouth the Pine Tree State to start “saying something different about Maine than ‘it’s not worth investing in.’”

Fixing what’s not broken
If all this strikes you as a massive undertaking intended to right a large number of wrongs, you’re getting the picture. And if you question whether some of those wrongs are as bad as Maginnis makes them out to be, you’re not alone.

Maginnis says that she already has strong evidence of her project’s success. For example, she notes that many of the 560 entrants wrote in their entries that they had learned something new about Maine when researching their submissions — which is, it’s true, a start down the road of teaching the world about Maine’s creativity, but not really numbers worth boasting about. And she professes great satisfaction at having brought discussions about art into the halls of government and corporate boardrooms, in her search for financial and logistical support — even though many of her sponsors and collaborators are long-time activists in the local arts community.

There are even farther-reaching goals, though. Maginnis admits that, based on the wealth of national-scale artists who live here, Maine has a strong reputation among artists and art sellers and a robust visual-art life and economy. Considering their small populations, Portland and Maine — which have been art destinations for decades — have a high number of quality galleries and museums. But still, Maginnis insists that more people think of Maine as a state where businesses and artists struggle, rather than one where ingenuity is key to survival — and that this project can help shift that view.

That seems like a strange perspective, but it’s easier to understand how she got there when she offers the most startling example of the pessimism driving her forward. There are, she says, currently “no industries” in Maine where creative people can work.

That’s a particularly ironic statement for many reasons, not the least of which is the letter of support from Governor John Baldacci that is prominently posted on the Art All Around project’s Web site. In it, the governor makes clear that “more than 63,000 Maine residents are currently employed in the creative sector, which provides about 10 percent of all Maine’s wages.”

Her claim is further contradicted by the fact that she delivers it — with great earnestness — in one of several conference rooms in the offices of a large Portland marketing firm that provides her with free desk space and other support. At the desks outside the room where she is speaking work some of the most successful creative minds in the state.

Talk of the town
The public’s objections to the Art All Around project are legion, and range from philosophical to savage. The most pragmatic complaints decry the use of $1.2 million in private donations to pretty up massive oil tanks when the petroleum industry is making record profits and Mainers can’t afford to heat their homes or gas up their cars.

Some local residents have expressed concerns about the designs themselves, with one South Portland artist telling the Current (a weekly community newspaper serving South Portland) the designs give her “little to be excited about.” A resident and business owner quoted in the same article used the word “horrendous” to describe some of the designs — her strongest praise was, “Others, I could live with.” And a South Portland city councilor voiced among the most common criticisms of the designs: “I was expecting (design proposals) more along the lines of Maine-related history, mountains, seascapes, and native animals.”

Even the tough-as-milquetoast Portland Press Herald arts section recently ran a column calling the project “controversial.” (Note to those reading daily newspapers: the word “controversial” is code for “We hate this, but aren’t comfortable saying it ourselves, and we can’t be bothered actually talking to anyone to get a quote.”)

Project creator Jean Maginnis has an answer to all of those critics. “A lot of people” tell her they like the project and its semifinalists and are willing to support it with their time, energy, and money. Fighting back tears, she explains that this work is “valuable . . . because art matters.”

Press Releases: Dumped by text

Published in the Portland Phoenix

He might not like this comparison, but Barack Obama has pulled a Britney. He told his supporters — or at least those who signed up on his Web site — his vice-presidential nominee choice before granting an interview to a major daily paper or even holding a made-for-TV press conference.

Yes, Obama dumped the newspapers and the TV folks the same way the Mouseketeer-run-amok ditched K-Fed in 2006: by text message.

Some mainstream media outlets have tried to claim they had the news first, saying they had beaten the campaign to the punch by telling readers and viewers (mostly on their Web sites) that US Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, was the “likely” choice throughout the day last Friday. But none of them could get rid of that troublesome word “likely,” and the only official-type comment was an outright denial from Biden, who said, “I’m not the guy.” So their efforts were pretty transparently speculation, however right they have turned out to be.

(As one possible exception, CNN has been claiming its reporting apparently influenced the timing of the text message — at 3 am Saturday rather than 8 am, as the campaign had originally planned.)

But the guessing game that makes up much of mainstream political journalism these days didn’t gain much traction among the general public. Americans were waiting for the word from Obama himself — not on TV, and not in the newspaper, but in their text-message inboxes.

The old-media train was already headed off a cliff, but Obama’s move has accelerated the derailment, highlighting the shortcomings of the traditional news sources and, simultaneously, the practicality of a new form of mass communication.

Of course, the newspapers made it easy to see where they missed the boat — witness the massive headlines on Sunday morning, more than 24 hours after the text went out, saying Biden was the pick. By then, the only people not in the know were — you guessed it — people who only get their news from the daily paper (if any such people still exist).

“Yesterday’s news tomorrow” never seemed so apt a slogan for the daily-newspaper industry. Even the TV newscasts were reduced to telling a huge portion of viewers something they already knew.

Obama’s text also showcased a new way that news consumers can get information. While many news organizations have started to “go mobile,” with “mobile-accessible” Web sites readable on Internet-enabled cell phones, and text-message alerts about breaking news, this is the first time a non-news organization has been invited by so many people (hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions — the campaign’s cagey about the numbers) right into their purses and pockets.

