Erie CounterNewsMedia

Erie Times-News launches nefarious "pocketbook journalism"

2010-10-01T05:12:00.006-04:00

The Erie Times-News has launched a new twist on the unethical practice of what has come to be known as "pocketbook journalism" with a long-delayed return to public comment on its online local news content which requires readers who wish to comment to pay $3 per month to the Times-News for the "privilege."

Appended to an article today boasting that Gannon University has joined its all-out campaign in support of County Executive Barry Grossman's misguided and controversial proposal for an Erie County community college, is a an advertisement urging readers of its online edition known as GoErie.com to shell out $2.99 (plus sales tax) for the "opportunity" to comment on selected local news stories. It apparently does not apply to editorials and non-local articles or columns.Here's the complete text of the advertisement:

Thank you for your interest in this article. You can join the conversation about this topic by becoming a member of GoErie.com Insider for $2.99 per month. That's less than 10 cents a day!

Your membership includes writing and reading comments on latest local stories like this one you just read. You will also be able to opt-in for new membership features as they become available.

Sign up below using Press+, an online subscription service for news websites.
Thank you for your interest in this article. You can join the conversation about this topic by becoming a member of GoErie.com Insider for $2.99 per month. That's less than 10 cents a day!

Your membership includes writing and reading comments on latest local stories like this one you just read. You will also be able to opt-in for new membership features as they become available.

Sign up below using Press+, an online subscription service for news websites.

The Times-News is the only newspaper in the country which has adopted this spurious practice, underlining its negative contribution to legitimate journalism in the United States, indeed the world.

Erie Time-News headline editor grossly mis-states letter's intent

2010-09-17T22:21:00.005-04:00

In the headline over a letter to the editor Friday, the Erie Times-News wrote: "School boards to blame for pension woes"

Whoever wrote the headline obviously didn't fully read or comprehend the well-written letter submitted by Selina Servideo of North East.

She wrote: "What caused the shortfall? Not the employees who benefit from the fund. Every employee contributes 7.5 percent of salary to PSERS. Employees have always responsibly contributed to their pensions, but the same can't be said for all school districts and the state (my emphasis).

"Before 2001, contributions were split essentially equally between the district, the state and the employees. But while employee contributions rose from 6.25 to 7.5 percent after 2001, the state and districts gave themselves a contribution "holiday" over the past decade and contributed almost zero percent in the years following 2001.(my emphasis).

Ms. Servideo further wrote: "The state and districts essentially gave themselves a "Buy now! Pay Later! No Money Down!" deal, and now that the bill's come due, they want the taxpayers, students and teachers to pay for their recklessness."

If the editor who wrote the half-correct headline had bothered to read to the middle and end of the letter, he or she would not have grossly mis-stated its full and valid thrust.

Letters to the Erie Times-News editor: A more realistic interpretation

2010-09-06T09:19:00.006-04:00

In recent months the Erie Times News has published in its Letters to the Editor columns two letters from out-of-towners praising the newspaper. For example, here's one of them published today, with the editor's self-adulatory headline:

Letters to the editor:

Morning starts right with newspaper

My family and I were recently in North East for a visit with family and friends. Every morning, without fail, the morning paper from the Erie Times-News was at the door, and all of the adults sat down to read it from cover to cover with much anticipation. What a great newspaper. Thank you for doing such a good job. The paper made our vacation all the more enjoyable. Keep up the good work.

Sue Dawson Ostrom|West Bend, Wis.

This letter is similar to one published a couple months ago from a Connecticut woman visiting Erie.

Obviously, the Times-News considers these letters to be positive statements enhancing its image.

But there's another implication which projects a contradictory image. One never sees letters from local readers complimenting the newspaper unless it's to comment on the writer's self-interest, such as thanking the newspaper for an article or photo that flatters the letter writer, whether a person or an institution.

That's because local readers are highly aware of and sensitive to the local newspaper's generally inferior and self-serving editorial and journalistic practices which are contrary to the norms and high standards newspapers should espouse. Out-of-town readers, of course, see only a narrow snapshot of the Times-News' news and editorial output which is wildly out of context with the broad reality of its infectiously corrupt and anti-journalistic practices.

Idiocy at the Erie Times-News on a slow news day

2010-08-30T20:07:00.003-04:00

In today's Erie Times-News:

Snowy early winter in Erie region's forecast
By ROBB FREDERICK
robb.frederick@timesnews.com

A month from now, when hurricane waves are carving up all that nice Atlantic tline, pay attention. Those storms could have us shoveling in December.

This is perhaps the most idiotic Page One banner story I've ever seen. Snow in Erie in December? What a revelation! Whoever wrote this story must live on the Equator. Must have been a slow news day.

11 county school districts agree to subsidize proposed community college

2010-08-29T17:09:00.000-04:00

Despite assertions that property tax revenues won’t be used to support the controversial community college proposed by County Executive Barry Grossman, eleven school districts within the county which pay for the operation of the Erie County Technical School from local school district property tax revenues have agreed to subsidize the proposed community college should it materialize.

The technical school has agreed to donate rent-free 35,000 sq. feet of its classroom, lab and welding instruction space worth more than half a million dollars annually for five years, thus circumventing Erie County council‘s prohibition against the use of tax revenues to support the project.

The technical school operating committee, which consists of a board member from each of the participating schools throughout the county, entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Grossman providing for the rent subsidy at its regular monthly meeting Thursday. The specific details remain to be worked out in a lease agreement, according to the unsigned MOU outlined in the agenda for Thursday’s meeting.

The eleven participating school districts include Wattsburg, Harborcreek, North East, Iroquois (Lawrence Park/Wesleyville), Girard, Fairview, Fort LeBouef, General McLane, Millcreek, Union City and Northwestern.

In a resolution adopted at its meeting Thursday night, the technical school's operating committee resolved that it fully supports the establishment of a county community college and the donation of rent-free space to it, even though the 11 school districts its members represent are strapped for operating funds, drastically cutting both personnel and programs to meet budgetary cutbacks.

There was no indication whether the 11 school boards have been consulted or voted on the subsidy, or whether the technical school operating committee members acted on their own without their various boards' knowledge or express consent.

Erie Times-News unveils another community college propagandist

2010-08-29T09:27:00.006-04:00

The Erie Times-News and its stepchild, Rethink Erie, the elitest group behind the controversial tax-supported community college proposed by one-term County Executive Barry Grossman, trotted out their latest propagandist to reiterate their talking points, an obscure businessman from Fairview whose op-ed column in Sunday's newspaper reeks of naivete.

In a typically misleading headline over his column, the Times-News lamely mis-characterized Andrew Foyle as an "educator" simply because he is a citizen who sits on the Fairview school board, and represents that board on the board of the Erie County Technical Institute, presumably to try to qualify him as a credible advocate for a community college, a futile ploy. Nowhere in his dissertation does Mr. Foyle betray any evidence of expertise as an educator, rather the contrary.

In a specious apples and oranges exercise, Mr. Foyle wrote in the Times-News that the position of the three county council members who oppose using property tax revenues to fund the proposed community college is morally inconsistent with their recent objections to a proposal to privatize the two county-owned and operated nursing homes.

"It's unfortunate," Mr. Foyle piously wrote, "that the slim majority of council doesn't feel the same 'moral obligation' to help educate our young people who are also in need of financial assistance."

That's an inane statement that underscores Mr. Foyle's fundamental misunderstanding of both higher education and subsidized health care. The latter is mandated by federal and state law, the former is not. Morality has nothing to do with it.

Whether the county nursing homes continue to be run by government or are given over to the private sector to operate, the vast bulk of patients' costs will continue to be paid from the same public sources, medicare, medicaid and their various permutations. And the private sector is certain to operate them more efficiently, providing the same or higher level of services for less cost, a plus for both the patients and taxpayers.

With supreme arrogance and utter disdain for the facts, Mr. Foyle wrote: "Inarguably (Inarguably?), an educational gap exists in our region between secondary education and affordable postsecondary education and/or the existing for-profit business and trade schools. With far too many families in our community living at or below the poverty level, demand exists for affordable education."

For one thing, there are numerous public and private sources of post-secondary funding for disadvantaged students which help to level the financial playing field, so the "gap" is not as foreboding as Mr. Foyle implies.

Second, why should county taxpayers have to pay for the specialized vocational training of prospective employees whom manufacturers and industrialists like Mr. Foyle require to operate their for-profit businesses, when they should be providing the training themselves out of their profits as a cost of doing business?

Is it any wonder that, as Mr. Foyle asserts, "Many of the leading employers in this community have been quite vocal in their support of a community college because of a growing demand for skilled workers." Who wouldn't rather have someone else pay for some of their costs of doing business, rather than paying for it themselves? It's the American way.

So, as we can see, Mr. Foyle, GE and other employers who support a tax-funded community college are just as guilty of seeking to avoid certain costs as the vast majority of the county's property taxpayers are reluctant, indeed unable, to finance a community college. His and his cohorts' position isn't the altruistic conceit he attempts to portray it as.

Mr. Foyle says what bothers him most is that the county pays out millions of dollars towards social services, but "Unfortunately, our county government doesn't make the connection that an investment in education today will lead to a decreased demand for social services tomorrow." If Mr. Foyle or anyone else thinks investment in a community college will diminish the entrenched social services bureaucracy in any way, they are self-delusional. The historic experience dictates that it will grow bigger.

Mr. Foyle writes in the Times-News: "Without a community college, or other affordable alternative, many high school graduates from lower-income families can't afford the education necessary to gain these skills. Without a skilled local labor force, how long do you think these companies will stay in Erie?"

Is Mr. Foyle deaf, dumb and blind? Doesn't he know that Erie businesses are leaving Erie in droves for greener pastures offshore like Mexico and elsewhere, not because there aren't skilled workers here, but because there are skilled workers there who will work for much lower wages in venues where taxation, utilities and other key cost factors are a fraction of those here in Pennsylvania. Here a dominant source of industrial energy is electricity, the cost of which will nearly double next year, thanks to the dismal legacy of former governor Tom Ridge's disastrous deregulation initiative back in the mid-90s.

Mr. Foyle says "I applaud Grossman for his vision in continuing to champion a community college." Here we find him at his most naive. Would Mr. Foyle turn over his business to the county government to run? I don't think so. County government has consistently failed in its higher educational initiatives. As Keith Farnham has repeatedly pointed out, county taxpayers are still nearly a million dollars in debt to the state for the county's last failed attempt at post-secondary ed, CamTech. It isn't "vision" that's driving the county executive's pipedream, it's blindness to economic reality.

If County executive Grossman, Mr. Foyle, the Times-News,Rethink Erie and other proponents of a county community college would get behind the promising but aborted effort to align with the highly successful Butler County Community College to provide a proven community college environment here in Erie at much less cost than is proposed for Grossman's boondoggle, Erie County's disadvantaged youth would have their affordable education.

But affordable education isn't really what the county executive, the Times-News, Rethink Erie and their sycophants are really interested in. What they're really interested in are empire building, self-aggrandizement and power-broking at any cost to the taxpayers.

Pat Howard's hysteria, histrionics and the community college

2010-08-26T13:43:00.007-04:00

In his hysterical advocacy for an Erie County community college opposed, according to his own newspaper's survey, by nearly 90 percent of readers, Erie Times-News Managing Editor Pat Howard, in typically prolix prose, resorted to prevarication and half-truths, even urging an elected public official to disobey state ethics law.

These combined with an array of factual errors in last Sunday's vituperative column denigrating two county councilmen who have displayed the courage of their convictions, undermines what little credibility Howard may have as a putative journalist, none in my estimation.

It would take more time and space than his epistolary histrionics are worth to disprove all of Howard's fanciful notions about the role of two of the four council members - Lyle Foust and Joseph Giles - who, along with two other council colleagues, have bravely withstood the gross falsehoods and misrepresentations published almost daily in the monopoly Erie Times-News by Howard and his cohorts, so I'll just address a few of the most glaring ones.

It begins with the headline Howard wrote over his Sunday column: "Foust's decision to abstain not as clear-cut as he portrays it.", an assertion so at odds with reality it boggles the mind. Foust took his principled stand to abstain from voting on the community college issue based upon a thorough legal analysis by county council's own attorney, Thomas Talarico. He concluded it would be a clear conflict of interest and violation of state law for Foust to vote on the community college question whether he voted yea or nay. It doesn't get more clear-cut than that.

Nevertheless, Howard wrote that Foust should "push" what Howard misperceives as "the legal limits of the gray area," and vote in favor of a community college, but which a rational person would see as a black and white legal admonition against voting either for or against it. In other words, according to Howard, break the law.

Howard claims Foust "advocated" (Howard's word, not Foust's) in favor of an Erie county community college when two years ago he wrote in the Meadville newspaper that it was "an opportunity that northwest Pennsylvania must seize if it is to make progress in the challenging years ahead."

Howard fails to note that was long before first (and quite likely one) term County Executive Barry Grossman was elected to that position and "advocated" that the community college's unknown but considerable costs should be financed by Erie County's already heavily-burdened property taxpayers. That provision is at the very root of Councilman Giles' opposition to the community college proposal advanced by the dissembling county executive.

The most pernicious aspect of Howard's and his newspaper's relentless campaign on behalf of a community college is their abject failure to give not merely equal, but ANY time and space to opponents. Instead they publish slanted news stories, editorials and op-ed columns on its behalf almost daily, but none in opposition, while printing every letter to the editor favoring their pet project, but only one in ten of those opposed to it, despite their pious editorial pronouncements proclaiming freedom of speech and the press. It underscores the cynical truism that "A free press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

Grape expectations

2010-08-25T17:49:00.006-04:00

Each year, as grape harvest season rolls around in rural Erie County and neighboring communities, and the fragrance of ripening grapes permeates the countryside, the Erie Times-News trots out one of its reporters to produce a formualic article on the prospects for this year's harvest - its size, volume, quality and value.

An unusual aspect of this year's crop is that the remarkably hot summer days in July and August have ripened the grapes sooner than normal, and harvesting is scheduled to begin in about a week, one to two weeks earlier than usual.

The ritual typically consists of interviews with a couple grape growers, invariably one from North East, the heart of the lake shore grape-growing district; the fellow out at the Lake Erie Regional Grape Research Lab on North Cemetary Rd,John Griggs, a knowledgeable and dedicated grape expert, and a Welch Foods spokesperson whose company processes most of the non-vinifera grapes grown in Erie County and neighboring New York and Ohio vineyards at its North East plant, the biggest in the world.

Rarely, if ever, do the reporters have the slightest knowledge of the grape farming industry, and their articles betray their ignorance. For example, in this year's article, the reporter fails to identify the predominant grape under harvest, the famous Concord grape whose juice finds its way into millions of jelly, jam, preserves and beverage containers marketed by Welch and others around the world.

But later in the article, he writes: "The region's Niagara harvest, which began in 2009 on Sept. 25, is likely to begin before Labor Day, Griggs said."
Clearly the writer doesn't know the difference between Concords, which are purple, and Niagaras, which are white.Typically, local grape growers harvest their Concords first, then when finished with that variety, begin harvesting the Niagaras.

However, this year, a new harvest strategy is being implemented by the National Grape Cooperative members in which some of the Niagaras will be harvested earlier, followed by the Concord harvest, after which harvest of the Niagaras will be completed, one prominent local grape grower told me.

Had the reporter done a modicum of homework, he would have known the Concords are the predominent variety by far, while the Niagaras represent only a tiny percent of the annual harvest locally.

The Grossman / community college / Erie Times-News / Flowers axis

2010-08-23T00:19:00.006-04:00

Erie Times-News Reporter Kevin Flowers, who seems to be County Executive Barry Grossman’s personal propagandist for his beleaguered community college proposal, authored yet another polemic in Sunday’s newspaper anticipating Grossman’s planned trip to Harrisburg to confer with state officials on his pet project’s diminishing prospects.

The article presents, ad nauseum, all of Grossman’s pat and discredited arguments in favor of his proposal, a paroxysm of contradictions, circular illogic, pyramiding assumptions, mis-truths, half-truths and outright lies, many of which may be found verbatim in the editorials of the Erie rag.

I suspect Flowers has a “SEND” key on his computer programmed to transmit with robotic precision reconfigured versions of Grossman’s cliché-ridden litany of community college rhetoric on a pre-set schedule without having to apply additional thought.

Penning his article in advance of Grossman’s trip to the commonwealth’s capital provides two more redundant opportunities for the Times-News to reiterate the county executive’s tiresome fabrications disguised as news stories, typically adorned with a mug shot of the snowy-bearded solon: another while he is in Harrisburg, yet another upon his return.

Flowers quotes Grossman as saying: “"I'm not going to lie to them. I'm going to tell them (state officials)exactly what the situation is here…" Why would Grossman have to disclaim any intent to prevaricate, unless it’s part and parcel of his mind-set? Indeed, it’s a matter of public record that the county executive has not always told the truth, on the one hand pledging publicly that county property taxes would not be needed to finance his pipedream, but on the other privately pursuing strategies to acquire them precisely for that purpose.

Grossman is also quoted by his personal publicist as saying that “I want them (state officials) to understand that we have the vast majority of our business community asking for this college. That we have financial support already. We have support from labor, and the minority community, and a lot of the nonprofit groups.”

But what he undoubtedly WON'T tell them about is the vast opposition throughout the county to his hare-brained scheme, which two informal media surveys, one of them by the Times-News, have measured at more than 80 percent.

Reporter /publicist Flowers wrote in the article: “Grossman also said that pursuing a partnership with an existing community college could be possible, but county officials prefer to start their own school to maintain local control over curriculum.”

To which county officials would he be referring besides himself, as there are no others on record to that effect? In any event, that’s a red herring, because any model of that configuration would provide for a local advisory board to set local community college curricula.

Flowers also wrote: “Grossman has said that the Erie region could be one of the largest areas in the country without direct access to a community college.” Another falsehood. For example, Butler County Community College just to the south of us has already announced plans to provide a college credit tourism training course for Edinboro University students, and has for years provided first-class training for firemen from Erie County communities.

Although more than three-fourth’s of Flowers’ lengthy Sunday article consisted of Grossman’s previously-publicized and readily rebuttable rationalizations in favor of the community college, and very little about opponents' arguments against it, Flowers did note at one point buried deep within the story, that “County Council's Tuesday night vote drew cheers from many community college opponents in the area, who have long argued that Erie has adequate higher-education options, and that both the county and state government cannot afford a community college.” Amen.

The Erie Times-News: Spinning the facts, twisting the truth

2010-08-22T16:20:00.007-04:00

The lengths to which Erie Times-News editorialists will go to twist the truth and spin the facts in its all-out, unprincipled campaign for a proposed Erie County community college was graphically demonstrated in an editorial last week in which it launched an ad hominem attack at two county councilmen who oppose the college, one on groundsthat county taxpayers do not support using property tax levies for it, Joseph Giles; the other, on conflict of interest grounds, Kyle Foust.

For example, in a cheap attempt to discredit Foust, the editorial stated: “On Feb. 1, 2008, Foust wrote an Op-Ed column for the Meadville Tribune, saying that ‘there is no doubt that the long-term economic prospects for northwest Pennsylvania will be greatly enhanced by the creation of a community college.’ Foust, who works for Mercyhurst College, now claims that voting on the college represents a conflict of interest.”

The editorial falsely implies there’s a contradiction in the two positions attributed to Foust by the editorial when, in fact, there is none. One may laud prospects for a community college, but still justifiably vote against it on conflict of interest grounds, as Foust honorably and legally did.

As Foust has conclusively demonstrated, it would be a direct violation of state conflict of interest statutes for him to vote in favor of the government-subsidized non-profit community college while working for a competing for-profit higher educational institution, to wit, Mercyhurst College. Were he to do so, Foust could be prosecuted for official misfeasance and misconduct, notwithstanding a far-fetched and hysterical rebuttal in Sunday’s newspaper by its managing editor and columnist Pat Howard, the Times Publishing Co.’s chief lobbyist for the community college.

Community college boosters: Hoist on their own petard

2010-08-02T19:47:00.003-04:00

The sponsors of a proposed Erie County community college have been, to paraphrase Shakespeare and Hamlet, embarrassingly hoist on their own petard. Their dubious proposal is broadly based on hypothetical grounds that a community college would serve as an engine for economic development in Erie’s depressed economy and jobless environment by training workers for new jobs in a transformational workplace.

It ignores the reality that key existing employers are laying off workers right and left, and/or relocating to other venues, like Mexico, where business and industrial costs are much lower. Who’s to say there will be jobs here for prospective community college grads to fill? Quite the opposite. Proponents have coated their advocacy with a slick façade of spun rhetoric while omitting any contrary viewpoints, giving their enterprise a false aura of legitimacy.

The move for development of a community college in Erie, one of 38 of the state’s 52 counties without one, has been spearheaded by a self-anointed group called Rethink Erie. It consists of various special interests including the Erie Regional Chamber and Growth Partnership and its chief officer, Jim Dible, retired publisher of the Erie Times-News. Though the proposal is controversial within the community, you’d never know it based on what you read in the Times-News, which studiously ignores the widespread opposition in its one-sided coverage.

Institutional proponents - a laundry list of the area’s leading elitests, including the Times Publishing Co. and its political weapon, the Times-News - have contended from the outset that community college costs, whatever they may be, will be met without burdening the county’s taxpayers. That has become their mantra of sorts.

For example, in an editorial published March 28, 2010, The Times-News opined: “With its due diligence to develop a ‘pro forma’ on projected enrollments, revenues and expenses, Rethink Erie has the necessary numbers to persuade Erie County Council and Erie County's school districts to join as partners to sponsor the college, with no burden on taxpayers (my emphasis).

And First Term County Executive Barry Grossman, in lockstep with Rethink Erie and the Times-News, who has made the community college his administration’s signature symbol, has echoed that enticing but dubious promise. He was quoted by the Times-News as saying that “… gaming revenue, endowment money, tuition, scholarships and state and federal grants will pay for the college; taxes won't be raised, he pledges.”

Even longtime retiring Schools Superintendent James Barker has opted in. Under state law, the school district is a potential co-sponsor of the community college along with the county. Barker was quoted as saying that “The need for a community college isn't in question, the cost is…But it's clear that if we do this right, it will add no burden on our taxpayers." (Barker denies having any interest in a job with the prospective community college. Judith Miller, hired recently by Rethink Erie to serve as coordinator for the proposed community college, may be a candidate for the top job there. She retired in June as superintendent of the North East School District).

But once the “pro forma” was tested, proponents have had to back off that key no-tax claim, as discussed below. And therein lies their embarrassment and dilemma.

Typically, the cost of maintaining and operating a community college in Pennsylvania derives from a three-way split: one-third, from the students via tuition; one third from the coffers of the principal sponsor, the county (and, possibly, one or more school districts); and the final third from the state.
Since the Erie County’s budget is already perennially overcommitted, any additional revenues would have to come from increased property taxes.

Unless the first two funding sources convince the third source - the state - that they can uphold their end of the financial plan, the state, represented by the state board of education, won’t approve the required application for establishing a community college here, thus negating the state’s one-third share of funding.

The key to moving Rethink Erie’s proposal forward earlier this year was approval by county council of the application to the state for establishing a community college in Erie County. That question came to a critical vote before council in late June. The outcome was in serious doubt because at least three of the council’s seven members (one abstained on conflict grounds, a no-vote under parliamentary rules) weren’t willing to entertain even the remote possibility of saddling taxpayers with any part of funding for the proposed two-year institution. They were justifiably skeptical of proponents’ claim that county property taxpayers would not be exploited.

But that wouldn’t seem to be a problem, because proponents of the community college, mostly stakeholders who stand to profit financially or personally - directly or indirectly - have argued, as shown above, that local costs of establishing and maintaining a community college can be magically met through non-tax revenues.

These include a share of gambling proceeds from the Presque Isle Casino estimated at $1.5 - $2 million annually, a one-time grant of $1 million from the Erie Community Foundation, and other lesser sources. Taxpayers, they have claimed from the outset, need not apply. Based on these sources, they assert, the county’s annual one-third share would approximate a manageable $1.5 million, sufficient to support the college. But that’s obviously unrealistically low.

For example, with a student load of around 700, close to that estimated for Erie County, Butler County provides its highly successful community college, the oldest one in western PA, with a $4 ½ million subsidy from property taxpayers each year to keep the institution going, spokesman Bill O’Brien told me, about which more below.

Co-incidentally, on the eve of the county council vote last June, the prolix propagandists at the Erie Times-News shifted into high gear, disgorging a barrage of articles and editorials attesting prospectively to the dire consequences should council fail to authorize the application seeking permission to establish a community college. One of the editorials ended on this ominous note: “If council rejects the community college, remember whose votes torpedoed Erie's future.”

Shoving journalistic ethics and balanced and fair coverage out the door, the Times-News has lavishly promoted the community college in its news and editorial columns, while ignoring the vast reservoir of suppressed opposition to it within the county. Ironically, in June, the online version of the Times-News - GoErie.com - featured a running survey on its editorial page asking readers to vote on whether or not they agreed with the paper’s position on the community college. The last time I looked, just before the survey was yanked from the web site, the vote was 83 percent of respondents opposed to the Times-News position and the community college, 17 percent agreed!

To ensure that proponents’ claim that county property taxpayers wouldn’t be burdened with having to pay perpetual operational and life cycle maintenance costs of the community college, if established, Councilman Joseph Giles offered an amendment to the proposal at the June council meeting. It expressly provided that property tax revenues would not be raised for those purposes. As amended by Giles, the proposition, which may otherwise have been narrowly defeated, was approved by county council with near-unanimity.

Since the county council’s action putatively met the non-property tax criterion of Rethink Erie and its various sycophants, one would assume they would have applauded it. But not so. Instead, they condemned Giles’s amendment. That betrayed their true intention of railroading the community college through the approval process, then subsequently seeking to impose property tax increases to help fund the county’s one-third share.

County Executive Grossman admitted as much when, in an astonishingly obtuse move, he went before the Erie school board on June 30, hat in hand, to beg for a healthy chunk of school funds to help finance the community college. He sought a commitment to contribute $250,000 each year for the next ten years. Asked by a board member whether that meant county council would reverse itself and rescind the Giles amendment prohibiting the use of county property tax money for the community college, Grossman, according to a report in the Times-News, replied: “I have to be frank with you. I'm trying to use you people as leverage."

And in an interview the following day with the Times-News, Grossman let the cat irretrievably out of the bag. He was quoted as saying that “if school districts, private businesses and others throw their financial support behind the community college, it could make it harder for County Council to maintain its position regarding county tax dollars.” Nevertheless, the school board politely but firmly rebuffed Grossman. He told the Times-News he would ask all the other school districts in the county for contributions as well, but the prospects there are even less promising.

While previously maintaining the pretense that county tax money would not be used to support the community college, Grossman has now made it clear he intends to renege on that “pledge.” Indeed, he has already done so by supporting a $29,800 grant from the county to Rethink Erie. That group, in turn, is using the taxpayer money to contract with a consulting firm to prepare an economic impact study needed for state-mandated approval of the community college. It was, in effect, a sole source, non-competitive no-bid contract; not illegal, but under the circumstances, highly questionable.

In a column following county council’s June vote, Pat Howard, managing editor of the Times-News and lead tenor in the community college choir, dismayed by the turn of events, bewailed council’s adoption of the Giles amendment. In its aftermath, he warbled a convoluted recitative: “With an assist from state Sen. Jane Earll, who led the push to attach some gambling money to the project, and from the folks at Rethink Erie, who commissioned new research on the subject,” Howard wrote, “ Grossman, the county executive managed to lower projections for the local tax share to a nice round number. Zero (my emphasis).”

However, Howard added, “The gambling revenue the college is banking on is likely to remain relatively static over time, or could even drop in the face of expanded competition in the gambling business, while the local share of community college costs will be subject to the normal cycle of inflation...As things stand now,” Howard wrote, “a community college at some point would either have to cut costs or find new, sustainable sources of revenue other than taxes if the gambling cash doesn't cover its nut." Nut?

The dilemma emerging from Rethink Erie’s and County Executive Barry Grossman’s untenable proposition is that (one) there are no “new sustainable sources of revenue” available; (two) politicians and bureaucrats are congenitally incapable of cutting costs from their pork buffets, and (three), by Howard’s own admission, gambling revenues are certain to be insufficient. That leaves property taxes to foot the community college tab a certainty, an outcome its proponents have publicly ruled out, but privately endorsed, until Grossman allowed the feline to escape. And that’s the petard of their own devise on which they are hoist.

Community colleges are a positive force wherever they exist, and would prove to be so in Erie. But the threshhold consideration here is whether this county’s property taxpayers can afford the one proposed by the Rethink Erie cabal given the uncertainty of its purported utility and the inhospitable socio-economic circumstances prevailing here.

That combined with the proliferation of other unique higher and alternative education options available in the county, both technical and academic, renders their proposal based upon its inevitable burden on taxpayers redundant. And the overriding taxpayer sentiment in Erie County is a resounding “No!” There are too many other higher needs and priorities clamoring for finite county resources.

Lost amid clouds of effluvia generated by Rethink Erie, the Times-News and their single-minded cohorts, are other more realistic and palatable options. These include a promising one which was briefly explored locally but summarily rejected by the county’s control barons aiming for a power grab. They prefer a puppet institution readily susceptible to various forms of insider manipulation.

This option stems from an impressive presentation made in Erie earlier this summer by Butler County’s widely-respected community college system (not covered by the Times-News) offering to establish a satellite college in Erie like those highly successful ones it has already placed in Lawrence and Mercer counties. Those are in addition to five more it is in the process of installing throughout the region.

Under the Butler model, the set-up, operational and maintenance costs by an operator with proven competence and success would be far less than establishing one in Erie County from scratch. It would also genuinely, not falsely, eschew the need for property tax revenues. The non-tax sources cited by the Rethink Erie axis such as casino revenues, Erie Community Foundation and other private grants and donations would truly suffice to cover all costs, given the efficiencies obtainable within the established and highly qualified Butler system, negating any need to use county property taxes.

Butler Community College has already made impressive inroads by establishing partnerships with a handful of institutions outside its geographical bounds in western Pa. like the one proposed with Erie County, including Edinboro University, and in western New York. But in yet another one-sided news article in the Erie Times-News, a Rethink Erie spokesperson blithely dismissed these key developments, and others like them, as irrelevant to the higher need for a community college.

The facile rejection by Rethink Erie, County Executive Grossman and the Times-News of the superior Butler model demonstrates that they are more concerned with incestuous empire building at taxpayers’ expense, than they are with providing affordable higher vocational education for lower income residents aimed at bestirring an economic and industrial renaissance, and reversing joblessness in Erie County.

As of this writing, several weeks before this article was published, the resolution of this issue was still very much in doubt. Would the state approve the county application if county council remains steadfast in its stand against the use of property taxes? Or would council ultimately bend under the high voltage pressure applied by Rethink Erie and its principal lobbyist, the Erie Times-News, and concede to the tax pushers? Stay tuned.

More community college bias from the Erie Times-News

2010-07-18T01:03:00.003-04:00

True to its one-sided assault in favor of a community college,the Erie Times-News gave a non-entity named Steve Wilson about 30-column inches Sunday to rant against those who don't support or have raised questions about the proposed facility.

Unfortunately Mr. Wilson provides none of the answers. That makes about 300 column inches the biased newspaper has devoted to its campaign to ramrod the community college through, versus about 30 inches in total letters to the editor opposed to it. But who's counting?

