Published June 23, 2010

NECN has video of Sen. John Kerry’s remarks about the greatest story of military insubordination since Gen. MacArthur in Korea.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal is quoted disparaging the Obama administration in a Rolling Stone article (it’s up, read it).

“As far as I’m concerned, personally, the top priority is our mission in Afghanistan and our ability to proceed forward competently. It will be up to the president of the United States as commander in chief to make the decision as to whether or not he and his national security staff feel that they can do that,” Kerry said Tuesday, after speaking with McChrystal.

“All of us would be best served by just backing off, staying cool and calm, not succumbing to the normal Washington twitter about this.”

Or the Washington Twitter about this: McChrystal is a trending topic.

Update: Kerry is awfully gentle, given that McChrystal’s people accused him of “diplomatic incoherence”:

Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, “turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it’s not very helpful.”

Update: President Obama has accepted McChrystal’s resignation.

Published June 22, 2010

After I wrote about hiring more Sgt. Homer’s, Elaine Driscoll of the Boston Police Department sent me some valuable demographics about the city’s ranks.

“The Police Commissioner has the most diverse command staff in the history of the Boston Police Department,” she said in an e-mail.

Here is BPD data on ethnicity and gender within its sworn ranks:

Continue reading →

Published June 22, 2010

First, stop what you’re doing and read about the fascinating quest of Margaret Sullivan, a Boston police historian who discovered a tiny clue in an old book and wound up rewriting the city’s racial history.

His name was Horatio J. Homer. Sergeant Homer. He joined America’s oldest police force in 1878 and served with distinction for 40 years. He was buried in an unmarked grave and forgotten.

After reading Kevin Cullen’s column in the Globe today, I called Larry Ellison, the president of MAMLEO, the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers.

“I thought it was amazing,” Ellison told me. “I had no idea that any persons of color were on the force that far back.”

Until recently, the official record showed that Boston hired its first black cop in 1919, after the police strike. Not so.

Fast forward to 2010. The BPD’s ranks still aren’t nearly as diverse as city itself. Last August, Bianca Vazquez Toness reported on the department’s ambitious efforts to diversify. Despite the department’s progress, very few minorities make it to supervisory positions.

Of the most recent batch of 50 police sergeants, Ellison told me, one was black.

“I was very pleased that (Homer’s appointment) was that far back but also troubled by the fact the way things are going now. There won’t be many Sgt. Homers in the Boston Police Department,” Ellison said. “It’s just as hard to be promoted now as it was then.”

Of the 2,000 Boston cops, Ellison said, there is one captain of color. There are no female captains and no female lieutenants.

“What better way (to honor Homer) than to have a police force in 2010 reflective of progress?”

I have a request in to interview Commissioner Ed Davis, who has addressed this matter candidly before. Meanwhile, Ellison and MAMLEO are filing suit to challenge the antiquated sergeant’s test, which Ellison said favors cops who are good at studying for the test, not those most qualified to lead.

Published June 22, 2010

Wondering where your fundraising dollars go? Here the people and stories our journalists are chasing on a warm Boston Tuesday:

• Bob Oakes and Lisa Tobin are examining whether the city has succeeded in making the Rose Kennedy Greenway a gateway to the waterfront. Their story kicks off a new WBUR series about Boston Harbor called “Look Out.” (Don’t miss Adam Ragusea’s related but different story from Radio Boston a few weeks back.)
• Curt Nickisch is comparing and contrasting the way local Brazilian and German communities watch the World Cup. Should be a lot of fun. Later today he’ll cover Venture Summit East at Harvard, a conference for VC’s. Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker will speak there at noon.
• David Boeri is repackaging his story on the budget troubles of Gardner, the defunct chair capital of the world, for NPR. Good story, worth a listen.
• Sonari Glinton is reporting on potential state budget cuts to special education.
• Bianca Vazquez Toness is covering a planned protest of a state amendment that would bar undocumented immigrants from in-state tuition.
• Andrea Shea is profiling the key players in Massachusetts’ struggling creative economy.
• Kevin McNicholas, a WBUR freelancer, is covering a new conference with opponents to legalized casino gambling in Massachusetts.
• Intern Carolyn Cruthirds is attending a news conference with the Boston TenPoint Coalition, where leaders will declare a gang violence ceasefire as part of the semi-annual “Season of Peace.”
• I’m trying to book Marc Rotenberg, the Internet privacy guru, for a Radio Boston story about Google’s Street View cameras collecting personal data from home Wi-Fi networks. The Massachusetts attorney general is now involved.