If digerati philosopher Esther Dyson is correct — and all signs are that she is — then the most precious commodity of this century will be people’s attention. That makes the second-most-precious commodity the ability to get their attention — that is, the cell phone.

The Obama campaign’s success at getting immediate and direct access to large numbers of Americans could have a major effect on the outcome of the election. Most important, the campaign can send its supporters reminders to vote on Election Day — and receiving a reminder has been shown to significantly increase a person’s likelihood of actually casting a ballot.

But it’s also a hedge against the mainstream media, a warning shot across the bow of those talking heads and political horsetraders who ignored the real problems facing our country and instead spent massive amounts of air-time and ink speculating about whether Obama was secretly a Muslim, whether the pastor of the Christian church he attended was anti-American, whether the editors of The New Yorker had crossed some sort of ethical line, and a hundred other things that are pretty insignificant to average Americans struggling to buy groceries and heat the house.

With that one text message, the Obama campaign has signaled that not only can it make the daily-grind newshounds irrelevant, but also that whenever the need arises, it will.

Too scared to win? Barack Obama must fight for his principles, or he’ll give away the keys to the White House

Published in the Portland Phoenix; reprinted in the Orlando Weekly

The video shows a meeting of Barack Obama’s campaign staff. A progressive activist arrives to pitch in, but her eyes glaze over amid Democratic-establishment polling reports and move-to-the-center cliché-spouting. Not quite two minutes go by before she interrupts to explain Obama’s connections to big corporations and neo-conservative foreign-policy advisers. “He’ll promise to rock the boat, but he won’t sink it,” she warns, insisting that the campaign return to the strong, eloquent, principled stands Obama took in the primary.

Her argument wins over those in the room, but before switching strategies, one of the ex-establishment groupies has a question: “Do we still work for Obama?” The progressive’s answer: “No! He works for us. He always did.”

Sure, it’s just the opening skit of the most recent Liberty News TV episode, a progressive news-and-commentary program written and filmed in Portland and distributed on public-access cable channels nationwide. The Illinois senator and his campaign staff need to sit up and take notice anyway, not because it’s a suggestion of a path to victory, but because the clip lays out his only path to victory.

There are a lot of people giving Obama advice about what he should do to beat John McCain. (See “Winning at the Grassroots Level” for a list of books offering similar advice for progressive activists.) But only one of them is offering advice based on an actual analysis of long-term voting and polling data to determine what voters really really want. And what they want is not someone who follows the polls and gets pushed around by the media, but someone who knows what he believes, says so, and stands up for it even in the face of criticism.

In his primary campaign, Obama staked out the progressive, aggressive, principled high ground, and attracted millions of passionate supporters. Having created the movement, and having been selected as its head, he should now follow his people — which almost certainly means doing something more dangerous than any major candidate has ever done: ditching the party establishment.

The people who back Obama may be energetic young progressives, but they are not unlike the vast majority of Americans when it comes to what they look for in a candidate. Glenn Hurowitz, a longtime progressive activist, explains in his book Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party that a major factor determining any voter’s choice is whether the candidate fights well (a characteristic described in polling data as being a “strong leader”).

That trait, Hurowitz argues, trumps most other concerns — even differences of opinion on major policy questions (though not party affiliation). His book, based on a new analysis of 40 years of election and polling data, suggests that the reason the far-right conservative movement has risen to control the American political system is not due to any particular intelligence or ability on the part of right-wing activists, who espouse positions vastly divergent from most Americans’ values. The rise of the right has happened because Democrats and progressives refuse to stand and fight for what they believe in.

His book (for which Portland Phoenix staff writer Deirdre Fulton was a research assistant before she came to work here) debunks the surrender-prone “politics of fear,” saying Democrats cannot win by immersing themselves in polling data and shifting position as public opinion evolves. Rather, they need to show some backbone — by clearly stating Democratic and progressive values, and then standing up for them, over and over, even in the face of political resistance.

Audacity
Sadly, Obama appears to be turning to the center — for example, with his vote to approve the Bush administration’s warrantless-wiretapping program, which he had previously condemned. That brought waves of criticism from progressive activists, bloggers, and even the New York Times editorial board.

Yes, his vote to give telecom companies immunity for their role in illegal spying on Americans was a major policy failure, and one at odds with most Americans’ expectations of privacy from government snooping. But its repercussions are far worse, in Hurowitz’s analysis, because Obama missed a chance to be seen standing up for what he believes.

With his vote on the wiretapping bill, Obama behaved like most Democrats, who surrender to political pressure, waver as polling data comes in, and wait until the last minute to declare their position on an issue — and take the side that was going to prevail anyway. Not only do they lose important fights on public-policy issues, but they simultaneously destroy their credibility with voters.

Hurowitz’s research shows that when progressives and Democrats take and hold principled stands on issues, they gain respect from voters (even those who disagree with the particular position) and emerge as popular leaders, even if their stand fails. So if Obama had objected, fought, and voted against the bill, people’s opinion of his leadership abilities would have increased, whether or not the bill ultimately became law.

The crux of this argument is really quite simple: Americans are disillusioned with our politicians, and we want something different. We are so disappointed, in fact, that when we find someone who really is different — like Obama seemed to be during the primary — we get excited about him or her, regardless of whether we agree with them on key issues, and regardless of whether they win the fights they engage in. The mere act of fighting is enough, because a politician sticking to his or her guns despite opposition is such a rare surprise in this country.