All Wilson does is repeat the talking points prescribed by the self-appointed cabal which calls itself Rethink Erie, a step-child of the Erie Regional Chamber and Growth Partnership headed by Times-News usta-be Jim Dible, which in turn heads a rag-tag collection of special interests interested mostly in the personal and financial gains they see for themselves in the establishment of a county-run - more likely mis-run - community college, rather than the public interest. Whatchu bucking for Steve, a posh six-figure job at the public trough compared to the lesser taxpayer-paid state job you already have?

Launching ad hominen attacks on those few brave souls who have dared to oppose the college in letters to the editor, and who get three or four column inches to have their say, Wilson amply demonstrates that he is guilty of the same "disinformation, mis-direction, faulty logic, ignorance and inexplicable vitriol" he hurls at opponents of the community college. Plus, add irretrievably naive.Don't bet the Times-News will allow a critic equal space in the paper, because you'd lose.

Each of Wilson's talking points in easily refutable. For example, Wilson says "Letter writer Keith Farnham wants us to believe that because Eriez Magnetics Chief Executive Timothy Shuttleworth didn't specifically mention the need for a community college when writing recently about Pennsylvania's poor business climate, we obviously don't need one."

That's only the first of Wilson's intellectually corrupt arguments, since Farnham's letter cited more than just that as a basis for his position. Wilson goes on to say that "Farnham cites as further 'evidence' that the president of the Manufacturer & Business Association has challenged the need for a community college. So, apparently, the guy running a nonprofit membership organization is more credible than major for-profit employers who support the community college, such as GE Transportation, the region's biggest employer, and Scott Enterprises."

Of course Steve, these for-profit guys would much rather have the taxpayers pay for the special training or re-training they should be providing to their new hires or laid-off employees at company expense.

Wilson says 'Farnham also states without any substantiation that 'the Erie area is considered to have a quality work force.' Really, by whom? Certainly not GE Transportation or Scott Enterprises.

I don't know about Scott Enterprises, as its' contribution to the local economy is negligible, but why would GE want more workers to enter the local workplace when it's already laying off workers by the thousands, and outsourcing their work, not because the local labor force is unqualified, but because GE can get a lot cheaper labor without union representation offshore in places like Mexico, China, Thailand and Afghanistan.

And one should remember that GE's local here-today-gone-tomorrow whiz-kid, barely dry behind the ears,will be gone to greener pastures in another year or two, to be replaced by another equally oblivious to the local labor picture.

2010-07-12T15:18:00.002-04:00

2010-07-12T15:18:00.001-04:00

2010-07-12T15:18:00.000-04:00

And the beat goes on: The runway to nowhere

2010-07-04T22:29:00.008-04:00

My previous post here dealt with yet another article by Times-News Reporter Tim Hahn, who seems to have been delegated the task of fulfilling the Times Publishing Company's editorial policy in favor of the $80.5 million runway extension at the Erie airport in its news columns.

In the previous post, I referred to Hahn's reporting as "typical of the sloppy, superficial, incomplete and biased reporting one has come to expect from the monopoly daily, which raises more questions than it answers."

In Sunday's edition, Hahn surpassed those characteristics with an article headlined "Erie airport breaks ground on runway extension," in which he enshrined the Times Publishing Co.'s editorial policy in the very first sentence - what newspaper folks call the "lede" - with this moronic observation: "A 7,500 foot-long main runway has been a DESIRED (my emphasis) feature for the Erie International Airport since it was first documented in the facility's 1974 master plan."

Desired by whom? It's proponents, certainly, like those attending the ground breaking ceremony Saturday for the runway extension project. But how about it's many detractors, for whom the project is anathama, such as the homeowners who were forced willy-nilly to abandon their long-established homes inconveniently in the path of the runway extension, as well as those remaining residents who must suffer endlessly the roar of jets in their homes and yards day and night for the foreseeable future.
The certainly don't desire it.

And how about those who believe the runway extension is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive, a drag on limited county finances and tax revenues desperately needed for other core county services such as human and social services, always underfunded and unmet.

But where the Times Publishing Co. is concerned, those folks don't count. It's only those who "desire" the runway extension whose voices are heard and heeded, like the "large number of federal, state, county and local officials who spoke of the project's history and the benefits that are expected to come from it," according to Hahn, who seems to be prepping for a spot on the editorial page staff.

Hahn quoted comments made at the groundbreaking by Lou Porreco, past president of the airport authority who said: "When this expansion is completed, we will be opening the door here for more aircraft operations with greater range, capacity and safety than we have ever enjoyed in the past,"..."before sinking his shovel into the brown earth." "That will be extremely important for the future of this region."

That's a lot like what Porreco's counterparts in Pittsburgh said a couple decades ago when they abandoned the old Pittsburgh airport and built a brand new one costing hundreds of millions more to accommodate "more aircraft operations" in that transportation hub. Problem is, it never materialized, and today the new Pittsburgh airport is a ghost city, with most of its terminals shuttered due to the lack of demand for transport services there. Here's how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described it several months ago.

Airport traffic declined again last year
Friday, February 12, 2010
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Passenger traffic dropped another 7.8 percent at Pittsburgh International Airport last year, continuing a trend that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has yet to abate.

Overall, eight million travelers used the airport in 2009, compared to 8.7 million in 2008. That's only about a third of the 20.7 million passengers that used the airport in 1997, its record year, when it was a major hub for US Airways.

The Allegheny County Airport Authority attributed the latest decline to a 20 percent decline in passengers posted by US Airways, which eliminated its Pittsburgh hub in 2004 but still is the region's dominant carrier with nearly 29 percent of the traffic.

AirTran Airways posted a 24.8 percent gain in 2009 and Southwest Airlines, the airport's second largest carrier, showed a three percent increase, but neither was enough to offset the US Airways losses.
_________________________________________________________________

And here's a blog I first posted a year or so ago pertaining to the "desired" airport feature.

Mob hysteria fuels runway project

A contagious mob hysteria has overtaken Erie county council and executive Mark DiVecchio, egged on by the development-at-any cost crowd and its mouthpiece, the Times Publishing Co., as they bind taxpayers to superfluous runway expansion at the Erie airport to expand services already underutilized by Erie’s anemic air passenger market,which should be directed towards more traditional and critical county needs.

All county residents must pay one way or another for the runway project, despite the fact that nearly half the county’s residents outside city and Millcreek/Summit boundaries will derive little or no benefit from it. Most of the relatively few who use air passenger services at all, prefer to drive to Buffalo, Cleveland or Pittsburgh where a more convenient and timely array of flights await to serve them.

Any benefit to them from this wasteful expenditure is negligible or non-existent.While all council members share in the political depravity inherent in the airport runway scheme, the principal culprit is the county executive who is pandering to Times-News editorialists and their sycophants.

Proponents claim the runway project is needed to fuel future economic growth which will enhance the entire county. But no one has produced a single credible survey or study to support their contention, nor anything resembling a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, county officials are flying, so to speak, by the seat of their pants

TIMES-NEWS BIAS, ERRORS PERVADE AIRPORT RUNWAY ARTICLE

2010-06-10T14:42:00.010-04:00

Today's article in the Times-News by Reporter Tim Hahn on the award of a construction contract for a controversial runway extension at the Erie airport is typical of the sloppy, superficial, incomplete and biased reporting one has come to expect from the monopoly daily, which raises more questions than it answers.

To put the article in context, one needs to know that the Times Publishing Co. is rabidly in favor of the runway project as a matter of editorial policy, as it is of most expenditures of public funds, whether they're needed or not (although The Times is notoriously skinflintish when it comes to paying adequate salaries for competent reporting, editing and editorial management at its newspaper: ergo, its generally sub-standard journalism).

Consequently, any Times-News article on the runway project is predictably sharply slanted in its favor, even though there's significant opposition to it within the county, which is rarely or never mentioned in the Times-News coverage, such as Hahn's article.

According to the article, there were only two bids for the first of three phases of project construction whose total cost is estimated at about $80 1/2 Million. Evidencing a dire need for some grammar school tutoring, Hahn wrote: "The company's bid (for Phase One )was the lowest (sic) of two that airport officials received in May." (It was actually the "lower" of the two.)

Hahn said it was about $1.5 million lower than the airport authority's original estimate, or $10,620,000. (Elsewhere in the story, he says the lower bid added up to $10,519,500, indicating he needs some help with his math too). The only other bid was significantly higher than both, about $15,775,575.

Hahn's, and the newspaper's bias comes into play early in his lead paragraph. He writes: "Erie International Airport officials have officially found a BARGAIN (my emphasis) in the first phase of their $80.5 million runway-extension project."

There 's nothing in the story's factual presentation to indicate the contract is a "bargain." And even if there were, that's an opinion which belongs in an editorial, not in a news story, unless it's attributed to a knowledgeable outside source. Just because the low bid is lower than the authority's estimate and the only other bid, doesn't necessarily mean it's a bargain.

It's more likely an indication that the authority's project cost estimating competence is lacking and it simply over-estimated the cost of Phase One. Or it could indicate that the lower bidder deliberately underbid in order to position itself for advantageous bidding on the two subsequent project phases.

Alternatively, it could suggest a ploy common to construction contracting, which is to bid low deliberately to get the job, then when work is well underway, to come in with a change order needed to complete the project, materially raising the cost,leaving the authority with no option but to comply or litigate at an even higher cost.

In any case it's incumbent upon the reporter to determine WHY the low bid was so much lower than the other, as well as the authority's estimate. For starters, Hahn should have contacted the high bidder to inquire why there was such a disparity between the two bids.

Realistically, the low bidder's bid should have been higher because that contracter is from Ohio, and would have to move his equipment and workforce farther to the job site than the high bidder, which is located in Erie. That alone should raise a flag for any competent reporter, but Hahn ignored it.

Hahn quoted Airport Director Chris Rodgers as saying "that the first phase of construction is expected to result in 329 jobs and about $6.7 million in payroll paid out, all impacting the local economy."

In fact, neither Hahn nor Rodgers has any idea how many, if any, of the 329 jobs will go to Erie workers. Many if not most of them are likely jobs held by Ohioans who work for the Ohio contractor, and won't be available for local hire. But exaggerating the local job impact better serves the Times-News editorial bias.
__________________________________________________________________________

For more on the airport runway extension fiasco see my blog archive at Feb. 2, 2010.

HOW THE ERIE TIMES-NEWS SNUFFED OUT THE LIGHTS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM IN ERIE COUNTY

2010-06-07T14:07:00.009-04:00

In a Good Morning column today entitled "Thankfully a Light shines on", Times-News Reporter Ed Pallatella regaled us with a beguiling narrative of a small weekly newspaper for which he once worked on the West Coast as an intern known as the Point Reyes Light.
Like most small newspapers, existence for the Light was and is a constant and precarious struggle, surviving through two changes of ownership despite the fact that it was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize. According to Pallatella, it's now owned by a non-profit.
"The Light's future is far from settled;" he wrote: "the paper likely will need grants to stay in business over time. For now, the Light is still burning, an example of newspaper's bond with its community...Its story, to the relief of its readers (and one former intern) has not ended."
Ed's story reminds me of the fate of half a dozen weekly newspapers here in Erie County which weren't so lucky. Once known as the Brown-Thompson Newspapers, they were the information and advertising lifelines of communities like North East, Edinboro, Girard, Union City and others.
Their lights were snuffed out by Ed's employer, the Times Publishing Co., which bought them several years ago, then within a few years, predictably terminated their existence which in one case had lasted about one hundred years, my hometown newspaper, The North East Breeze.
Seems the Times's owners didn't want the weeklies, whose advertising rates were roughly half those of its flagship daily, The Erie Times-News, competing for the various communities' advertising dollars with the daily newspaper. So they shut them down, leaving the small communities without a voice, forcing their small businesses and governing bodies to pay big city rates for advertising space in the Times-News.
At the time, The Times promised the communities would not suffer for want of local news because the Times-News would publish a community page each week devoted exclusively to news in the newspaperless towns. But that promise was soon extinguished.
Sadly, in this case, thanks to the Times Publishing Co., the lights have gone out.

CUT THROAT COMPETITION AT THE ERIE TIMES-NEWS

2010-05-21T15:45:00.003-04:00

The following blog appeared in the current issue of FolioMagazine, which covers the national magazine trade. It was written by Executive Editor Matt Kinsman

Cutthroat Competition: Breaking into a Monopoly
Two regional titles show just how vicious local publishing can be.
By Matt Kinsman
05/20/2010

Every highly competitive magazine market is used to trash talk, undercut rates and the occasional sneaky gambit from rivals (remember the Pub Exec publisher trying to get the lowdown on FOLIO: newsletters by pretending to be a prospective advertiser?)

In the city and regional category, where barriers to entry are fairly low yet the clash for the limited dollars of local advertisers can be a life and death struggle week in and week out, competition can get especially cutthroat, particularly when a newcomer enters a highly concentrated market.

In 2008, Rena Tran founded Erie Life Magazine, located an hour and a half from Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo. Today, the magazine (which has changed its name to Great Lakes Life) generates between $500,000 and $1 million in ad revenue and is sold on more than 600 newsstands in three states and Canada.

Erie Life/Great Lakes Life faced many of the typical startup challenges (particularly as it launched just as the bottom was falling out of the magazine market). But it also ran up against what some observers have called a near-media monopoly in the local newspaper, Erie-Times News. (In 2006, a media watchdog group called The Media and Democracy Coalition protested the FCC considering loosening limits on media ownership, citing the Erie-Times News as one example of a potential problem.)

Erie Life's first marketing efforts included a billboard teaser campaign that said, "Erie Life Magazine. Now There's a Choice." Shortly after Erie Life announced it's impending launch, Erie-Times News announced it was launching its own magazine, Lake Erie Lifestyle.

During Erie Life's first year, former Erie-Times News publisher Jim Dible took over the Erie Chamber of Commerce (Erie Life subsequently quit the Chamber, and in a follow-up meeting, Erie Life vice president and partner Paul Loncharic says that Dible told him that the Erie-Times News saw Erie Life as its "greatest enemy.")

Loncharic says Erie Life ran up against a number of "exclusive partnerships" with Erie-Times News and local media outlets such as the local public television and radio station. Erie-Times News executives also sat on the boards of large hospitals, universities, and arts organizations, such as the Philharmonic, according to Loncharic.

"Some advertising agencies in Erie were even worse," says Loncharic. "They wouldn't risk their relationship with the Times. One agency had told us that if they placed with us they could lose their discounts for their classifieds."

Loncharic claims the Times resorted to huge rate discounts ($700 for a full page versus Erie Life's $2,500 yield for a full page), as well as old tricks such as hiding copies of Erie Life on the newsstand. Even Erie Life's ability to attract writing talent was threatened, according to Loncharic. "We lost freelancers because of intimidation," he says. "It was tough."

Once, the magazine sought expansion money from the local Economic Development Corporation. "They kept begging us to see our financial statements but wouldn't tell us what government loans or grants we were qualified for," says Loncharic. "Months later I was sitting in a meeting with a local businessman who out of the blue asked me, ‘So I heard the Economic Development Corporation wanted to see your books.' I said, ‘How did you know that?' and he said ‘Because the publisher of the Erie-Times News sits on one of their boards and was dying to know what your books looked like. I confronted the EDC about it later and they claimed she wasn't on that board and they are a pillar of confidentiality."

As of this posting, Erie-Times News hadn't returned repeated requests for comment. However, Joe LaRocca, a journalist and author of the blog Erie CounterNewsMedia (whose mission is to "countercheck the Erie news media for inaccuracy, errors of commission or omission, bias, incompetence, arrogance, chutzpah, excessive hubris, and other sins against ethical and professional journalism") says Erie Life's claims don't surprise him.

"Coincidentally, the inaugural edition of a new magazine put out by Marnie Mead Oberle, an heir of the Mead family which owns the Times Publishing Co., made its first appearance in last Sunday's edition of the Times-News," says LaRocca. "It deals with roughly the same subject matter as Erie Life, except that it has more the feel of an advertising supplement. Undoubtedly the Times is trying to force out Erie Life so that its magazine, which currently has the free circulation advantage of the 77,000 Sunday paper's circulation, may take over the field unchallenged. The Times' failure to respond is typical. As a newspaper monopoly, they answer to no one."

.

Pat Howard, the dissimulator

2010-05-11T01:19:00.003-04:00

I'm reprinting the following post from last September to highlight the Erie Times-News's continuing failure to reinstate online reader's comments appended to news and editorial content appearing in both the online and hard copy editions, exposing Managing Editor Pat Howard's penchant for dissimulating. It's pretty clear, for the reasons I advanced below last year,that the Times-News has no intention of restoring public comment to its online edition, unlike most other intellectually honest newspapers which do. Among other things, the Times-News's glaring omission gives the lie to its frequent and pious but phony editorial assertions championing freedom of speech.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2009

ADDENDUM: This morning, after this blog was posted, I received a response to my query addressed to Managing Editor Pat Howard as to when the Erie Times-News plans to resume online readers' comments. It came from Jeffrey Hileman/Managing Editor/New Media. He replied: "Mr. LaRocca – Pat Howard asked me to respond to your questions. GoErie.com plans to reintroduce reader comments as part of its redesign, though we do not yet have a start date." ____________________________________________________

Until last Spring (2009), the Erie Times-News followed the relatively new practice adopted by most newspapers here and abroad in recent years of enabling readers of their online editions to comment freely on articles and other ediorial content, in writing, by appending a comment box at the bottom of each article.

Then, without warning, The Times-News dropped the highly popular feature, a move which was explained by Managing Editor Pat Howard as a temporary one while the Times-News’s website – know as GoErie.com – was being reprogrammed or redesigned.

Howard promised readers the feature would be resumed soon thereafter. As all regular readers of GoErie.com know, to date it has not been resumed. And since neither Howard nor any Times-News person has revealed in the prolonged interim why it has been discontinued, or whether it will ever be resumed, readers remain gagged and in the dark.

I e-mailed Howard yesterday to ask him why the Times-News has discontinued online readers’ comments, whether it plans to resume them and, if so, when? Not surprisingly, I’ve not received a response from Howard. If I do, I’ll post it later on this blog. (See ADDENDUM above.)

The Times-News is not the only newspaper to discontinue online readers’ comments, but there have been only a handful nationwide.

While not within the rationale provided by Howard at the time the Times-News discontinued readers’ comments, most of the other newspapers which have done so have cited widespread abuse of the feature, primarily by anonymous bloggers who persistently engaged in ad hominem attacks which, if identifiable as to source, could be actionable, obscene language, irrelevant posts and other uncivil practices.

This is a common complaint lodged by virtually every newspaper which allows online readers’ comments. It is mitigated to some extent by some newspapers which attempt to monitor the abusive posts and delete them.
But because they receive hundreds to thousands of readers’ posts each day, depending upon the size of the newspaper, it’s virtually impossible for small newspapers with limited intellectual staff like the Times-News to monitor the comments effectively.

Big metro or national newspapers like the New York Times, USA Today, the LA Times, the Washington Post and others affluent enough to afford them have created staff positions whose exclusive province is to monitor and manage online readers’ comments, because they recognize that in this new era of the worldwide web they must follow the crowd if they are to survive in the fast-changing cyber environment.

In some but not all smaller newspapers, the vast majority of comments which are abusive make it into print. While the newspapers provide standing guidelines demanding civility for readers’ comments, they are almost universally ignored, and the newspapers are in most cases helpless to enforce them.

This leaves them with only two options: Either maintain the status quo and continue to suffer the abusive behavior – an unpleasant option at best - or discontinue the highly popular online readers’ comments altogether, and alienate their spiraling online readership. The latter is the path the Times-News has apparently chosen.

There is, however another option which would almost certainly eliminate most if not all of the abuses pertinent to online readers’ comments: disallow anonymity or psuedonymity, an option which I personally support. (See, for example, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Maureen Dowd’s recent column on anonymous blogging, “Stung by the Perfect Sting,” Aug. 26, perhaps the only time I’ve ever agreed with her hyperbolic rants).

That aside, there’s an unspoken dynamic at play within this context which I believe is primarily responsible for the Times-News’s discontinuance of online readers’ comments, as opposed to the rationales asserted above.

An inordinate number of the anonymous ad hominem attacks and abuses were directed at the newspaper staff, its erratic news coverage, editorial stances and its ownership, the longstanding Times Publishing Co., a newspaper monopoly which over the years has swallowed up all the competition, both daily and weekly, except for the Corry Journal, throughout its northwestern PA circulation area, as well as parts of surrounding counties in New York and Ohio.

Much of the commentary, mostly anonymous, was highly critical in unflattering, indeed embarrassing terms of the Times-News’s news and editorial policies and practices and personnel, which are, with good reason, widely seen as biased, shallow, inaccurate, self-serving, unprofessional and arrogant (I concur). Moreover, its Letters to the Editor section is routinely mismanaged.

I believe the thin-skinned operatives at the Times-News chose to discontinue the feature rather than suffer sustained embarrassment at the hands of merciless bloggers, most of them anonymous.

While I do not post or blog anonymously, but always identify myself by name, I was a frequent online critic of articles published in the Times-News, as well as its overall news and editorial practices. While I am often blunt in my criticism, I pride myself on my civility. I do not presume, however, that the Times-News discontinued online readers’ comments because of my feeble and captious criticism.

The last comment I posted before online readers’ comments were discontinued occurred on April 12 of this year. In response to Howard’s regular Sunday column boasting of the Times-News’s showing at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Assn’s. awards program, I posted a detailed factual analysis showing that The Times-News’s performance was greatly exaggerated by Howard.

For one thing, the Times-News is not in the same competitive category as the Commonwealth’s major newspapers in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Philadelphia. And several of the newspapers in towns smaller than Erie made a much better showing. (See my April 12, 2009 archive blog at http//.www.eriecounternewsmediablogspot.com.)

It should be noted that NO privately/corporately-owned newspaper is obliged to provide a forum for online readers and commenters. However, it ill-behooves any newspaper which persistently and piously preaches on behalf of First Amendment freedoms of press and speech, as the Times-News does, to be seen as a censor of populist expressions of opinion from the vast unwashed which the internet now makes readily and universally possible.

The Times-News is already criticized widely for crass rewriting and editing of Letters to the Editor which is tantamount to, if not actual censorship.

Lake Erie Biofuels is no hero

2010-03-01T15:38:00.004-05:00

The following letter to the editor appeared in Sunday’s Erie Times-News. I highly recommend it to anyone whos hasn’t already seen it. The author of the letter, Frank M. Gerlach of Harborcreek is to be commended for his perspicacity.

Biodiesel plant an albatross for future generations

"In the Feb. 21 Erie Times-News, a feature story stated that Hero BX, the local biodiesel plant, is feeling the pain because its buyers are losing a $1-per-gallon tax credit. As a result, it is idling the facility and 80 jobs are affected.

"Let's take an objective look at the federal government giveaway. The plant has a capacity of 45 million gallons of biodiesel per year. That is $45 million that we need to borrow from China to pay for this boondoggle.

"But wait, the plant employs about 80 people. About $45 million in tax credits divided by 80 jobs equals $562,500 per job annually (what a deal).

"It is no wonder that this kind of government thinking has been and will continue to make our great nation a second-rate country. If we don't have the money, we borrow it. Our grandchildren and their children will pay for this kind of government thinking. And, by the way, I understand that almost all of the biodiesel provided at this facility is shipped overseas.”

In that same vein, here’s a blog I posted here back on Thursday, September 17, 2009

Energy contradictions at the Erie Times-News

In its blind zeal to promote development at any cost in Erie, the Times-News breathlessly editorialized on behalf of Lake Erie Biofuels Tuesday which has been producing biofuels at the old Hammermill plant site for a year or so now.

Applauding the plant's planned production expansion from 40 million to 70 million gallons annually with the help of a $1.6 million state loan, the editorial ignored the internally inconsistent claim that the company's newly announced expansion will help the nation to achieve "energy independence" despite the fact that virtually all its heavily taxpayer-subsidized product(amounting to about $1 a gallon) will continue to be exported outside the U.S.

The Times-News hailed the fact that the company has changed its name to "Hero X," appropos to nothing in evidence except that "The name change is part of a branding campaign to reach a worldwide market," while boasting that its use, among other raw materials, of vegetable oils would promote environmentally benign goals.

This further ignores the hard lessons of the recent ethanol craze which resulted in a 35 percent increase in the national average consumer cost of foods like bread, cereals, poultry, beef and other foodstuffs dependent primarily upon ethanol feedstocks such as corn and grains.

On one hand, the editorial quoted a company official as saying:"We believe in biodiesel and its role for our country in increasing our energy independence (my emphasis)and improving our environment." But on the other hand it quotes the same official as saying "the plant is strategically located to export(my emphasis)its products using rail, highways and Lake Erie."

Oblivious to the inherent contradiction, the Times-News editorial exulted: "It's exciting to realize that Erie can help lead the way as Americans make good on our decades-old pledge to achieve energy independence."

To date, Erie Biofuels has exported most if not all of its product across the oceans, where there are more lucrative markets. There's no reason to believe that will change anytime soon,if ever. How does that promote national energy independence? Exporting domestic biolfuels and U.S. energy independence are mutually exclusive conceits

Mob hysteria fuels runway project, revisited

2010-02-12T23:13:00.003-05:00

I've been a critic of the asinine Erie airport runway expansion project purported to cost about $80 million, but which will inevitably vastly exceed that misleading estimate.

An article in today's Pittsburgh Post Gazette reporting yet another huge decline in traffic at that city's international airport further confirms the waste of public monies here in Erie on this runway to nowhere. Following that is a blog I posted on this topic back in November of 2007.

Airport traffic declined again last year
Friday, February 12, 2010
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Passenger traffic dropped another 7.8 percent at Pittsburgh International Airport last year, continuing a trend that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has yet to abate.

Overall, eight million travelers used the airport in 2009, compared to 8.7 million in 2008. That's only about a third of the 20.7 million passengers that used the airport in 1997, its record year, when it was a major hub for US Airways.

The Allegheny County Airport Authority attributed the latest decline to a 20 percent decline in passengers posted by US Airways, which eliminated its Pittsburgh hub in 2004 but still is the region's dominant carrier with nearly 29 percent of the traffic.

AirTran Airways posted a 24.8 percent gain in 2009 and Southwest Airlines, the airport's second largest carrier, showed a three percent increase, but neither was enough to offset the US Airways losses.

Mob hysteria fuels runway project

A contagious mob hysteria has overtaken Erie county council and executive Mark DiVecchio, egged on by the development-at-any cost crowd and its mouthpiece, the Times Publishing Co., as they bind taxpayers to superfluous runway expansion at the Erie airport to expand services already underutilized by Erie’s anemic air passenger market,which should be directed towards more traditional and critical county needs.

All county residents must pay one way or another for the runway project, despite the fact that nearly half the county’s residents outside city and Millcreek/Summit boundaries will derive little or no benefit from it. Most of the relatively few who use air passenger services at all, prefer to drive to Buffalo, Cleveland or Pittsburgh where a more convenient and timely array of flights await to serve them.

Any benefit to them from this wasteful expenditure is negligible or non-existent.While all council members share in the political depravity inherent in the airport runway scheme, the principal culprit is the county executive who is pandering to Times-News editorialists and their sycophants.

Proponents claim the runway project is needed to fuel future economic growth which will enhance the entire county. But no one has produced a single credible survey or study to support their contention, nor anything resembling a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, county officials are flying, so to speak, by the seat of their pants

The death of community journalism, revisited

2010-02-12T22:47:00.005-05:00

Just below is a comment from D. Homan posted about a week ago pertaining to a blog I penned here more than two years ago dealing with the Times Publishing Co.'s, decision to junk the network of weekly newspapers throughout the county once known as the Brown Thompson Newspapers. In defense of this callous money-grubbing move, the Times promised to uphold a commitment to community journalism in those communities by featuring one of them each week in its daily rag, the Erie Times-News. Needless to say, that promise was short-lived, as asserted by Mr. Homan.

D. Homan said...
"It's very disappointing that the Times-News has not kept its promises to have a section for each community to replace their local Brown-Thompson newspapers. This monopoly on the local news should be against the law!Then they make it so hard to submit a comment on the story. No wonder there are no comments!"
February 7, 2010 11:07

Here is a copy of the blog to which his comment pertains, first published here back in October, 2007.

An epitaph for community journalism

This is the story of how the Times Publishing Co, five years ago, killed community journalism in Erie County. In July of 2002, the Times, publisher of the only metropolitan daily newspaper and seven weeklies within Erie County - which it had acquired years ago known as the Brown-Thompson newspapers - confirmed rumors rampant throughout the county for several months that it would close all seven.

They included the North East Breeze, which had been in continuous publication under one name or another for more than 100 years, longer even than the Times’s daily newspaper, as well as papers in Girard, Edinboro, Union City, Millcreek and elsewhere. While I can’t speak for the other communities, what happened in North East was prototypical.

Citing rising costs, the Times said in place of the local coverage hitherto provided by the weeklies, it would incorporate news coverage of each community in a weekly zoned or regional section of its daily newspaper, the Times-News, which it would call "NEIGHBORS."

But the reality which soon emerged was that the new weekly sections in the daily paper were loaded with copy from half dozen other communities, including some just across the PA-NY state line, Ripley, Westfield and Chautauqua. The Times did not explain how it was going to fit all the local news and editorial copy previously contained in seven weeklies - typically running from more than a dozen to several dozen broadsheet or tabloid pages - into a single weekly zoned section, for the obvious reason that it would be impossible.

Most of what the Times’s "Neighbors" section published about North East is what is known in the trade as “fluff:” soft, fleeting, feature and human interest articles which are fun and easy for newspaper writers to write, but which contain little of substance.There’s a place for that kind of newspaper writing, but not at the expense of more relevant and meaningful reporting requiring tough, time-consuming, gritty, dogged digging out of facts, or investigative and analytical reporting, which constitute a newspaper’s principal trade-in-stock.

Soon after the Times had acquired the Breeze and the other weeklies, the only ones within the county, from Brown-Thompson, it proceeded upon a premeditated and cynical long-term voyage of attrition that would ultimately eliminate them as advertising competition to the Times’s flagship daily in Erie.

The Times gradually cut staff, expenses and coverage at the Breeze, reducing the number of pages and its local “news hole,” using countless galleys of stock pages and trivial syndicated filler to flesh it out.

Much of the coverage had little or no relevance to North East readers and subscribers. Weekly inclusion of canned news and events from the other communities was indiscriminately shoveled into the shrinking news hole of the Breeze. It eventually became, in effect, a regional rather than a local weekly covering most of Erie County and parts of Crawford County and Chautauqua County, NY, although it was still called the North East Breeze.

For all these reasons: reduced staff, smaller newshole, irrelevance to local
interests, and non-professional journalism practices, the Breeze soon began losing local reader and advertiser support. Once cherished in the community, the Breeze eventually became an object of contempt among the vast majority of local residents.

By the time it was shuttered by the Times, over-the-counter-sales of the Breeze at the town’s most prominent news stand had dropped from about 60 to 16 copies per week, mirroring its drop in subscriptions, as well as reader and advertiser interest.

Immediately North East, like the other small towns which had been robbed of their local newspapers by the Times, lost its principal community bulletin board and consistent coverage of its local government entities, including the borough council, township board of supervisors, planning and zoning commission, water and sewer authority, and others, from which it has never recovered.

