NEED-TO-KNOW NEWS — For Friday June 13

[Scroll down for full week’s compendia]
 

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY — IN BRIEF
 
A Voice of Baltimore compendium, local and beyond.   Your weekday morning look  (with links)  at late-breaking news, current events, and what will be talked about wherever you may go on Friday:

Hells Angels bikers stopped at a restaurant in Gambrills; Anne Arundel Executive Laura Neuman is criticizing Steve Schuh over it.

•  NEUMAN HITS SCHUH ON HELLS ANGELS VISIT TO RESTAURANT

In April the gang stopped at the Greene Turtle restaurant in Gambrills and left without causing any problems.

Relative to the visit, Neuman brushed aside criticism from Schuh — who is running against her for Anne Arundel County Executive — for allegedly “using the police department for political purposes” to criticize Greene Turtle, calling it “clearly a political statement intended to cover up bad public policy” at the restaurant.

Schuh is the owner of several restaurants managed by GT-Mid States LLC, a holding company for restaurants including Greene Turtle Sports and Grilles in Gambrills, Pasadena and Annapolis. He is the company’s financial adviser and is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the businesses.

Read More at:  The (Annapolis) Capital

•  COUNTY SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT FOUND IN VIOLATION OF ETHICS CODE

Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance took a consulting job with a professional development company that does business with the school system. He promised not to do that anymore.

Read More at:  Baltimore Sun

•  EARLY VOTING BEGINS FOR JUNE 24 MARYLAND PRIMARY

The polls opened statewide Thursday morning at 10 a.m. They will remain open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. through next Thursday, June 19th.

Read More at:  WBAL-TV (Channel 11)

•  MD. JUDGE RULES AGAINST ONLINE BALLOTS FOR BLIND, DISABLED

Citing concerns about ballot security, a federal judge in Baltimore said Thursday he would not require elections officials to provide online absentee ballots for visually impaired and physically disabled voters in the June 24 primary election.

Read more »

The 1968 Baltimore riots required a curfew to bring the city under control. Shown here — Attman’s Deli, on East Lombard Street not far from the Inner Harbor — is just one of many burning and loot- ing sites in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.  But is earlier curfew for teenagers & children really necessary in 2014?

HOME SUPERVISION NECESSARY
TO CORRECT TEEN PROBLEM;
LONG-RANGE SOLUTION NEEDED

But earlier curfew obscures issue
 
By David Maril
 
There’s no doubt that Baltimore’s new curfew law, requiring children and teens to be off the streets by 9 p.m., is well intentioned.

The law is expected to go into effect in a couple of months after the City Council passed it and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake signs it.

The curfew requires anyone under 14 to be indoors by 9 p.m., and teens 14-16 to be off the streets by 10 p.m. during the week and 11 p.m. on weekends.

Well-intended or not, doesn’t this legislation, among the toughest in the country, give Baltimore the feeling of being a police state? And isn’t this a rather simplistic way of addressing the complex issues of safety, crime and the overall welfare of the city’s youths?

Instituting a curfew is a pretty drastic measure that changes the whole mood and feeling of a city.

I remember, as a kid, the negative feeling when a curfew had to be instituted back in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and there were riots taking place in Baltimore. A curfew was certainly called for. It was a period of turmoil, anguish and severe uncertainty, and the murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for president, would soon follow in Los Angeles.

Curfews are usually a last-ditch effort to maintain order and prevent mob violence, looting and chaos in the streets. To use them as part of finding a long-term solution to urban problems is questionable and you have to wonder if local government is overreaching.

Don’t get me wrong. Even though I don’t agree with the curfews, I hope they do work and prove to have a positive impact on safety and the quality of life.

However, I wonder about the following questions:

Read more »

 
NEED-TO-KNOW NEWS — For Friday June 6

[Scroll down for full week’s compendia]
 

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY — IN BRIEF
 
A Voice of Baltimore compendium, local and beyond.   Your weekday morning look  (with links)  at late-breaking news, current events, and what will be talked about wherever you may go on Friday:

Prospective Dundalk residents are being offered $5,000 to buy a home in the East Baltimore County community, an inner-ring suburb of Baltimore.

•  DUNDALK LEADERS OFFER $5,000 ‘INCENTIVE’ TO NEW RESIDENTS

In an attempt to re-brand the historic Baltimore community, local leaders are offering “$5,000 incentive grants” to prospective new homeowners.

Read More at:  WJZ-TV (Channel 13)

•  GANSLER ATTACKS O’MALLEY- BROWN RECORD IN FINAL DEBATE

The third Democratic gubernatorial candidate, State Del. Heather Mizeur, remained positive, refraining from direct attacks on her rivals as the three debated Thursday morning on WOLB-AM-Radio’s Larry Young Show.