In an interview, Hurowitz points to the conservative movement as an example. It’s dramatically out of step with the beliefs of almost all Americans, but its activists have convinced millions of people “to support pretty extreme right-wing candidates who don’t share American values,” he says.

“The Republicans realized that their values and their ideas are not what people are voting on, so they can hold those ideas and persuade people in other ways” — specifically, by standing on their principles (wrong-headed and dangerous though they may be) in a world of wafflers and waverers.

By contrast, the Democrats and progressives, whose visions for the country are, in fact, shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans, can’t seem to gather support for their initiatives, mainly because they won’t stand up for them when opposition arises.

“Seeming weak and losing all the time is not providing the strong leadership that voters are looking for,” Hurowitz concludes.

Hope
Obama may be getting the message. Hurowitz says he has seen some promising signs from the presumptive Democratic nominee: “In moments of crisis, his political instincts become better, and his principles actually come out, and he starts to actually fight for what he believes in. When he becomes comfortable and feels as if he has a lead in the polls is when he gets sucked into Washington conventional wisdom that for a Democrat you have to tack to the center to win.”

In the primary, for example, when Obama was behind, he became more willing to talk about Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses, “and that was when he surged in the polls,” Hurowitz observes. His attacks were based on fact, and were not snarky or nasty, as Clinton’s often were. “He attacked without seeming like he was on the attack,” which was a very effective weapon.

And Obama may have noticed that he didn’t pick up much support in the polls in the aftermath of his warrantless-wiretapping vote, cast shortly after he secured the Democratic nomination.

The “wisdom” of the party establishment would have expected otherwise, though — a move to the center, in Democratic political theory, attracts voters. But that’s advice from people who couldn’t even prevent George W. Bush from winning a second term.

Obama’s energy comes from the young, not the old, and that highlights what Hurowitz sees as a generation gap threatening the progressive movement. The older Democrats, who form most of the party establishment, grew up in the age of the hippies, and are more inclined to be “tolerant liberals,” he says, concerned about hearing everyone’s point of view and coming to an inclusive consensus resolution.

Turning to a recent example, Hurowitz talks about offshore oil drilling, and cites an environmental lobbyist saying publicly that she could understand the point of view of people who oppose her on the issue. “I could never imagine an oil lobbyist or a Republican . . . saying that they could understand the perspective” of an opponent, Hurowitz says.

But younger progressives — lefties who grew up as part of the “Me Generation,” for example — are less patient. “For younger people who have seen the fruits of losing battles because of the overemphasis on tolerance of other points of view, the important thing for us is actually winning concrete victories,” he says.

The progressive in the Liberty News TV skit wants Obama to propose a nationwide light-rail system. “Where’s the bold plan to get us out of fossil fuels and into alternative energies?” she asks. The others in the room, not yet convinced, roll their eyes, fold their arms, and lean back in their chairs.

“Liberals can be confrontation-averse,” Hurowitz says. But that causes a problem because Republicans and conservatives don’t play by the same tolerant, inclusive, consensus-building rules. “There’s a high price to non-confrontation in politics,” Hurowitz says, noting the wins racked up by the right, and suggesting “Democrats should start acting more like principled conservative activists.”

“We have to cultivate a great love for progressive values (and) at the same time a recognition that putting those values into place requires standing up for what you believe in and fighting hard against those who disagree with you. That is the challenge”

Dreams
“Forty years worth of political science research shows that being a proud progressive makes political sense for Democrats,” Hurowitz writes very early in his book. “Candidates can take quite unpopular positions without suffering major negative political consequences. So long as they do it with sincerity, integrity, and passion, they’re unlikely to lose many votes because of it,” he writes.

That’s where Obama fell down on the warrantless-wiretapping vote. Hurowitz’s analysis suggests the vote hurt Obama’s image not so much because it put him in the Bush camp for a bit, but because it cast doubt on his forthrightness as a principled leader.

The penalty for errors like that can be severe. Progressives who are disappointed don’t vote Republican, but they do the next-worst thing: they don’t vote at all. (Or, if they do vote, they go for a third-party candidate.)

So how can Obama win? First up, Hurowitz says, is “emphasize partisan affiliation.” The main factor in which candidate a voter supports is party self-identification. Right now “more people identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans, and that is the single biggest thing that’s going to help Obama this year,” he says.

Obama’s “task is to make sure Democrats don’t defect,” which means making sure they’re not disappointed in him or thinking of him as a bad leader. One way to do that is to declare his principles and describe himself in opposition to McCain. Another way is to do what progressives have already begun doing, and portray McCain not as “the independent he seeks to portray himself as but rather a lackey of President Bush and the Republican establishment,” Hurowitz says.

“McCain is just walking into it,” having won the Republican primary because “people admired his generally principled stands,” but now he has “totally jettisoned everything that people liked about him.”

Obama can do it. He can win. But it means standing his ground, not just against the Republican attack machine, but against those in the establishment of his own party who will try to push him to be a moderate, well-tempered centrist candidate, in the image of Al Gore or John Kerry.

Hurowitz’s biggest worry is that “Republicans will come up with an effective attack on Obama and Obama won’t hit back out of fear that striking back will make him unattractive to voters.”

The solution? Obama must remember “every day of his campaign” a famous line from Democratic attack dog James Carville: “It’s hard for your opponent to say bad things about you when your fist is in his mouth.”