It also lost its only outlet for local advertising. Accustomed to print advertising costs geared to the size of the community and its small mom and pop businesses,local advertisers were suddenly faced with costs apropos to metropolitan Erie, which they could ill afford.

Costs of legal advertising for the local government entities required by law doubled overnight, forcing them to cut back drastically in other budget areas and eliminating critical services and programs.

In the wake of these sobering events, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Erie Times-News. It concluded::

“It's tragic that a faceless and indifferent absentee corporation purportedly dedicated to the freedom of information and press with no ties to or stake in the community, except for its bottom line, has with impunity put an inglorious end to one of this community’s most precious and long-lived assets and institutions, a reflection of its unique culture and heritage, its local newspaper.”

Needless to say, the Times never published my letter.

"Newspaper of the Year" - A hollow award

2009-10-10T19:39:00.002-04:00

The Pennsylvania Newspaper Assn.'s announcement today it had named the Erie Times-News "Newspaper of the Year" was hailed by itself and its feckless sycophants in the local blogosphere with unbecoming exultation. As a reality check, here's a copy of the blog I wrote when the PNA's foundation announced the annual 2009 press awards last April.

____________________________________________________

In today’s edition, the Erie Times News announced that “thirteen Erie Times-News writers, photographers and page designers earned 18 top awards” in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Assn’s 2009 Keystone Press Awards statewide competition (By my count, it’s 17, but whose counting?).

In that context, Managing Editor Pat Howard boasted: "These awards reach into all corners of our newsroom to highlight excellence both in print and online. It's well-deserved recognition for the journalists being honored, and a reflection of the talent and commitment our entire staff brings to bear every day in serving our audiences in ways no other news organization in the region can.”

That seems curiously at odds with my longstanding contention that the Times-News’s press credentials are, with a few exceptions, by and large mediocre at best, its news and editorial coverage of issues, people and events important to its Erie readers usually inept, shallow, biased, unprofessional, irrelevant, mis and uninformed.

Unless I'm wrong, how could the Times-News seemingly have scored so lavishly in this year’s press awards competition?

Let’s put that into perspective. The article said that “The Times-News competes in Division II, for newspapers in the 50,000-to-99,999 circulation.” What the article didn’t do is put that distinction in context, which is needed to grasp its implications.

For purposes of the Keystone Awards, the commonwealth’s newspapers are divided into eight divisions. Division I includes Pennsylvania’s most prominent newspapers with the largest circulations. There are only seven of them: the largest, the Philadelphia Inquirer which also publishes the Philadelphia Daily News; the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Allentown Morning Call, the Pittsburgh Tribune, the Harrisburg Patriot-News and - although it’s technically a statewide cooperative news service, not a newspaper - the Associated Press.

Division Two consists of six newspapers: the Erie Times-News, the York Daily Record/Sunday News, the Scranton Times-Tribune, the Reading Eagle, the Bucks County Courier-Times, and the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal/Sunday News. In each division .there are about 40 award categories, with awards being given for first and second place winner, and in a few cases honorable mention. That means there are about 120 different award opportunities available to Division II newspapers, of which the Times-News received awards in 17.

However, less than half the categories deal with the principal news and editorial writing functions, which are the hallmark of any newspaper, and about half of those encompass sports writing, a lesser function in terms of the broad public interest.
In the most important news writing category, investigative reporting, the Times-News did not score, beat out by the York Daily Record/Sunday News and the Scranton Times-Tribune.

In another key function, editorial writing, the Times-News took a second place. In commentary/columns, the Times-News was outwritten by the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal and the York Sunday News. In the spot news category, the Times-News was bested by the York Daily Record and the Reading Eagle. In the ongoing news category, it tanked, losing out to the Bucks County and Scranton newspapers.

The Times-News took a first in the Special Projects category and second place in the “niche” category, whatever that is. It also took a second place in news series writing, firsts in feature and /feature beat writing, a first for a business/consumer story, a first in sports beat reporting, a second in feature photo, first in sports photo and second in online journalistic innovation (the internet). It lost out in News Beat reporting to the Reading and Lancaster papers. Photographer Jack Hanrahan distinguished himself with a top Specialty award in the visual category in competion with all of Pennsylvania’s newspapers, including the Big Seven.

Though the Times-News appears to have won its proportionate share of press awards, the most telling factor is that none of them was in the top most vital news and editorial reporting and writing categories

Another interesting point to note is that all of the Times-News’s A-list reporters, writers and columnists were skunked in the competition, like Howard, Ed Mead, Kevin Cuneo, Kevin Flowers, John Guerriero and Ed Palattella.

Also noteworthy is that most of the top news and editorial writing awards went to newspapers in the more densely populated eastern part of the state, where, unlike the Times-News, they face intense competition from other newspapers, including big metropolitan sheets.

Erie news media, bloggers, ignore Phil English's mad dash through the "revolving doors"

2009-10-04T01:29:00.009-04:00

“Although the influence powerhouses that line Washington's K Street* are just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol building, the most direct path between the two doesn't necessarily involve public transportation. Instead, it's through a door—a revolving door that shuffles former federal employees into jobs as lobbyists, consultants and strategists just as the door pulls former hired guns into government careers. While members of the executive branch, Congress and senior congressional staffers spin in and out of the private and public sectors, so too does privilege, power, access and, of course, money.” *(K Street is the legendary lane in the nation’s capital where lobbying organizations are concentrated. From Open Secrets: The Center for Responsive Politics – Revolving Doors.

A comprehensive report several years ago done for the national public interest organization, Public Citizen, states unequivocally that “Lobbying is the top career choice for departing members of Congress. It also states that “Departing Republican members lead Democrats in the rush to K Street.”

Former Congressman Phil English of Erie, a Republican who represented Pennsylvania’s House District Three for 14 years until he was defeated last year by U.S. Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, an Erie Democrat, fits the revolving door mold perfectly, joining the prominent lobbying and law firm Arent Fox in Washington D.C. following his loss last November to Ms. Dahlkemper.

Only a few months out of office, barely breaking stride, Mr. English dashed through the revolving doors separating his congressional role - where he dealt extensively with issues and institutions in the private commercial and government sectors - from the private sector, where he will now deal with Congress on their behalf.

Mr. English began writing a column recently for former Erie Times-News Reporter Peter Panepento’s blog, Global/Outside Erie. Although he alludes to his new position with Arent Fox LLP in his inaugural column, he never once mentions the words “lobby” or “lobbying,” even though Arent Fox is one of the most prestigious lobbying firms in the nation.

It’s not located on K Street, but it boasts a prominent venue on Connecticut Ave, NW, not too far from the White House and the U.S. Capitol Building with offices in New York City and Los Angeles. Besides lobbying Congress and government agencies on behalf of powerful clients, Arent Fox is a busy litigator in virtually every field of commerce, keeping its more than 300 lawyers busy representing clients in litigation.

In his first column for Outside/Global Erie, Mr. English identifies himself as Arent Fox’s Senior Government Relations Advisor, a supervisory position. Some of the more prominent lobbyists whom Mr. English joins in his new job are or have been Dale Bumpers, former Arkansas governor and U.S. Senator; John Culver, former U.S. Senator for Iowa, both of whom currently work with him at the firm's Washington, D.C. office; and Fred Thompson, former U.S. Senator for Tennessee, Actor and 2008 presidential candidate who once lobbied for the company.

Under the “cooling off period” prescribed by federal law, Mr. English may not directly lobby his former colleagues in the House of Representative until a year after he was voted out of office last year. But as Arent Fox’s Senior Government Relations Advisor, he may and does legally supervise and advise the firm’s lobbyists who do, a difference without much of a distinction. Whether he will retain that title and function after the cooling off period or proceed actively to lobby his former congressional colleagues is perhaps a question he can answer in an ensuing column.

In his first column several weeks ago, Mr. English characterized his day job with Arent Fox somewhat euphemistically, thusly: “My new professional home is Arent Fox LLP, a highly regarded Washington area law firm. As their Senior Government Relations Advisor, my practice involves developing strategies and solving problems in many of the areas I was active in as Congressman – healthcare, trade, taxes, and energy among others. The firm has given me a wonderful opportunity to continue my work as part of a world-class bipartisan team.”
The key phrase within that statement which gives one pause is “in many of the areas I was active in as Congressman.” While a member of Congress, Mr. English was endowed with secret status in dealing with sensitive classified government information. Though prohibited from using that insider information other than in his official capacity as congressman, there’s nothing to prevent him from surreptitiously utilizing it as an Arent Fox operative. Indeed, though he and they would probably deny it, that’s one of the main reasons why the firm hired him. Inside information and privileged access. It’s the fatal flaw in the government’s revolving door architecture.

Though Mr. English has every legal right to engage the revolving door syndrome –hundreds of congressmen before him have – and Arent Fox to hire him, it’s his ethical mores which are in serious question here. Mr. English says the job with Arent Fox has given him a “wonderful opportunity to continue my work (my emphasis) as part of a world-class bipartisan team.”

Is that a Freudian slip? Was he subliminally or consciously working for Arent Fox as a congressman?

More significantly, why wouldn’t Mr. English offer his post-congressional services to a recognized and respected non-profit public interest organization and use the skills, access and insider information he acquired at public expense while in Congress to advance a broad public agenda consistent with his work in Congress? After all, the taxpayers continue to pay him through the generous, indeed exhorbitant pension and retirement benefits package which Congress, with Mr. English’s collaboration, have bestowed upon themselves.

It's noteworthy that neither the mainstream Erie news media nor the local blogoshphere have noted, much less challenged Mr. English’s mad dash through the revolving door, nor his self-serving characterization as anything but the lobbyist/opportunist he really is. Did the sponsor of the blog to which Mr. English contributes, a former newspaper reporter, check his journalist credentials at the door when he launched his blog?

Energy contradictions at the Erie Times-News

2009-09-17T00:09:00.004-04:00

In its blind zeal to promote development at any cost in Erie, the Times-News breathlessly editorialized on behalf of Lake Erie Biofuels Tuesday which has been producing biofuels at the old Hammermill plant site for a year or so now.

Applauding the plant's planned production expansion from 40 million to 70 million gallons annually with the help of a $1.6 million state loan, the editorial ignored the internally inconsistent claim that the company's newly announced expansion will help the nation to achieve "energy independence" despite the fact that virtually all its heavily taxpayer-subsidized product(amounting to about $1 a gallon) will continue to be exported outside the U.S.

The Times-News hailed the fact that the company has changed its name to "Hero X," appropos to nothing in evidence except that "The name change is part of a branding campaign to reach a worldwide market," while boasting that its use, among other raw materials, of vegetable oils would promote environmentally benign goals. This further ignores the hard lessons of the recent ethanol craze which resulted in a 35 percent increase in the national average consumer cost of foods like bread, cereals, poultry, beef and other foodstuffs dependent primarily upon ethanol feedstocks such as corn and grains.

On one hand, the editorial quoted a company official as saying:"We believe in biodiesel and its role for our country in increasing our energy independence (my emphasis)and improving our environment." But on the other hand it quotes the same official as saying "the plant is strategically located to export(my emphasis)its products using rail, highways and Lake Erie."

Oblivious to the inherent contradiction, the Times-News editorial exulted: "It's exciting to realize that Erie can help lead the way as Americans make good on our decades-old pledge to achieve energy independence."

To date, Erie Biofuels has exported most if not all of its product across the oceans, where there are more lucrative markets. There's no reason to believe that will change anytime soon,if ever. How does that promote national energy independence? Exporting domestic biolfuels and U.S. energy independence are mutually exclusive conceits.

Bar Assn. correctly disses Domitrovich

2009-09-15T23:52:00.009-04:00

I rarely agree with lawyers, but the Erie County Bar Assn.'s
poll released yesterday evaluating county judges up for ten-year retention in the Nov. 3 election, got it exactly right when a pluralty recommended against the retention of Judge Stephanie Domitrovich. In my opinion Domitrovich is utterly unqualified to serve as dogcatcher in Erie County, much less as judge.

Unaccountably, the Erie Times-News article reporting on the bar association poll failed to flesh out the story, simply giving the rating scores of the three candidates up for retention, also including Judges Kelly and Dunlavey, who were rightly recommended. Covering a mere seven or eight column inches as published online, the sketchy story was co-reported by Lisa Thompson and Ed Pallatella, writer overkill if there ever was for such a meager epistle.

Domitrovich's service as a county judge since 1989, if one can call it that, followed by her ten-year retention by county voters in 1999, is testament to their collective ignorance when it comes to judging judges. Let's hope their collective IQ has been elevated sufficiently in time for the November election to heed the county bar association's enlightened recommendation against Domitrovich's retention, of which she is wholly unworthy.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have never been a party in litigation in Domitrovich's court. I was an observer in an orphan's court proceedings in 2007 involving a friend of mine - let's call him "Andy" - seeking to escape the legal clutches of an abusive son who controlled the substantial inheritance his slightly impaired father had received upon the death of his mother several years earlier, a son who forced him unjustly to reside in a substandard assisted living facility against his informed wishes.

In ruling against the father, Domitrovich trampled all over his due
process rights, among other things denying him the legal right to be present at the first hearing on his case in her court which was conducted without his knowledge and ended with his virtual incarceration, rendering any reversal against herself of Domitrovich's initial ruling a very steep, and as it turned out, impossible climb.

Why? Because the abusive son, striving to gain unquestioned control of his father's inheritance, was represented by an attorney who was a member of a law firm with a familiar name and high-powered political connections in Erie which need not be elaborated, David Ridge. Domitrovich, who received campaign money from at least one member of that firm, baldly acquiesced to the Thrasimicusian precept of realpoliticks that "might makes right." It was power politics in the guise of justice at its ugliest.

So disorganized were Domitrovich and her courtroom staff, that she did not see the father's brief seeking to unseat his son as his "guardian" until minutes before a second dispositive hearing was underway.

But just to make certain the impoverished father, denied his rightful inheritance by his abusive son, didn't prevail, Domitrovich appointed to represent him an incompetent sycophant whose represention more reflected the son's cupidity rather than the father's best interests. In addition, she exercised on the stand impermissible and undue influence on the father, craftily leading him in directions opposite to his wishes.

The father lost his case, his inheritance, his personal freedom and, denied the expert care his inheritance would have afforded him, in less than a year, his life. He died, the doctors said, of cancer. But in my untutored opinion, "Andy" succumbed to a broken heart. Soon thereafter his abusive son claimed a significant portion of his father's inheritance which might have been used, as intended by his mother, to enhance and extend his life.

This is not the first time Domitrovich has been found lacking by an official judicial evaluation panel. Following her retention as county judge in 1999, she presented herself as a candidate in 2001 for election to the State Superior Court. In that year's state judicary elections, she was the only candidate whom the Pennsylvania Judicial Evaluation Commission gave a "not recommended" rating.

In reaching that decision the Commission said it had "received numerous
and consistent reports concerning the Candidate’s shortcomings as a judge that were found credible and were neither acknowledged nor sufficiently refuted by the Candidate.

"Specifically, the Commission found that the Candidate lacks proper judicial temperament and decorum, often exhibiting a lack of proper respect for lawyers and litigants in her courtroom. There was a significant concern that she frequently adopts one side of an argument presented to her, failing to give proper weight and consideration to the opposite position.

"Reports also suggested," the Commission said, "that the Candidate can and does lose her temper in the courtroom. Most significantly, the Commission observed that the Candidate was a poor listener, a critical weakness in a prospective appellate court judge. Accordingly, the Commission concluded that the Candidate lacks the skills necessary to serve adequately as a Judge of the Superior Court."

These were the exact failings wich led to a gross instance of miscarried justice in the case I cite above.

One wonders how a judge with those articulated disqualifications is equipped to serve on any court, much less the state Superior Court. Do Erie Countians deserve a judge who, according to her peers, "lacks proper judicial temperament and decorum," or one who "lacks the skills necessary to serve adequately" on the appellate court level? I don't think so.

Her judicial disqualifications aside, Domitrovich's clownish antics in the courtroom are legend. She once recessed a hearing in mid-progress, inconveniencing all parties, some of whom had travelled miles to reach the courthouse, because she had a hair appointment.

Don't be deceived by Domitrovich's glitzy but shallow self-contrived resume, voluminusly padded with inconsequeantial but high-sounding attributes. Vote "NO" in November against the retention of Domitrovich!

2009-09-01T11:51:00.001-04:00

What happened to the Erie Times-News's online readers' comment forum?

2009-09-01T01:35:00.007-04:00

ADDENDUM: This morning, after this blog was posted, I received a response to my query addressed to Managing Editor Pat Howard as to when the Erie Times-News plans to resume online readers' comments. It came from Jeffrey Hileman/Managing Editor/New Media. He replied: "Mr. LaRocca – Pat Howard asked me to respond to your questions. GoErie.com plans to reintroduce reader comments as part of its redesign, though we do not yet have a start date." ____________________________________________________

Until last Spring, the Erie Times-News followed the relatively new practice adopted by most newspapers here and abroad in recent years of enabling readers of their online editions to comment freely on articles, in writing, by appending a comment box at the bottom of each article.

Then, without warning, The Times-News dropped the highly popular feature, a move which was explained by Managing Editor Pat Howard as a temporary one while the Times-News’s website – know as GoErie.com – was being reprogrammed or redesigned.

Howard promised readers the feature would be resumed soon thereafter. As all regular readers of GoErie.com know, to date it has not been resumed. And since neither Howard nor any Times-News person has revealed in the prolonged interim why it has been discontinued, or whether it will ever be resumed, readers remain gagged and in the dark.

I e-mailed Howard yesterday to ask him why the Times-News has discontinued online readers’ comments, whether it plans to resume them and, if so, when? Not surprisingly, I’ve not received a response from Howard. If I do, I’ll post it later on this blog. (See ADDENDUM above.)

The Times-News is not the only newspaper to discontinue online readers’ comments, but there have been only a handful nationwide.

While not within the rationale provided by Howard at the time the Times-News discontinued readers’ comments, most of the other newspapers which have done so have cited widespread abuse of the feature, primarily by anonymous bloggers who persistently engaged in ad hominem attacks which, if identifiable as to source, could be actionable, obscene language, irrelevant posts and other uncivil practices.

This is a common complaint lodged by virtually every newspaper which allows online readers’ comments. It is mitigated to some extent by some newspapers which attempt to monitor the abusive posts and delete them.
But because they receive hundreds to thousands of readers’ posts each day, depending upon the size of the newspaper, it’s virtually impossible for small newspapers with limited intellectual staff like the Times-News to monitor the comments effectively.

Big metro or national newspapers like the New York Times, USA Today, the LA Times, the Washington Post and others affluent enough to afford them have created staff positions whose exclusive province is to monitor and manage online readers’ comments, because they recognize that in this new era of the worldwide web they must follow the crowd if they are to survive in the fast-changing cyber environment.

In some but not all smaller newspapers, the vast majority of comments which are abusive make it into print. While the newspapers provide standing guidelines demanding civility for readers’ comments, they are almost universally ignored, and the newspapers are in most cases helpless to enforce them.

This leaves them with only two options: Either maintain the status quo and continue to suffer the abusive behavior – an unpleasant option at best - or discontinue the highly popular online readers’ comments altogether, and alienate their spiraling online readership. The latter is the path the Times-News has apparently chosen.

There is, however another option which would almost certainly eliminate most if not all of the abuses pertinent to online readers’ comments: disallow anonymity or psuedonymity, an option which I personally support. (See, for example, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Maureen Dowd’s recent column on anonymous blogging, “Stung by the Perfect Sting,” Aug. 26, perhaps the only time I’ve ever agreed with her hyperbolic rants).

That aside, there’s an unspoken dynamic at play within this context which I believe is primarily responsible for the Times-News’s discontinuance of online readers’ comments, as opposed to the rationales asserted above.

An inordinate number of the anonymous ad hominem attacks and abuses were directed at the newspaper staff, its erratic news coverage, editorial stances and its ownership, the longstanding Times Publishing Co., a newspaper monopoly which over the years has swallowed up all the competition, both daily and weekly, except for the Corry Journal, throughout its northwestern PA circulation area, as well as parts of surrounding counties in New York and Ohio.

Much of the commentary, mostly anonymous, was highly critical in unflattering, indeed embarrassing terms of the Times-News’s news and editorial policies and practices and personnel, which are, with good reason, widely seen as biased, shallow, inaccurate, self-serving, unprofessional and arrogant (I concur). Moreover, its Letters to the Editor section is routinely mismanaged.

I believe the thin-skinned operatives at the Times-News chose to discontinue the feature rather than suffer sustained embarrassment at the hands of merciless bloggers, most of them anonymous.

While I do not post or blog anonymously, but always identify myself by name, I was a frequent online critic of articles published in the Times-News, as well as its overall news and editorial practices. While I am often blunt in my criticism, I pride myself on my civility. I do not presume, however, that the Times-News discontinued online readers’ comments because of my feeble and captious criticism.

The last comment I posted before online readers’ comments were discontinued occurred on April 12 of this year. In response to Howard’s regular Sunday column boasting of the Times-News’s showing at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Assn’s. awards program, I posted a detailed factual analysis showing that The Times-News’s performance was greatly exaggerated by Howard.

For one thing, the Times-News is not in the same competitive category as the Commonwealth’s major newspapers in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Philadelphia. And several of the newspapers in towns smaller than Erie made a much better showing. (See my April 12, 2009 archive blog at http//.www.eriecounternewsmediablogspot.com.)

It should be noted that NO privately/corporately-owned newspaper is obliged to provide a forum for online readers and commenters. However, it ill-behooves any newspaper which persistently and piously preaches on behalf of First Amendment freedoms of press and speech, as the Times-News does, to be seen as a censor of populist expressions of opinion from the vast unwashed which the internet now makes readily and universally possible.

The Times-News is already criticized widely for crass rewriting and editing of Letters to the Editor which is tantamount to, if not actual censorship.

Erie Times-News Review of Tom Ridge's book: a new low for mediocrity

2009-08-30T06:36:00.009-04:00

The Erie Times News's much bally-hooed treatment of Tom Ridge's new book in today's edition penned by Reporter John Guerriero sets a new standard for mediocrity.

It consists primarily of an interview of Ridge, the first and former secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security in the last Bush administration, Pennsylvania governor and Northwest PA congressman.

One wonders whether the reporter bothered to read the book, of which the Times-News boasted it had received an advance review copy, proclaiming it would present "the first print interview" based on the book, due for release Tuesday. An enterprising newspaper would have presented a package consisting of a full-blown critical review and a sidebar interview. But no one has ever accused the Times-News of being enterprising.

There is no independent critical analysis of the book or Ridge's comments on it, nor any quotes or comments from other political figures or prominent commentators in a position to present informed commentary either critical or supportive of the content of Ridge's memoirs.

There is only Ridge's self-serving self-analysis, a simulacrum of a playwright who writes a critique of his own play. Nothing in the "review" complements the book's bland title, "The Test of Our Times."

If there's anything "new" or original in the book, the reporter failed to ferret it out, possibly because he quickly scanned the index and selective passages, rather than reading it in toto, the Cliff Notes approach.

The Times-News had a rare opportunity for a national "scoop," but blew it on a pandering epistle predictably massaging the inflated Ridge ego.

Headlined "Ridge book offers Beltway insight," the article consists mostly of hindsight.

Much is made of the already exhausted "buzz" over whether Bush administration officials, including the president, pressured Ridge to raise the color code alarm just prior to the 2004 general election in order to boost his reelection prospects over the Democrat nominee John Kerry. Ridge denies there was any pressure, according to the article, although the issue was debated among administration officials, with the consensus, which included Ridge, prevailing against heightening the color code.

Lost in this contrived and politically inspired imbroglio raised by Democrats and liberal media to embarrass the Bush administration is the reality that terroristic threats are always more likely within the context of a national election, and proposals to raise the alarm appropos terrorism are fully justified. Check out the recent elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terroristic suicide bombings have plagued their electorates.

The reporter writes: "Despite his disagreement with the GOP over the Chambliss campaign commercial and some of his conflicts in the Bush administration, Ridge said he plans to stay involved with the Republican Party. 'I think I can still offer some advice and support and counsel and be a force within the party. Time will tell,' he said."

But Ridge, a faux Republican a la Arlen Specter is more likely to be viewed, at least within the GOP's conservative wing, as a prospective turncoat, the spy within, given his deprecating comments thereof. His "involvement" may be suspect and unwelcome. So far, he's been more of a "force" for the opposing party than for the one to which he putatively belongs.

Hubbert's "Peak Oil" theory debunked

2009-08-27T22:09:00.006-04:00

Not too long ago I wrote in this blog a brief essay pooh-poohing the prevalent theory that both U.S. and global oil production had already or soon would "peak," as consumption outran remaining and diminishing petroleum reserves. One commenter took me to task for presuming to criticise Author Hubbert's "peak oil" theory. Here's what I wrote back in 2008:

For several years now, the conventional wisdom has subscribed to a theory called "peak oil," which stands for the proposition that at some point the availability of petroleum reserves reached a peak in the United States and began irreversibly dwindling.

The theory was first advanced by a book entitled Hubbert's Peak, whose central premise holds that U.S. domestic petroleum supplies peaked in 1970. But it's deeply flawed by a major factual error.

The author failed to take into account the fact that how much producible oil remains within domestic oil provinces depends entirely upon the going market price for oil. For example, at $100 per barrel, much more oil is producible than at $50. Pick your figures.

On Alaska's North Slope, both onshore and offshore, more than 14 billion barrels of oil have been produced since its inception in 1977, flowing at rates ranging between about 1 million and 2 million barrels per day. Nearby is a deposit of what is known as 'heavy oil,' not unlike the Athabasca tar sands in northwestern Canada, which exploratory drilling has shown contains an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil.

However, because of reservoir dynamics, these reserves are not economically producible at today's market prices for oil, but will eventually be producible at some higher figure depending upon demand.

There are scores of unexplored areas throughout the U.S. both onshore and offshore in state oceanic waters up to the three-mile limit and between three and 12 miles in federal waters overlying the outer continental shelf. Billions of barrels of oil may underlie the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), as well as the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska.

Neither Mr. Hubbert, nor anyone, can know when or where more oil may be found until all these prospective areas are identified. In short, Mr. Hubbert has presumed to identify and quantify a natural resource, which is unidentifiable and unquantifiable without further exploration activities.

Thus, his central premise is nonsensical. Mr. Hubbert's research is formidable, but his mind set has led him to the wrong conclusions. This same rationale applies to his similarly erroneous thesis regarding global 'peak oil.'
Here's an analysis from today's New York Times which vindicates my view.
New York Times Op-Ed Contributor

‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy
August 27. 2009
By Michael Lynch

(Michael Lynch, the former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an energy consultant.)

REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone).

Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.

A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. And this has been demonstrated over and over again: the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil first claimed in 1989 that the peak had already been reached, and Mr. Schlesinger argued a decade earlier that production was unlikely to ever go much higher.

Mr. Birol isn’t the only one still worrying. One leading proponent of peak oil, the writer Paul Roberts, recently expressed shock to discover that the liquid coming out of the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest known deposit, is around 35 percent water and rising. But this is hardly a concern — the buildup is caused by the Saudis pumping seawater into the field to keep pressure up and make extraction easier. The global average for water in oil field yields is estimated to be as high as 75 percent.

Another critic, a prominent consultant and investor named Matthew Simmons, has raised concerns over oil engineers using “fuzzy logic” to estimate reservoir holdings. But fuzzy logic is a programming method that has been used since I was in graduate school in situations where the factors are hazy and variable — everything from physical science to international relations — and its track record in oil geology has been quite good.

But those are just the latest arguments — for the most part the peak-oil crowd rests its case on three major claims: that the world is discovering only one barrel for every three or four produced; that political instability in oil-producing countries puts us at an unprecedented risk of having the spigots turned off; and that we have already used half of the two trillion barrels of oil that the earth contained.

Let’s take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don’t report that additional recoverable oil as “newly discovered,” the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.

A related argument — that the “easy oil” is gone and that extraction can only become more difficult and cost-ineffective — should be recognized as vague and irrelevant. Drillers in Persia a century ago certainly didn’t consider their work easy, and the mechanized, computerized industry of today is a far sight from 19th-century mule-drawn rigs. Hundreds of fields that produce “easy oil” today were once thought technologically unreachable.

The latest acorn in the discovery debate is a recent increase in the overall estimated rate at which production is declining in large oil fields. This is assumed to be the result of the “superstraw” technologies that have become dominant over the past decade, which can drain fields faster than ever. True, because quicker extraction causes the fluid pressure in the field to drop rapidly, the wells become less and less productive over time. But this declining return on individual wells doesn’t necessarily mean that whole fields are being cleaned out. As the Saudis have proved in recent years at Ghawar, additional investment — to find new deposits and drill new wells — can keep a field’s overall production from falling.

When their shaky claims on geology are exposed, the peak-oil advocates tend to argue that today’s geopolitical instability needs to be taken into consideration. But political risk is hardly new: a leading Communist labor organizer in the Baku oil industry in the early 1900s would later be known to the world as Josef Stalin.

When the large supply disruptions of 1973 and 1979 led to skyrocketing prices, nearly all oil experts said the underlying cause was resource scarcity and that prices would go ever higher in the future. The oil companies diversified their investments — Mobil even started buying up department stores! — and President Jimmy Carter pushed for the development of synthetic fuels like shale oil, arguing that markets were too myopic to realize the imminent need for substitutes. All sorts of policy wonks, energy consultants and Nobel-prize-winning economists jumped on the bandwagon to explain that prices would only go up — even though they had never done so historically. Prices instead proceeded to slide for two decades, rather as the tide ignored King Canute.

Just as, in the 1970s, it was the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution, today it is the invasion of Iraq and instability in Venezuela and Nigeria. But the solution, as ever, is for the industry to shift investment into new regions, and that’s what it is doing. Yet peak-oil advocates take advantage of the inevitable delay in bringing this new production on line to claim that global production is on an irreversible decline.

In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.

Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota. But that may not keep the Chicken Littles from convincing policymakers in Washington and elsewhere that oil, being finite, must increase in price. (That’s the logic that led the Carter administration to create the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a $3 billion boondoggle that never produced a gallon of useable fuel.)

This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep looking for other cost-effective, low-pollution energy sources — why not broaden our options? But we can’t let the false threat of disappearing oil lead the government to throw money away on harebrained renewable energy schemes or impose unnecessary and expensive conservation measures on a public already struggling through tough economic times.

Times-News neglects landmark First Amendment court decision in Erie federal court

2009-08-10T12:19:00.002-04:00
The news room at the Erie Times-News has once again displayed its incompetence and egregious lack of journalistic ethics and professionalism by grossly underplaying a major story with profound First Amendment implications statewide and beyond because of petty local politics and animosity by Managing Editor Pat Howard, other top editors and reporters Kevin Flowers and Ed Pallatella towards the principal actor and local citizen hero, Dan Galena, in a law suit decided in federal district court last week.

Against all odds, bucking the local political establishment and the biased but influential monopoly daily newspaper in northwestern Pa., Galena stunningly prevailed in federal court last week after a jury trial upheld his contention that Erie County Council Chairman Leone Fiore and other council members violated the state’s open meetings, or “Sunshine” law, its own County Code and his civil rights by having him forcibly ejected from a council meeting by a sheriff’s deputy back in March of 2007 when he vocally protested the legality of council’s procedure in adopting ordinances.

