Maggie Brooks is so shocked, shocked that she’s become a Shock Trooper, trampling the First Amendment as she storms the Central Library and threatens to cut off the latter’s county funding. And her small-town mentality – or political cynicism – has given us a nice likeness of Rudy Giuliani vs. the Brooklyn Museum.

What is Brooks’ beef? Goodness gracious, she says, library patrons are being allowed to access “adult” sites, and it’s possible that kids are looking over the pervs’ shoulders. Such are the obsessions of Church Ladies everywhere. They aren’t bothered about small things like attacks on free speech, and the last thing they’d do is consort with groups like American Library Association, which defends freedom of patron internet access. Of course, the ALA has also opposed Bushie designs to spy on library users, and that might give Brooks another incentive to pull a Giuliani. Is she positioning herself for a race for higher office?)

People like Brooks shoot first… but ask no questions later.

What we have here is not real concern for children and community “values,” but an attempt to impose a kind of cyber-apartheid. If Brooks gets her way, Central Library patrons, a large proportion of whom are low-income people with no other internet access, will see only the material their superiors deem safe; meanwhile, the well-heeled, including many Blue Nose Republicans whose money and power keep Brooks and her clones in business, can surf porn securely at home.

I hope this whole business will blow up in the county executive’s face. She’s had too long a honeymoon, almost an endless one, even though her policies are generally indistinguishable from those of her predecessor, Jack Doyle – i.e., retraction of services, maintenance of elite privilege, and a relentless war on the poor.

News of a more uplifting sort: I usually avoid commenting on anything in City Newspaper, though I love the work of my friend Tim Macaluso, the sole remaining staff writer there, and follow the work of George Grella and Frank DeBlase. (BTW, whatever happened to Krestia DeGeorge? Did the heavy hand of CityNews labor policies shove him down the front steps? Has anyone seen anything in the paper about his leaving? I haven’t. You’d think the publisher would at least acknowledge his contributions and wish him well.) But now Rochesterians should check out an article in the Feb. 21-27 issue by Metro Justice organizer Jon Greenbaum, a man who’s definitely got smart things to say about the local economy.

In the article, the first of two on the subject, Greenbaum casts a skeptical eye on orthodoxies like promiscuous tax breaks, which never to seem to go away. And he looks hopefully toward alternative “path[s] to a better business climate,” including the policies that made Finland’s economy one of the healthiest in the world - several notches above the US, in fact.

But this issue of the paper has a dark side, too. After you read Greenbaum’s piece, turn to “The Mail” on page 2. There you’ll find a prime example of “alternative” hypocrisy and screwy thinking, in the form of an editor’s response to a letter about a recent ad. I’m not so interested in this particular ad debate, which centers on some odd, pseudo-edgy Toronto tourist pitches. What bugs me is how the editor, Mary Anna Towler, buttresses her defense with a discreditable theory about commercial speech that she’s trotted out at least once before. The first time around, she used it to justify her running a recruitment ad from the Ku Klux Klan. (Maybe some of you remember the firestorm that followed.) This time, she’s trying to justify running cigarette ads, regardless of how they contribute to disease and death.

Briefly, Towler bases her justification in “a commitment to freedom of speech” and claims the paper is “in the business of fostering communication, not suppressing it.” How noble. Or rather, noble-sounding.

And how wrong. Commercial speech doesn’t have full freedom. It’s rightly subject to all kinds of limitations (truth in advertising, etc.) that don’t apply to political, artistic and other forms of expression. Moreover, newspapers and magazines routinely turn down ads that fail to meet content guidelines. Compare CityNews’ own guidelines for “adult” material, which have apparently evolved over time but are nonetheless much more restrictive than those of the Village Voice and other alt weeklies – not to mention “mainstream” internet sources like craigslist.

So what’s the story? I can’t help thinking that with CityNews there’s still a lot less than meets the eye. And that Mary Anna Towler and Maggie Brooks have more than a little in common.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 15:29 EST

Updated: Sunday, 25 February 2007 12:48 EST

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However we get around town these days, we should be happy that the Center for Disability Rights is getting tough on unshoveled sidewalks. CDR is a group of, by, and for people with disabilities, and CDR staff and members frequently attack any impediment to full citizenship, whether it’s a legal matter related to the ADA or a physical barrier like snow and ice on the most basic of transportation facilities.

I’ve addressed the sidewalk problem for years – most recently in a December 10, 2006 post, which see below. That post was concerned with the relatively early, and basically lightweight snowfall that effectively shut off access to many otherwise well-used sidewalks. (I gave a limited pat on the back to the Memorial Art Gallery for “cleaning up their act” after many missteps, but after observing recent MAG performance this time around, I take it all back. They continue to shortchange the public walks, even as they lavish labor and salt on the drives and walkways within the fence. And MAG’s parent organization, the UR, is still doing a bad job with some of the public walks under its purview along Mt. Hope Ave.)

Maybe now that CDR is making this a very public issue, things will change. The group recently got Mayor Bob Duffy and other City Hall officials out on manual wheelchairs to see how the other half lives. The officials were all impressed by how hard it was to negotiate even a well-maintained walk – the unshoveled walks were no-go areas entirely. Media coverage highlighted the risks disabled folks encounter almost daily when forced to ride their wheelchairs on busy streets. (Check out CDR’s narrative and photos at www.rochestercdr.org/WheelingInTheSnowWithDuffy.html.)