Winning at the grassroots level
These books, all published within the past nine months, lay out very specific guidelines for on-the-ground political activists and get-out-the-vote efforts.

FEAR AND COURAGE IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY by Glenn Hurowitz | Maisonneuve Press | 274 pages | $14.95

A TIME TO FIGHT: RECLAIMING A FAIR AND JUST AMERICA by Jim Webb | Broadway | 272 pages | $24.95

CAMPAIGN BOOT CAMP: BASIC TRAINING FOR FUTURE LEADERS by Christine Pelosi | Polipoint Press | 243 pages | $15.95

CRACKING THE CODE: HOW TO WIN HEARTS, CHANGE MINDS, AND RESTORE AMERICA’S ORIGINAL VISION by Thom Hartmann | Berrett-Koehler | 220 pages | $24.95

FRAMING THE FUTURE: HOW PROGRESSIVE VALUES CAN WIN ELECTIONS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE by Bernie Horn | Berrett-Koehler | 175 pages | $24.95

GET OUT THE VOTE, SECOND EDITION: HOW TO INCREASE VOTER TURNOUT by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber | Brookings Institution Press | 225 pages | $18.95

HERE COMES EVERYBODY: THE POWER OF ORGANIZING WITHOUT ORGANIZATIONS by Clay Shirky | Penguin Press | 336 pages | $25.95

LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER: STAND UP STRAIGHT by Robert Creamer | Seven Locks Press | 618 pages | $23.95

What should you do?
Glenn Hurowitz offers three pieces of advice for progressives who want to make a difference in November

REGISTER TO VOTE You can do this on Election Day, but voting itself will go faster if you do it in advance, either in person or by mail. You need to prove both your identity and where you live. The ideal document is a driver’s license (or some other government-issued photo ID that has both your photo and your address). Barring that, you’ll need your Social Security card or birth certificate and a utility bill or bank statement with your name and address on it. You can either go to your town office or call there to ask for a voter-registration card to be mailed to your home — you fill out the card and send it in with photocopies of the appropriate documents.

GO VOTE Don’t be so disillusioned that you refuse to participate, or so confident that you think your candidate will win without your support.

BRING A FRIEND Don’t assume everyone is as tuned-in to this election as you are, even though it’s a historic opportunity. Remind people to vote, and make a plan to meet them at the polling place on Election Day.

Jeff Inglis can be reached atjinglis@phx.com.

Press Releases: After the fall

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The bad news for the Portland Press Herald just won't stop.

The layoffs slated for August 18 — the third staff-reduction this year — will leave a demoralized, overworked crew, with 20 percent fewer staffers overall than at the same time last year.

The company’s predictions suggest advertising revenue might be down as much as $200,000 per month, as compared to 2007. And publisher Chuck Cochrane admitted in the pages of his own paper that the company will lose money this year.

Circulation dropped by more than 10 percent in the six months between September 2007 and March 2008, according to records filed by the paper with the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The paper is for sale, but the deal — if it happens — won’t come soon enough to prevent the Seattle Times Company (the PressHerald’s corporate parent), from failing to make its September payment on the loans it took out to buy Maine’s largest daily and its two sister papers (in Waterville and Augusta) 10 years ago.

It’s time to ask: Could the Portland Press Herald go under? The future of daily newspapers has been in question since the dawn of the Internet age. But the questions are only getting louder. The Albuquerque Tribune, a daily newspaper founded in 1922, closed in February. Closer to home, the Argus Champion, a 185-year-old weekly in central New Hampshire, announced two weeks ago that it would close at the end of July.

So far in Maine, most newspaper closings have been like those announced by Rockland-based VillageSoup in June: after buying six papers from Courier Publications, the company condensed those six and its previous two papers into five publications.

But in the June-July issue of American Journalism Review, senior contributing writer Charles Layton explained “why a lot of newspapers aren’t going to survive.” It’s not a pretty picture: with print-advertising revenue dropping precipitously, and online revenue-growth slowing, “we may begin seeing, pretty soon, big American cities with no daily newspaper,” he writes.

One industry analyst Layton interviews says some dailies will survive — “small local newspapers . . . with circulation under 25,000,” and some very large dailies, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. But many of the rest — including possibly papers as large as the long benighted San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune — may close down.

This trend is not without risk, as many have pointed out. After all, daily newspapers — and their Web sites — are still how many people get their news. That’s true even of people who don’t read much — TV news stories and many radio headlines spring from the pages of daily papers. How will people be informed citizens, the industry asks, if daily papers die?

Layton's article suggests people have already found other ways, quoting another news-business consultant as saying, “If a big newspaper in a metropolitan area dropped dead right now, nobody under 30 would care.”

He might be right about Maine: more than two out of every three 18-to-35-year-old residents of Southern Maine don’t read the PPH right now, according to an independent audience survey released in February.

Even young journalists see the writing on the wall. In a piece entitled “Don’t Bean Count Me,” posted July 17 on the Columbia Journalism Review’s Web site, 26-year-old Kathleen Nye Flynn (a former weekly reporter now a grad student at Columbia Unviersity's journalism school) asked reporters facing major staffing cuts to walk off the job in protest.

If they're at the Press Herald, they should probably take their resumes with them.