The court ordered council to pay Galena $5,000 and all attorney and court costs. According to one estimate, the law suit will have cost Erie County taxpayers about $100,000 to defend.

Since the questionable procedure used for years by county council to move an ordinance from first to second reading on the same day at the same meeting is utilized by virtually every municipal legislative body in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the federal court verdict upholding Galena’s position is certain to have widespread repercussions throughout the state.

The procedure effectively denies the public a full hearing and opportunity to comment timely on council actions. Under law, ordinances must have two separate readings on two separate days before council can take final action adopting them. It’s a way of making sure that members of the public have ample time to consider the ramifications of proposed ordinances and comment on and favor or oppose them before council takes final action on them.

Although the Times-News carried a few sketchy stories on Galena’s law suit as it progressed through the court system, as well as minimal reporting of the jury verdict in his favor last week, the newspaper vastly underplayed the magnitude of the verdict’s implications throughout the commonwealth, and failed to give Galena due credit for perservering in the face of overwhelming odds, including callous attempts by Leone and other members of council to intimidate him brutally.

Ironically, it’s the kind of official wrongdoing involving freedom of the press and the public’s right to know which the local news media should take the lead in exposing, but failed miserably to do so. Instead The Times-News and the rest of the local news media largely ignored Galena’s public-spirited crusade against the errant council and its arrogant chairman’s attempt to hold themselves above the law, failing to give the issue the prominent coverage it deserves, or lauding him for pursuing his strongly-held convictions in court at considerable personal expense and sacrifice.

The Times-News frequently editorializes in favor of open meetings under the state’s Sunshine law, freedom of the press and public access to public information in the hands of government, but ignored this important First Amendment violation occurring right under its nose, and failing to take Galena’s lawsuit seriously because of internal hostility towards Galena for his frequent and sharp criticisim of its news and editorial coverage often expressed in his angry letters to the editor which the Times-News never publishes.

In his defense against Galena’s charges of violations of the Sunshine law and the County Code, Leone said he ordered Galena out of the courthouse during a council meeting on March 20 , 2007 because he was “disruptive” when he objected to council’s attempt to move an ordinance from first to second reading on the same day. Leone said council has set aside a public hearing period near the opening of council meeting to allow fpr public comment.

However, since council’s action on the ordinance came after the public hearing, there was no opportunity for Galena to comment on it prior to that action. Moreover, the state’s Sunshine law expressly allows anyone to raise an objection against council action at any time during a meeting if there is a perceived violation of the Sunshine law.

AP, Erie Times-News distort findings on Palin inquiry

2009-07-22T12:24:00.005-04:00
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The AP (Asinine Press) today published yet another distorted article, mauled further by the Erie Times-News's inaccurate headline over an article out of Alaska on the findings of a so-called "independent investigator" appointed to investigate an ethics claim against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin,

The headline states: "Investigator rules against Palin in ethics probe"

In fact, the investigator," Thomas Daniel, an Anchorage attorney who works for the law firm that represents President Barack Obama and other leading Congressional Democrats, Perkins Coie,did not rule against, nor implicate Palin, merely finding that "she may have violated" a state ethics law, an unsurprising finding from an attorney who works for the nation's top Democrats. Whether or not she did remains to be determined by the state Personnel Board which will consider the investigator's findings. This is a pro forma process.

The "investigator" released his findings to Palin 's political foes in violation of state law which requires all matters in an investigation to be held confidential until the Personnel Board issues its ruling.

The AP Story was initiated in Anchorage by its only daily newspaper, The Anchorage Daily News, the largest in Alaska, which is owned by McClatchy Newspapers in California, the second-largest newspaper chain in the U.S., a leftwing federation. Along with it stepchild, the Daily News, it has been critical of Palin since she was nominated for Republican vice president and has become an international celebrity.

The Associated Press says Palin "is securing unwarranted benefits and receiving improper gifts through the Alaska Fund Trust, set up by supporters."

These are false and unproven allegations, though presented as factual by the"independent investigator", and Palin and her attorney have denied them.

According to the AP, the investigator,the Obama hireling, said "there is probable cause to believe Palin used or attempted to use her official position for personal gain because she authorized the creation of the Alaska Fund Trust as the "official" legal defense fund."

In fact, Palin neither authorized nor controls the trust fund, which was established without her express consent by supporters based in Washington D.C. and has received no money from it. It was formed by her supporters to help her pay for her defense against a barrage of ethics complaints filed under Alaska law against her as governor by Obama supporters for which Alaska, unlike other states and the federal government, does not provide funding.

The complaints, so far 19 of them, which have all been dismissed or resolved without any finding of guilt, have incurred half a million dolars in legal costs for Palin.Most of them have been found to be trivial or without merit.

According to the AP, "The practical effect of the ruling on Palin will be more financial than anything else, although the fate of the tens of thousands of dollars in the fund is unclear, said Palin attorney Thomas Van Flein. The report recommends that the complaint be resolved without a formal hearing before the board. That allows her to resolve the issue without a formal ethics reprimand," another veiled but false implication.

There would be no "formal ethics reprimand" unless the Personnel Board finds that allegations filed by the "investigator," an Obama henchman, are true. Palin posted an entry on Twitter in which she said the "matter is still pending," a statement echoed by her attorney.

The fund aims to help Palin pay off debts stemming from multiple ethics complaints against her, most of which have been dismissed. Palin says she owes more than $500,000 in legal fees, and she cited the toll of the ethics probes as one of the reasons she is leaving office on Sunday.

Kristan Cole, the fund's trustee, said organizers have frozen the fund pending the personnel board's review. Many federal politicians, including Hillary Clinton, former U.S. Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and others are routinely allowed to have such funds to pay off legal bills, but quirks in Alaska law can present ethics issues.
Van Flein said the potential loss of money from the fund had absolutely no bearing on Palin's decision to resign.

He said Palin received the report 11 days after her July 3 announcement that she was leaving office. He also noted that the investigator recommended the governor seek reimbursement from the state for the cost of fighting ethics complaints that have been dismissed.

"It's cheaper for the people of the state of Alaska to have the bills paid for through the trust fund," Van Flein said. "But if that can't be done, then it looks like the state of Alaska could pay."

The investigator, Thomas Daniel, suggested that Alaska lawmakers may need to create a law that reimburses public officials for legal expenses to defend complaints that end up being unfounded.

Palin's friends and supporters created the Alaska Fund Trust in April, limiting donations to $150 per person. Organizers declined to say how much it has raised, and had hoped to raise about $500,000. A Web-a-thon last month brought in about $130,000 in pledges.

The ethics complaint was filed by Alaska resident Kim Chatman, a longtime Palin critic and Obama supporter shortly after the fund was created, alleging Palin was "misusing her official position and accepting improper gifts," both untrue.

John Coale, a Washington lawyer who helped set up the fund, called the probable cause finding by the "independent investigator" "crazy," adding that if upheld, it would mean that no governors of Alaska could ever defend themselves against frivolous ethics complaints.

"Anybody can keep filing ethics complaints and drive someone out of office, even if you're a nut," Coale said.

Unlike other states, he said, Alaska has no legal counsel's office devoted to defending the governor from allegations brought against her in her official capacity.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Watch your language, Pat Howard

2009-07-20T00:48:00.005-04:00
While I fully concur with the sentiments expressed in Sunday's column by Managing Editor Pat Howard in the Erie Times-News, I can't resist dinging him for his clumsy opening line syntax, which would earn grammar school students an F in sentence construction. He wrote:

"Despite HIM BEING one of the rare political figures to achieve statewide success from this corner of Pennsylvania, you could argue that BEING from Erie hurt former state Superior Court Judge Michael T. Joyce when it came time to pay for BEING a crook (my emphases)."

There are many more graceful ways of writing that sentence. Here's just one suggestion:

"Despite being one of the rare political figures to achieve statewide success from this corner of Pennsylvania, one could argue his Erie roots hurt former state Superior Court Judge Michael T. Joyce when it came time to pay for his crooked ways.

Tabloid time at the Erie Times-News

2009-07-13T01:21:00.007-04:00
Cementing its growing reputation as a broadsheet newspaper flaunting tabloid sensationalism of the National Inquirer ilk,the Erie Times-News ran a page one story Sunday above the fold at the right top of the page with a 42 point headline explicating a seedy sex triangle involving a low-level administrator at the North East Borough office.

In the meantime, the newspaper's editors and reporters ignore other far more important local governance stories in which top-level part-time, paid borough officials with roaring conflicts of interest routinely stiff North East, state and federal taxpayers of millions of dollars for gold-plated utility projects in order to pad their own professional fees.

Here is Times-News Sex Reporter Gerry Weiss's lead paragraph, straight out of STAR-type-tabloids:

"The North East Borough manager is being investigated by state police on allegations of criminal trespassing after his former girlfriend accused him of having sex with his estranged wife in the lover's apartment." It only gets worse

I ask you, could Weiss's lead have been more titillating? Or more irrelevant? While the subject of the piece is indeed the borough manager, in North East Borough's mercenary pecking order, his responsibilities and salary are barely above the level of a clerk typist.

With mind-numbing detail, Weiss quotes directly from a search warrant, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

Putting out Sunday's newspaper on Saturday post meridian, the slowest news day of the week, is always a challenge for news editors. But the Weiss sex-fest represents a new low in Times-News annals where the norm usually scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

AP distorts Gov. Palin's decision to resign as Alaska governor

2009-07-08T11:28:00.004-04:00
Once again, the AP, acronym for Asinine Press, distorted Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's decision to resign as governor, fabricating a "possible 2012 Presidential run" in an article carried in the Erie Times-News today.

Palin has neither said nor in any way indicated she plans to run for president in 2012. She has given many reasons why she decided to resign, which the AP ignored, while publishing one she did not give, nor for which there is any objective evidence, once again substituting opinion for fact.

Read Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's reasons for resigning, not the news media's fictional creations

2009-07-04T07:40:00.005-04:00
Don't expect the mainstream news media, including the AP story in today's Erie Times-News, to give Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's unfiltered version of the reasons why she decided to resign as governor effective July 26.

They have all concocted fictional and speculative scenarios which place her decision in a bad light based on comments from her natural enemies both inside and outside Alaska, such as Democrats who fear her national popularity and crooked Republicans whom she has bested in ethical jousts.

For Palin's own words, go to http://www.adn.com., the website for the Anchorage Daily News, which is owned by the left-wing McClatchy chain based in Calfornia, the second largest-newspaper chain in the country, a strident critic of Palin.

Biden, Obama & Broadband

2009-07-02T12:04:00.004-04:00
Dan Galena astutely observes that the Erie Times-News and the Pittsburgh Tribune differ on the number of folks who attended VP Joe Biden's chat at Seneca High School in Wattsburg. The Times-Snooze said 500 attended. Here's the Trib's report:

Biden fails to draw crowd in Erie

Wattsburg, Pa. — "Vice President Joe Biden visited a small town on the outskirts of Erie today to talk to rural folks about federal stimulus money that can be used to expand broadband access to the Internet for rural areas that typically have poor connections.

"Apparently stimulus money and broadband are not all that interesting to the local folk here: Only around 100 or so people have showed up so far to hear Biden talk at noon at Seneca High School off Route 8 in Wattsburg.

"The room looked so sparse that about 30 or so chairs were removed by volunteers to give the illusion of a full house.

"The effect didn't exactly work.

"Pittsburgh native and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper are also on hand to talk about access to high speed internet as an essential tool for success in business and in school in our struggling economy."

It's ironic that Biden should address school kids, and be lavishly praised in the local media by his old school chum Jim Lanahan of Mercyhurst North East in light of the fact that Biden was publicly disgraced for cheating at law school.

Does anyone really believe the Obama administration's push for universal broadband in the boondocks is altruisticly motivated when one considers that the president raised most of his election campaign funds via the internet in mostly urban centers, but did poorly in rural areas. This may be the first signal for his reelection aspirations.

The Erie Times-News and Open Records filings

2009-07-02T04:09:00.003-04:00
In an editorial published today, the Erie Times-News celebrated the new transparency in the commonwealth's operations fostered by the recently-enacted open records law which went into effect last January.

According to the editorial, some 500 requests for public records have been filed with the state's Open Records office during the six months since it's been in business. Guess how many requests have been filed by the Times-News's inquiring "investigative journalists."

Zip. Zero. Nada. None.

Harrisburg corruption you won't find in the Erie Times-News

2009-06-30T10:32:00.003-04:00
The following is from Tim Potts, founder and head of Democracy Rising PA, whose goal is to reform government in Pennsylvania, unarguably the most corrupt state in the nation.

WAMs - The Highest Cost of Corruption

Last week's back-and-forth between Gov. Ed Rendell and legislative leaders somehow walked around Walking Around Money, or WAMs. This was especially curious because Associated Press Capitol reporter Marc Levy's three-part series put the matter front and center. Yet high-profile interviews never touched on spending that, according to Capitol insiders, amounts to $750 million in the current year's budget.

A few reporters questioned the $201 million surplus in legislative accounts, but none pressed the case to find out why lawmakers think it's fair to keep a 67% percent surplus while telling school districts that they should use their capped 8% reserve to balance the budget. Or why the executive and judicial branches must shut down or endure payless paydays while lawmakers and their staff roll merrily along.

Add the surplus and WAMs, and you get close to $1 billion in dubious spending and possible savings that could help to resolve this year's budget dilemma.

What to expect. Don't expect either the governor or lawmakers to give up their pork while their constituents eat beans. Until there's a deal, leaders will meet privately with each other, the governor and the gambling interests, who have the access ensured by $4.4 million in campaign contributions.

This reduces many rank-and-file lawmakers to expensive eye candy. When not being wined and dined by lobbyists and cajoled by leaders, lawmakers clog golf courses, restaurants and phone banks where they busily dial for dollars. Legislators also debate a few important issues to kill time in between relatively inconsequential lawmaking and feel-good resolutions. Looking to make sandals PA's official summer footwear? Your time has come.

Meanwhile, with budget and tax votes looming, lawmakers hold out for election insurance, i.e. WAMs. Because leaders need 102 House votes and 26 Senate votes to pass a budget, WAMs are a carrot leaders use to extort votes, just as lawmakers use their votes to extort WAMs.

What's corrupt about WAMs? Secret programs invite abuse and illegality. Just ask the jurors who convicted former Sen. Vince Fumo, D-Phila.

Some say that WAMs let lawmakers get their fair share of state taxes. However, Levy's report illustrates that WAMs are a way for legislative leaders to give money to themselves at the expense of everyone else. For example, former Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Greene, directed $82 per constituent to Greene County at the expense of citizens in Bedford County, who received only 20 cents per constituent during the last half of 2008.

Some point to worthwhile projects that WAMs support, such as libraries, senior centers and fire companies. But while funding for WAMs grows, lawmakers do not fund adequately the established programs that serve citizens statewide. Instead of allowing professionals with a statewide perspective to allocate funds on the basis of need, lawmakers siphon off money for WAMs that take from the weak and give to the well-connected.

WAMs are unconstitutional. This is why lawmakers and governors are so determined to keep secret how WAMs are allocated, where they are in the budget, how organizations apply for them and which organizations apply for WAMs but don't get them.

WAMs violate the separation of powers. The money for WAMs is appropriated to executive agencies. Once that happens, it is unconstitutional for members of the legislative branch to decide how the money is spent. This distinguishes WAMs from federal "earmarks," where the law appropriating the money states the project being funded and the lawmaker who got the earmark. Once the law is enacted, federal lawmakers have no further decision-making authority, a practice that maintains the separation of powers.

Second, some WAMs circumvent constitutional requirements for giving tax dollars to private parties. For example the Constitution says that appropriations to private schools must be in a separate bill from general appropriations. These are called "non-preferred" appropriations. There are dozens of them each year, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to private colleges and universities. Yet DeWeese got a $1 million WAM for private Waynesburg University to renovate a science hall without a bill and a vote, as the Constitution requires.

The reason for the constitutional requirement is simple when you realize that the state's own public universities have science halls, dormitories and other facilities in serious need of repair.

Question:

How high will the cost of corruption have to go before we decide to stop it?

Tax hikes? How about paring the Legislature? Guest Column

2009-06-27T00:44:00.001-04:00
By Brian O'Neill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Gov. Ed Rendell's campaign to raise the state income tax should be no more popular or successful than Walter Mondale's pledge to raise federal taxes in 1984.

Mr. Mondale got creamed in his bid to unseat President Ronald Reagan (who continued to blithely run up the national credit card). Mr. Rendell is going to lose this argument, too, as he should.

Because there is no way America's Largest Full-Time State Legislature can justify even a small increase in taxes until it pares its own budget.

Senate Republicans will prevail in blocking this tax increase (which would run about $5 a week for a person earning $50,000 a year). But before they impose the only alternative, massive cuts in education and elsewhere, legislators need to share more of the pain they're about to dish out.

The Republican-dominated state Senate passed a bill last month that would cut legislative appropriations by more than 10 percent from current levels (from $332.2 million to $293 million), but that isn't nearly enough. With 253 legislators, that still works out to $1.16 million per legislator. That's an unfathomable expense just to keep the chambers running.

Senate Republican spokesman Erik Arneson pointed to the proposed 10 percent cut and also to a 9 percent cut in number of staffers in the Republican caucus since January 2006 -- about 40 positions. But when 40 jobs represent just 9 percent of the total, that only reminds us that our Legislature has the most staffers of any statehouse in the republic. There were roughly 3,000 helpers at last count.

Legislative expenses should be cut by at least 20 percent, as some area lawmakers from both parties have suggested.

"I understand your point," Mr. Arneson wrote at the end of our e-mail exchange. "Given the way revenues have continued to plummet, it is absolutely fair to expect us to look at cutting the legislature further if we reach agreement to adopt a no-tax-increase budget that makes the other cuts included in Senate Bill 850 [which proposes the 10 percent cut]."

That would be wisdom were it not for the "if." There should be no ''if." Slashing the legislative budget should be dependent on nothing else. It's imperative.

Every few years, the Pennsylvania citizenry wakes up to what is happening in Harrisburg. The unconstitutional mid-term pay grab in the summer of 2005 was one such moment, and this idea of raising taxes during a recession is another.

It's true that the Legislature cannot balance the budget simply by lopping itself. The savings would be in the tens of millions of dollars, and the budget deficit is estimated at $3.2 billion. That doesn't matter. This is about sharing the pain.

There would be any number of places to begin. Lawmaking is not a physically demanding job like, say, firefighting or mining. Its demands are mental. Trying to justify yet another day in Harrisburg to snarf up the $158 per diem can tax the brain. So here's one quick savings idea: Let's call one $158 meeting to discuss eliminating the right of retired lawmakers to begin receiving a full pension at age 50.

That's at least 10 years too young, and we'd have more healthy turnover in the statehouse if there were no legislative pension. Put the lawmakers on a 401(k). One day soon they will have to deal with ticking pension time bomb for state workers, and they'll need to make their own sacrifices first.

Then there is, of course, the size of the Legislature itself. We have 253 lawmakers. Comparable states, Ohio and Illinois, get by with 132 and 177.

The Pennsylvania Constitution allows no voters' initiative to get a referendum on the ballot, and reducing the Legislature's size requires a constitutional change. But all downsizing proposals have sputtered in Harrisburg largely because the lawmakers have no reason to believe they'll be voted out if they don't reform now.

This "temporary" tax increase, which Gov. Rendell says would last three years, provides the opening for the tedious process of changing the constitution. Call your state senator and representative and offer this simple advice: "Tax me? Cut you."

That probably won't work, but it would be good for one's soul.

Erie Times-News drops the ball again

2009-06-25T11:36:00.008-04:00
The Erie Times-News carried an AP story today (State grants grow as criticism persists, Practice said to be unfair election tool) which exposes the longstanding practice of state legislative leaders to corral tens of millions of taxpayer dollars illegally every year and dole them out as special community grants to favored legislators outside the constitutionally prescribed budgetary process, using it primarily as a reelection campaign tool for select incumbents.

It's standard newspaper practice in such matters to localize a story like this by contacting local legislators and grilling them on what role,if any, they have played or are playing in such unsavory practices, and expose their malfeasance to local citizens, if any.

This story gives the Times-Snooze a perfect opportunity to play a role in ongoing and so far unsuccessful efforts by some legislators and citizen activists and groups to reform the legislature and curb rampant abuses like this one by bringing to the attention of local voters how legislators they have elected have and are performing on this issue so they can decide whether to retain them at the next elections.

For example, local State Senator Jane Earll, a Republican, as chair of the Senate Community, Recreational Development and member of the Gaming committees is one of those hallowed "legislative leaders." Does she condone and persist in this practice, or is she one of the reformers? How about the other half dozen area state legislators? Have they participated in this annual boondoggle?

Holding local legislators accountable for their actions in office is standard newspaper practice except at the Times-Snooze, which consistently prattles on in its editorials on how important freedom of the press protections under the First Amendment enable the press to function, but ignores the concommitant responsibility to exercise that freedom to expose legislative wrongdoers on behalf of the broad public interest.

More Rendell Pay-to-Play from Democracy Rising PA

2009-05-21T12:53:00.002-04:00
This is from Tim Potts's blog. He's the founder and head of the citizen advocacy group, Democracy Rising Pennslvania, which advocates government reform in the Commonwealth. It's the kind of gutty investigative reporting you'll never find in the Erie news media.

Last week the Harrisburg Patriot reported that Gov. Ed Rendell's administration has signed a seven-year, $201.1 million contract with a Minnesota testing company. Data Recognition Corp. (DRC), which provides tests for the state's current standardized testing program, got the contract to create a new, statewide graduation exam even though the General Assembly has not authorized the testing program.

Where might pay-to-play come in? According to state records, DRC executives made these contributions to Rendell's gubernatorial campaign:

February 24, 2006 - $5,000 from Russell Hagen (chair of DRC's board)
September 21, 2006 - $1,000 from Hagen
September 23, 2006 - $1,000 from Susan Engeleiter (DRC's CEO & President)
January 18, 2007 - $10,000 from Hagen

Two weeks later on February 1, 2007, Rendell expressed support for "a single standard for high school graduation" based on recommendations from the Commission on College and Career Success, which Rendell convened in August 2005.

Questions:

Why would a Minnesota corporation pay so much attention to an election that was a foregone conclusion in PA? (Rendell won 60%-40%.)
If the object of a campaign contribution is to influence the outcome of an election, why did Hagen's largest contribution occur after the election when Rendell still had $1.7 million in campaign funds and no debt to retire?
Why is Rendell accepting contributions for a gubernatorial campaign when he can't run for governor again?

Implications for the budget. This is not a new trick for Rendell. In 2007 he held up the budget, demanding increased funding for motion picture production. Unknown to lawmakers was that Rendell had secretly signed a letter committing $3.5 million to Lionsgate, a film production company in California. Lionsgate was represented by former Rep. Mike Veon, D-Beaver, who had lost re-election in 2006 following his vote not to repeal the Pay raise of 2005 and who is now awaiting trial for his alleged role in the Bonus Scandal.

Question: Will Rendell delay this year's budget until he has retroactive authority for the DRC contract?

That other notorious coincidence. The DRC contract is reminiscent of another coincidence between contributions to Rendell's political fortunes and a contract for the contributor. See theApril 9 edition of DR News presenting the Wall Street Journal's report on Rendell and a Houston, TX law firm.

Rendell's not alone. Although he got the lion's share of campaign contributions from DRC executives, Rendell was not the only PA political figure to benefit. Here are other contributions:

October 5, 2007 - $500 from Hagen to Friends of Jess Stairs (Stairs, R-Westmoreland, was then chair of the House Education Committee)
May 14, 2007 - $1,000 from Hagen to Dominic Pileggi for Senate Committee (Pileggi, R-Delaware, was and is majority leader)
May 9, 2007 - $500 from Hagen to Friends of Jim Rhoades Committee (Rhoades was then chair of the Senate Education Committee)
November 17, 2006 - $1,000 from Hagen to Friends of Jim Rhoades Committee
November 13, 2006 - $600 from Hagen to Friends of Jess Stairs
November 6, 2006 - $500 from Hagen to Raphael Musto for Senate Committee (Musto was then minority chair of the Senate Education Committee)
November 3, 2006 - $500 from Hagen to Friends of James Roebuck Committee (Roebuck was then minority chair of the House Education Committee)
November 2, 2006 - $1,000 from Hagen to Friends of John Perzel (Perzel, R-Phila., was then Speaker of the House)
September 20, 2006 - $400 from Hagen to Friends of Jess Stairs
May 11, 2006 - $1,500 from Sandra Wiese (DRC's VP of Governmental Affairs) to Friends of Senator Jubelirer Committee (Jubelirer was then president pro tempore of the Senate)
May 9, 2006 - $1,000 from Hagen to Friends of Sen. Dave Brightbill Committee (Brightbill was then majority leader)
January 18, 2006 - $1,000 from Wiese to the Committee to Elect Mike Veon (Veon was then minority whip)

Question:
Why have there been no contributions since October 2007?

Did Phil English game Kevin Cuneo?

2009-05-12T02:01:00.004-04:00
Back in February, Kevin Cuneo wrote in his gossip column the following:

"Former U.S. Rep. Phil English will keep busy with his work on the National Commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. English was recently appointed to a three-year term on the commission. He'll serve on the task force on cultural issues."

In response, I wrote here, addressing Cuneo:

"Kevin, where's the rest of the story? By whom was he appointed? Is this yet another example of Congress feathering its own nest and looking after its own defeated members? Is this a salaried position, with travel, per diem and expenses perks? Does it extend and enhance the former congressman's lavish retirement, per diem, health and pension benefits"?

Needless to say, Cuneo, who publicly boasts of dialoguing with readers but in reality engages mostly in drawn-out soliloquies, never answered those key questions.

Then, on April 15, this article appeared in PM in the Legal Business, a beltway publication;

Former Rep. Phil English Joins Arent Fox

Arent Fox has added former Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.) to its Washington office as a senior government relations adviser, the firm announced today. English’s first day at the firm is today.

English lost his bid for an eighth term in November to Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pa.) after representing Western Pennsylvania’s 3rd District from 1995 to 2009. In the 110th Congress, he served as the ranking member on the House Subcommittee of Select Revenue Measures.

At Arent Fox, English will be advising clients and generating business in areas similar to those he focused on in Congress, including health, energy, tax and trade legislation. He will not be lobbying during his first year at the firm in keeping with federal guidelines, a firm spokesman says.

English currently serves on the U.S. National Commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which advises the State Department on educational, scientific, cultural and communications issues pending before the international organization.

English could not be reached immediately for comment.

Posted by Jeff Jeffrey on April 15, 2009

How is it that English will, as Kevin put it, "keep busy with his work" on the National Commission, when he's working fulltime for Arent Fox? And why would Cuneo, who purports to be a newsman, write about English's appointment to the National Commission, but ignore his hiring by Arent Fox?

My guess is English, or a surrogate, wanted to publicize his appointment to the Commission, and fed Cuneo a blurb on it, but for his own reasons wanted to keep his job with Arent Fox quiet (which raises all kinds of conflict of interest issues), so he kept his own counsel.

It's a classic example of how crafty politicians game unwitting newsmen. And it makes a mockery of so-called "revolving door" laws which are designed to keep former lawakers like Engish, who have been privy to mountains of classified secret information, from using information they gained as "public servants" to compromise the public's interests while working for lobbying firms representing special interests.

Social engineering at the Erie Times News

2009-05-10T01:38:00.005-04:00
Sunday, May 10, 2008

In his weekly column today, Pat Howard, managing editor of the Erie Times-News, writes glowingly of the public forum held last week engineered by him and his colleagues at the paper.It was called "Times-News...,"uh sorry, "Erie Agenda '09." It was like reading a review written by the playwright of his own play. All raves, naturally.

According to Howard, about 150 people attended the forum, the discussion of which was "guided" by himself and three other of his newsroom colleagues, Liz Allen, Kevin Cuneo and Kevin Flowers whose qualifications are suspect, to put it kindly. And, by the way, aren't newsfolk supposed to report the news, rather than make it?

In the interests of full disclosure, I neither attended the forum nor watched the streaming video of the hyper-hyped event on my computer, so I can't evaluate the performance. But Howard's words speak volumes. Headlined "Erie's agenda comes into focus amid spirit of realism, optimism," his column extols and sums up the forum's ambiance. "It was very cool," he writes, with sophomoric eclat.

Those who happen to disagree with Howard's and the Times-News editorial board's myopic vision of what they see as Erie's future are portrayed as "loudmouths at the end of the bar" evincing "a strain of sour defeatism...that generates a hollow whine." Wow. And this is the guy who says "We're all in this together."

Howard's pet topic, on which he preaches incessantly but cluelessly, is "regionalism," once known as "metro government," which seeks at the furthest extreme advocated by Howard to lump most or all of the county's municipalities and functions under a single government umbrella.

Can you imagine an Erie city or county council, with their petty politics and relentless penchant for self-agrandizement infecting every other municipality within the county, big or small, writ large? It boggles the mind.

Apparently some regionalism advocates at the forum weren't prepared to go as far as Howard and the Times-News would lead them, and "came at the question from a different angle," with more limited visions of Big Brotherism.

While Howard prefers that big government be foisted on home rule venues wholesale by the corrupt gang in Harrisburg, he grudgingly concedes "that's not going to happen, so the incremental regionalism" described by others "is probably the best path available."

Most alarming of all was Howard's punch line: "...the dialogue on Wednesday night should be only the beginning. Here at the Erie Times-News and GoErie.com, it's our job to see to that." Shallow cliches aside, with the Times-News, it's never a dialogue. Think, rather, a monologue.

Half-baked concoctions guide Times-News '09 agenda

2009-05-07T00:27:00.003-04:00
Why would any thinking and intelligent folks care what the Erie Times-News and its hand-picked assemblage of bureaucrats, ivy-towered academicians and pompous third rate editorialists have to say about shaping the future of the Erie area?

The failing newspaper, which has had to unload a bunch of staff persons and cut the salaries of the rest while shrinking its news coverage to an irreducible minimum, should focus its dwindling energies on its own broken publishing infrastructure.

If the Times-News would do the job its supposed to of adequately informing its readership of the state of public affairs rather than trying to manipulate them in its own selfish interests, the community would be better served.

The community doesn't need the half-baked concoctions of an arrogant and power-hungry editorial board to tell it what it should or shouldn't do, especially a publishing monopoly which can't competently manage its own business and professional affairs, awash in a tsunami of demoralized staff.

In a feeble attempt to bolster its waning relevance within the community, the Times-News cobbled together what it fatuosly labelled "Erie Agenda 09," a time warp reference it would seem from the worn-out rhetoric surrounding it, to 1909 A.D., pitching it as a catalyst for change, but inadvertently invoking the ageless truism that the more things change, the more they are the same.

Scarcely reassuring was the assertion in the Times-News and Goerie.com Wednesday that the discussion during last night's "forum" would be "guided" by such ineffectual luminaries and psuedo-journalists as Managing Editor Pat Howard, Public Editor (so-called) Liz Allen, Assistant Managing Editor Kevin Cuneo, and Reporter Kevin Flowers, all of whom many of us see as part of the problem rather than part of a solution.

FAVORITISM AT GOERIE.COM

2009-05-06T21:41:00.002-04:00
It seems the headline on my last post on the Erie Yacht Club's "gift" membership to State Rep. John Hornaman should have read "Favoritism at Goerie.com," The Times-News's online edition. Kara Rhodes at the Times-News tells me the story ran in the print edition of the Times-News on Tuesday.