All plans subject to change, etc.

Published June 21, 2010

The Globe’s Andrew Ryan reports:

Four Boston libraries targeted for closure at the end of the summer have won a reprieve and will remain open for an undetermined amount of time, according to sources in the Menino administration.

The branches will still be closed, just not as soon. The city has not figured out what to do with the buildings once they’re vacant.

Library officials have said that trimming some branches is not the worst thing the world — and that keeping busy branches open on Sunday, for example, may be a better use of city money. Friends of the BPD are emboldened by the final firefighters contract, which costs the city a few million less than expected after union concessions.

Published June 21, 2010

We spend a lot of time thinking about when and how people listen to 90.9 FM and read wbur.org. It helps us figure out where to invest people and money.

Some conventional wisdom: Our biggest radio audience listens during “morning drive” — 6-9 a.m. — the time people are getting ready for and then driving to work. Our biggest online audience reads (and listens) on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. — the time most people are at the office.

Now we’re turning our attention to moms. Surely moms everywhere read my blog, so our news director, Martha Little, a mother of two in Brookline (and eight in the newsroom), poses this question to you, Mom:

I moved here last September from Los Angeles, where I had been the senior editor of NPR’s defunct midday news magazine, Day To Day. I’m also a mom with two kids who is finding that Boston is an infinitely easier town to live in than Los Angeles. To wit: I ride my bike to work, and my kids walk to school. In LA, one kid rode the bus 45 minutes to school, the other 20 minutes. And I had a half-hour commute at 5 o’clock in the morning.

I’m trying to get a handle on the lives of other women in and around Boston. I would love to hear from women in the Hub to get a sense of your life and what you might want to hear on the radio and when you want to hear it? For example, with WBUR’s latest series, on college loan debt, we got a huge response from parents who are coping with debt themselves.

We’re wondering if we played that particular series at the right time in the morning. Is it hard to listen to WBUR in the morning getting ready for a long day? What are the times when you’re best able to listen to WBUR? For example, is the 7 a.m. hour busier than, say, the 8 a.m. hour?

Do respond us in the comments. Hey, moms, what do you think about a tweetup at the station?

Update: Check out the discussion on Facebook.

Published June 20, 2010

Or microburst. Or macroburst. Does anyone know what that was?

I was in the middle of the Arnold Arboretum in my flip flops when the water came pouring down. It was majestic to behold, once I found shelter. Just listen to that sound. The thunder and lightning arrested me.

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Published June 18, 2010

Solstice isn’t until next week. But Radio Boston’s Friday news in review roundtable regulars were already in a summer mood today when they shared their favorite stories of the week.

Peter Canellos, editorial page editor of the Boston Globe, whetted my appetite for some street food on the Greenway. There’s been debate over whether to require local-only food, or to bring in the tried-but-true kid-friendly hot-dog vendors. Canellos thinks they came up with a good compromise: Ethinic food carts. Put a little spice into downtown Boston where Irish pubs currently dominate. (No offense to my Irish friends. And anyway, I’ve been told that curry is so popular, it’s become the national dish of your neighbors across the Irish Sea.) I’m hoping for kebabs, burritos and sushi. Yum.

If you’re wondering what to do with all those boxes of bottled water you bought when greater Boston was under its boil-water order, Alison Lobron of Commonwealth Magazine suggests heading out to the Cape. Falmouth was put under a boil-water order on June 16 when high levels of coliform bacteria were found in the local water supply. Alison says you can enjoy a weekend on the Cape, use up all that bottled water, and maybe even help out a local who doesn’t relish the idea of cart-to-cart combat over supplies of water at the grocery store.

My hubbub takes us south of the border, to Newport, R.I. The Cliff Walk there is one of my favorite summer strolls. Beautiful views, crashing surf, peeks into the lawn parties of the ostentatiously rich. Oh, and what about the fence? It’s not there yet, but a recent Rhode Island Supreme Court ruling has prompted talk of fencing off much of the Cliff Walk. In April, the court ruled that Simcha Berman of Brooklyn, N.Y., could sue property owners after the ground gave way under his feet on one section of the walk. The fall left Berman paralyzed from the neck down. The court found that Newport had long been aware of the Cliff Walk’s “latent dangers,” including erosion on the trails. So now, the possibility of putting up more fencing is the talk of the Walk.