Trying out an anti-demonstration ‘sonic cannon’

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The Maine Marine Patrol is considering purchasing a “sonic cannon” capable of broadcasting earsplitting, “disorienting” sounds, like those that have been used to break up peaceful demonstrations in public spaces in Iraq and the country of Georgia.

The device, called a “long-range acoustic device” (LRAD), is described by its manufacturer, the California-based American Technology Corporation, as having the ability to emit an “attention-getting and highly irritating tone for behavior modification.” (The company’s Web site helpfully adds that the device, which costs roughly $20,000, is two feet in diameter, and weighs 60 pounds, has been used “in combat since December 2003.”)

A demonstration model on loan from the manufacturer was tested in Maine over the July 4 holiday weekend by Marine Patrol officers interested in another aspect of the device: its capability to broadcast highly directed sound that can reach people as far as a mile away — for example to communicate with a boat approaching a security zone, according to Marine Patrol Major John Fetterman.

That was one of the intents of the device when it was invented for the US military in response to the failure of a security zone to protect the USS Cole from a suicide-bomber’s attack in a Yemeni port in 2000. That attack killed 17 sailors.

But it wasn’t the LRAD’s only purpose, nor the most worrisome to those who might be more inclined to peaceful assemblies than attacks on warships. The manufacturer’s Web site touts another “feature” of the LRAD — its “warning” sound. That tone can be as loud as 151 decibels, which is enough to cause permanent hearing damage to a person as far as 1000 feet away after just a few seconds of exposure. So if a Marine Patrol officer even accidentally switched the device over to “warning” mode from its more benign “communication” mode, it could literally and permanently deafen anyone in its line of fire.

According to news reports, the warning tones from LRADs, which can be mounted on trucks as well as boats, have been used against civilians by Iraqi police and US troops in Iraq over the past few years, and were used in November 2007 by police in Tblisi, Georgia, to disperse an anti-government rally. (The New York Police Department deployed at least one LRAD near a demonstration outside the Republican National Convention in September 2004, but didn’t use the warning tone.)

The most-often touted “success” of the device’s warning tone was in defense of a Carnival Cruise Lines cruise ship attacked by pirates firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades off the coast of Somalia in 2005. While it did repel the attack, one of the two men who used the device against the pirates says he has lost some of his hearing as a result.

But perhaps we can take some comfort in Fetterman’s remark that if the Marine Patrol did buy an LRAD, it would probably buy “only one” and move it from boat to boat as needed. And he says the agency is “only looking at it for communications,” not for crowd-dispersal purposes.

On the Web
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/georgia-police-.html
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/acoustic-weapon.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj1hGarg8lk
http://flickr.com/photos/16241099@N00/379261/

We told you so: FairPoint’s phone-line takeover is as bad as regulators feared.

Published in the Portland Phoenix

We knew it would be bad. Heck, beyond all the ink in all the other newspapers, we at the Portland Phoenix printed 4500 words over the course of six months explaining what was wrong with the Verizon-FairPoint merger, in which a North Carolina-based little-phone-company-that-could spent $2.3 billion of mostly borrowed money to take over the northern New England operations of one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies (see “A Bad Idea Triumphs,” by Jeff Inglis, February 29).

But it is with a distinct feeling of dismay (though perhaps just a touch of schadenfreude) that we report that the change-over has been more disastrous than even we thought: FairPoint is performing terribly now, and all signs point to the situation getting far worse, and probably never getting better.

Let’s move past the MISSING ONLINE BILLING SYSTEM that has customers in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont upset at having to buy stamps to mail in their payments for phone service. That’s still not resolved, but it’s relatively minor — and the company says it’ll be fixed by late fall. Liberty Consulting Group, the Pennsylvania-based company monitoring FairPoint’s transition for regulators in all three states, says it shouldn’t be a big problem. (You’ll see shortly that neither FairPoint nor Liberty is establishing a very good track record for this sort of promise, but there are much bigger fish to fry than complaints about adding 42 cents to everyone’s phone bill.)

We can less easily dismiss the fact that more workers have left the company than FairPoint predicted, leaving the new outfit SHORT OF EXPERIENCED WORKERS at a time when customers need reassurance — which usually comes in the form of speedy, competent service. That goes for both in-person physical repair work and over-the-phone support.

FairPoint had said that, upon closing the deal, it would hire an additional 675 employees in northern New England. But as of March 31, according to a report from Liberty, the company had 10 percent fewer employees than Verizon had had 10 months earlier, meaning it needs to hire replacements for roughly 270 people before economic-development number-crunchers can even begin to count any “new” workers. FairPoint corporate communications manager Jill Healey Wurm says the company needs to hire a total of roughly 900 people, but wouldn’t give a reason for the increased number. The company had hired 260 people as of the end of April, the most recent numbers Liberty or FairPoint have disclosed.

Liberty, though, says not all 900 positions need to be filled, and has claimed that only “key” positions do — while simultaneously recognizing that defining the word “key” is ... well, key, and refusing to define it.

But honestly, those issues too are small potatoes compared to three other problems lurking just under the radar, hidden in plain sight, in Liberty’s reports — all of which are available on the Web sites of the Maine and New Hampshire Public Utilities Commissions (the NHPUC one is much easier to find and use, atwww.puc.state.nh.us/Telecom/FairPoint.htm).