However, there was no sign of it in the Tuesday online edition, or thereafter, which is the only version of the Times-News I read. And in the "Stories Most Read" section of Goerie, there was no mention of the Hornaman story, even though it would certainly have been that day's most read story had it appeared in the online edition.

Nevertheless, the taint of favoritism at the Times-News still applies because the print version treated Rep. Hornman's conflict of interest, and the elitest Erie Yacht Club's obvious attempt to influence public policy in its favor with kid gloves, by minimizing their ill-conceived actions. Don't expect an outraged editorial condemning them.

I tried to retrieve the print version of the story from the newspaper's online Archives, but could only get the first few lines of the story without shelling out $2.95 to the Archives service. Many newspapers which archive their print editions online enable readers to retrieve the current week's or month's published material free of charge, only assessing a fee for earlier published articles. As usual, the Erie Times-News has taken the low road, requiring a retrieval fee after the first day of publication.

Sue Weber and the courthouse flood

2009-05-05T11:07:00.000-04:00
Erie County Controller and gadfly Sue Weber has commented on my earlier post pertaining to the malfunctioning water filter at the Erie County Courthouse which so far has cost an estimated $600,000 in repairs, although some estimates rise to $1 million or more.Her comments are shown below, with her consent:

On April 29, Weber commented:

Good blog. I have been keeping my eye on this. In fact, I called Kevin Flowers a few days ago with the new total of damages, which I am keeping my eye on, and then he wrote the article. I have inspected the filter in question, called the manufacturer, etc. I was my dad's tomboy and love fixing things. Anything mechanical or construction related is interesting. You will recall after the original article came out I commented that this fiasco was going to cost the County hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then in the media, the Divecchio Administration basically said I did not know what I was talking about, blah blah blah. THERE IS A CAUSE TO THIS and the taxpayers shouldn't just take it lying down. We have the huge deductible and now the loss has gone beyond the limits of our CCAP insurance coverage. Our future premiums will go up because of this claim.

If this were your home or mine, we'd be climbing all over the individual who installed this unit and/or the manufacturer. THE UNIT WAS BRAND NEW AND WAS JUST INSTALLED. I think you should come to the courthouse and I will show you the unit, explaining how it works. You will then find it bizarre that they "can't find the cause" of this disastrous flood.

Sue Weber, County Controller-451-6367

A couple days later, Weber added:

Erie County is in the insurance pool with the County Commissioners Assn. of PA. It gives the County better rates. As I understand it that limit is $500,000 and then Luigi Pasquale says another carrier's coverage begins. I need to discuss this with him further but I would guess that is similar to stop loss insurance for health care. Hope you can pay a visit so I can show you this device. Incidentally, they did not need this filter. It was put in for the fifth floor grand renovation. The rest of us just drink the unfiltered stuff and it's fine. I have a copy of one of the change orders for the fifth floor renovation. It's $76,000 for solid cherry paneling. Just for fun, I measured the baseboard in Mark D's office and have a stick sitting on my desk with that measurement of his wonderful cherry molding.

The amount of new furniture coming into the courthouse daily as they keep moving offices around is astounding. The total value of all the furniture in my office is probably less than $1,000. I bought my small conference table myself. Our desk chairs are so old it's hilarious. Our carpet is a zillion years old and is ripped and beyond cleaning. We are there to do a job, not look chic.

I could write a book on why the County is broke.

Sue

Rep. Hornaman took $700 Erie Yacht Club membership

2009-05-04T23:32:00.004-04:00
State Rep. John Hornaman of Erie County was one of about 60 Pennsylvania lawmakers who accepted a total of $60,000 in travel, meals and other freebies last year, according to mandatory statements of financial interest newly filed with the State Ethics Commission, the Associate Press has reported.

According to the AP story filed today, Rep. Hornaman,a Democrat, collected a membership in the Erie Yacht club worth more than $700. He has attended tourism and fishing events at the club, and had dinner with his wife at its restaurant.
"When they offered it to me, quite frankly" Hornaman told the AP,the cost factor didn't enter into my mind" It didn't even come to me, I thought it was a nice gesture."

According to the AP, About three dozen of the 253 state representatives and senators disclosed gifts or free "transportation, lodging, hospitality" in the reports that were due in Harrisburg on Friday.

They let others pay for their football and baseball tickets; golf fees; travel to Japan, Australia, Turkey and Switzerland; and legislative or political conferences at various locations within the United States. They also accepted donations for senior expos and similar events worth an additional $15,000.

Who's Guilty? The county's million dollar (?) water damage costs

2009-04-26T15:01:00.005-04:00
In a follow-up to his intermittent serial saga of stories on the malfunctioning water filter at the Erie Courthouse back in November of last year, Erie Times-News Reporter(?) Kevin Flowers reported today that the bill for the repairs has reached $600,000 and is still climbing.

Flowers further reported today that: "The Nov. 21 incident was caused by a malfunctioning water filter in an equipment room on the courthouse's sixth floor. (Luigi)Pasqual (procurement and maintenance supervisor) said county officials and insurance adjusters are still trying to determine why the water filter malfunctioned."

It's not credible that county officials have not yet determined who or what caused the malfunction. Their failure or reticence to do so suggests that certain county "leaders" from Executive Mark DiVecchio on down are avoiding accountability to cover up wrongdoing on someone's (s') part, with Flowers's witting or unwitting concurrence.

Nor has Flowers, as a presumed "investigative journalist" (see Managing Editor Pat Howards self-serving column recently on press awards), made any apparent attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery, which has cost the county far,far more than the mere repair costs cited above in terms of lost county work hours and other residual expenses.

Neither Flowers nor any responsible county official has even acknowledged additional collateral costs, much less ventured a guesstimate of them, which almost certainly will approach or exceed $1 million.

By injecting the role of "insurance adjusters" into his story, Flowers implies that whatever or whoever caused the malfunction (factory defect, incompetent installation, operator/human error, etc.),county taxpayers are protected. But even if the insurer or insurers pay the repair bill cited above (though not the collateral costs), there is still the hefty $25,000 upfront insurance deductible county taxpayers will have to pay, if they haven't already.

This isn't the first time I've blogged on his matter. Back in November of last year, I wrote:

According to an article in the Erie Times-News today written by Reporter Kevin Flowers, around 3 am. Thursday, a stainless steel water filter on the sixth floor of the Erie County Court House failed during extensive renovations there.

"The breakdown sent as many as 900 gallons of water cascading downward through the courthouse’s east wing, soaking ceiling tiles, saturating carpets and splashing computers, telephones and other office equipment", Flowers wrote. " It also set off a chain of events that postponed scheduled hearings and shut down business at the courthouse, 140 W. Sixth St., for the entire day.

"Among the areas damaged was the fifth floor, where a $3.9 million renovation project is nearing completion. Although courthouse rumors Thursday put the damage at as much as $1 million, DiVecchio and other county officials said it could take a day or two to determine that," according to Flowers.

Flowers said "Luigi Pasquale, the courthouse’s manager of procurement and the supervisor of county facilities, said insurance is expected to cover most of the loss.

'I think it’s under control now,'’ said DiVecchio, who consulted with President Judge Elizabeth K. Kelly, Sheriff Bob Merski and other county officials before deciding around 8 a.m. Thursday to shut the building down and send roughly 600 courthouse employees home for the day.

According to Flowers,Pasquale said the water filter was installed about four months ago. The county has a $25,000 deductible for such damage, Pasquale said, which means that county dollars would cover the first $25,000 of repair and insurance would cover of the rest."

The above is yet another example of poor, partial and superficial reporting by the Erie Times News.

The article answers the fundamental questions of what, where and when, but neglects the crucial question of "why." Why did the filter fail? Was it factory defective, or was there human error in installing it?

In either case, taxpayers should not have to pay for the damages and repairs, or for the costs of sending home 600 county employees while repairs are effected..
Basic investigation could and should determine where the blame for the failure lies, and the accountable party or parties should be assessed accordingly.

Do your job, Kevin and quit glossing over and covering up the failures of your buddies at the courthouse.

Tody's article demonstrates that neither County Executive DiVecchio nor Flowers has stepped up to do his job. Maybe it's time for feisty County Controller Sue Weber to step into the breach.

Erie Times-News Press Awards - The Rest of the Story

2009-04-12T17:42:00.002-04:00
In today’s edition, the Erie Times News announced that “thirteen Erie Times-News writers, photographers and page designers earned 18 top awards” in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Assn’s 2009 Keystone Press Awards statewide competition (By my count, it’s 17, but whose counting?).

In that context, Managing Editor Pat Howard boasted: "These awards reach into all corners of our newsroom to highlight excellence both in print and online. It's well-deserved recognition for the journalists being honored, and a reflection of the talent and commitment our entire staff brings to bear every day in serving our audiences in ways no other news organization in the region can.”

That seems curiously at odds with my longstanding contention that the Times-News’s press credentials are, with a few exceptions, by and large mediocre at best, its news and editorial coverage of issues, people and events important to its Erie readers usually inept, shallow, biased, unprofessional, irrelevant, mis and uninformed.

Unless I'm wrong, how could the Times-News seemingly have scored so lavishly in this year’s press awards competition?

Let’s put that into perspective. The article said that “The Times-News competes in Division II, for newspapers in the 50,000-to-99,999 circulation.” What the article didn’t do is put that distinction in context, which is needed to grasp its implications.

For purposes of the Keystone Awards, the commonwealth’s newspapers are divided into eight divisions. Division I includes Pennsylvania’s most prominent newspapers with the largest circulations. There are only seven of them: the largest, the Philadelphia Inquirer which also publishes the Philadelphia Daily News; the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Allentown Morning Call, the Pittsburgh Tribune, the Harrisburg Patriot-News and - although it’s technically a statewide cooperative news service, not a newspaper - the Associated Press.

Division Two consists of six newspapers: the Erie Times-News, the York Daily Record/Sunday News, the Scranton Times-Tribune, the Reading Eagle, the Bucks County Courier-Times, and the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal/Sunday News. In each division .there are about 40 award categories, with awards being given for first and second place winner, and in a few cases honorable mention. That means there are about 120 different award opportunities available to Division II newspapers, of which the Times-News received awards in 17.

However, less than half the categories deal with the principal news and editorial writing functions, which are the hallmark of any newspaper, and about half of those encompass sports writing, a lesser function in terms of the broad public interest.
In the most important news writing category, investigative reporting, the Times-News did not score, beat out by the York Daily Record/Sunday News and the Scranton Times-Tribune.

In another key function, editorial writing, the Times-News took a second place. In commentary/columns, the Times-News was outwritten by the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal and the York Sunday News. In the spot news category, the Times-News was bested by the York Daily Record and the Reading Eagle. In the ongoing news category, it tanked, losing out to the Bucks County and Scranton newspapers.

The Times-News took a first in the Special Projects category and second place in the “niche” category, whatever that is. It also took a second place in news series writing, firsts in feature and /feature beat writing, a first for a business/consumer story, a first in sports beat reporting, a second in feature photo, first in sports photo and second in online journalistic innovation (the internet). It lost out in News Beat reporting to the Reading and Lancaster papers. Photographer Jack Hanrahan distinguished himself with a top Specialty award in the visual category in competion with all of Pennsylvania’s newspapers, including the Big Seven.

Though the Times-News appears to have won its proportionate share of press awards, the most telling factor is that none of them was in the top most vital news and editorial reporting and writing categories

Another interesting point to note is that all of the Times-News’s A-list reporters, writers and columnists were skunked in the competition, like Howard, Ed Mead, Kevin Cuneo, Kevin Flowers, John Guerriero and Ed Palattella.

Also noteworthy is that most of the top news and editorial writing awards went to newspapers in the more densely populated eastern part of the state, where, unlike the Times-News, they face intense competition from other newspapers, including big metropolitan sheets.

Legislative pay raise payback is self serving

2009-04-08T05:52:00.003-04:00
A staff-written article in today's Erie Ties-News reports that nine of ten state legislators from northwestern PA. say they are returning, or will return to the state or donate to charity the automatic 2.8 cost of living pay increases they received effective the beginning of this year, about $2,200 for rank and file legislators. Those in leadership positions voted themselves more.

One online commentor wrote: "Let's remember our legislators, all 253 of them, are the second hoghest paid in the US. Only Calif. are paid more. With 67 counties PA could do with 100 legislators not the 253 we have. That alone will save 200 million."

I don't know whether "hoghest" was a Freudian slip, a pun, or a typo, but it's highly appropos. While PA legislators have the second-highest salaries, their total compensation packages including, per diem, travel allowance, staff allowance, health and pension benefits, etc., are the highest in the land, making the PA legislature the costliest in the nation. By most reckonings, it's also the most corrupt.

If those legislators who say they are contributing their pay raises to charity think they are off the hook, they must think that charity begins at home, because they are the beneficiaries nevertheless of the pay hike by virtue of the fact that they are using it to buy votes, in effect, a bribe.

Whether they return or donate the increment, it still goes towards their eventual retirement benefits.

The article doesn't tell us how long these legislators intend to return or donate the increment. Is it just until the end of the fiscal or calendar year, or the end of the legislative biennium, or beyond? Or just until the next middle-of-the-night/no-public-hearing pay raise comes along?

The article also does not report whether these legislators will support legislation now pending which would reduce the size of the legislature by half. Like most Erie Times-News articles, it filters self-serving legislative pronouncements through rose-colored glasses.

News media which once bashed "convicted" Alaska U.S. Senator Stevens, now ignore his exoneration

2009-04-05T04:49:00.004-04:00
When former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, the longest serving Republican in U.S. history, was indicted last year, then convicted in federal court a mere seven days before last November's general election, on charges of failing to disclose gifts from an Alaska friend and oilfield executive, the Erie Times-News, scores of other newspapers, editorialists and pundits penned tens of thousands of disparaging words condemning Stevens and gloating over the political demise of one of the most powerful figures in beltway politics in recent decades.

Stevens narrowly lost his reelection bid last November by a mere 3,000 votes out of more than 290,000 cast. Nearly half Alaska's voters believed he was innocent and voted to reelect him notwithstanding his conviction. His narrow defeat was irrefutably attributable to the taint of his conviction.

But last week, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder issued his stunning announcement that he would ask the judge who presided over Stevens's trial to reverse the conviction and dismiss the charges with extreme prejudice (meaning the Justice Dept. could not refile them),nor seek a new trial due to gross prosecutorial misconduct, and withholding vital exculpatory evidence, the silence from Sen. Stevens's news media and other captious critics has been deafening.

The prosecutorial team which engineered Stevens's false conviction, professional bureaucrats appointed under an earlier Democrat administration, has been removed from the case by Holder and is under internal investigation. Two of the three team leaders are Democrats who contributed to Barack Obama's presidential csampaign.

Other than the obligatory story reporting the attorney general's shocking announcement,the Erie Times-News and countless other newspapers, editorialists and pundits have ignored Steven's exoneration.

Simple civil courtesy demands apologies from those media who mercillessly bashed Stevens for gratuitously defaming an innocent person falsely convicted.

U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska vindicated

2009-04-01T15:57:00.002-04:00
Back in Nov 28, 2008, Ed Mathews (Mead) wrote in his column:
"Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, 85, had held that Senate seat for 40 years, longer than any Republican in history. After being convicted recently, it was hard to see how he could expect to keep his seat against his Democratic opponent,Mark Begich. He lost the seat in a close race."

In response, I wrote:

"The reason Ted Stevens lost his reelection bid to the U.S. Senate is because he was stuck in Washington, D.C, defending himself against dubious charges during his trial and unable to campaign for reelection in Alaska, while his opponent campaigned freely throughout that vast constitutency. Stevens has appealed his conviction on grounds of proven prosecutorial and juror misconduct which should have resulted in a mistrial,if not dismissal of the charges."

Stevens, who was the U.S. Senate's longest serving Republican with 40 years of service, was fully vindicated today with an announcement by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the charges against him have been dismissed and his conviction reversed due to prosecutial misconduct, tampering with evidence and mishandling prosecution witnesses, among other things. Stevens was charged with failing to disclose gifts and services he allegedly received valued at $250,000.

AG Holder also said there would be no retrial. The federal prosecutors who handled the case were removed from it and are under internal investigation by the Justice Dept. Stevens' conviction in federal court in Washington, D.C. in October of last year came ony seven days before the November election in Alaska, yet he lost to his Democrat opponent by only 3,000 votes out of 290,000 cast. Despite his (flawed) conviction, nearly half Alaska's voters believed he was innocent.

Just the facts,please, Ed

2009-03-25T00:11:00.002-04:00
In his column today, Ed Mathews (Mead) wrote, among other things: "(Alaska Governor Sarah)Palin dismissed Alaska's safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who refused to fire a state trooper who was the ex-husband of Palin's sister."

This is a classic example of the folly of the three-dot school of journalism as practiced by Ed. His clear, but false, implication is that Palin dismissed State Trooper Commissioner Monegan because of the marital discord between her sister and her sister's Trooper ex-husband, whom Monegan refused to fire.

Monegan SHOULD have fired the errant gun-toting trooper because (a) he tasered an 11-year-old boy for kicks, a felony under Alaska law; (b) illegally shot a moose out of season, a "capital" offense in Alaska; (c) was caught drinking beer while driving a state trooper vehicle; and (d) before witnesses, threatened to kill Palin's father, a retired high school coach and teacher.

Palin did nothing illegal when she fired the commissioner. Under Alaska law, she is empowered to hire and fire him WITHOUT CAUSE. There was plenty of cause to fire him, but she didn't need any.

Just the facts, please, Ed.

Times-News beer editorial shows contempt for fairness

2009-02-27T06:27:00.004-05:00
In an editorial today entitled "Wegman beer approval good move," the Erie Times-News, itself an examplar of non-competitive operations, signalled its contempt for a competitive retail environmnent.

Its editorial endorsement of beer sales exclusively at Wegman's ignores the lack of fairness in giving one retail or commercial entity a distinct advantage over others of its kind, namely the many other food markets throughout the Erie area. They will inevitably find some of their clientele shifting to the entity with the unfair competitive advantage.

It's naive to suppose that making beer sales available at a single outlet is a desireable first step in the direction of eventual commercialization of all alcoholic beverages at multiple venues, which seems to be the thrust of the Times-News editorial.

On the contrary, all it does is take some of the pressure off that goal, making it less accessible than ever.

While most of us realize that Wegman's is a choice source of newspaper advertising, Times-News editorialists should think these issues through more carefully before rushing into rash and irretrievable judgments.

In a one newspaper town, other food marketeers have no other effective advertising choices for their wares and can't realistically withhold their advertising from the Times-News in retribution.

Gwen Ifill's 'prostitutional journalism'

2009-02-25T19:57:00.006-05:00
In his Times-News syndicated column today, David Broder raved about
psuedo-journalist Gwen Ifill's book, "The Break-Through: Politics
and Race in the Age of Obama," just released last month.

For those of us without Broder's ingrained bias, Gwen Ifill lost all
credibility as a journalist when she agreed to moderate the vice
presidential debate last Fall between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin without
revealing that she had already written this wildly pro-Obama book
scheduled to be released on presidential inauguration day in January
of this year, then refusing to step down once her blatant conflict of
interest was revealed.

Despite Ifill's pronounced pro-Obama/Biden bias as moderator, betrayed
by her obvious choice of questions designed to play to Biden's strengths
and Palin's weaknesses, Palin clearly "won" the vice presidential "debate,"
riddled with Biden's glaring factual errors.

Formerly with the left-wing New York Times, now with the ultra liberal
PBS News Hour, Ifill brazenly allowed Biden to rebut Palin time after time,
while cutting off Palin's attempts to rebut Biden.

Because of the obvious conflict of interest inherent in the belated disclosure
of her book, and her failure to step down as moderator once it was belatedly revealed, Ifill should have been yanked as moderator.

Had Obama/Biden lost the election, Ifill's book would have tanked. But with
their election, and the slavish praise by fellow ideologues like Broder,it's on track to sell tens of thousands of copies, enabling Ifill to profit from her prostitutional journalism.

Kevin, where's the rest of the story?

2009-02-21T18:49:00.002-05:00
Kevin Cuneo wrote in his latest column the following:

"Former U.S. Rep. Phil English will keep busy with his work on the National Commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. English was recently appointed to a three-year term on the commission. He'll serve on the task force on cultural issues."

Where's the rest of the story? By whom was he appointed? Is this yet another example of Congress feathering its own nest and looking after its own defeated members? Is this a salaried position, with travel, per diem and expenses perks? Does it extend and enhance the former congressman's lavish retirement, per diem, health and pension benefits?

PA's New "Right to Know" Law: A Work in Progress

2008-12-04T23:10:00.005-05:00
Pennsylvania's new "Right to Know " law, which goes into effect
next month, governs public access to public records. Its
"Sunshine" law governs access to public meetings. As reported
today in the Erie Times-News, the General Assembly made some
significant improvements to the existing Right to Know law earlier
this year, which were signed into law by Governor Ed Rendell in
February. It did not address the Sunshine law, which remains
woefully deficient.

The new Right to Know law leaves much to be desired in terms of
transparency, and should merely be viewed as a work in progress.
Right to Know advocates should continue to pressure legislators
for more transparency and openness. They should also continue
their efforts to reform the commonwealth's Sunshine law.

The new Right to Know law’s two most important features are its
unprecedented inclusivity; it draws virtually every publicly
funded agency,including for the first time, the legislature,
state universities and some private recipients of public funds,
within its reach;and it shifts from the requester to the agency
the burden of proving whether information being sought is public.

While the new law requires public agencies to assume that all
records in their hands are public unless they are expressly
exempted, it also establishes a staggering number of exemptions.
There are 30 broad categories of exemptions, plus numerous
sub-categories, bringing the total number of exemptions to
nearly 100.

The new Right to Know law could, with only a slight bow to
hyperbole, be subtitled, the Pennsylvania Continuous Attorney
Employment Act of 2008, as the commonwealth’s hundreds of
agencies at every level wrestle to comply with its intermingling
provisions, laden with legal jargon, especially during the
early years of its implementation before its provisions become
settled law.

The Erie School District Swindle: Part Two

2008-11-30T15:32:00.008-05:00
Today’s Erie Times-News carries a follow-up of an on-going
story about the Erie School District’s lawsuit against JP Morgan
Chase which the school district alleges overcharged it more than
$1 million for financial services several years ago.

Today’s article focuses on the school district's efforts to
have the case heard in federal district court here in Erie,
whereas the banking consortium wants it held in federal court
in Manhattan. What this otherwise informative story lacks is
background and context which tells us how the Erie School
District got into the dilemma described in the Times-News article.

For example, not once is the name of the person perhaps most
responsible for its predicament, nor his leading role in it
mentioned,longtime Schools Superintendent James Barker, although
a photo of him accompanies the article.

Following is a piece I posted on my blog "Erie Counter News Media"
more than a year ago, on October 14, 2007 which may provide some
helpful context.
_____________________________________________________

Times-News Reporter Ed Pallatella fell hook, line and sinker
for School Superintendent James Barker's fancy spiel about
how the school district may have paid an unknown but presumably
excessive amount in fees to the broker, J.P. Morgan, which
managed the refinancing of $37 million in bonded indebtedness
for the district back in 2003.

If Barker had couched his tale of woe in memorandum form it
could have been called what is colloquially known as a CYA Memo,
and I don't believe I have to spell that out.

Don't know if Barker ever heard the old saw "The buck stops
here," and "here" is directly on his oversized desk. Yet he
managed by inference to blame everyone but himself for the
school district's loss, whatever it is, although it appears
to be at least $750,000, or half of what the school board
was told its profit would be from the refinancing scheme,
plus whatever excess fees may have been paid to the broker,
if any, plus the $60,000 the district paid to a downstate
financial firm to advise it (badly, it appears) on how to
handle the refinacing.

But I suspect, and I believe Barker knows the loss will be
significant, or he wouldn't have gone to the lengths he
did to concoct his convoluted cover story.

Then, of course, there will also be the huge but unknown
prospective expense the school district's taxpayers will
have to bear to litigate Barker's faux pax, thus compounding
the loss, coupled with the prospect that the outcome of the
litigation may be a big fat zero for the school district.
There's no doubt Barker is the culprit here, but you'd never
know it without reading between the lines of Pallatella's story,
which provides an elaborate if convenient escape route for
the superintendent.

He's presumably the high-priced expert the board pays big bucks
plus perks to guide them through financial morasses like this one.
And it appears all he had to do in 2003 was insist on knowing what
the refinancing fee would be, a no brainer in most business
environments except, apparently, in the superintendent's suite.
But instead, he allowed himself and the school board to be stiffed
by slick New York bankers, assuming pending litigation shows that's
what happened.

A further irony is that it took an enterprising reporter with
Bloomberg News in New York City to uncover this major story in
the Times-News's own backyard

Think again, Ed

2008-11-25T20:51:00.001-05:00
There are some items in Ed Mead's column today which
warrant some comment. Here's how the column headline read:

Legislative pay cut unlikely

Then he wrote: "It is not certain, but there is talk in
Harrisburg that one of the ways to reduce the budget is to
cut back on salaries of state legislators. That might be a
tough law to get passed, since the legislators would be
voting to cut their own salaries."

There's no "talk" I'm aware of pertaining to legislators
voting to cut their own salaries, but there is widespread
discussion over the prospect of disallowing this years 2.8
percent cost of living allowance (COLA)for legislators, judges
and certain other elected and appointed state offices which
goes automatically goes into effect each year, thanks to a
self-serving law the legislature enacted about 20 years ago.

Ed also wrote:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, 85, had held that Senate seat
for 40 years, longer than any Republican in history. After
being convicted recently, it was hard to see how he could
expect to keep his seat against his Democratic opponent,
Mark Begich. He lost the seat in a close race.

The reason Ted Stevens lost his reelection bid to
the U.S. Senate is because he was stuck in Washington,
D.C, defending himself against dubious charges during his
trial and unable to campaign for reelection in Alaska,
while his opponent campaigned freely throughout that vast
constitutency. Stevens has appealed his conviction on
grounds of proven prosecutorial and juror misconduct which
should have resulted in a mistrial,if not dismissal of the charges.

Thirdly, Ed wrote:

President-elect Barack Obama is looking ahead and knows that by naming Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, he will eliminate one possible opponent for a second term in 2012.

Hillary Clinton's appointment as secretary of state does nothing do preclude her presidential candidacy in the 2012 election. Indeed it strenghtens and emboldens her hand by butressing her foreign policy credentials and political stature.

Delete It Cancel

Erie Times-News story misses the main point

2008-11-22T18:05:00.001-05:00
According to an article in the Erie Times-News today written by Reporter Kevin Flowers, around 3 am. Thursday, a stainless steel water filter on the sixth floor of the Erie County Court House failed during extensive renovations there.

"The breakdown sent as many as 900 gallons of water cascading downward through the courthouse’s east wing, soaking ceiling tiles, saturating carpets and splashing computers, telephones and other office equipment", Flowers wrote. " It also set off a chain of events that postponed scheduled hearings and shut down business at the courthouse, 140 W. Sixth St., for the entire day.

"Among the areas damaged was the fifth floor, where a $3.9 million renovation project is nearing completion. Although courthouse rumors Thursday put the damage at as much as $1 million, DiVecchio and other county officials said it could take a day or two to determine that," according to Flowers.

Flowers said "Luigi Pasquale, the courthouse’s manager of procurement and the supervisor of county facilities, said insurance is expected to cover most of the loss.

'I think it’s under control now,'’ said DiVecchio, who consulted with President Judge Elizabeth K. Kelly, Sheriff Bob Merski and other county officials before deciding around 8 a.m. Thursday to shut the building down and send roughly 600 courthouse employees home for the day.

According to Flowers,Pasquale said the water filter was installed about four months ago. The county has a $25,000 deductible for such damage, Pasquale said, which means that county dollars would cover the first $25,000 of repair and insurance would cover of the rest."

The above is yet another example of poor, partial and superficial reporting by the Erie Times News.

The article answers the fundamental questions of what, where and when, but neglects the crucial question of "why." Why did the filter fail? Was it factory defective, or was there human error in installing it?

In either case, taxpayers should not have to pay for the damages and repairs, or for the costs of sending home 600 county employees while repairs are effected..
Basic investigation could and should determine where the blame for the failure lies, and the accountable party or parties should be assessed accordingly.

Do your job, Kevin and quit glossing over and covering up the failures of your buddies at the courthouse.

Anothe Erie Times-News puff piece

2008-11-22T17:42:00.003-05:00
The following article appeared in today's edition of the Erie Times-News.

Robbins re-elected to leadership post

State Sen. Bob Robbins, of Greenville, R-50th Dist., has been re-elected by his Senate GOP colleagues to a leadership position for the 2009-10 legislative session.
Robbins was re-elected Senate majority caucus secretary. As such, he handles all nominations submitted by the governor to the Senate for approval.
Robbins ensures that the Senate receives all background information and coordinates the review of nominations by committees and the full Senate.
As part of Senate leadership, Robbins also plays a role in setting the Senate's agenda."Serving in leadership gives residents of northwest Pennsylvania a stronger voice in state government affairs,'' Robbins said in prepared remarks.

Where did this story come from? Except for the abstract quote at the end, none of it is attributed to anyone. It reads like an unedited press release issued by the Senate Republican caucus or Robbins's office.

Why do state senators need someone in a "leadership" position to ensure "that the Senate receives all background information and coordinates the review of nominations by committees and the full Senate."

The nominations come directly from the governor's office. Can't they or their staffs do it for themselves. Is this just another excuse to reward party loyalty with a position that pays more than rank and file senators are paid and purports to justify additional staff?

The reporter who filed this story and the editor(s) who edited it should be ashamed of themselves for letting this puff piece get through without an iota of critical scrutiny.

Gwen Ifel's blatant conflict of interest

2008-10-04T01:35:00.001-04:00
Governor Palin clearly won Thursday night's vice presidential
debate despite the blatant pro-Obama/Biden bias of Moderator
Gwen Ifel, who chose and posed questions she knew would play
to Biden's strengths and Palin's weaknesses.

Formerly with the left-wing New York Times, now with the
ultra left-wing PBS News Hour, Ifel brazenly allowed Biden
to rebut Palin time after time, while cutting off Palin's
attempts to rebut Biden.

Because of her glaring conflict of interest, Ifel should
have been yanked as moderator. Her pro-Obama book,
scheduled to be released on presidential inauguration
day in January, will tank if Obama/Biden lose the election.
If Obama loses, she sells a couple thousand copies; if he wins,
she sells half a million copies.

Sayonara to Erie Times-News "public editor"

2008-09-29T16:21:00.004-04:00
A couple weeks ago, I noted here the lack of a "public
editor" credit on recent Liz Allen columns whose content
would normally call for such a credit line.

I speculated that its absence may foretell an unannounced
decision by the Erie Times-News quietly to eliminate that position.

Liz is the third Times-News staffer to hold the "public
editor" assignment, following Jeff Pinski and Kevin Cuneo,
since it's inception five or six years ago, although I
may be a year or two off. Pinski held the title longest,
3 or 4 years; Cuneo one or two, and Liz only a few months.

Over the past couple weeks, events seem to confirm my
earlier speculation that the position has been quietly dropped,
as there's been no "public editor" credit on any of Allen's
columns in the interim.