Again, I have to say that this is not a trivial concern. Just as societies are judged by how they treat their vulnerable members, transportation systems (emphatically including pedestrian and wheelchair facilities) should be judged by how they serve the full range of users – and to what extent they insure mobility rights for all.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 21:16 EST

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Just got back from the final report to the community by participants in the Downtown Rochester design charrette. The whole process was great, and I was glad to take a small part in it.

I think many of the ideas that were floated - including the development of new residential tracts (with, hopefully, sufficient affordable housing to meet real folks’ needs and prevent ueber-gentrification), the addition of pedestrian-friendly features, and sensible recovery of badly used public spaces like the Inner Loop – will come to fruition, though it might take longer than most of us would like.

But that’s the rub. Though the charrette (see www.rrcdc.org) is undeniable evidence of how much local energy is available for reclaiming the area within and adjacent to the Inner Loop, the lack of state and national urban policy, and the funds to back up the latter, will keep holding us down. I hardly have to tell you why. The nation’s most notorious multi-trillion-dollar campaign is directed elsewhere – almost anywhere else, in fact, but America’s cities. We are all New Orleans now. Or in another sense, and to some small degree, Baghdad.

Not to trivialize what’s happening in Iraq. I just saw an AP report about US military servicemembers being kidnapped and shot to death January 20 by so-far-unidentified insurgents wearing American uniforms. This tragedy obviously has its elements of farce – I mean, so much for vaunted “security” arrangements at US installations, and for Iraqi military effectiveness. But there’s some irony, too. How many times have we heard about gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms as they committed some atrocity against soldiers or civilians? Of course, we’ve been expected to believe that these gunmen had stolen the uniforms for a disguise – instead of the more likely conclusion, that they wore Iraqi army uniforms precisely because they were in the Iraqi army.

So what do we think now? Was there some collusion that helped the men posing as US military to gain entry and seize their victims? And just as important, was there some skullduggery that kept the facts of the January 20 kidnapping and murder hidden from the American people till after the Commander-in-Chief gave his State of the Union? (Can’t wait to read tomorrow’s papers.) When we’re trying to sort out the lies, we need to start at the top, with the incumbent Great Prevaricator.

We should all stand for a moment of silence in solidarity with the peace marchers who'll be in Washington tomorrow. As I write this, a half dozen buses are preparing to leave from MCC. I wish all the freedom riders well - and I'd be with them if I weren't committed to the Northeast Organic Farming Association meeting in Syracuse this weekend. Which is a form of peacemaking, too, I guess.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 22:57 EST

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Sometimes you’ve got to be a Johnny One-Note. And so it is with the illegality of the Iraq War – and with demands that the US withdraw immediately.

As I’ve said here and elsewhere for many depressing months, the US invasion of Iraq was illegal and immoral from Day One – indeed, even before that, since the mere threat of launching an aggressive war, when the threat is backed with the physical means to wage war, violates at least the spirit of international law. And when a nation actually launches an aggressive war, that nation becomes an international outlaw subject to appropriate countermeasures. (Don’t hold your breath; it’ll be a cold day in the globally-warmed future when “coalition forces” of some kind seize Washington, arrest the commander-in-chief and neutralize the weapons of mass destruction in his arsenal.)

But with very few exceptions, politicians and pundits and academics persist in framing the war question as a tactical and strategic matter only. Whether it’s George Bush and his absurd escalation, or the Congressional Democrats offering another path to “success” in Iraq, or media types across the spectrum editorializing about how to extricate our forces from a quagmire (big news: antiwar Senator Chuck Hagel, who’s way to the left of Hillary Clinton on this one, has dubbed it a “bog”), the acceptable range of options still is so pinched that the real issue – that an aggressor state must cease its aggression immediately and unconditionally – can’t squeak through to consciousness. Yet there it is, for all the world to see; and there’s no doubt that most of the world does have its eyes wide open.

So again to quote antiwar veteran and author Stan Goff: “Exit” isn’t a strategy, it’s an order. This country, though its military-industrial fingers have been almost perpetually crossed, has pledged to follow the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, etc. And none of these covenants allow us to keep doing what we’re doing.

Bush is now trying to confound the opposition by demanding that advocates of withdrawal come up with a “plan,” as if withdrawal isn’t more of a plan that his witless “staying the course.” And the Democrats - with party leaders like Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, and with an agenda that makes them a sort of Junior Chamber of Commerce next door to the Republicans’ Fat Cats Club – will respond with gestures in the House and Senate as their poli-biological clock runs down to 2008.

You can already tell which way the wind and the hot air are blowing by the Dems’ silence on Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s newly announced run for president. How many will get on board with the one true antiwar candidate? Kucinich’s highly detailed withdrawal plan features a relatively quick pullout of US forces and contractors, a regional conference aimed at stabilizing Iraq, an infusion of UN-controlled peacekeepers, actual reparations to be paid by the US and UK, and guarantees of Iraqi sovereignty and control of the country’s oil wealth. (The plan, viewable at http://kucinich.us, has some nice touches of the kind you rarely see from Democratic high officeholders – like a clause about keeping the IMF and World Bank from dictating terms during the reconstruction.)

Let’s hope the past won’t dictate the political future here at home. In 2004, the party and its media enablers scrambled for John Kerry while giving Kucinich a kick in the teeth. Thus they, the supposed realists, set back the cause of peace a couple of years. Talk about a mind-boggle as well as a bog.

Posted by jackbradiganspula at 22:48 EST

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