Moving at a snail’s pace
The first major problem is the speed of FairPoint’s takeover from Verizon, which is ALREADY FOUR MONTHS BEHIND SCHEDULE, a delay that means customers will not see the lower phone rates promised by FairPoint until December at the earliest, rather than August, as regulators had hoped. (In December, FairPoint customers in Maine will get a credit retroactive to August, totaling around $20 per phone line.) The original transition plan gave FairPoint four months after the date the deal actually closed to prepare to take over all phone-system operations from Verizon (an event called the “cutover”).

But months before closing, FairPoint was saying it would need more time to get ready, in January estimating it would need five months post-closing. Liberty’s January 14 report, its second monthly summary of FairPoint’s preparedness, called that deadline “very aggressive” and expressed “doubts that FairPoint can meet” it. In its February 11 report, Liberty was even more worried, calling the five-month schedule “extremely aggressive.”

By Liberty’s March 7 report, the closing was slated for March 31, and FairPoint was saying it needed six months post-close, delaying the cutover to “late September” at the earliest. While Liberty called the delay “helpful,” the consulting firm wrote that it was “too soon to assess the likelihood that FairPoint will be able (to) meet a September cutover date.”

Its April 10 report also saw Liberty saying it was “too early to judge” FairPoint’s ability to take over in September, but by May 9, Liberty was calling it “unlikely” that FairPoint would be ready in time.

And a month later, on June 6, Liberty’s report just plain said it: FairPoint’s four-months-plus-two-extra target of a September cutover was “unrealistic” because testing was nowhere near complete, neither of new software created by FairPoint to handle the former Verizon systems, nor of connections with other telephone companies. Liberty then recommended the cutover be delayed another two months, and happen sometime in November, saying it did “not anticipate any substantial roadblocks to FairPoint’s meeting that date.”

On June 17, FairPoint acquiesced to Liberty’s judgment. But before November, there are many important milestones for FairPoint to hit, including making sure it can import Verizon’s customer and wiring data into its computers without problems, finishing developing its software, hiring staff, and then training them to use the software that’s not yet developed.

Maine officials, and FairPoint, remain convinced the cutover will happen. “Liberty believes FairPoint is up to the task,” but just needs more time, says Fred Bever, spokesman for the Maine Public Utilities Commission. FairPoint’s Wurm takes a less-reassuring tone: “The cutover is going to happen in a very reasonable and hopefully seamless way.”

Emergency calls
There is one more project FairPoint needs to complete — or actually start — before it’s ready for cutover: Maine’s emergency calling system, E-911. It’s a core issue, and one we talked about though nobody else did: FairPoint is the company handling emergency calls from Mainers (and New Hampshirites and Vermonters) in dire, life-threatening situations. Which is why it gives us no pleasure to report that FairPoint is UNPREPARED TO HANDLE 911 CALLS.

To date, broken telephone systems have temporarily blocked 911 callers from reaching three dispatch centers in Maine, and have caused problems in New Hampshire as well.

First struck was the Cumberland County center in Windham, which serves nearly 70,000 people in 17 communities, and lost its ability to accept 911 calls five times on April 17 and 18. The phone company is supposed to maintain backup systems to recognize such failures and immediately re-route 911 calls to other offices, such as the state’s main dispatch center in Gray. But on one of those five occasions, the re-routing took more than 30 minutes.

When the dispatch center lost its connection again on May 16, the switchover took more than an hour, which cost the company $25,000 of the $6.4 million the state pays every year for handling 911 calls.

And another failure May 17 took 15 minutes to re-route calls. That’s not how long it took FairPoint to fix the broken system — that’s how long it took them to arrange for any 911 calls coming in to be answered by a human being who could help them, rather than hearing a busy signal or endless ringing.

The fix was actually relatively simple — there is now a physical transfer switch (much like a light switch) in the county dispatch center, and when the system goes down again, rather than relying on the questionable automatic system, a dispatcher will just reach over, flip the switch, and 911 calls will go to the state police in Gray.

On May 27, though, that office lost its connection for 10 minutes, and on May 28, a second malfunction caused a technician to shut down the system for seven hours. Another dispatch center was able to pick up the slack, but still, two people who called 911 were disconnected mid-call. That led state officials to demand physical transfer switches in six more dispatch offices.

And then between June 13 and 15, the Penobscot County dispatch center in Bangor, serving roughly 150,000 Mainers, lost service twice, once for six hours and the second time for more than 30 hours. In both cases, calls were routed to another dispatch center, but the first one was not detected by any automated system or even any dispatch staff — a citizen called 911, got a busy signal, and called her local police department’s non-emergency number to seek help.

On June 28, dispatchers at a 911 call center in Concord, New Hampshire, had trouble reaching police and fire departments in southern New Hampshire because of telephone problems lasting roughly 90 minutes, according to Foster’s Daily Democrat.

FairPoint says it has found and fixed the problems, but they’re not drawing anyone’s attention to the fact that soon we’ll be far worse off. Company officials and regulators agree that the systems that have been breaking down, while FairPoint’s responsibility, are actually the old systems created by Verizon. The problems likely “would have happened under Verizon,” says Wayne Jortner, senior counsel at Maine’s Office of the Public Advocate, which represents the public in utilities-regulation cases and has been a major player in the FairPoint dealings.

