Another People's Republic breaks rank

Berkeley recently voted down a measure that would have welcomed freed Guantanamo Bay detainees to come live in their sunny city, thus leaving Amherst (and Leverett) high on the shortlist for providing Bed & Breakfasts for those cleared of terrorism charges, but still under confinement at our leased Cuban military base.

Perhaps Amherst Town Meeting should have dispatched Ruth Hooke to the Berkeley City Council chambers to pitch the proposal, and while there she could also have advocated on behalf of Amherst's most recent foray into national defense policy decisions: the "Bring the War Dollars" home resolution.

Accuracy in reporting

UPDATE Wednesday morning The Boston Herald Screams

UPDATE Tuesday 10:00 PM The Boston Globe steps up

UPDATE 2:30 PM: So apparently it was not the Umass bureaucrats who reconsidered domestic terrorist Raymond Luc Levasseur's speech and showed some spine by allowing it on Thursday. It was those damn Professors. And you can certainly tell that from the "official" press release issued by the highly staffed "news office"--penned by former Gazette reporter now turned PR flack--Patrick Callahan:

Umass Office of News and Media relations, grudgingly, "reports"
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UPDATE: 11:30 AM: So I'm seeing by Google news realtime updates that UMass has now reconsidered the cancellation of convicted domestic terrorist Raymond Luc Levasseur and his presentation is back on. Damn! Nice to see Umass bureaucrats have a spine.
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So as if the People's Republic of Amherst is not getting hammered enough by conservative talk radio because the Gitmo story gets misrepresented that Amherst is embracing terrorists, now our local newspaper has to join in.

Town Meeting did not invite "Ravil Mingazov" to move to Amherst. They invited detainees who had been "cleared" of any wrongdoing and were free to leave Gitmo. In fact the word "cleared" appeared four times in the warrant article overwhelmingly approved by Town Meeting last week.

Yes, Ruth Hooke (the original petitioner) did mention his name as a possible candidate but he was not specifically mentioned in the article Town Meeting passed.

And maybe if Federal authorities read the venerable Daily Hampshire Gazette they will not clear Mingazov and then he will fail to qualify as "cleared" and as a result would not be invited to live in Amherst.

The Springfield Republican reports (with a more accurate headline and lead)

Incoming!

WBUR Boston radio reports (NPR affiliate)
Cartoon in today's Amherst Bulletin (also loaded with Letters and Columns on Gitmo)
Ruth Hooke addresses Amherst Town Meeting

UPDATE: 9:20 AM So conservative Boston talk radio station 96.9 WTKK called and will be interviewing me at 10:10 AM. Google search them as they stream live
Looks like this story hit the AP wire about an hour ago as the Boston Herald just published it and the 'Comments' are already pouring in (not overly complimentary of course).
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ORIGINAL POST last night 10:30 PM

So batten down the hatches, dig the foxhole a little deeper or fire up the Romulan cloaking device, as Amherst will once again become Ground Zero for conservative scorn. The "advisory" article welcoming "cleared" Gitmo refugees passed Town Meeting muster rather overwhelmingly.

Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe gave a "minority report," but it was more an advisory to Town Meeting that she has done numerous interviews with all manner of mainstream media and heard from Umass officials concerned about safety and parents threatening to scratch Umass and Amherst College off their list of prospective schools.

Being a former PR flack she knows that the real story is not getting out--and that Amherst is being misportrayed as providing safe haven for terrorists.

Within hours of the horrific attacks on 9/11 democratic and republican lawmakers lined up at the capital building and sang "God bless America." Tonight I felt like trying to get Town Meeting to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, especially the closing: "with liberty and justice for all."

Princess Stephanie reads an apologetic piece.

The Gitmo shuffle

Obviously the cataclysmic events of 9/11 brought national attention to the Amherst Select Board decision from the night before restricting the display of 29 commemorative American flags in the downtown.

Around 6:00 AM that morning the AP sent out a brief one-paragraph article about the Amherst town officials decision from the night before, just proving how slow a news day 9/11 first dawned.

Unfortunately some of the BIG media (Fox and CNN) got the story wrong--probably in the confusion of what started going terribly wrong at 8:46 that morning. As a result, some folks watched the Twin Towers fall and then heard a story about a small town in western Massachusetts restricting the rights of residents and businesses to fly the American flag. You can just imagine the hate mail that flowed into Amherst Town Hall that week.

Well as that old saying goes, "here we go again." This Gitmo detainees to Amherst story hit the AP wire on Tuesday (curiously they did not carry it a month ago when the Springfield Republican first covered the story) and within hours the story broke about Federal authorities arresting a Sudbury, Massachusetts resident for plotting to attack shopping malls (probably in the Boston area.) Not a good mix for Amherst.

But, once again, the story is not always presented fairly. Some people make is sound as though Amherst is laying out the welcome mat and promising to harbor Osama Bin Laden. The two men now named by Ruth Hooke are, rightfully, getting great scrutiny and may not pass the smell test.

But the actual Warrant article does not name names and does say four times that the person or persons (does not even mention a number) will have been "cleared." Surely out of all the people left at Gitmo, there does have to be one or two who are completely innocent. Therefore they are not "terrorists".

So if they do ever come to Amherst, the town would not be coddling terrorists.

Michael Graham rips Amherst on radio and in print. Ouch.

Howie Carr Piles on. Double ouch.

And now even the Wall Street Journal. Triple ouch.

The Amherst Bulletin speaks, in their wimpy sort of of way.

Ruth Hooke on welcoming Gitmo guys to Amherst

Whew! So yesterday's 443 hits set a new world's record (about half coming from Boston radio station WTKK 96.9) surpassing last year's 412 when the AP covered Ms. Awad resigning as Amherst Select Board member citing stalking and harassment by little old me as the reason. This of course set the stage for a replacement election last October and a reorganization of the Select Board where Princess Stephanie ousted Gerry Weiss as Chair.