Read More at:  WBAL-TV (Channel 11)

•  REPUBLICANS SQUARE OFF IN ARUNDEL EXECUTIVE DEBATE

County Executive Laura Neuman and challenger Steve Schuh, a two-term state delegate, debated this week in Severna Park.

Read More at:  Baltimore Sun

•  ANNAPOLIS MAYOR NAMES ASSISTANT TO DEFUNCT JOB

Bob Agee this week agreed to join the Pantelides Administration as assistant city manager, a job he had already been performing since mid-April — and which is scheduled to be eliminated June 30 under the city’s fiscal 2015 budget.

Read More at:  The (Annapolis) Capital

•  LEGISLATIVE AIDE, BROTHER ACQUITTED IN STATE CAPITAL OFFICE FIGHT

Read more »

Humphrey Bogart (as Sam Spade), left, proposes to Sydney Greenstreet (as Kasper Gutman), right, that Peter Lorre (as Joel Cairo), center, take the role of their “fall guy” in the 1941 film “The Maltese Falcon,” based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett. When the “Fat Man” (Gutman) balks, the “gunsel,” played by Elisha Cook Jr. (not shown), ends up taking the rap instead.

KEY TO PLAYING THE ‘BLAME GAME’:
NEVER ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG;
‘SOMEONE ELSE WAS AT FAULT’

Vet. Affairs’ Gen. Shinseki is prime example;
Martin O’Malley & Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown
play the game by blaming state website

HUMPHREY BOGART PROPOSES ‘FALL GUY’
 
By David Maril
 
Eric Shinseki’s resignation as Veterans Affairs Secretary is the most recent example of when a problem arises, the accepted practice is to find a scapegoat and make it look as if the situation is being corrected by getting rid of that one person.

It’s easier to replace one person than to go into a complex and dysfunctional system and try to correct the specific issues that are causing the problem.

Years ago in the movie “The Maltese Falcon” Humphrey Bogart tells Sydney Greenstreet they have got to have a “fall guy” to take the blame for the crime and murders.

In sports, when the team flops and the players fizzle, the coach or manager usually goes. It’s easier to make one change than get rid of all the talent that isn’t producing.

This type of culture produces too many leaders, in government and the private sector, who focus only on covering their backs and avoiding blame instead of striving for results and honest accountability.

The VA hospital system problems, with unacceptable delays in health treatment being covered up, were much deeper than Shinseki. His big downfall is that he isn’t a politician.

The former general was an easy target for our babbling and pontificating hacks in Congress, who are the masters of pointing the finger and making noise while doing nothing.

Shinseki, who didn’t want to be a distraction to attempts to fix the problems, did the unusual and accepted the blame.

These days, that’s rare.

Read more »

Filmmaker Astra Taylor’s new book, The People’s Platform, propounds that the Internet has failed to bring about the great leveling that some of its apostles foretold but has instead concentrated power in fewer hands than ever before.

FILMMAKER ASTRA TAYLOR
SEES DOOMY FUTURE FOR
INDEPENDENT THOUGHT

Forerunner of Voice of Baltimore
cited as ‘best of both worlds’
 
By Stephen Janis
 
It is a ritual that extends as far back as the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). A new technology appears to transform the way we live, think, and make a living in a mostly productive capacity.

That is, until a critic, in this case Benjamin, looks under the hood and generates a critique that calls into question all the casual assumptions that drive our understanding of it.

Which is where Astra Taylor enters with her new book, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.

She too, like Benjamin, sees politics at play in our digital transformation where others see solely utopian potential. And like Benjamin, she constructs a critique that illuminates how the same process of self- interest that drives development of new technologies can also unravel its best attributes.

Taylor accomplishes this by giving us a true and well-articulated sense of the potential for heightened inequality that naturally emerges from the ashes of transformative change, and how that very idea is tinged with a sense of defensive near-fanaticism that protects the unequal distribution of the benefits.

This is, of course, the dilemma that Taylor and others like her, face. Are we instruments of technological determinism, or free actors who can keep at least a palpable democratic footing in the cybersphere?

Are we participants in the dawn of a new era of total information, or so-called digital serfs toiling away creating a free stream of content for zillionaires like Mark Zuckerberg to monetize?

It’s a dilemma that propels Taylor’s strongest argument. She, like Benjamin, understands that technology is not a neutral tool. She also conveys, like old-school cultural theory superstar Raymond Williams, that technological determinism is a convenient way of disguising the underlying social injustice that arises when any technology radically alters the playing field.

She makes the most coherent argument yet that the most interesting aspect of the Internet is how familiar it really is, and how tethered it is to the existing hierarchies and economic inequalities of the tactile world it was once touted as destined to transcend.

Particularly in the realm of media is where Taylor makes her most insightful arguments.

Read more »