Patrice Bergergone?

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

From the Sunday Boston Herald:

Bergeron concussed

‘Mild’ injury may sideline Bruins center

WILMINGTON — A team that has been hammered by head injuries like few others in the NHL the last several seasons, the Bruins [team stats] now are dealing with another concussion to a key player.

General manager Peter Chiarelli revealed yesterday that center Patrice Bergeron suffered what’s been classified as a mild concussion as a result of a hit by Claude Giroux in the third period of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinal series with Philadelphia on Friday night.

This is bad news for the Bruins, given that Bergeron has already suffered two other concussions:

His first came as a result of a hit from behind by Philadelphia’s Randy Jones in October 2007. Bergeron missed the rest of the season. In December 2008, he collided with then-Carolina defenseman Dennis Seidenberg and missed more than a month of game action with a concussion.

Bergeron has inarguably been Boston’s best player in the postseason. But the team’s prospects in the Stanley Cup playoffs pale in comparison with Bergeron’s future career prospects.

Here’s hoping for the best for him first, best for the Bruins second.

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Wolfie – Wolfie – Lick Me Your Comb

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

For the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Interview with former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, old friend Ken Fallin provided this image:

Swell drawing. But wouldn’t the real caricature have been this image?

Just askin’.

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It’s Good To Live In A Two-Daily Town (Thomas Drechsler Edition)

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

How much fun is it going to be to follow the Sale DiMasi corruption trial over the next several weeks?

But first – a clarification, please.

Who exactly is round-up-the-usual-suspects lawyer Thomas Drechsler representing in this case?

From Peter Gelzinis’ Friday Boston Herald column:

You know you’re in for a slimy affair when Tom Drechsler points to his own client, Richard W. “Dickie” McDonough, a veteran lobbyist with a weird Trump hairdo, and says: “I don’t want to offend him, but he’s gotta be a glad-hander. I mean, that’s what a lobbyist does, right? Whether you agree (with the notion of lobbying) or not, it’s legal.”

From Milton Valencia’s Friday Boston Globe report

Thomas Drechsler, attorney for one of DiMasi’s two codefendants in the case, Richard Vitale, said, “Mr. Lally made more money . . . than anyone else in this courtroom,’’ adding that Lally had bragged to one of his business partners, “I can’t stop thinking about how to get money out of this deal.’’

The hardworking staff, on the other hand, can’t stop thinking:

WTF?

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C.J. Chivers, As In Shivers (Misurata Edition)

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

Absolutely stunning depiction by New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers of rocket attacks on the Libyan town of Miseryata:

The Lives at the End of the Rockets’ Arc

MISURATA, Libya — The four fresh corpses, the remains of people recently killed in the shelling of Misurata, rested on the floor of an office in a small clinic. Each was wrapped in a dirty blanket. No one knew what to do with them, just as no one present had any idea of their names.

They were a man, a woman, a boy about 2 and a girl perhaps half that age. The top of the girl’s head was gone, as were both of the woman’s lower legs.

Each day this city presents its residents with ghastly sights and reminders that there has been no shortage of ill fortune here. But even within the confines of a city besieged by its own nation’s army, there can be little luck crueler than theirs. They were migrants from Nigeria trapped in another country’s war. When they died, they had been minutes from escape.

I’ve read a lot of Chivers’ reports over the years. This is one of the saddest.

Photo: Bryan Denton for The New York Times

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The League of Women Cutthroaters

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

From our Late to the Party desk:

The hardworking staff just saw the League of Women Voters TV spot sandblasting Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R-Killing Kids) for his vote to end the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gasses.

Yeesh.

Memo to Scott Brown: You never want to be the cause of a little kid wearing an oxygen mask, no matter how slimy the charge might be.

Last week in the Boston Globe Brown “accused the League of Women Voters of being a ‘pawn’ of his critics,” while yesterday’s Globe ran a letter to the editor from a former LOWV activist:

During my tenure with the Boston chapter of the league, I served along with representatives of other local organizations on the Environmental Protection Agency working group. We monitored the agency’s progress in bringing the Boston metropolitan area into compliance with federal air-quality guidelines.

Brown’s attempt to twist the league’s historical support of the Clean Air Act into a partisan attack on him displays his ignorance of the league and its mission.

A mission that has apparently become more – well – pragmatic lately, as the Globe’s Political Intelligence blog noted:

WASHINGTON — The League of Women Voters has offered strong support in the past for disclosing who pays for political advertising, but the voter education group this morning would not name the donors funding its TV ads attacking Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown—at least not this year.

“We comply with the spirit and the letter of the law and report all contributions in our annual reports,” said Elisabeth MacNamara, national president of the League of Women Voters, in a phone interview.

Gas masks all around, eh?

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Finding Tommy Ashton At the 9/11 Memorial

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

From Thursday’s New York Times:

Constructing a Story, With 2,982 Names

How do you find a name?

How do you find one name out of 2,982? How can you spot two or three incised words around twin pools that — taken together — extend an acre and a half? How is it possible to discern letters no higher than an inch and a half in the shadow of what is to be the tallest skyscraper in New York City?