This includes her last column on editorial matters which
appeared in Sunday's paper calling for reader contributions
to the Times-News's Op-Ed pages on the forthcoming general
election. Once again, no "public editor" credit line.

If my specualtion is correct, dropping the public editor title
is a development too long in coming, because it's been a fraud from
its outset. As I've pointed out here repeatedly over the past
couple years, the role of the public editor is to serve as an
advocate and voice within the newspaper for the readers.

But its Times-News practitioners have instead turned the function
on its head and converted it into a shrill mouthpiece for the
newspaper and its editorial, news and related operations.

Erie Times-New editor is pot calling TV kettle Black on slease campaign advertising

2008-09-28T22:45:00.003-04:00
In his Sunday column, entitled "Truth becomes casualty
when politics mimics war," Erie Times-New Managing Editor
Pat Howard, commenting on presidential campaign TV advertising,
said among other things, that "fact-checking operations" tell
us attack ads "are spewing gross distortions and flat-out
lies more often than in the past."

Those who subscribe to these tactics, Howard wrote,"know that
while some voters are students of issues, positions and
evidence, many others, by inclination or aptitude, get
their information only in bits and pieces, and it tends to go
in one ear and straight to the gut.Such people are especially
prone to being frightened, manipulated and bamboozled."

This is the pot calling the kettle black.
The Erie Times-News's local and syndicated Op-Ed columns,
like the left wing national mainstream media (The New York
Times, The Washington Post, The Buffalo News, The Pittsburgh
Post Gazette, the L A Times, et al) all whose news and
editorial coverage is heavily slanted in favor of Obama/Biden
and against McCain/Palin, play the same role within the print
media that the false advertising Howard hollowly deplores exercises
within the electronic media.

What the "fact checkers" - in whom Howard seems to place so much
faith - need, including the Times-News, is someone to check their
facts. More errors and bias are typically asserted in the name of
fact-checking than are committed in the original fact scenario.

Why Sarah & Todd Palin ignore Troopergate subpoenas

2008-09-23T14:33:00.003-04:00
A Buffalo News letter to the editor writer recently
asked "How can the Palins not honor subpoenas" in
the Alaska Troopergate investigation? That's
a good question that deserves a full answer.

The subpoenas were issued by an interim legislative
committee called the Legislative Council, which handles
administrative and other legislative affairs while the
legislature is not in session. It consistes of 12
mumbers appointed by the presiding officers of the
Alaska state House and Senate.

Because of the current coalition make-up of the Alaska
legislature, the council is made up of four Democrats
and eight Republicans.

Keep in mind that not all Republicans in Alaska are
political allies of Governor Palin, a Republican,
because her successful reform efforts in
Alaska have targeted both Democrat and Republican
members of the legislature.

She also successfully ran against the incumbent
Republican governor without the support or help of
the Alaska Republican Party which supported
the incumbent, and blew the ethics whistle on the
chairman of the Republican Party for corruption,
forcing his resignation from an important
state commission to which he was appointed by
the former Republican governor.

Partly as a result, she has an 80 percent-plus
favorable rating in Alaska and is the most popular
state governor in the nation's history. Many Republicans
ae among the 20 percent minority in Alaska who don't like
Governor Palin.

Thus, while the Legislative Council appears to be
a bi-partisan body, its membership is 100 percent
anti-Palin.The members' antagonism towards
Governor Palin was a condition of their appointments
to the council.

Two of the Democrats on the council, Senators Hollis
French and Kim Elton,are openly Obama supporters. They
were captured in a photo at Obama headquarters in Anchorage.

French was the prime instigator, is the manager of
the Troopergate investigation, and is likely to run
against Palin in the next gubernatorial election if
she is still governor. He handpicked the special
investigator handling the Troopergate investigation.
a personal friend whose wife was once a colleague of
the former Alaska public safety commissioner
whom Palin fired. Elton is the chair of the council,
and contributed more than $2,000 to Obama's
campaign.

Both the launching of the Troopergate investigation
and the issuance of the subpoenas by the council fly
in the face of Alaska's Constitution. The council is
expressly barred by the constitution from conducting
investigations of the executive branch, or issuing
subpoenas to its members.

Two other standing legislative committees, State Affairs
and Judiciary,are authorized to investigate the executive
branch and issue subpoenas,but neither has done so. The
legislature as a committee of the whole may
also launch investigations and issue subpoenas,
but has not done so.

Five Republican members of the legislature, including
the Republican speaker of the house, have filed an action
in state court seeking an order to dismantle the
investigation on constitutional grounds.

Alaska law also mandates that any investigation
into personnel matters may only be undertaken by
the three-member State Personnel Board, whose
members by law are appointed by the govenor. Governor
Palin has pledged to cooperate with any Personnel
Board investigation.

Shortly after the Troopergate investigation was launched,
Senator French issued a public statement predicting that
it would produce an "October surprise" implying that it
would adversely compromise Governor Palin's
vice presidential candidacy.

His comments, which revealed that the investigation
was predisposed against Palin, raised a firestorm of
controversy in Alaska, forcing French to retract them.

This is when the investigation's political "taint"
was exposed and bad faith demonstrated, prompting
Governor Palin to withdraw her previously
pledged cooperation.

It should also be kept in mind that the Alaska Constitution
unequivocally empowers the governor to fire any cabinet
member and certain other political appointees "without cause."

Thus, the short answer to the letter writer's question
is that both the Troopergate investigation and the issuance
of subpoenas by the Legislative Council are unconstitutional.
_____________________________________________________________

Author's note: I covered the Alaska Legislature and
state govenment in the state capital of Juneau for 20 years.
I also dsigned and taught a college credit course on the
legislative process at the Uiversity of Alaska. Senator Elton
was one of my students.

Erie Times-New press awards less than they seem

2008-09-22T01:38:00.003-04:00
Sunday's Erie Times-News carried a self-serving article
reporting that the paper won seven, count them seven,
press awards announced by the Pennsylvania Newspaper
Assn. Foundation recently.

The article said the Times-News won the awards in
competition with other newspapers throughout the
state with circulations ranging between 35,000 and 70,000.

It neglected to mention that these are Division
Two newspapers. This division includes smaller
newspaper cities around the state like York,
Bucks County, Reading, York, Erie and others.

It does not include the bigger and more prestigious
papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Philly News, the
Allentown Morning Call, the Pittsburgh Tribune
and the Harrisburg Patriot-News.

By failing to make that distinction, the Times-News
gave the false impression that the awards it received were
in competition with those far superior newspapers.

Attorney general puts bonusgate "in the freezer"

2008-09-16T02:22:00.003-04:00
Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett says he has
temporarily suspended his investigation into the
legislative bonusgate scandal until after the
November general election, so as not to influence
election outcomes.

His decision comes on the heels of reports that the
investigation is now focusing on possible misconduct
by Republican legislators.

Earlier this summer, a grand jury indicted eight legislators,
one former legislator and a ranking legislative aide,
all Democrats, in the sweeping invesigation, which Corbett
said was expected to implicate Republican legislators as well.

The Democrats are alleged to have channeled nearly two million dollars
into partisan political election campaign activities, and illegally paid
hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses to legislative
aides who worked on election campaigns on state time.

So far no Republicans have been named or indicted, although
Corbett, a Republican, reported recently that half a dozen
Republican legislative aides have been interviewed in
connection with a scheme by House Republicans. They allegedly
used a $1.8 million state-of-the-art computer system paid
for by taxpayers for partisan political campaign purposes.

Corbett's announcement that the investigation would be
suspended until after the general elections is viewed
by some critics as a partisan scheme to protect
Republican candidates seeking election or reelection
who might be implicated if the investigation were to
proceed now.

In an editorial yesterday entitled "Criminal timing:
Corbett should not put Bonusgate in the freezer," the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said: "Justice delayed is justice denied.

"The legal cliche lies at the heart of what is wrong with
state Attorney General Tom Corbett's decision to put off
any presentments in the scandal known as Bonusgate during
the month preceding the election," the Post Gazette editorialized.

"Mr. Corbett, a Republican who is running for a second term,
was elected to investigate and prosecute crimes and corruption,
regardless of the political affiliations of any of the targets.
And that's what he has been doing -- witness the partisan
complaints made about his investigation from both sides of
the political aisle.

"Mr. Corbett's investigation started in 2007 and focused
first on the House Democratic caucus, which was logical
given the $1.9 million spent on questionable bonuses
in 2006 alone, a total that dwarfed sums allotted by
House Republicans and the Senate. Now his attention is
turned to House Republicans.

"When Mr. Corbett worked in the U.S. attorney's office,
it was the practice of federal prosecutors not to indict
in political corruption cases in the month preceding an
election, according to his spokesman, Kevin Harley. The
intention is to eliminate the suggestion that charges
are being filed in an attempt to influence the outcome
of an election.

"We'd argue that any information coming out of Mr. Corbett's
investigation is something voters might appreciate knowing
before they cast their ballots. If and when Mr. Corbett
gets enough evidence, that's when he should issue new
presentments," The Post Gazette said.

I agree. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
It smacks of partisan political favoritism to have prosecuted
Democrats facing reelection, while allowing potential
Republican wrongdoers to go before the voters unscathed.

Is the reign of the Erie Times-News "public editor" over?

2008-09-14T22:38:00.005-04:00
Is Liz Allen's failure to identify herself for the first
time as "public editor" in the credit line at the bottom
of what appears to be the public editor column today a
nuanced annoucement that the Erie Times-News has decided
to eliminate the position of "public editor," so called?

Or is this not the irregular installment of that column?
It's hard to tell because the "public editor" at the
Times-News wears several hats, a contradiction in terms.
A "public editor" cannot by definition be any other
editor without creating an inherent conflict of interest.
Not to worry. The Times-News recognizes conflicts of
interest only in others, not itself.

If my suspicion is correct, there's no real loss, as the
Times-News's "public editor" has never served that function
as defined within the trade since its inception, starting
with Jeff Pinski through Kevin Cuneo and now Liz Allen.

Instead of being advocates for the public, as public editors
are wont to be, they've been mouthpieces for the newspaper, a
kind of unofficial director of public relations and promotions
for the Times-News.

In today's column, Liz writes about a phone conversation she
had with a reader, Richard Spaeder of Erie, who has subsribed
to the Times-News or one of its aberrations for 59 years.

He apparently called to express his dissatisfaction with the
Times-News's decidedly liberal bent in general, and its
unrelenting editorial campaign against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin,
the Republican vice presidential nominee in particular.

It's interesting to note how Liz distorted Mr. Spaeder's
complaint that the Times-News's Op-Ed content is heavily
weighted against Governor Palin.

To counter that criticizm, Liz broke down the Times-News's
Op-Ed columnists by ideology - liberal, moderate and
conservative. By that count, she said, there's only a
difference of one more liberal columnist than conservative
or moderate(assuming one agrees with her breakdown, which
I don't, e.g., David Broder a "moderate?" Hardly.
He's as left-wing as they come)

But Mr. Spaeder didn't complain about the columnists' known
ideological biases per se if Liz correctly characterized his complaint;
he complained about the ideological CONTENT of the Op-Ed page,
notably that trashing Governor Palin.

His complaint is well-founded. For example, on two consecutive
days last week, the Times-News ran a total of six columns back
to back trashing Palin, none supporting her.

In addition, the selection of Letters to the Editor by the
Times-News's left wing editorial page editor has also been
heavily biased against Governor Palin.

If Liz's omission of the "public editor" credit on her column
today is indicative of a surreptitious Time-News's decision
to eliminate that position, it's not an isolated case.

Today, for example, the public editor for the Sacramento
(California) Bee, the flagship newspaper of the fading
McClatchy Newspaper empire, announced in his column today
that it would be his last as public editor,a victim of top
management budget cuts, joining several other major newspapers
throughout the country which have done the same in recent months.

Republican legislators now under investigation by grand jury

2008-09-12T08:35:00.003-04:00
You'd never know it from reading the Erie Times-News,
but Attorney General Tom Corbett has dropped the other
shoe in his investigation into corruption in
Pennsylvania's House of Representatives.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an article yesterday
noting that the grand jury is looking into the Republican
caucus's allegedly illegal use of a state-of-the art
computer system for partisan political campaign purposes.
The fraudulent use of at least $1.8 million of taxpayer monies
is alleged.

Half a dozen of the House's Republican staffers have been
interviewed by the grand jury in the course of the investigation,
the Post-Gazette reported. The Post-Gazette has obtained a copy
of a contract between a former House majority leader and a company
which provided the computer services.

So far eight Democrat House members and two staff persons
have been indicted in the attorney general's on-going
investigation into what has come to be known as "bonusgate."

These ten Democrats have been charged with fraud
for rediredcting taxpayer funds into partisan political
campaigns, and paying certain staff persons
more than $1 million in bonuses for their allegedly illegal
campaign activities while on the state payroll.

While he has not been indicted, the House majority leader,
Bud DeWeese of Greene County, is under fire by some of his
own party members who have publicly called for him to step
down because of his failure of leadership.

So far, ten Democrat legislators have asked for DeWeese's
resignation as majority leader. DeWeese is up for reelection
to his House seat this year.

Two of the Erie area's five state legislators have remained
mum on what role, if any, they played in the bonusgate
scandal, viewed as the biggest ever to hit Pennsylvania.
They are Flo Fabrizio and John Hornaman.

The Times-News has been consistently behind the curve
on this scandal, and has never bothered to ask the area
delegation what they may know about it, and
has never published an article on what
the local tie-in may be.

Democrat Governor Ed Rendell has also remained curiously
silent on bonusgate, presumably because until recently,
only Democrats have been indicted. Will he maintain his silence
once Republicans are implicated?

The pedant and the demagogue

2008-09-09T00:13:00.003-04:00
Not satisfied with six, read them, six editorial columns
yesterday bashing the McCain-Palin ticket and promoting
Obama-Biden, the Erie Times-News also ran a lengthy puff
piece, complete with mug shot, about a former schoolboy
buddy of Joe Biden's, Jim Lanahan, an administrator at
Mercyhurst North East.

The article had about as much substance as Obama's
tissue-thin resume. Its shaky premise hardly
justified so much space in the paper unless it was
intended primarily as a pretext to bolster even
further that day's six Op-Ed columns pumping up
the Democrat presidential ticket.

Lanahan both pushed the Obama-Biden candidacy and
dumped a ton of sour grapes on Palin, replicating the
vicious sexist attacks which the far left media have
piled on Palin since McCain elevated her to her historic role.

I find it interesting that Lanahan would denigrate
Governor Palin's alleged lack of experience, but
ignore that obvious deficiency in both members of
the Obama-Biden ticket.

Palin has more executive experience than both of them
put together, and is a proven political reformer, having
among other things challenged and defeated the incumbent
Republican governor with 22 years' seniority as a U.S.
senator from Alaska, a certified member of the old boys'
club, and blown the whistle on the chairman of the Alaska
Republican Party for ethics violations.

Biden, on the other hand, was caught plagiarizng material
while at law school and publicly misrepresenting his
collegiate academic status as a candidate for Congress.

Isn't it ironic that a college administrator
would advance as a role model someone with a resume as
checkered with academic pettifoggery as Biden's?

Obama has never led a reform effort of any kind, and
epitomizes the self-serving old boys' club which Palin
and McCain are committed to decimating in the nation's capital.

In a glowing reminisence of schoolboy days, Lanahan told
the Times-News that Biden eventually conquered a stuttering
handicap that plagued him as a youth. Senator Biden is to be
congratulated for overcoming that handicap. Now if he would
only do something about that demagoguery.

Runway extension costs: Short on details

2008-09-03T19:19:00.003-04:00
In yet another of its “news” stories in the guise of
an editorial, the Erie Times News published an article
today on the progress of the airport runway extension,
currently estimated to cost $80.5 million, entitled
"Airport runway extension - 1st house torn down."
While wordy in length, it's short on pertinent details.

Reporters, as writers, are notoriously inherently
deficient in mathematics and finances. As a case in
point,the reporter who penned this story, quoting Erie
economic development director Bob Spaulding, wrote, in
part: "That means the county will not have to pay to
insure the ($21 million) bond issue. It will also
save on interest costs, he said."

A fiscally savvy reporter, an oxymoron, would have
asked the economic development guru he quoted the
next logical question: What did he mean when he
said "It will also save on interest costs."?

Revenue bonds which are repaid through revenue earned
by the project they are floated to finance are
substantially more expensive to float because of
much higher interest costs than general obligation bonds.

What are the life cycle financing costs of floating this
airport runway bond issue for a project which may not be
completed in years, and even then is never likely to
generate anywhere near the revenue necessary to pay
for its construction, amortization and life cycle
maintenance costs?

That means the payout will have to come, one way
or another, from general funds? In other words, how
much are taxpayers being asked to pay beyond the
face value of the bonds? And how about the huge
and inevitable project cost overruns? The devil
is in the details. It's a pig in a poke.

Not only don't we get the answer to the question,
we don't even get the question.

Gov. Palin's landmine # 2: The bridge to nowhere

2008-09-02T00:04:00.001-04:00
This is yet another example of the folly politicians engage
when they’re not upfront with the public. Sooner or later the
truth will out, and when it’s later, it’s always worse
because untruth takes on a life of its own, complete with
unfounded rumors and distortions that could have been
avoided had the truth been told at the outset.

Although it’s not a major setback, and in the end Governor
Palin did the right thing, in this case she initially shaded
the truth and is now paying the consequences.

Several years ago, congressional funding in the amount of
some $400 million for two proposed new bridges in Alaska
was earmarked by one of Alaska’s two Republican U.S.
senators, Ted Stevens, arguably one of the most powerful
men in the nation’s capital in recent years.

The costlier of the two bridges was intended to link the
city of Ketchikan, Alaska’s fourth largest city, with
the offshore island on which its municipal airport is
located. The only way air passengers can get to or from
the airport is by ferryboat, about a 15-minute ride.

It would be the equivalent of going by boat from Erie’s Public
Dock to Presque Isle by ferry. (The second bridge would have
served the more populous Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city,
and isn’t especially relevant here).

The Ketchikan bridge, estimated to cost about $350 million,
would have served another purpose besides eliminating the
inconvenient and, in bad weather, hazardous ferry boat
ride to and from the airport. The city, now crowded on
a narrow shoreline between the water and the mountains
behind it has for decades needed more room for commercial
and residential expansion.

Although only a few dozen residents now live on the island,
the bridge would have opened up a whole new area to residential
and commercial development, allowing the city to experience
substantial growth.

Thus, there was a legitimate rationale for
what mockingly came to be known as “the bridge to nowhere”
which was lost in the growing unrest with Congress’s infamous
pork barrel politics. Instead it became a symbol for the
arrogance of lawmakers like Stevens who felt they could do
anything they like with impunity.

In the early stages of the efforts to obtain the funding
for the bridges, Palin was not governor. But as mayor of
a small Alaska city and later as candidate for governor,
she was an advocate for Alaska’s interests and actively
supported Stevens and the rest of Alaska’s congressional
delegation’s efforts on behalf of the Ketchikan bridge
funding. She is quoted in several Alaska newspaper accounts
as supporting the project.

It was only after she became governor that the pork barrel
politics which gave rise to widespread disaffection with
congressional earmarks that Palin opposed the bridge funding
and publicly spoke against it. Nevertheless, the funding was
approved and deposited into Alaska’s state treasury after
Palin became governor.

But once there, Governor Palin announced a year or so ago that she
would not authorize the money to be used to build the “bridge
to nowhere.” Instead, she said, it would be used to fund
other needed state infrastructure projects. That was the right
thing to do and it met with almost unanimous approval.

Fast forward to August 29, 2008 in Dayton, Ohio, the day
Senator McCain announced his decision to name her as his
vice presidential running mate. In the excitement and
chaos of the moment, Palin asserted at one point in her
acceptance speech that she had rejected the bridge to
nowhere and told Congress thanks but no thanks, drawing
a roar of approbation from the Republican partisans in Dayton.
She was technically correct, but misleading. She should have
said she accepted the funding, but used it for other state projects.

Some of the national news media did what they’re
supposed to do, check into the veracity of public
utterances issued by politicians and refute them
when they’re wrong.

That’s what happened to Palin. If she had told the
complete truth the day she was anointed,her dissembling
would not have come back to haunt her as it has, even
though her statement was partly truthful.

As a result, her credibility, one of her most prized
attributes,has been somewhat compromised, perhaps
irreverisbly.
Inevitably, the McCain campaign's political foes will
use this lapse against her at every opportunity during
the balance of the campaign.

The landmines in Governor Palin's path

2008-09-01T17:06:00.003-04:00
With his canny decision to name Alaska Governor Sarah
Palin as his vice presidential running mate, U.S.
Senator John McCain has moved his chances of winning
the presidential election from dead in the water to
Olympian heights.

Critics from the left – Both Democrats and Republicans –
are condemning his choice as political. Well guess what?
This is politics. What do they think motivated U.S.
Senator Barrack Obama to choose U. S. Senator Joe Biden
as his running mate instead of Senator Hillary Clinton?
Good will and altruism?

While choosing Governor Palin does not by any means
guarantee Senator McCain’s team will win the presidential
election, it certainly improves his prospects. At this
point, anyone who thinks they know what the outcome will
be is fantasyzing. It depends entirely on how Goveror
Palin performs on the campaign trail over the next two
months.

If her remarkable, but largely unknown history - which is
rapidly being revealed,like peeling back layers of an
onion - is any indication, the prospect is promising.

While Palin has many qualities and characteristics in her favor,
there are a few ticking land mines in her path which
she and the McCain campaign failed to address at the outset,
leaving them to be sniffed out by her political critics,
thus making it appear she’s trying to hide something.

Landmine No. 1.

Governor Palin should have revealed and explained
at her very first public appearance as a candidate,
in detail, the circumstances surrounding the $100,000
investigation underway by her political foes in the Alaska
legislature.

It's designed to probe what role, if any, she played in the
firing of the former Anchorage police chief she had appointed
as the commissioner of public safety in her administration who,
among other things, is the head of the Alaska State Troopers.
She is vulnerable but not culpable in this scenario.

It stems from the fact that her sister was married to
and has divorced a state trooper with a checkered criminal
record, once suspended but never terminated from duty.
His record includes illegally shooting a moose without a permit,
virtually a capital crime in Alaska, driving a trooper vehicle
while drinking beer and probably drunk, tasering an 11-year-old boy
just for the hell of it, and threatening to shoot and kill Palin’s
father with a unsheathed pistol in his lap.

The pretext behind the legislative investigation is that Palin
and members of her staff and family used her office to try to
pressure her appointee, the commissioner of public safety, to
fire the trooper. He refused to do so, and later, based on what
her critics say was a pretext, Palin fired him, explaining only
that she “wanted to move (the department) in a different direction.”
Her critics say it was because he refused to fire the errant trooper.

What’s lost in the controversy is that the trooper clearly
deserved to be fired for his past record and actions. But in
handling the matter poorly and failing to give more plausible
and specific reasons for firing the commissioner, Palin left her
natural foes in the legislature – some of them still resentful
of the sweeping legislative reforms she pushed through last
year - found this way to get back at her.

While Palin and her husband Todd acknowledge they had
discussed the matter with the commissioner separately on
more than one occasion, she denies they ever asked him
to fire the trooper, though that was clearly their wish.

However, a ranking staff member has admitted he tried
to pressure the commissioner to fire the trooper. When
Pain learned of it she suspended him pending the outcome
of the invesztigation, which Palin said she welcomes.

To add fuel to the controversy, the fired commissioner
himself has publicly stated he believes the reason Palin
fired him was because he refused to fire the trooper,
which Sarah steadfastly denies.

Nevertheless, the legislative investigation, results
of which are due out the end of October, while vindictive,
politically-motivated and much ado nothing, will have
to be allowed to run its course, leaving a shadow
of a shadow over Palin's head until it’s resolved in her
favor.

So much for Landmine No. 1. I’ll continue this
post later to discuss a couple other landmines in
Governor Palin's path..

The Erie Times-News finally catches up

2008-08-31T07:05:00.005-04:00
In an AP story out of Harrisburg published in its
Sunday edition today,the Erie Times-News finally caught
up with Pennsylvania's pending energy catastrophe,
the deregulation of electricity rates, a story first
broken here (see below) more than a week ago.

Within the next two years, the deregulation of electricity
rates engineered 22 years ago by former Governor Tom Ridge
will cause them to skyrocket in northwestern Pa. by
50 percent.
____________________________________________________________

Ex-Gov. Tom Ridge's hidden legacy emerges
from the shadows, a ticking time bomb

The long-standing love affair which a majority of
Pennsylvanians have had with former Governor Tom Ridge
is likely to come to a screeching halt for many of
them in the next couple years.

That’s when one of Ridge’s hidden gubernatorial
legacies, a ticking time bomb, emerges after two
decades from the shadows.

A product of the law of unintended consequences,
it’s the impending reversal of the deregulation of
electrical rates throughout the commonwealth which
Ridge sponsored and championed as governor in the
mid-1990s.

The return to unregulated electricity rates
will complete the triple whammy of energy consumer cost
explosions, and exacerbate the adverse economic
impact which has followed the dramatic increases in
gasoline and heating fuels over the past year.

Depending upon location within the state, electric rates
are expected to jump anywhere from 12 percent to 72
percent in 2010 and 2011, with a statewide average of
more than 40 percent.

That’s when the rate caps imposed by the Electricity
Generation Customer Choice and Competition Act - signed
into law by Ridge in 1996 after a robust campaign
promoting it - will expire.

The catalyst for the concerns about a forthcoming crisis in the
skyrocketing consumer cost of electricity is a study recently
released by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC).

It found that if the rate caps were to come off today, electric
rates in Pennsylvania would rise virtually overnight by an average of 43
percent, and impose a calamitous burden on home, commercial and
industry users.

The spike in electric prices is expected to be highest in the western
part of the state, where they look to rise by as much as 67 percent
in Allegheny County, and 50 percent in northwestern Pa., according to
the PUC study.

Some experts believe impending deregulation will precipitate a mass
exodus of industry and commerce from Pennsylvania, cause thousands
of small businesses throughout the commonwealth to fail, result in
massive unemployment, and further impoverish low income residents,
all of which the 1996 deregulation act was designed,
over-optimistically as it turns out, to forestall.

After the fall, the act will allow electricity producers to charge
rates based upon their costs of production and delivery.
Previously, they could not recover those costs through proportional
rate increases because of the ceiling placed on rates by the 1996
act, signed by Ridge after a high visibility promotional campaign.

But with the caps due to come off at staggered intervals throughout
the state in 2010 and 2011, electricity producers will be able to
charge rates which putatively reflect their costs of acquiring the
fuels needed to generate electricity – primarily oil, natural gas
and coal. Those costs have risen exponentially since the electric
rate caps were first applied in 1997.

Normally, the powerful electricity-producing lobby would have been
able to thwart passage of legislation in 1996 regulating and
putting caps on electrical rates. But what gave deregulation its
impetus in the mid-90s was a disarming Faustian bargain between the
popular Ridge administration and the general assembly on one hand,
and the electric industry on the other, the unintended consequences
of which are only now beginning to appear.

It provided that in exchange for acquiescing to rate caps, the
industry would be allowed by the state through the PUC to bill and
recover from consumers the costs of constructing new electrical
generating plants, a practice previously disallowed.

Ridge’s rationale centered on the theory that lower electrical rates
than those in other states would attract new industry to
Pennsylvania, produce tens of thousand of new jobs, and give rank
and file Pennsylvania users more affordable electricity.

In the first years following deregulation, Pennsylvania surpassed
other states in electrical rate-lowering, ranking first in the
nation. In a February 7, 2001 press release Ridge said: “Once again
we were named the No. 1 state for electric deregulation. Why? We
have plenty of juice…we’re plugged in. Customers have greater
choices. And consumers and businesses have saved $3 billion. So if
any companies in California are listening,” Ridge gloated, “come on
over to Pennsylvania. We’ll leave the lights on for you.” Ridge said
at the time deregulation “will create more than 36,000 new jobs in
Pennsylvania by 2004.” That never happened.

Ridge’s theory was based on the optimistic premise that the capped
rates would bring new electric-producing competitors into the state
and lower rates overall through wider competition. The flaw in the
theory was that it self-destructed.

Newcomers couldn’t compete in Pennsylvania with the big existing
producers. Even with the rate caps, existing producers were able to
generate healthy profits since deregulation went into effect 20
years ago because of the absence of new competition.

With the unshackling of the rate caps two years hence, they will
make a killing of unprecedented proportions at the expense of
consumers unless the legislature and the PUC enact and devise
remedies to interdict them against what is expected to be a
powerful lobbying effort by the industry to make sure the rate caps
disappear forever.

How is retribution exacted from a former governor whose failed
vision 20 years after the fact results in punitive consequences on
an unprecedented scale for his onetime constituents?

By elevating him, apparently, to one of the nation’s leading
cabinet level positions and widespread celebrity.

The road to kingmaking

2008-08-30T18:06:00.003-04:00
In her column published August 24, Liz Allen, the
Erie Times-News's newly-anointed "public editor,"
so-called, successor to Kevin Cuneo in that position,
appealed to readers to "help frame the issues" relating
to the upcoming general election on Nov. 4.

The newspaper would use the input, Liz said, to enable
its editorial board to reach decisions with respect
to editorial endorsements.

Since time immemorial, the Erie Times-News and other
self-promoting newspaper more interested in purveying
influence rather than information, have been publishing
editorials endorsing or not endorsing candidates and
ballot issues in the final rundown to upcoming elections.

This is an archaic and arrogant practice which over
the decades has detracted rather than contributed to
the electoral process.

It’s one that has never been acceptable among intelligent
and thinking citizenry, and is growing less and less
palatable as self-serving newspapers like the Times-News,
poseurs of objectivity, make recommendations pro or con
which reflect their own biases, vested and financial
interests, not the general public’s. It's influence-peddling
of the rankest kind.

Here’s what one prominent newspaper founder, owner and
publisher, Al Neuharth whose newspaper, USA TODAY, with
the largest circulation in the nation, more than
two million, has said about this counterproductive
and despicable practice:

“Enlightened newspaper editors and owners have come
to understand that when they endorse a political
candidate their news coverage becomes suspect in
the eyes of readers, even though most reporters
are basically fair and accurate.

“When USA TODAY was founded in 1982, we decided our
role was to inform, educate, entertain, debate, but
not dictate. That built trust among readers and is
one of the reasons the "Nation's Newspaper" has the
largest circulation in the country.

“If decision-makers at newspapers quit trying to be
kingmakers, they and their readers would benefit.”

Amen.

What they need is a break from their breaks

2008-08-30T14:02:00.003-04:00
An Associated Press article in the Times-News today reported on the likely agenda of the Pennsylvania General Assembly's upcoming nine-day session, concluding it with this statement: "After all that, lawmakers will need a break." Then they'll go on a three-month holiday "break."

Just the facts please!

Pennslvania legislators don't need anymore breaks. They're nearly the highest paid in the country, with the highest perks anywhere, which they wildly abuse; the largest legislature in the nation with twice as many members as the commonwealth needs per capita; twice as many staff persons as they need who spend most of their time campaigning for the reelection of their employer; have granted themselves and their families the finest retirement and medical benefits anywhere, and only meet in session two or three days out of the week when they're not out on a "break."

They don't have to worry about health benfits or high gas prices because the taxpayers pay for them all through an exhorbitant health program legislators designed for themselves, and auto travel allowances they voted to give themselves. Give ME a break!