But soon, those old computer systems will be replaced with new ones created by FairPoint. Except Liberty’s reports say FairPoint’s SOFTWARE FOR HANDLING 911 CALLS IN MAINE IS NOT EVEN READY FOR TESTING! Liberty’s May 9 report says “a working version ... is not planned to exist until August.”

We can take some comfort in the fact that FairPoint officials and Maine regulators say they won't allow the cutover to happen until the state's 911 system is fully operational. But even if testing starts on schedule next month, any major problems could cause yet another delay. And while Verizon’s gear is old and breaking, FairPoint has nothing — nothing — to replace it.

Parting with cash
FairPoint will need to pay millions of dollars for all these new systems and testing and staff and training. Many of those costs were predicted before the deal was approved, though they included a few surprising financial assumptions by FairPoint (see “No Raises for Seven Years,” November 16, 2007; and “No Raises — It Gets Better,” November 20, 2007, both by Jeff Inglis).

But the four months of delays in the cutover will cost FairPoint $66 MILLION IT WASN’T PLANNING TO SPEND. And every month of delay beyond November will cost another $16.5 million. That money is paid to Verizon by FairPoint as, effectively, a lease of Verizon’s staff, software, and other behind-the-scenes systems.

And FairPoint has just issued its first post-purchase dividend, unloading $23 million in cash to its shareholders, which is money it can no longer spend fixing problems, or making service better. The company says it will have enough money to do what needs doing.

But to a pessimist’s mind, FairPoint is cleverly positioning itself to cry “poor” to state regulators if it runs into unforeseen expenses at some point in the future. Without those millions — and any other millions it may hand out to shareholders down the road — the company will actually be poor, and will be telling the truth if it asks for emergency rate increases or extensions on other commitments. (Maine, for example, has “required” FairPoint to expand the proportion of phone lines that can handle high-speed Internet service from 70 percent to 90 percent over the next five years, but then said that if the company hasn’t done so in time, it can have an extra year with no penalty.)

Jortner says concerns about FairPoint’s financial model failing are “absolutely valid,” though he takes pains to say “we’re not predicting that at this point,” and to note that the regulatory approval was structured so that if FairPoint is running low on cash, “it’s the dividend that gives,” not cash to run the phone system.

Even to an optimist, FairPoint is putting itself in a position with relatively little wiggle room. The company just spent $15 million on new trucks, none of which run on biodiesel or ethanol, Wurm says, though the company told regulators its financial model didn’t include any allowance for gas prices to increase. On top of that, with transition delays, fewer workers (none of them fully trained on FairPoint’s systems), and major software elements not even ready for testing, the company’s time is running out.

More alternatives
And the pressure is really on. Nationally, millions of landline customers are canceling their service — on average, 350 customers in northern New England do so every day. (Verizon numbers indicate as many as eight percent of customers disconnect in any given year.) They’re moving to using just cell phones, or pairing cell phones with Internet-based telephone service, such as TimeWarner Cable’s Digital Phone service, which allows TimeWarner to deliver a customer what is called a “triple play” — cable television, high-speed Internet, and telephone service — over one wire and paid for on one bill.

FairPoint’s business plan depends on the company retaining more of those customers than Verizon did, and having fewer of them seek communications services — including high-speed Internet access — from other companies. That will take some doing.

A key element of customer retention will be FairPoint’s own “triple play” service. Company spokeswoman Wurm observes that because of the cutover delay, FairPoint has partnered with DirecTV to create something like a “triple play,” with DirecTV providing satellite television and FairPoint delivering telephone and Internet service. But FairPoint is using regular telephone wires, which in many cases are decades old and may need replacement to carry data as well as voice traffic. And even when equipped with top-notch technology (which costs millions), the copper telephone wires FairPoint is depending on transmit data more slowly than fiber-optic connections, which are the real future (see “Internet Disconnect,” by Jeff Inglis, August 24, 2007).

In many parts of Maine that have telephone service from FairPoint, RESIDENTS AND BUSINESSES ARE UNWILLING TO WAIT for high-speed Internet access; wireless-Internet providers have set up shop and are expanding rapidly to meet demand, in communities from Presque Isle to Bar Harbor.

Even Democratic Governor John Baldacci has seen the future. On June 10, he attended the ceremony opening a fiber-optic line offering businesses in Bangor access to an all-fiber network reaching to Augusta, Portland, Portsmouth, and Boston.

Who owns that network? Not FairPoint, still struggling with software development and testing, but Lewiston-based Oxford Networks, which has more than 600 miles of fiber strung throughout Maine already. The future is here. Maybe one day FairPoint will arrive, too.

Press Releases: Herald or harbinger?

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Those of us fascinated by the rapidly deflating balloon that is the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram have had a lot to chew over from a lot of sources lately. (Not surprisingly, one of the worst sources of information on this topic was the PPH itself.) Here’s a roundup of what you might have missed in the flurry.

Layoffs Effective July 1, 31 fewer people work at the Press Herald (including reporters Paul Carrier, Kevin Wack, Tess Nacelewicz, Seth Harkness, Josie Huang, and Jonathan Kaplan). Some of them took "voluntary severance" packages, while others were just laid off. Six already-vacant positions were eliminated, and five more layoffs are in the works. All four of the paper's satellite news bureaus were closed — including the ones watching the Maine State House and Washington DC. Also gone? The day and night editors (Andrea Nemitz and David McNabb) and a copy editor (Gary Christian).

