Terry Cowgill

Making the Rounds

Evidently my earlier post on David Horowitz’s appearance Thursday at Hotchkiss has made the rounds. It’s now posted on Horowitz’s own publication’s website, FrontPage Magazine.

From there, it found its way onto lucianne.com, the website of literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who made headlines during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when she met with Linda Tripp and urged her to take incriminating tapes to independent counsel Ken Starr.

Now, where are my royalties? I need a new cell phone …

You Shoulda Went to Law School

Kudos to my colleague Rick Green of The Hartford Courant, who took first prize in the 2007 National Awards for Education Reporting from the National Education Writers Association. Rick won the award for a column he wrote last year on a substitute teacher in Norwich facing criminal charges because porno pop-up windows inadvertently started appearing on a computer one day in her classroom.

Because of Rick’s fine work (and that of others), the teacher’s conviction was overturned. We like Rick at the LJ because he is one of the only Courant writers (along with Cornwall resident Rinker Buck) who ventures out to the NWC to actually see what’s going on. For his trouble, Rick gets a plaque and $150, which just might be enough to fill his car’s tank come Christmas time.

Horror on the Left: Horowitz and Academic Freedom

In watching David Horowitz’s transformation from lefty radical, confidant of Huey Newton and the son of communists, all the way to conservative Republican, I have always marveled at how deeply the hard left despises him — more so than they do most right wingers.

I suppose it’s because he is seen as a turncoat — someone who used to be one of them, but has peered through the fog and rejected heroes of the left such as Howard Zinn, whom Horowitz condemned last night as “a Stalinist fraud.”

Once Nancy Johnson country, the Northwest Corner is now solidly blue. Still, about 75 people turned out see Horowitz at the Elfers music hall at The Hotchkiss School [see photo at left]. Before he began, Horowitz worked the room, introducing himself to everyone there. I chatted briefly with him about being a community journalist — a job he professed great respect for because “you really get to know the people you cover.”

The appearance was sponsored by the Hotchkiss Republicans and Young America’s Foundation, a conservative young people’s organization Horowitz has supported for years.

Horowitz, a nationally known author and activist who appears regularly as a guest on cable news shows, has long been a champion of academic freedom and has lamented the extent to which academia has been dominated by the left, especially on college campuses, but also in settings such as Hotchkiss.

In her introduction, Natalie Boyse, a junior at the school and a member of the Hotchkiss Republicans, lionized Horowitz in a way that would probably even make the Heritage Foundation blush.

Continue reading Horror on the Left: Horowitz and Academic Freedom…

FYI …

… I am scheduled to appear this morning at 9:10 a.m. on WAMC’s Journalists’ Roundtable. On the agenda will be President Bush’s visit tomorrow to Kent and possibly some NWC real estate talk. Click here to listen live. Just before that at 8:30 a.m., I will will make my usual appearance on Marshall & Mike.

Test Tube Tissue

There’s good news out there for all you vegans who, in actuality, are closet carnivores. PETA is offering a $1 million reward for anyone who can develop a way to manufacture fake meat.

In-vitro meat? It’s an interesting plan, if a bit impractical. Animal cruelty aside, you’d think there would be fewer environmental consequences from producing animal tissue in a test tube than there would be from all the hog, chicken and cattle farms spread across the world.

But any time I read an article about PETA, I’m always struck by how overheated the rhetoric gets from these people. The contest has evidently sparked something of a civil war among PETA members, since many “are repulsed by the thought of eating animal tissue, even if no animals are killed.” Hmmm … I thought one of the tenets of veganism is the cruelty and barbarism in killing animals for human use. So what could be wrong with growing tissue in a tube? No animals suffer and I can still get a cheeseburger at Applebees.

The NYT quoted one PETA member who objected to fake meat as saying, “My main concern is, as the largest animal rights organization in the world, it’s our job to introduce the philosophy and hammer it home that animals are not ours to eat.” Then my question is: “Who does have the right to eat animals?”

On more than one occasion I have watched my daughter feed her gecko. She dumps a few crickets into his cage, he spies one, wiggles his tail a bit, and pounces on his meal (although sometimes he misses and gets a mouthful of sand instead). I agree that animals should not be subjected to gratuitous or unnecessary cruelty, but if I go into my backyard and grab a squirrel with my bare hands, doesn’t it become “mine to eat?”

Does PETA argue that animals shouldn’t eat animals either? Indeed you could make a good case that animals are more cruel to each other than we are to them. I once saw an episode on Animal Planet that left me speechless and nearly sick. As soon as a female chimp had finished giving birth, a couple of males snatched the newborn from her and started munching on its tender tissue. It was easily the most barbaric thing I had ever seen and it was performed by animals on each other.

I think the PETA people should listen to a variation of the mantra of abortion rights advocates in the U.S. and become pro choice: “If you don’t like meat, then don’t eat it.”

All Gaffing Aside

When he appeared before a San Francisco audience earlier this month and characterized rural Pennsylvanians as xenophobic, gun loving bigots, Obama had what I would call a Kinsley moment. The Democratic frontrunner said that’s not what he meant. He had merely misspoken and “mangled” his words. A gaffe, in other words.