Pennsylvania's "farmland preservation" boondoggle

2008-08-30T11:18:00.003-04:00
Like an Autumn rite, each fall as the exquisite aroma of
ripening Concord grapes permeates the eastern Erie County
countryside, the Erie news media hone in on the usual
suspects for quotes and sound bites on the qualitative
and quantitative aspects of the grape crop, including
estimated tonnage per acre and sugar content.

Together those factors determine the gross value of
the harvest.One or two prominent grape farmers are
briefly interviewed for their take on the condition
of and prospects for the year’s crop; an expert over
at the regional agricultural experiment station is
consulted on more technical aspects; and a manager
of the Welch Grape Juice plant in North East, the
largest of its kind in the world, lends his expertise
on the subject from the perspective of the global marketer.

Occasionally an agronomist is called in to add academia’s
glossy imprimatur to the process.These formulaic media
reports are relentlessly simplistic, predictable and
invariably misleading or worse because the print and
broadcast reporters who produce them know little or
nothing about the subject, often drowning in arcana
and missing the big story.

For example, last year about this time, the Erie Times-News
ran an editorial commenting upon the prospective economic
impact of the grape crop on Erie County and beyond, summing
it up with the headline “Grape industry rebounds” and
concluding that “Agriculture is a roller coaster business,
as growers know all too well. But right now, these purple,
golden and green vineyards are producing plenty of green.”

But only a week or so earlier, The Times-News ran an article
which said just the opposite. A grape farmer the newspaper’s
reporter talked to said - despite what looks like an excellent
crop - growers expect little more than a break-even year,
with a harvest of six to seven tons of grapes per acre.
At this year’s expected prices, the grower said, income
from that level of production will barely cover production costs.

Apparently whoever writes and edits the editorials at the
Times-News doesn’t bother to read the articles the reporters
write.But the Times-News and other Erie media can’t see the
vineyard for the grapes.

Expect to see any day now a dreary re-run of this fictional
narrative masquerading as fact.

The real story which the Erie news media have missed and
ignored for years has nothing to do with cyclical crop
and harvest dynamics.

Rather it’s a gradual trend over the past two decades
which represents a paradigmatic shift in the grape farming
culture. It has quietly transformed the grape growing corps
in eastern Erie County with a long tradition of self-reliance
from hardy independent folks of yore to government hand-out
recipients of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars
subsidized by taxpayers at all levels of government, local,
state and federal.

This transformation is the regrettable but unintended
consequence (at least for the mindless masses who have
supported it) of something euphemistically known as
the state Farmland Preservation program, enacted into
law in 1987 by the Pennsylvania general assembly
under the most false of pretenses, yet enthusiastically
heralded by the Times-News and other Erie news media
as the salvation of Farmland Pennsylvania.

Back about two years ago, The Times-News published an
article bearing the garish headline: “Dying on the vine,
Concord grape growers struggle to hang on.” A reality
check indicated otherwise.

While one could sympathize with a few who were hurting,
the greater majority of grape vineyard owners in Erie
County, especially in the east county, have done very well,
thanks to enormous state subsidies many of them have
received under the so-called farmland preservation program.
It's a get-rich scheme for a select few at the expense of
millions of Pennsylvania taxpayers.

In 2005, that ill-advised scheme got a healthy multi-million
dollar boost with the passage of the so-called “Growing
Green II” ballot proposition by Pennsylvania voters which
provided an unspecified but massive amount of funding for
the program.During the past 18 years since the program's
inception in 1989, more than 50 Erie County farmers within
seven municipalities have collectively received more than
$7 million from state and local taxpayers for selling
development rights on their farms to the county or state
under the program.

By selling the development rights to the state for a
negotiated sum the farmers agree to continue that
acreage in farming activity in perpetuity and never
use or sell it for non-farming development purposes.
Statewide, about $1 billion has been poured into the
program, which was launched with a $100 million
statewide general obligation bond issue approved
by Pennsylvania's voters in 1987.

The massive subsequent funding - ten times the original
amount approved by the voters - however was not
subjected to a vote of the people, but has been
surreptitiously approved incrementally by the legislature
and successive governors, both Republican and Democrat.

The awards to individual farmers in Erie County since they
began participating in the program in 1994 range from a
high of $832,000 for 595 acres committed to the program
to a low of $30,000 for 20 acres. Total acreage committed
to non-development of farmlands in Erie County since the
program began is upwards of 3,000.

Guess what virtually all of them have used some of the
windfall they collected from the state for : to develop
their non-preserved farmland!The Farmland Preservation
Program, a huge financial boondoogle on behalf of
participating farmers, real estate developers, land
speculators, money changers and other promoters
throughout the state, is jointly administered and
funded by the state and county governments, with
some funds available from township and federal sources as well.

The Erie County Planning Department administers the
program locally under state- mandated procedures.
One of the program's more insidious features is that
it contains no disclaimers prohibiting state or local
legislators or officials who have used their public
offices to create and administer the program from
exploiting and profiting from it by participating,
a clear violation of ethical precepts.

While there is no evidence that this has occurred in
Erie County, there is no guarantee that it won't. It
has occurred frequently in other parts of the state
where the program is being implemented far more
extensively.

While local and state officials and
bureaucrats repeatedly claim the program has widespread
public and farmer support, in the case of the public,
it's unlikely the general public would be supportive
if it knew what is really going on behind the extravagant
claims of its supporters.

But it doesn't, because of the failure of the news media
to expose it.At the same time, prospectively eligible
farmers who hope to participate in this giveaway program
would be foolish not to support it, given the enormous
subsidies it makes available to them with no real commitment
on their part. Whoever said there’s no free lunch, never
heard of Pennsylvania’s farmland preservation program.

The program’s purported goal is to assure permanent
preservation of viable agricultural lands in order to
protect the state's agricultural economy and culture.
Its objective is "to slow the loss of prime farmland
to non-agricultural uses," according to the state
Bureau of Farmland Preservation in Harrisburg, which
administers the program at the state level.

But since its idealized inception nearly two decades
ago, the program has taken a sharp turn to the right.
Elsewhere in the state, for example in Lancaster
County, the largest agricultural county in the
state - compared to which the Erie County program is
a mere drop in the bucket - it has had the diametrically
opposite effect of opening more farmlands to developmen
t at much higher prices, putting them out of reach of
all but the most affluent.

In a smaller way, it has had the same effect in eastern
Erie County and will continue to expand here. In one
notable instance in southeastern Pa., the state paid a
Montgomery County farmer $3.7 million for the property
rights to his 70 acre farm, an average of about $53,000
per acre. Another farmer there was paid $48,000 per acre.

Inevitably, this will happen in Erie and other participating
counties as well, albeit on a lesser but munificent scale.
While farmers who participate in the program sell the
development rights to their land, they can continue to
raise, harvest, market and utilize any livestock,
crops or products grown or derived from them for their
own benefit, in effect, double dipping into the state
and local taxpayers' pockets.

They also retain sub-surface rights to any mineral deposits,
such as oil and/or gas. The commercial reality which enables
the so-called preservation program to gobble up more land
than it preserves derives from the fact that the portion of
the farmers' land not preserved which adjoins reserved land,
over time becomes much more valuable on the real estate
housing and commercial market.

That's because private purchasers can be assured the
non-preserved farmland they buy on which to build their
homes or businesses won't be blighted by unsightly
housing, business or industrial developments on adjoining
land owing to its preserved farmland status. Their back
and front yards will remain forever open to scenic farmland vistas.

This hastens and expands development on non-preserved
farmland, as participating farmers jump at the opportunity
to exploit rising market prices precipitated by the
diminishing amount of land available for development.

It also gives them a windfall with which to launch
housing and other developments on their non-preserved
farmland, thus removing that acreage from farming,
an alarming trend which has already begun in east
Erie County.

How the “farmland preservation”
boondoggle works.

The monetary amount participating farmers or owners
of farmland receive for their land sought to be
preserved, called "easements," is derived from the
difference for which their land would sell for
farming purposes compared to how much it would
fetch for development purposes.

As a hypothetical if somewhat simplistic example,
if Farmer A offered to buy 500 acres from Farmer B
for its market value of half a million dollars for
farming purposes, and a real estate developer
offered Farmer B $750,000 for the same acreage
for residential, commercial or industrial development,
the state/county would pay Farmer B the half million
dollars plus the $250,000 difference to place his
acreage in the farmland preservation program instead
and retain its farming function.

North East grape farmers outnumber by far those
from other parts of Erie County who have been awarded
funds under the program since its inception. Plans were
initiated last year to curb participation of North East
farmers in the program in an effort to spread its limited
funding around to other parts of the county previously
less favored.

There are four possible funding sources for the farmland
preservation program: the county, state and, rarely,
federal and township governments. The program was initially
funded by a $100 million general obligation bond approved
by the voters in 1987, which was heavily lobbied by certain
farming, real estate interests, banks, land developers,
well-organized land trusts in the nation and others.

The bond issue, though controversial, was readily passed
by more than 2 to 1, with 1,172,483 voting for it, 575,330
against. Pennsylvania voters naively supported the bond
issue because of its superficially attractive features
and deceptive patina which over the years continue to
over-ride the program's hidden mercenary realities which
defeat the purported goal of farmland preservation.

Over the years, more than half as much has been expended
on the program annually as was provided by the initial
$100 million bond issue, although no voter approval has
been obtained for the additional funding.Since its
inception in 1989 through Sept., 2003, the state and
57 of Pennsylvania's 66 counties have paid about one
billion dollars to preserve about 300,000 acres of
farmland, according to state figures.

In some southeastern Pennsylvania farming areas, county
and municipal bonds have been floated to expand the
farmland preservation program because of limitations on
government funding.Authorization of these bonds has been
fueled by special interest groups having nothing to do
with farmland preservation except to profit from it by
exploiting the development it is supposed to curb, but
which in fact it generates, such as realtors, banks,
land developers, general and sub-contractors, and others.

Meanwhile, rank and file voters, duped by the program's
duplicitous promoters and the news media's failure to
expose them, continue to be led down a merry path.
Amortization of these bonds shifts the burden for
their repayment onto future generations who have no
say in whether they want to assume this burden of
debt for a program that has more to do with profiteering
and accelerated development of rural landscapes than
with farmland preservation.

Pennsylvania owns the dubious distinction of leading
the nation in the number of farms and acres of farmland
protected, about 300,000. But this distinction is
double-edged, because the longer range effect, as
noted earlier, has been to open up more farming
land to development faster than would otherwise
have occurred, but at much higher prices than lower
income folks most in need of affordable housing can pay for it.

Back in 1987, when the $100 million general obligation
bond proposal was placed before the state's voters, it
was aggressively lobbied by farming and other special
interests which would benefit from it. But there was one exception.

In Lancaster County, Donald L. Ranck, a prominent and influential
farmer in Paradise Twp., along with a handful of devoted
supporters, launched a vigorous campaign opposing the bond
issue and the program on grounds that, as formulated, its
long-range effects would adversely impact both farmland
preservation efforts and the interest of taxpayers throughout
the state, without commensurate benefits.

Today, Ranck still actively opposes the relentless expansion
of the program, while advocating reforms which would sustain
the preservation of Pennsylvania's farmland without the
deleterious effects he and others claim it promotes in its
present form, but so far with limited success in the face
of politically powerful development interests.

His proposed reforms would also significantly reduce its
exploitation of taxpayer dollars. Says Ranck: "The best
prevention for farmland development is allowing landowners
to keep their development rights, keep their building rights,
keep their management rights. The worst loss of farmland
occurs next to 'preserved' farms. This is so obvious you
may wonder why the preservation gang can't see it. "We
believe they can, but continue their charade for their
own personal profit. Future generations will curse them
for it!" Rank predicts.

Currently, portions of 3,000-plus farms and mor than 400,000
acres have been preserved statewide through the program.
But the Commonwealth is not keeping track of how much
non-preserved farmland has been lost to development as
a result of the program since its inception nearly two
decades ago.

Nor is it letting it be widely known how
many hundreds of millions of dollars, now approching
$1 billion, millions of state and national taxpayers
have paid for the disproportionate benefit of a very few.

Area State Legislators: Should House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese step down over bonusgate scandal?

2008-08-28T15:47:00.009-04:00
In an earlier post last week I noted that I had sent e-mails
to the five state House members - three Democrats and two
Republicans - who represent this area whether they would
publicly call for Rep. Bill DeWeese, D-Greene County, to
step down as majority leader for his role in the current
bonusgate scandal now being investigated by the state
attorney general (See August 25, Erie Times-News columnist
trumps newsroom).

So far, ten of DeWeese's fellow House Democrats downstate
have called for him to step down.

Here's the question I posed to area legislators:

As you know, your House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese was
not one of the eight legislators, all Democrats, indicted
recently by the Grand Jury investigating the so-called
Bonusgate scandal.

However, that investigation by the state attorney general's
office is continuing, and it's a virtual certainty that
others will be implicated.

So far, ten of your Democrat colleagues in the House of
Representatives have asked Rep. DeWeese to step down
as majority leader even though he wasn't indicted because
he is/was very close to some of the principals who
have been, and because this scandal occured, so to speak,
"on his watch."

It's generally believed that it is inconceivable Rep. DeWeese
did now know about the bonus gate activities in which case
he is culpable by association; or, if he didn't, he's an
incompetent leader.

Can you tell me whether you believe Rep. DeWeese should
step down as majority leader or,as one of your House
Democrat colleagues has suggested, resign from the
legislature and abort his reelection campaign?

RESPONSES

Of the five area state legislators, three have responded
to my question. They are Reps. Pat Harkins (D), Rep. John Evans (R)
and Rep. Curt Sonney (R). Reps. Flo Fabrizio and John Hornaman,
both Democrats, have not responded.

Here's Rep. Evans's response:

Dear Mr. LaRocca

"As a Republican member of the House, I do not have a vote for
Democratic leadership positions. Only members of the Democratic
Caucus have the ability to address the viability of Rep. DeWeese's
leadership. Thank you for your concern regarding this matter.

John Evans

In a subsequent response,Rep. Evans added these comments:

Dear Mr. LaRocca,

Perhaps there is a reason that only Democrats are calling
for him to step down. They elected him as their leader.
Your question would be a different story if you were
talking about our Republican leader Sam Smith, as I
voted for him to be the Republican leader. It makes
no difference what any Republican thinks about removing
Deweese as leader since we can do bsolutely nothing about
his leadership status. I hope this addresses your
question.

John Evans

Here's my response:

Dear Rep. Evans,

Thanks for your thoughtful response. You may have a point.
However, I believe the point you're missing is the role
of legislator as a filter of information for his and her
constituents.

Legislators are our eyes and ears in Harrisburg.
Especially in light of the fact that here in Erie
County the only daily newspaper covering all or
most of three key counties does not staff the
legislature or central state government in Harrisburg
from the Northwest PA perspective.

Whether or not there is sorely needed legislative reform
going forward depends upon whether the mass of public
opinion is behind it. That will only happen if you and your
colleagues inform the public of the critical need for reform
(about which I'll have more to say to you later)in light of
the corruption which the attorney general has uncovered,
with still more to come, perhaps implicating some Republicans.

If you and your colleagues remain silent on the issues
and feed me and the public coordinated responses that
don't address them realistically, there's nothing to
launch and sustain reform. Fortunately, ten Democrat legislators
downstate have not taken that position.

Joe LaRocca

Here's Rep. Sonney's response:

"Thank you for your website submission from Aug. 8th. As a
Republican I'm sure that Rep. DeWeese could care less about
my thoughts on him stepping down. You asked if I believe if
he should step down from his leadership role? Absolutely!
As you mentioned in your email, it happened "on his watch"
therefore, he should be held responsible for the actions of
his caucus' members and staff. Furthermore, you asked if he
should end his re-election campaign, fortunately we live in a
great country that allows the people of his district to decide
who will represent them in Government. I would hope that the
good citizens that he currently represents will not send him
back to Harrisburg."

Here's Rep. Harkins's response:

Mr. Larocca,

Thank you for your interest in Mr. DeWeese.
I have been working on a number of issues in my district
the past month(Education, Healthcare, Property Tax
Reform) that not being in Harrisburg I have not had the
chance to talk to the rest of the Democratic Caucus
to see what is actually going on. What do you think I
should do?

Pat Harkins

In response to Rep. Harkins's question to me above,
"What do you think I should do?" I replied as follows:

Dear Rep. Harkins

As I indicated, Rep. DeWeese has not been indicted for an
alleged crime, so this is not a case of presumption of innocence.
The question is whether Rep. DeWeese knew what was going on with
respect to bonus gate, even if he wasn't a participant, which
he may have been.

If he did know or participated, he's complicit. If, as
he says, he didn't, then he's an incompetent leader.
That's an issue for his House followers to judge. In
either case, I believe he should step down. Apparently,
at least ten of your Democrat colleagues agree.

I personally believe Rep. DeWeese is complicit based on
eveything I've read, including his own published statements
in one or all of the state's four major newspapers: the
Harrisburg Patriot News, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the
Philadelphia Inquirer and the Allentown Call (Forget the
Erie Times-News. They're clueless).

I don't see how House Democrats can claim any credibility
going forward if DeWeese remains in the caucus leadership
in any capacity. Democrat credibility may not be salvageable
in any case, depending upon what happens with the ongoing
investigation.

My experience is that corruption is contagious, doesn't
respect political boundaries, and it's possible
that some Republicans may be implicated, in which case
the entire House's credibility is at stake. Unless those
presumably like you who were not implicated make a vigorous
and transparent effort to clean House, so to speak, its
future looks even more dismal.

As can be seen, all three legislators who responded
to my query danced around the question.So I again posed the
question: This time Rep. Harkins replied:

Joe, as I said before I have not been in Harrisburg to speak with the
rest of the Democratic Caucus or Rep. DeWeese. We have nine session days
scheduled for the fall session and the election is on Nov. 4th. and if
the voters in his district feel they want to vote him out that is their
prerogative.

If the man has not been indicted or convicted of a crime I
have no reason to ask him to resign. I am as frustrated as you that only
Democrats have been indicted in this probe and the more I see the more I
suspect that there is a political motive involved here. After the
November 4th. election we Democratic House members will meet to
reorganize and at that time we will see who would be best to lead our
caucus. If this is a political ploy to weaken the Democrats in November
I am very concerned with who might try to lead the Republicans and serve
as speaker of the House. Stay tuned!

Rep. Pat Harkins

I responded:

Dear Rep. Harkins:

Thanks for your amplification. I believe the test of whether
it's a political ploy depends enirely on whether the attorney
general finds that some Republicans are implicated. As I said
earlier, I believe large scale corruption such as this is
contagious and crosses party lines.I will be very surprised,
as well as suspicious, like you, if some Republicans are not
implicated.

I don't understand why you feel you need to consult with
the other members of your caucus. This is a matter of
individual conscience. Apparently ten members of your
caucus downstate individually believe he should step down
as majority leader and have publicly said so.

You say that "if the voters in his district feel they want
to vote him out that is their prerogative." However, regardless
of whether Rep. DeWeese is indicted and/or convicted of a crime(s), his
failure of leadership, which is undeniable, greatly transcends
his district and has both statewide and national impications
because of the adverse effect bonusgate has had in corrupting
Pennsylvania's treasury and electoral processes.

Your constituents and the constituents of every other legislator
outside DeWeese's district have a compelling stake in whether he
continues to wield leadership power statewide.

Sincerely,

Joe LaRocca

Special prosecutor in legislative corruption scandal unwarranted

2008-08-27T13:16:00.004-04:00
The Associated Press reported Monday that the Democratic nominee
for Pennsylvania state attorney general, John Morganelli, has
called for appointment of a special prosecutor to take over the
legislative corruption investigation launched by the incumbent
AG Tom Corbett a Republican. Morganelli is currently district
attorney in Northhampton county.

So far in the wide-ranging investigation. a grand jury has indicted
eight sitting legislators, one former legislator and three staff
members linked to them, all Democrats. Corbett has publicly stated
that the investation is on-going, that Republican legislators and
staff are also targets, and that more arrests are pending.
It was reported last week by the Harrisburg Patriot-News that Corbett
has begun interviewing Republican legislative staff as part of
the on-going investigation.

Although Corbett bungled the felony case against former State Rep.
Linda Bebko-Jones, D-Erie, recently who plea bargained down
charges that she forged signatures on her reelection petition
see August 25 post, Justice perverted), it would be a huge mistake to
hand over his ongoing investigation on legislative corruption
to a special investigator.

As pointed out in the AP article, that would require reenactment
of an expired law authorizing appointment of a special prosecutor.

More importantly, it would effectively put the investigation of
legislative corruption into the hands of the legislature,
currently controlled by Democrats. The result would be the
fox guarding the chicken coop.

While Republican Corbett has so far failed to produce any information
linking fellow Republicans in the legislature to the biggest legislative
corruption scandal in the commonwealth's history as promised, unless
and until there's credible eveidence that Corbett's not being evenhanded,
he should be free to pursue the investigation unfettered.

News bias at the New York Times

2008-08-26T22:33:00.009-04:00
I sent the following query to David Stout at the
New York Times, whom I knew briefly when I worked
with him at the Erie newspaper back in the 60s. It's
in connection with the New York Times's regular feature,
Talk to the Newsroom, in which designated
Times editors and reporters respond to questions
from readers about their respective roles at the
newspaper, a kind of behind-the-scenes view.

The column was written by Stout over period of several days
a couple weeks ago. His current position at the Times is
"continuing news editor" whereby he rewrites, edits and
updates articles appearing in the Times on a continuing
basis throughout a news cycle. My query and Dave's response follow:

"Q. As an obviously committed and ethical journalist, how
do you deal internally and intellectually as you write and
rewrite news copy, with prevailing criticism from credible
quarters, including some by The Times's public editor, that
The Times has a pronounced liberal or leftist bias, not only
on its editorial and Op-Ed pages, but in its news columns as
well, sometimes on Page One?

— Joe LaRocca, North East, Pa."

"(A) Joe, your question is more complicated. It's true that our
editorial page is known, in general, for a center-to-left
orientation, as opposed to a center-to-right leaning.

"But our Op-Ed page has certainly presented conservative
viewpoints as well, unless I completely misunderstand David
Brooks and William Kristol and, before them, William Safire.
Of course, I expect some readers to distrust me because I
work for The Times — and others to give me the benefit of
the doubt for the same reason. I expect some readers to
see a motive in what I write, or don't write.

"I wrote an article about the execution in Texas of a man who
killed a store manager in a robbery seven years ago. It was
a brief article, in no sense a reconstruction of the case,
and I did not mention the victim's name. Therefore, a reader
told me in an e-mail, I was obviously sympathetic to the killer,
and shame on me and The Times.

"Now, how does one respond to an accusation like that?
Of course, how I see the world — and the news — is influenced
by my life experience. It is not influenced by what I think
the high-ranking editors think I should think. But I know some
people will think otherwise, no matter what. It's part of the job."

I believe Dave responded as candidly as he could under the
circumstances. I believe him when he says his writing "is not
influenced by what I think the high-ranking editors think I
should think. But I know some people will think otherwise, no
matter what. It's part of the job."

But there's a pervasive mind-set at the Times which subtley colors
the conscious or sub-conscious zones of its newswriters and editors
to which some of them succumb to one degree or another. As Dave
said, it's a complicated question.

While working in Alaska as a news journalist back in the 70s and 80s,
I was the chief field correspondent for the Times in Alaska for a number of years, writing mostly for its national, business and travel news desks. I knew I had to tailor the stories I wrote for the Times to conform to its ideology or they
wouldn't be published.

Since I had a high rate of publication there despite heavy
competition from staff writers for space in the newspaper,
I must have succeeded in tilting my stories to the Times
editors' satisfaction.

That is,I admit, a form of professional prostitution, and any
newsperson who doesn't acknowledge his or her susceptibility
is a liar.

But I justified it on grounds that if I didn't go with the
Times tilt, none of the reporting and writing I did which I felt
was important for its readers to be exposed to would see the
light of day. Half a loaf is better than none.

Dave's comment pertaining to the New York Times's Op-Ed page
is somewhat of a dodge. I did not say, of course, that the OP-Ed
Page is EXCLUSIVELY liberal or leftist. But David Brooks and
Bill Kristol are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The Op-Ed Page is PREDOMINANTELY liberal, featuring other
leftist writers like Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Bob Ebert,
Maureen Dowd, Tom Freidman, Nicholas Kristoff and others. It's a
bias which is unfortunately all too often garishly reflected
on its news as well as its editorial pages.

TheTimes recently took a lot of heat for publishing an Op-Ed article submitted by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, then refused to publish a response by the Republicn nominee John McCain unless he rewrote it to conform to certain guidelines prescribed by the Times.(Sounds like the practices of another smaller, more obscure Times newspaper).

Who's picking whom at the Erie Times-News?

2008-08-26T07:49:00.004-04:00
Erie Times-News writers, editors and proofeaders need to brush up on who/whom usage. In his column today, Ed Mead wrote:

"Kennedy has always been ready to support the Democratic Party, whatever it does or whomever (SHOULD BE WHOEVER) is running.

In his article today in which he wrote Governor Rendell predicted John McCain would not pick Tom Ridge as his runnning mate, John Guerriero wrote:

"But Horton said it doesn't matter who (SHOULD BE WHOM) McCain picks as his running mate because the Erie delegate said he thinks Obama will win Nov. 4. Many polls now show a close race between Obama and McCain."

Guerriero's article is typical of the one-sided coverage the Times-News has given to the Obama/McCain contest. While it's cleverly nuanced, it's worth incalculable thousands of dollars in political advertising and promotion to the Democratic presidential nominee's campaign, while at the same time detracting from the McCain campaign.

Erie Times-News columnist trumps newsroom

2008-08-25T21:51:00.004-04:00
It's revealing that a major statewide political story
with potentially profound local implications was broken
locally by a gossip columnist, and underscores the
ineptitude of the Erie Times-News's feeble news department.

Last week Ed (Mathews)Mead broke the news locally that the
prolonged investigation by the state attorney general
has spread from Democrat wrongdoers in the state
legislature to their Republican counterparts, as
promised earlier by the AG.

It comes as no surprise to Pennsylvanians in Pittsburgh,
Harrisburg, Philadelphia and elsewhere throughout the
Commonwealth, as their newspapers had been writing
about this new development several days earlier. But not
a peep from the Times-News until Ed's column last week.

A couple weeks ago I sent e-mails to the five legislators
from the Erie area - three Democrats and two Republicans
- asking them whether they would publicly call for House
Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, a Democrat of Greene County,
to step down from his post.

They are Pat Harkins, Flo Fabrizio, John Hornaman, Democrats;
Curt Sonney and John Evans, Republicans.
Already, ten Democrat legislators from downstate have
pubicly called for DeWeese to resign as majority leader.

While DeWeese is not one of the eight Democrats in the
legislature who have so far been indicted in the wake
of the investigation - with more apparently to come,
including Republicans - the corruption unearthed so
far came under his watch, and betrays, if nothing else,
a failure of leadership. That alone should trigger his
resignation.

It's also virtually inconceivable that DeWeese knew
nothing of the illegal goings-on over the past few
years that funneled more than $1 million of taxpayers'
funds to Democrat election campaigns,and corrupted the
state's electoral process, since it involved other
members of the House leadership, and it's possible
that he may also come under indictment as the
investigation proceeds.

But even if he doesn't - DeWeese is masterful at
covering his tracks - he should be thrown under
the bus by his legislative colleagues for allowing
these alleged crimes to occur under his leadership.

So far, I've received responses to my e-mails only
from one local Democrat and one Republican, Pat
Harkins and Curt Sonney respectively.

One can only surmise from the deafening silence on
the part of the other three that they don't want
to rock the boat because they fear they too may
become implicated as targets in Attorney General
Tom Corbett's deepening investigation. Why else
would they keep mum?

Rep. Bebko-Jones case: Justice perverted

2008-08-25T11:00:00.003-04:00
In a recent editorial, the Erie Times-News lauded the
state attorney general’s office for its handling of
the case of former State Rep. Linda Bebko-Jones,
who entered into a plea agreement on felony charges
for falsifying signatures on her re-election
petition, noting among other things that Bebko-Jones
has been in poor health since her indictment.

It's a classic case of justice perverted based upon not
what one has done, but whom one knows.

While I feel sorry for Ms. Bebko-Jones's sad dilemma,
there are ample public resources that would have
been available to sustain her medically and
otherwise - like those available to thousands
of her former constituents - had a faceless
bureaucrat in the state attorney general's office
not arbitrarily and irrationally adjudged the
punishment applied under her watered-down plea
bargain "appropriate.”

What the editorial neglected to mention is that
Bebko-Jones also received a lump sum $65,000
severance payment that would otherwise had
been forfeited if the original felony charges
had not been waived under the feckless and
ludricous plea bargain negotiated by her attorney
and the attorney general's office. It also
neglected to mention that she will likewise
retain the extravagant health and medical
benefits legislators have granted unto themselves.

While Bebko-Jones's 14 years as a state legislator
are cited by the editorial in her defense, who
knows what other questionable deeds she may have
perpetrated over the years under the thin cloak of
presumed legislative immunity? Capable of one,
capable of others?

There's no doubt that in going along with the
plea agreement, the state attorney general's
office pandered to the celebrity political
clout reflected upon Bebko-Jones's attorney,
David Ridge, by his famous brother Tom Ridge,
Corbett's fellow star Republican.

Does this mean that Mr. Corbett will also plea
bargain down the felony charges in the indictments
laid against the ten Democrat legislators so far
in the on-going legislative bonus gate scandal,
with more apparently to come, some Republicans
included, so that they too may retain their
plush legislative retirement plans, severance
pay and health benefits?

If not, Mr. Corbett could justifiably be accused
of applying a double standard. With his injudicious
handling of the Bebko-Jones case, the attorney
general has started up - or down, depending upon
one's perspective - what lawyers and judges like
to call "a slippery slope."

Perhaps all the legislators indicted in the bonus
gate scandal should retain David Ridge as their
attorney. (Not to worry, David. I won't demand a
cut of your lucrative fee, if they do).

There's no need to enact new law to govern legislative
corruption cases as suggested by the Times-News editorial.
All that's needed is for the attorney general's office
to enforce rather than eviscerate existing law on a
case by case basis.

Ask not where's the outrage, ask where's the coverage

2008-08-25T10:25:00.005-04:00
In an editorial recently, the Erie Times-News asserted
that reform of the Pennsylvania General Assembly's
legislative practices is so "serious" and the
investigation into them by the attorney general is so
"important, but has itself consistently failed to give those
issues the serious coverage they deserve.

The editorial said "The bonus scandal may not
have raised as much outrage yet as the pay raises."

The bonus scandal has diverted millions of taxpayer
dollars to partisan political election campaigns,
illegally kept bona fide third party candidates off
the ballot and thoroughly corrupted Pennsylvania's
statewide electoral process. It's far more outrageous
than the despicable midnight pay raise debacle.

Yet except for a scathing column or two by Pat Howard,
it has received little meaningful coverage by the
Times-News, which accounts for the dearth of public
outrage in this area.

As the only daily newspaper in Pennsylvania's fourth
or fifth largest city, the Times-News has long shirked
its responsibility to staff the legislature and the
governor's office in Harrisburg on a fulltime basis,
relying mainly on anemic AP coverage and occasional
rewrites or pick-ups of other newspaper's articles
for its meager coverage of the state legislature's
and the governor's enormous impact on our daily lives.