Critiques Those who remain are again subject to the sometimes-withering criticism of the pseudonymous "T. Cushing Munjoy" at the PressingTheHerald blog (see "Pressure Is On," by Jeff Inglis, March 12). He quit posting when the papers went up for sale, figuring it made little sense to attack a retreating enemy, but returned to the fray when the sale was delayed.

Low bids According to media watcher (and Phoenix political columnist) Al Diamon, none of the Press Herald's three potential short-list buyers offered enough money to make owner Frank Blethen happy. Let's take a stab at a rock-bottom price: the major properties — land and buildings — the company owns are assessed by tax officials in their respective cities (Portland, South Portland, Augusta, and Waterville) at a total of nearly $30 million. That leaves out multi-million-dollar printing presses and "intangible assets" such as the newspapers’ names, Web site addresses, customer and advertiser databases, and what is called “goodwill” (the reputation the company has in the community).

Who's in? Possible buyers named by Crosscut Seattle (at crosscut.com, a must-read Web site for PPH watchers) were Black Press, which owns more than 150 newspapers in the US and Canada, where it's based; Gatehouse Media of New York state, owners of nearly 400 daily and weekly newspapers across the US; and Wilkes-Barre Publishing Holdings of Pennsylvania, whose flagship paper is the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader.

Union woes The Press Herald has sued its employees' union over the workers’ insistence that any buyer agree, as a condition of purchase, to take over the existing union contract, which runs through 2010. In the suit, the Blethens ask for a federal judge's ruling that no such promise is required. Court documents include a letter from one Blethen executive expressing concern about “whether a sale is possible” if the contract must be preserved.

Red ink According to the lawsuit, the Blethens need the money from selling the Press Herald quickly, “to reduce bank debt and to avoid the dire consequences of being in default.”

Weak contentPPH editors won't even use top-notch material when it's free. In mid-June, the McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington DC bureau put out an incredible multi-day series on conditions, management, and the innocent detainees at the US government's offshore prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. (McClatchy owns 49.5 percent of the Seattle Times Company, and the PPH has been running McClatchy News Service copy for months.)

The series would have run days after a replica of a Gitmo cell visited Portland (see “A Night in Guantánamo,” by Jeff Inglis, June 13), and just as a US Supreme Court decision on detainees' rights made international headlines.

But the PPH missed its chance to lure readers with excellent, exclusive journalism on a topic current to Mainers, and of great relevance to Americans.

He ain't heavy — well, maybe a little bit

Published in the Portland Phoenix

In the legend of Robin Hood, when Robin meets Friar Tuck, he gets Tuck to carry him across a stream. In the middle, for reasons that vary with the source of the story, Tuck drops Robin in the water, which provokes a swordfight that ends in a stalemate, after which Robin invites Tuck to join Robin's band of Merry Men.

That story, modified by artistic idealism and hope, is one of the inspirations for Armen Moradians's "100 Carry Project," in which he plans to carry 100 people — one by one, piggy-back style — along a two-mile route through downtown Portland.

His hope is that his project will be a nonviolent way to bring strangers together, by putting themselves through a physical and mental ordeal that will lead to an increased feeling of mutual understanding — without dropping anyone in water or any sort of swordfight.

Moradians, a dancer and performer who lives near Deering Oaks Park, has carried 12 people since late November — this past Sunday, I was the 12th. We met on Friday at a coffee shop, partly to talk over what we were going to do, and partly for him to size me up and determine whether he could, in fact, carry me. (I am, so far, the heaviest person he has carried; at 185 pounds, I outweigh Moradians himself by 40 pounds.)

His first point was that being carried is anything but a passive role: I would have to hang on to him with all my strength if we were to succeed. My task was to use my energy to keep us together, while most of his energy moved us from the George Cleeves memorial on the Eastern Prom to Monument Square and back. And, as he predicted, I was nearly as exhausted as he was at the end, though we were both also elated and relieved to have finished.

It is exactly the type of symbiotic relationship Moradians had in mind when he dreamed up the project — a voluntary undertaking to suffer in the search for some sort of greater learning. (What the people he has carried have learned is described, in part, in their post-carry entries on his blog. What he learns will be collected in a project-culminating performance when he's done.)

His second point, there at the coffee shop, was that he didn't know what would happen during the carry. In addition to never having hefted my weight before, the route itself bore unforeseen, and unpredictable, physical perils — weather, sidewalks, traffic, other pedestrians, that kind of thing.

But the third point was that most of the challenge was actually mental, and that it was in the psychological sphere where he was most unsure of what would transpire. Physical discomfort was a given, but how we dealt with that — in our own heads and talking to each other — would be what made the carry possible.

There was actually a lot of temptation to give up. Motorized transportation options, in particular, called to us. At the outset, a city bus drove past; later, another bus's driver waited at the stop for us to approach, and when Moradians didn't step into the bus, she shouted out a warning about back injuries. At the halfway point, in the middle of Monument Square, two gleaming white stretch limousines waited, though not for us. We persevered through the 80-minute trip — I figured that if he was crazy enough to keep carrying me, I was crazy enough to keep hanging on. And by the end, both exhausted and in pain, I cheered from his shoulder as he fast-walked toward the Cleeves obelisk marking our journey's end.

The guy has 88 more carries to go. Who's next?

On the Web
Armen Moradians's "100 Carry Project": armencarry.blogspot.com