Last year, not long after Sen. Joe Biden called Obama “clean and articulate,” Michael Kinsley defined a gaffe brilliantly:

[It’s] when a politician tells the truth — or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when the spin breaks down.

That’s precisely why I (as a journalist) love gaffes. Not because they make the candidate look foolish, as Obama appears now to millions of people, but because gaffes are awkward moments when all the carefully scripted comments and loyal spin completely evaporate in the face of spontaneous ruminations that offer us a window into the candidate’s mind. Sort of like a Shakespearean aside.

Continue reading All Gaffing Aside…

Truck-Off

After sitting through that marathon informational meeting on the proposed new transfer station Saturday in Salisbury and listening to all the complaining about truck traffic, I decided to conduct an experiment.

At 2 p.m. today, I opted to spend an hour sitting in my car in front of the Scoville Library and counting the number of trucks that passed me on Route 44. By “trucks,” I don’t mean panel trucks, UPS delivery vehicles, noisy Harleys or pick-ups. We’re talking heavy equipment here: industrial-sized dump trucks or semi-tractor trailers.

I tried this experiment once when I was editor of The Millerton News during an era when there was so much traffic on the narrow Main Street of that village that elderly people and the young were afraid the cross Route 44 in front of my office (now Irving Farm) and others were known to have had their car doors ripped off the hinges by the lorries passing in front of Phil Terni’s store.

The results of that survey were surprising. If you had to guess, how many heavy-duty dump trucks and tractor trailers would you say pass by my selected Salisbury location in a hour during mid afternoon on a weekday?

I’ll post the results tomorrow. You might be surprised by the number here, too. I’ll also tell you the single worst stretch of road in these parts for truck traffic, hands down.

Death To All Taxes

Leave it to the NYT op-ed page to tell us something we already know. No one likes taxes. But in a commentary today, author Richard Conniff has a notion: since no one likes taxes, let’s just change the name and then there won’t be so much objection.

Of course, the piece is tongue-in-cheek. And I understand that Conniff is trying to make a larger point about the responsibility we all have to make society better and, yes, sometimes that requires tax increases. Who could disagree with that?

But his insistence that it’s the word that people object to rather than the concept strikes me as naive. As I pointed out in a post about labels more than a year ago, almost any word or phrase used to describe something regarded as objectionable or deficient by enough people will eventually take on a negative connotation by the sheer force of repeated use.

So changing the name of taxes, with its “punitive overtones,” to “dues” might make the concept seem a little more palatable. But over time, “dues” would be perceived just as negatively, notwithstanding the fact that the word “is rooted in social obligation and duty.”

What Conniff doesn’t understand is the concept of taxation has a negative connotation, not so much because of greed, but because too often people have seen public funds used for philosophically objectionable purposes (e.g. war, abortion) or wasteful ends (e.g. “bridges to nowhere”).

Nice try, Conniff, but you’re talking about nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.

Bloggin Live on the Scene

I’m sitting here at Falls Village Town Hall where the Board of Finance is meeting. I’m not sure whose network is showing up on my laptop. They don’t have a wireless router in Town Hall, so maybe I am surfing the web courtesy of Sweet William’s Bakery next door or thanks to someone named “kris,” who is also showing up on my Airport menu.

About 15 minutes ago, the board appeared satisfied with the Board of Education’s revised budget. This is after the finance board would not endorse a proposed 2008-09 Kellogg budget that called for the additional full-time teacher. The board directed school officials to make unspecified cuts to get the increase below the proposed 5 percent.

Now the finance board is pleased that the Kellogg crew has gotten the budget increase down to 2.2%. That’s because school officials made a variety of cuts in computers, equipment and supplies, and decided to increase the hours of a part-time teacher to rectify a perceived shortcoming in a multi-age grouping (rather than hire a new full-timer).

P.S. Not earth-shaking news, but it’s an example of how this medium can be used. Have a good night.

Writing Our Obit

Are newspapers really on the ropes? I emerged from two days last week in Albany at a newspaper convention wondering whether the imminent death of print media has been greatly exaggerated. My conclusion: it’s not an exaggeration, especially for the big guys.

As was the case at last year’s NYPA convention, there were some long faces after a series of seminars predicting the painful decline of what’s black and white and red all over. And for good reason.

The approximate figures I heard for 2007: ad revenue (classified and display) at the print divisions of U.S. newspapers declined by almost 10 percent at a time when several major events (e.g. the Iraq war and the run-up to the presidential primaries) no doubt increased the appetite for news nationwide.

But online advertising at those same companies grew by 20%. At about 10%, Web advertising is still a small portion of overall ad revenue, but it is the only sector that consistently shows growth.

True, most print divisions are still profitable, but their stocks are down all over the place because of the dismal projections of future performance. Others newspaper companies such as the dreadful Journal Register Company, which owns just about every other newspaper in this neck of the woods except for the LJ, have taken on so much debt that they can scarcely make their payments.

Continue reading Writing Our Obit…