Why, for example has Governor Ed Rendell expressed
no outrage over bonusgate or the lack of legislative
reform? Is it because so far only legislators within
his political party have been implicated?

At the very least, The Times-News should make the half
dozen area legislators of both parties within its
coverage area accountable for their actions in
Harrisburg and investigate what role, if any, they
may have played in the bonusgate scandal.

Did they, for example, with their votes or silence,
actively or clandestinely, support the vile decisions
and actions by their leadership - especially by the
unctuous majority Leader Bill DeWeese - which led to
the indictments, with many more to come?

THE UNFAIR AND UNBALANCED ERIE TIMES-NEWS

2008-08-24T01:20:00.005-04:00
I recently wrote three letters to the editor of the Erie Times-News.
The first one follows:

"Washington Post Columnist David Broder exhibited a classic
affirmation of the heralded mainstream media bias in favor
of Barack Obama and against John McCain in his latest column
(August 12)which purports to be a balanced assessment of
their respective views on their presidential
campaigns based upon Broder's interviews of both.

“There are several ways to measure this bias, but let's
take the simplest:Direct quotes by Obama: More than
200 words. Direct quotes by McCain,about 60 words.

“Then Broder drives home Obama's final quote in the
penultimate sentence by stating in the last sentence:
"I think everybody would agree to that last
point." I for one don't.

“In addition, Broder erroneously attributes a racial
slur to McCain which actually originated with Obama
when he famously said recently thatMcCain's supporters
would call attention to the Democrat's unusual name
and the fact that 'he is black,' when in fact it was
Obama who invented that slur.”

The "fair and blanced" Times-News's left wing
editorial page editor refused to publish my letter.

Then on August 2, the Times-News published a
letter to the editor bashing syndicated columnist
Charles Krauthammer, calling him, among other
derogatory names, "a partisan hack" because he
presumed to criticize Democratic presidential
nominee Barack Obama.

The letter bore a headline applied by the editor
which read "Krauthammer unprincipaled,"
an adjective which had not been contained in
the text of the letter.

The highly regarded Krauthammer, who is generally
considered a conservative, is a member of the
Washington Post Writers' Group. His
column regularly appears on the Op-Ed page of
the Erie Times-News. He is one of only two
syndicated columnist the Times-News carries
regularly who has received a Pulitzer Prize
for Journalism.

On August 4, in response, I sent a letter to the editor
praising Krauthammer for his column published in
the Times-News that day as follows:

"Once again Charles Krauthammer has demonstrated he's
the most intelligent and insightful pundit around.
(Ecology argument on oil won’t hold, August 4,2006).
His elegant writing style, his uncommon grasp and
marshalling of elusive and pertinent facts into
a synergistic whole leading to an inescapable and
irrefutable conclusion all contribute to making him
the nation's most credible political scribe. He's
neither liberal nor conservative. Just a first
rate thinker and writer who always hits the nail
squarely on the head."

The "fair and balanced " Times-News's far left
editorial page editor refused to publish the letter.

Then on August 11, the Times-News published
another letter to the editor trashing Krauthammer.
Again I sent in a letter lauding him. Again
the "fair and balanced" Times-News's extreme
left wing editorial page editor refused to
publish it.

Apparently, the left wing doesn't know what the
right wing is doing.

"HUBBERT'S PEAK OIL" THESIS IS DEEPLY FLAWED

2008-08-23T17:14:00.002-04:00
“For several years now, the conventional wisdom has subscribed to a theory called "peak oil," which stands for the proposition that at some point the availability of petroleum reserves reached a peak in the United States and began irreversibly dwindling.

The theory was first advanced by a book entitled Hubbert's Peak, whose central premise holds that U.S. domestic petroleum supplies peaked in 1970. But it's deeply flawed by a major factual error.

The author failed to take into account the fact that how much producible oil remains within domestic oil provinces depends entirely upon the going market price for oil. For example, at $100 per barrel, much more oil is producible than at $50. Pick your figures.

On Alaska's North Slope, both onshore and offshore, more than 14 billion barrels of oil have been produced since its inception in 1977, flowing at rates ranging between about 1 million and 2 million barrels per day. Nearby is a deposit of what is known as 'heavy oil,' not unlike the Athabasca tar sands in northwestern Canada, which exploratory drilling has shown contains an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil.

However, because of reservoir dynamics, these reserves are not economically producible at today's market prices for oil, but will eventually be producible at some higher figure depending upon demand.

There are scores of unexplored areas throughout the U.S. both onshore and offshore in state oceanic waters up to the three-mile limit and between three and 12 miles in federal waters overlying the outer continental shelf. Billions of barrels of oil may underlie the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), as well as the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska.

Neither Mr. Hubbert, nor anyone, can know when or where more oil may be found until all these prospective areas are identified. In short, Mr. Hubbert has presumed to identify and quantify a natural resource, which is unidentifiable and unquantifiable without further exploration activities.

Thus, his central premise is nonsensical. Mr. Hubbert's research is formidable, but his mind set has led him to the wrong conclusions. This same rationale applies to his similarly erroneous thesis regarding global 'peak oil.'

Ex-Governor Tom Ridge's hidden legacy emerges from the shadows

2008-08-22T22:25:00.004-04:00
The long-standing love affair which a majority of Pennsylvanians
have had with former Governor Tom Ridge is likely to come to a
screeching halt for many of them in the next couple years.

That’s when one of Ridge’s hidden gubernatorial legacies, a ticking
time bomb, emerges after two decades from the shadows.

A product of the law of unintended consequences, it’s the impending
reversal of the deregulation of electrical rates throughout the
commonwealth which Ridge sponsored and championed as governor in the
mid-1990s.

The return to unregulated electricity rates will complete the triple
whammy of energy consumer cost explosions, and exacerbate the
adverse economic impact which has followed the dramatic increases in
gasoline and heating fuels over the past year.

Depending upon location within the state, electric rates are
expected to jump anywhere from 12 percent to 72 percent in 2010 and
2011, with a statewide average of more than 40 percent.

That’s when the rate caps imposed by the Electricity Generation
Customer Choice and Competition Act - signed into law by Ridge in
1996 after a robust campaign promoting it - will expire.

The catalyst for the concerns about a forthcoming crisis in the
skyrocketing consumer cost of electricity is a study recently
released by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC).

It found that if the rate caps were to come off today, electric
rates in Pennsylvania would rise virtually overnight by an average of 43
percent, and impose a calamitous burden on home, commercial and
industry users.

The spike in electric prices is expected to be highest in the western
part of the state, where they look to rise by as much as 67 percent
in Allegheny County, and 50 percent in northwestern Pa., according to
the PUC study.

Some experts believe impending deregulation will precipitate a mass
exodus of industry and commerce from Pennsylvania, cause thousands
of small businesses throughout the commonwealth to fail, result in
massive unemployment, and further impoverish low income residents,
all of which the 1996 deregulation act was designed,
over-optimistically as it turns out, to forestall.

After the fall, the act will allow electricity producers to charge
rates based upon their costs of production and delivery.
Previously, they could not recover those costs through proportional
rate increases because of the ceiling placed on rates by the 1996
act, signed by Ridge after a high visibility promotional campaign.

But with the caps due to come off at staggered intervals throughout
the state in 2010 and 2011, electricity producers will be able to
charge rates which putatively reflect their costs of acquiring the
fuels needed to generate electricity – primarily oil, natural gas
and coal. Those costs have risen exponentially since the electric
rate caps were first applied in 1997.

Normally, the powerful electricity-producing lobby would have been
able to thwart passage of legislation in 1996 regulating and
putting caps on electrical rates. But what gave deregulation its
impetus in the mid-90s was a disarming Faustian bargain between the
popular Ridge administration and the general assembly on one hand,
and the electric industry on the other, the unintended consequences
of which are only now beginning to appear.

It provided that in exchange for acquiescing to rate caps, the
industry would be allowed by the state through the PUC to bill and
recover from consumers the costs of constructing new electrical
generating plants, a practice previously disallowed.

Ridge’s rationale centered on the theory that lower electrical rates
than those in other states would attract new industry to
Pennsylvania, produce tens of thousand of new jobs, and give rank
and file Pennsylvania users more affordable electricity.

In the first years following deregulation, Pennsylvania surpassed
other states in electrical rate-lowering, ranking first in the
nation. In a February 7, 2001 press release Ridge said: “Once again
we were named the No. 1 state for electric deregulation. Why? We
have plenty of juice…we’re plugged in. Customers have greater
choices. And consumers and businesses have saved $3 billion. So if
any companies in California are listening,” Ridge gloated, “come on
over to Pennsylvania. We’ll leave the lights on for you.” Ridge said
at the time deregulation “will create more than 36,000 new jobs in
Pennsylvania by 2004.” That never happened.

Ridge’s theory was based on the optimistic premise that the capped
rates would bring new electric-producing competitors into the state
and lower rates overall through wider competition. The flaw in the
theory was that it self-destructed.

Newcomers couldn’t compete in Pennsylvania with the big existing
producers. Even with the rate caps, existing producers were able to
generate healthy profits since deregulation went into effect 20
years ago because of the absence of new competition.

With the unshackling of the rate caps two years hence, they will
make a killing of unprecedented proportions at the expense of
consumers unless the legislature and the PUC enact and devise
remedies to interdict them against what is expected to be a
powerful lobbying effort by the industry to make sure the rate caps
disappear forever.

How is retribution exacted from a former governor whose failed
vision 20 years after the fact results in punitive consequences on
an unprecedented scale for his onetime constituents?

By elevating him, apparently, to one of the nation’s leading
cabinet level positions and, possibly, to the second-highest office
in the land.

The myth of the Erie Times-News 'public editor,' redux

2008-07-08T11:32:00.003-04:00
I break this blog's self-imposed hiatus today to comment on the Times-News' newly anointed "public editor" (so-called), one of the newspaper's long time columnists, Liz Allen, who replaced Kevin Cuneo in that position recently.

It's been months since I have bothered to read any of Kevin's columns as "public editor," for reasons which may be inferred from the content below. I finally gave up on any hope that Kevin would ever fulfill the legitimate role of public editor.

But hope springs eternal. When I accidently noted that Liz, a fine writer and journalist, had taken over the position, I momentarily entertained an expectation that she might at last give that function a modicum of legitimacy and credibiity. But, alas, I was doomed to disappointment. It's the same old fluff, perpetuating the Times-News' "public editor" in the role of all-out advocate for the newspaper, rather than for its readers.

Below is a blog I wrote back in October,2007 on this subject. Under Liz's stewardship, nothing has changed. (For perspective, I refer readers to the most recent article by New York Times Pubic Editor Clark Hoyt,in which he skewers the newspaper, and in particular, its popular columnist, Maureen Dowd, for their blatantly sexist coverage of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the Democratic presidential primary campaign).

Several years ago, in an one of many attempts to curb its dwindling circulation and advertising lineage, the management at the Erie Times-News, the monopoly daily in Erie County, did what many newspapers around the country have done in recent years for the same reason, including the prestigious New York Times. It appointed a “public editor” on its staff.

It was an attempt by newspapers to humanize their image as detached purveyors of news, and cozy up to the communities they served in hopes of drawing more readers into their subscription folds in order to grow advertising revenues. They have been falling alarmingly throughout the industry in recent years as a result of the proliferation of news and informational sources touched off by the digital revolution and the world wide web. The public editor, readers were told, would be “their editor,” representing them and giving them a voice within the Fourth Estate’s halls of received wisdom.

Though paid by the newspaper, the public editor would be an advocate of and for the readers, taking their side if their position or complaint were deemed valid by the public editor, even when it contradicted the staff position; and expressing the readers' views even when they came into conflict with the newspapers’ editorial version of news events or editorial conceits, providing a corrective lens whenever a newspaper was perceived to stray into error or down the wrong pathway, as they‘re frequently wont to do.

Among other things, a responsible public editor’s role is to respond to complaints and questions from readers by bringing them to the attention of the newspaper’s news and editorial staffs and finding a resolution between the two; but not one which necessarily accommodates the staff’s position.

The public editor in other venues also typically publishes letters from readers pertaining to his role or, on occasion, letters which the newspaper fails to publish in its regular letters section.

If warranted, in a regularly published column in the newspaper, the public editor would publicly take the newspaper staff to task for perceived errors or viewpoints, and issue corrections on the readers’ behalf if the newspaper itself didn’t.

Needless to say, if approached and executed correctly, the public editor’s job is no piece of cake. He or she must sit uneasily on a fence betwixt and between satisfying the “public” constituency,” without – if possible, but not at the risk of compromising his or her crededibility and independence from the official voice of the newspaper - alienating her or his newspaper bosses and colleagues. But there’s no danger of that ever happening at the Times-News. There, the public editor is public editor in name only, seldom in practice.

THE FIRST PUBLIC EDITOR

The first public editor at the Times-News was Jeff Pinski . After a long career as a reporter and editor there, he was demoted to that position, a sort of putting-out-to-pasture. Jeff served as public editor for several years.

Then, suddenly, without any notice, Pinski was gone without a trace; quietly replaced about a year ago by the current “public editor,” Kevin Cuneo. He’s another career Times Publishing Co. employee, following in his legendary father’s (Gene’s) footsteps, for years back in the post-WW II years the paper’s colorful and charismatic sports editor. The subtle announcement of Kevin Cuneo’s appointment as public editor came in the form of his first byline accompanying his first column in that capacity.

Not surprisingly, the bar for public editors has been set highest among those newspapers which have appointed them, by the New York Times. There have been three there over the past several years since the Times created that position, none a woman. All of them have been hired from outside the Times, coming with impeccable credentials, all of them limited at the outset to a term of about 18 months.

That’s about the optimum time it’s believed any person can tolerate the stress level involved in maintaining a credible balancing act between his or her public constituency and the staff of the newspaper which pays his or her salary.

At the NYTimes, all three have come from outside the newspaper and, when their terms were completed, the first two have returned to other prestigious lives in journalism, as will the third, Clark Hoyt, when he completes his term.

At the NYT, the public editor writes a column for publication twice a month responding to reader's feedback, or on his own initiative taking on perceived journalistic wrongdoing on the part of the newspaper staff, serving as its ethical conscience.

By contrast, The Times-News’s first public editor, Jeff Pinski, came from within the newspaper staff, where he had cultivated many loyalties and allegiances over the years, then served in the public editor’s position for several years.

That alone tells the story. Pinski was too wedded to the past and had too many friends there to carve a new path for the future as public editor. A nice guy and competent journalist, Pinski served far longer in that job (too long to be effective) at the Times-News than his counterparts at the New York Times, because he made no pretense of representing or advocating on behalf of the readers, thus avoiding the debilitating tension inherent in a real public editor’s role.

At best, he served as the newspaper’s go-between vis a vis the readers; at worst, as an apologist for the newspaper. While there were occasions when Pinski fulfilled the legitimate role of a public editor, they were few and far between, and he rarely, if ever, embarrassed or put the newspaper in a bad light even when it deserved to be.

Cuneo, also a nice guy, competent journalist and first-rate writer, during his tenure to date, has taken Pinski's mockery of the true role of a public editor even further. He has transformed the position into a fullblown advocate for the newspaper, rather than for the readers, wholly rejecting the well-established journalistic model.

In an e-mail to Cuneo shortly after he took over as "public editor," I told him his approach to the role was at odds with the norm. He cryptically replied: "We're not the New York Times. And Erie isn't New York." He got that right.
When complaints arise about the Times-News's coverage or editorial positions, his first impulse is to defend or counterattack, regardless of the legitimacy of the complaint. On rare occasion, he will make grudging concessions to the complainants when the paper's position or conduct is clearly indefensible.

I was once a victim of the public editor's recalcitrance in the face of demonstrable error on the part of the newspaper, as illustrated by this letter I e-mailed to Cuneo a couple months ago:

Dear Kevin,

On May 30, the Times-News ran an editorial lavishly praising the late Pennsylvanian Rachael Carson for her pioneering role in the environmental movement of the 20th Century and the repopulation of bald eagles in some regions of the U.S. The editorial ignores the journalistic adage that there's always more than one side to every story.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Carson demonized the use of the pesticide Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT), leading to a widespread ban on its use. The revival of bald eagle populations in the U.S is often attributed to the DDT ban.

It may or may not be true that the banning of DDT saved bald eagles from extinction. Some reputable scientests of late vigorously disagree, citing massive land drainage and critical habitat loss instead. Some of them refer to Ms. Carson's writing as "junk science."

Baldies were never an endangered species in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska or Canada. In fact, they have always been plentiful there. In some environs, they are so numerous they are considered pests.

There's an irrefutable downside and incalculable human cost attached to the ban precipitated by Ms. Carson on the use of DDT as a pesticide. Though she did not advocate a total ban, her writings prompted them in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Untold tens of thousands of people have died of maleria, typhus and other infections contracted from legions of disease-carrying mosquitoes which the judicious use of DDT would have eradicated. For example, according to Wikipedia, from 1934 to 1955, there were an estimated one and a half million cases of maleria in Sri Lanka, resulting in 80,000 deaths. After the country invested in an extensive anti-mosquito program with DDT, there were only 17 cases reported in 1963. Thereafter, due to the influence of "Silent Spring,"the program was abandoned, and maleria in Sri Lanka rose to about 600,000 cases in 1968-69.

According to the World Health Organization, after South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in Kwa Zulu Natal province rose from 8,000 to 42,000 cases. By 2000, there had been an approximate 400 percent increase in malaria deaths. Today, after the reintroduction of DDT, the number of deaths from malaria in the region is fewer than 50 per year.

Joe LaRocca

Cuneo never acknowledged my letter nor corrected the errors in the editorial, a common malpractice at the Times-News.

The dark side of horse racing, redux

2008-05-09T13:55:00.003-04:00
After a longer hiatus than I planned, I'm back on the blog, but with limited input,as I'm increasingly preoccupied with attending to the needs of a close friend who is entering the terminal stage of bone cancer.

What prompts me to leap back into the fray now is today's Times-News glaring front page package on the casino and Downs racetrack, and its celebration of man's inhumanity to equines.I've said this before, so rather than re-invent the wheel, I'm reprinting below my blog from last October on this subject.

It follows:

In yet another puff piece over the weekend celebrating Presque Isle Downs racetrack -a salutary run-down on the abbreviated 25-day first season of horse-racing - the Erie Times-News trumpeted the track’s financial and related successes over the past month, and its potential for even greater gains during next-year’s attenuated 100-day racing season.

“Racetrack’s trial run bodes well for 2008,” the headline blared in Saturday’s online edition. (That was changed in the Sunday edition to “Was track a runaway success?”) It was followed by Reporter Bob Jarzomski’s equally irrepressible lead paragraph: “In horse-racing parlance, Presque Isle Downs and Casino burst out of the gate with a clean break.”

But there was no mention of the Sport of Kings’ tragic darkside, which the local news media have ignored or played down, the cruel and inevitable deaths of some of the noble animals which feed the financial frenzy infecting their owners, promoters, bettors, camp followers and fans. There is reason for concern.

Despite the installation at the Downs of costly artificial Tapeta racing surface designed to reduce traumatic racetrack accidents, at least three horses died here during the 25-day season’s 200 races, injured in mishaps, then “euthanized,” a less than comforting euphemism. That is not an insignificant number for such a truncated season.

But we know very little about how, why or under what circumstances these elegant equines met their demises. The local news media dazzle, indeed overload us with celebratory details festooning casino and racetrack operations: millions of dollars waged; hundreds of thousands paid out; tens of thousands attend; hundred thousand dollar purses won; millions tithed to local governments; tons of local hay utilized; hundreds of hometown cheesecakes and other pastries consumed, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

But the news media are curiously silent when it comes to downside facts and figures. What exactly happened to the three horses which died or were put down here last month? Did they sustain terminal injuries during training or racing? Or were they barn deaths, perhaps from overdosing? How old were they? Were they too young to tolerate the stresses of competitive racing? Or were their deaths attributable to some imperceptible, as yet unknown, anomaly in the engineering of the new racetrack?

Growing scientific evidence tells us horses bred for racing are too young at two or two 1/2 years - when many of them hit the tracks for the first time, their muscles and structural bones still immature and underdeveloped - to withstand the pace and pounding. Yet overzealous owners, hungry for returns on their high investments in horseflesh, put them out on the tracks before they’re physically ready. Sometimes it pays off. Too often it ends in disaster.

Extrapolated over next year’s projected 100-date season, this year’s fatality rate of thoroughbreds at Presque Isle Downs suggests an increase to at least a dozen horses’s deaths in 2008, perhaps leading as well to some serious jockey injuries, possibly deaths.

It’s usually difficult, even impossible for horse doctors to pin down the cause or causes of equine breakdowns on the tracks, sometimes because they are invisibly rooted in earlier training or racing activities as one or two year-olds, when tiny bone splints or imperceptible hairline fractures arise in their slender, fragile leg bones, silent ticking time bombs lurking there, waiting to explode on the track when they’re three-year old colts, as in the case of the industry’s late and beloved Barbaro.

One influential racing writer, Bill Finley, wrote tellingly in the New York Daily News back in 1993: "The thoroughbred race horse is a genetic mistake. It runs too fast, its frame is too large, and its legs are far too small. As long as mankind demands that it run at high speeds under stressful conditions, horses will die at racetracks."

Nothing, I’m convinced, will dampen the ancient and universal craze for horse racing. Indeed, it seems to be on an implacable upswing everywhere. Richard Abbott, state commissioner of horse racing, told a Times-News reporter recently it’s too early to say the deaths of three horses here in a brief 25-day season sets a pattern or precedent for the coming and ensuing seasons. He was quoted as saying: "Obviously, we're distressed” by the injuries (reluctant, apparently, to use the word “deaths”). “Unfortunately,” he said, “that's a part of the sport."

That doesn’t mean every effort shouldn’t be undertaken to reduce the injuries and deaths to an absolute minimum. For starters, at the very least owners should be required to wait until horses reach physical maturity – at least three years - before putting them on the tracks.

But horse owners and their surrogates won’t go the extra steps to reach that goal unless and until an aroused public outside the racing community demands it. And that’s not going to happen so long as the news media suppress and sugarcoat the ugly realities of horse racing, while glorifying its fantasies.

Merry Christmas

2007-12-13T08:42:00.000-05:00
For the information of anyone who has missed my regular blogging, please be advised that I'm increasingly preoccupied with seasonal activities with little time left for posting new items. It's likely there'll be little action on this blog at least through the holidays, although serious issues with the unsavory editorial and journalistic practices of the Erie Times-News continue to pile up. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Joe LaRocca

Much ado about nothing

2007-12-04T08:24:00.000-05:00
Remember the anguished wail the Erie Times-News sounded over Summit Township's refusal to give one of its reporter's, on the spot, a copy of its voluminous application for a $14 million grant from the Presque Isle Casino's gaming revenues to cover new infrastructure costs in the township arising from casino activities?

Well there's been a resounding silence from the Times-News since. Seems like its complaint, to quote the Avon bard, was "Much ado about nothing."

Acording to a township spokesperson, a response from the county is expected by year's end. As a reminder, here's my post on the contretemps from Oct 12, 2007, entitled "A lachrymose epistle."

The Erie Times-News mounted its sanctimonious high horse again today with yet another whiny editorial complaining about the Summit Township development authority’s entirely appropriate method of handling one of the newspaper’s reporter’s request for a copy of a voluminous application by the Presque Isle Casino in Summit Township.

The application was for a $14 million county grant to help pay for infrastructure improvements such as roadways, utilities and others necessitated by the installation of the Downs horse racetrack there. At the recent night meeting, the authority voted to forward the completed application to county officials, whose approval of the grant would be required, for their consideration and action.

Despite the newspaper’s lachrymose epistle, its highhanded approach to seeking public information from a public agency at a nighttime meeting of the agency violated all the rules of civil conduct, justifying the low esteem in which newsfolk in general, and those at the Times-News in particular, are held nowadays.[1] The prevailing news and editorial practices of the Erie Times-News indicate why.

As a newspaperman with more than 40 years experience at several newspapers in four states including, among them, The New York Times and, many years ago, The Erie Morning News, I’ve dissected today’s sophomoric Times-News editorial to demonstrate its vacuity.

Editorial: “But when Erie Times-News reporter John Guerriero, acting in the newspaper's role as public watchdog, asked to see the application, the authority said no. It refused a request to allow the public immediate access to a public document.”

Response: This is incorrect.The state law on public records, applicable to municipal subdivisions like Summit Township, provides that public agencies must allow citizens access to public records “during regular business hours.” The meeting in question was held after regular business hours. Nevertheless, the authority did not refuse the reporter’s request to see the application, In fact, the authority’s secretary offered to let him look at it. But he unreasonably insisted on having a copy given to him on the spot. In order to obtain a hard copy, he was told, he would have to submit a request in writing and, if its release were determined to be legal, he would be given a copy after paying reasonable administrative and copying costs, as provided by state law.

Editorial: “This ultimately cost the Erie Times-News $65.50 to get a copy of the document. This would cost you the same, but you can stop by the newspaper to review the document. No charge.”

Response: This is exactly what the authority did, though it wasn’t required to do so by law. It offered to allow the reporter to see the application free of charge at the night meeting. It went above and beyond the legal requirement to accommodate him.

Editorial: “It (what the the authority did) also arrogantly violates the spirit of the law.”

Response: In fact the authority’s action upheld the letter of the law and exceeded its spirit by offering to allow the reporter to see the application without charge at the night meeting, even though it wasn’t required to do so, and its staff and members were fully preoccupied with the urgent business of the meeting. Editorial: “You would no longer have to justify to a public official or bureaucrat why you wanted a public document.”

Response: In fact, existing state law prohibits an agency from asking anyone why he or she wants a copy of any public document. The authority did not ask the Times-News reporter why he wanted a copy of the application.

Editorial: “The new law would begin with the presumption that records held by public agencies are public records.”

Response: The law already ascribes to that presumption, and clearly states what the legal exceptions are to that presumption.

As a multiple award-winning investigative journalist for more than 40 years, I’ve had my battles with public agencies over the release of public information and documents. Despite legal strictures, agency personnel usually have the discretion to waive some or all of them, and can often honor a reasonable request on the spot.

I’ve found that 99 percent of the time, if a reporter approaches agency personnel in a civil manner, they will be more likely to accommodate a request without requiring one to jump through all the legal hoops.

I’ve also tussled with legislative bodies over reforms of freedom of information legislation, and have learned the hard way that it’s a losing battle. The tension between government and those seeking information in its hands will always be with us, with government always holding the upper hand. Reporters and other players seeking access to information in the hands of government and its faceless minions must learn to play by the rules as they are, because the prospects of every changing them are remote or nil.

[1] For example, a new survey from We Media and Zooby Interactive found that 72 percent of survey respondents indicated they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today, primarily because of lack of trustworthiness.

STILL WANTED: A real public editor

2007-12-02T12:33:00.001-05:00
In the guise of a "public editor's" column in today's Erie Times-News, Kevin Cuneo gives us yet another house advertisement heralding the makeover of the paper's weekly Showcase tabloid insert. In retaliation, here's a reprint of my Oct. 21, 2007 post on the subject.

In a recent column, writing as the Erie Times-News’s “public editor,” so-called, Kevin Cuneo introduced by name the “people who represent newspaper’s readers" (Sept. 16, 2007) by serving as volunteers on the Reader Advisory Board. He wrote that they are “the kind of people…who love their daily newspaper, consider it an important part of the community and are never shy about suggesting ways to make it better."

It’s hard for me to believe the board members, who supposedly advise, consult with, discuss and help the editors guide the newspaper's news and editorial content, had anything to do with today’s farcical offering by Cuneo (Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007).Once again, in the guise of the paper’s public editor, Kevin donned his cap as promotions and public relations director to outline a desperation gimmick to increase the company’s declining advertising lineage and readership.

Kevin calls it the “know all about it” program designed to “deliver the details faster and easier than ever before,” (conceding for the first time ever I’m aware of, that the newspaper is less than perfect), apparently a play on the newsboy cry of old, "read all about it." More resembling an in-house ad than a column, today’s “public editor” offering gobbles up about 30 column inches of precious space on the op-ed page which should have been devoted to a serious discussion of public affairs, not to huckstering.

With one broad stroke, Cuneo not only corrupted the position of public editor, but the integrity of the newspaper’s op-ed page as well.If the Times-News reader advisory board is going to serve any useful public service,it could start by urging the newspaper to replace Cuneo with a real public editor who takes the position seriously.

Wrong hed, wrong lede, wrong story

2007-11-29T21:16:00.000-05:00
Newspapers are infamous for often writing headlines which don’t match or contradict the ensuing article. The Erie Times-News and the Associated Press trumped that anomaly today by putting together both a headline and a lede paragraph which said just the opposite of the rest of the story.

It exemplifies the folly I discussed in my Nov. 15 post entitled "The news media and gas prices: a self-fulling prophecy" which dealt with news media's attempts to predict the news, rather than simply reporting it.

The headline written by a Times-News rim rat over the AP story reads: “Gas prices fall in Erie, but another rise may be ahead.” The head was virtually echoed by the lede paragraph, written by the AP, which reads: “Gas prices in Erie fell to as (sic) low as $3.09 yesterday, but the low cost may be short-lived.” ( I sicced the preceding sentence because the bizarre syntactical construction “to as” is, to say the least, a superfluous redundancy.” Either “fell to $3.09,” or “as low as $3.09” would suffice).

The article then went on to say: “The Associated Press is reporting a surge in oil prices after a fire broke out late Wednesday at a pipeline carrying crude oil from Canada to the Midwest. The fire in northern Minnesota killed two workers and resulted in the shutdown of five pipelines, sparking concerns that supplies could be interrupted.”

The preceding paragraph would appear to be heading in the direction of the sense of the headline and the lede. But the very next paragraph clearly limns the inherent contradiction. It reads:

"A spokeswoman for owner Enbridge Energy told the AP that (sloppy writing here: “that” is redundant) the company has oil stored along the line and at refineries, the pipelines could be closed for several days without disrupting the flow of supply (my emphasis).

Hence, it's illogical to assume, as the Times-News and the AP falsely did, that lower prices would rise again based upon the information provided. Just the facts, please.

Mob hysteria fuels runway project

2007-11-28T02:24:00.001-05:00
A contagious mob hysteria has overtaken Erie county council and executive Mark DiVecchio, egged on by the development-at-any cost crowd and its mouthpiece, the Times Publishing Co., as they bind taxpayers to superfluous runway expansion at the Erie airport to expand services already underutilized by Erie’s anemic air passenger market,which should be directed towards more traditional and critical county needs.

All county residents must pay one way or another for the runway project, despite the fact that nearly half the county’s residents outside city and Millcreek/Summit boundaries will derive little or no benefit from it. Most of the relatively few who use air passenger services at all, prefer to drive to Buffalo, Cleveland or Pittsburgh where a more convenient and timely array of flights await to serve them.

Any benefit to them from this wasteful expenditure is negligible or non-existent.While all council members share in the political depravity inherent in the airport runway scheme, the principal culprit is the county executive who is pandering to Times-News editorialists and their sycophants.

Proponents claim the runway project is needed to fuel future economic growth which will enhance the entire county. But no one has produced a single credible survey or study to support their contention, nor anything resembling a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, county officials are flying, so to speak, by the seat of their pants