Start with a map.

In essence, that is what the National September 11 Memorial and Museum issued on Wednesday: a clear, navigable computerized guide to the location of every name inscribed on the bronze parapets that are being installed along the perimeters of the pools where the World Trade Center towers once stood.

My cousin Tommy Ashton was murdered on 9/11 in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He worked as an electrician’s apprentice at Marsh & McLennan. It was his second day on the job. He was 21 years old.

Thanks to their computerized map, I found Tommy at the 9/11 Memorial.

Here’s Tommy:

Here’s where his name will live on (in addition to the Tommy Ashton Basketball Tournament that his sisters have so diligently nurtured):

For the past ten years I’ve been thankful to the Times for their 2001 Portraits of Grief remembrance of Tommy:

Thomas Ashton: Sharing Old Memories

It was home movies night on Monday, Sept. 10, at the Ashton household in Woodside, Queens. No one is quite sure why the family decided to break out the old videotapes after so many years. But there they sat, glued to the screen: Thomas; his sisters, Colleen and Mary; and their parents, John and Kathy Ashton.

There were a lot of laughs, especially at the scenes of Thomas, barely out of a diaper, whipping the Frisbee at his father with the precision of someone 10 times his age. Monday was also Thomas’s first day at electrician’s school, part of his apprenticeship with Local 3 in Manhattan. The second day on the job, Thomas, 21, was sent to the 95th floor of the north tower.

”We hope that wherever he is, he is able to have those memories from the home movies in his mind,” Colleen Ashton said. ”It was special that we were able to share that time together.”

Now, with the 9/11 Memorial, I have something else to be thankful for.

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Correction o’ the Day (WSJ Edition)

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

From Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Corrections & Amplifications (sorry, no link because Rupert Murdoch shockingly wants to make money from his content so I have to type this myself):

The Constitution Center, an office building in Washington, D.C., is up for sale and could fetch as much as $900 million. A caption for a photo in the Property Report section on Wednesday incorrectly stated that the owner is selling it for $900,000.

Shoot – for 900 grand the hardworking staff would have made it the new Global Worldwide Headquarters.

Guess we’re stuck here.

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‘Twistory’ Lesson For UMass Professor

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

From TechPresident:

University of Massachusetts political science professor Stuart W. Shulman has built software for doing textual analysis on large amounts of data. So when he saw an explosion of Twitter activity around the death of Osama bin Laden, he saw the opportunity to collect a new “first draft of history,” and turned his tools, connected to Twitter via API, to scraping the service.

The result is about a gigabyte total of data containing many, many tweets that had the words “osama” or “bin laden,” and Twitter has demanded that he stop sharing it. Twitter contacted Shulman, who was giving the data away and offering licenses for his software as a textual analysis tool for academics to work with it, and accused him of violating Twitter’s terms of service. Shulman has removed the link to the dataset from his website.

But he’s frustrated, writing on his blog “[i]n my view, this is prime historical data (Twitter-History a.k.a. ‘Twistory’) that yearns to be free.”

Which got the hardworking staff to thinking about another piece of Twistory, Tweets from Tahrir, which publisher OR Books says, “brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the [Egyptian] uprising to be told directly by the people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.”

But there’s no violation there, according to EconomicsNewspaper.com:

[Co-author] Alex Nunns claims to have asked all twitterers (Twitter users) mentioned in the book permission to use their tweets and images. “They all agreed and were enthusiastic.” Twitter has not been contacted but “this should not be a problem, because users have been contacted.”

(There’s a good examination of the intellectual property/terms of service issue in this New Yorker piece.)

As for Prof. Shulman, TechPresident has this consolation for losing the Twitter material:  “[I]f Shulman waits, he should also be able to get that data through the Library of Congress.”

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Verizon’s Ovechtrick Or Treat

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

During the second intermission of Wednesday night’s Red Wings/Sharks game on Versus, this Verizon Rule the Air commercial lionizing Washington Capitals star Alexander Ovechkin popped up:

Too bad the next report was that Alexander the Grate’s Capitals had just been swept by the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Rule the Air?

Better the vastly overrated (and undergutted) Capitals star should have ruled the ice.

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Weekly Standard Spanks Obama’s (Leader From) Behind

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

The Weekly Standard’s latest editorial starts with a quote from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece about Pres. Obama headlined “The Consequentialist:”

Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength. “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,” the adviser said. “But it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.”

—Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, May 2

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol’s riff:

Thank you, Mr. or Ms. Anonymous Obama Adviser Speaking on Background to Ryan Lizza. Thank you for so boldly and visibly injecting into our politics the phrase “leading from behind.” Thank you for associating it with your boss. Thanks for confirming that our current president believes his task is to accommodate American decline. Thanks for reminding us how high a priority he places on appeasing those who revile us. And thanks for explaining that our Leader from Behind sees his role as “shepherding us through this phase” of appeasement and decline.

It just gets stupider from there.

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