Section: Editorial

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Crotonblog Responds to Comments on the Essay on Civility

May 31, 2008

We thank the too-few commentators who responded to our request that critics define civility for us—but none ventured an opinion on the meaning of civility. Unfortunately, the essay generated more heat than light. Here is our response to the comments on civility and censorship in the chronological order in which they were posted:

“sdavidson”
This critic led off with, “Calling Abe Zambrano stupid is not civil. You can say that he did something stupid, but to imply that he himself is stupid is uncivil, and indeed stupid.” What Crotonblog had said was, “How can one courteously say that Treasurer Abe Zambrano, now bucking for Village Manager after only four years as Village Treasurer, was stupid and unprofessional for sending out phony water bills?”

We don’t know what the commentator’s definition of “stupid” is. “The Random House Dictionary of the English Language” defines stupid as “slow to learn or understand; obtuse” and “tending to make poor decisions or careless mistakes.” We therefore stand by our guns in the use of the word. Stupid is the proper word to describe someone who aspires to appointment as Village Manager and makes a rash, unprofessional judgment call. And if the village board should consider Mr. Zambrano for the post of Village Manager, we urge the board members to take into account that his unprofessional act was reported in newspapers all across the United States and made Croton a national laughing stock.

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The Genesis of the Crotonblog-NCN Feud

May 27, 2008

Crotonblog is grateful for the several expressions of loyalty by its readers that are posted elsewhere on the blog. So that readers do not get the impression that we have a pathological fixation with the back-alley three-card monte game the NCN forums represent, we hasten to explain the reasons for our adversarial position.

It all began when Crotonblog was mercilessly attacked on the original NCN’s Crotonblog rip-off, called Croton Blog by NCN, and this continues to this day on its replacement Croton forum. The trumped-up charge is “Crotonblog is tearing the village of Croton apart.” At village board meetings, Croton’s mayor, Gregory Schmidt, and trustee Thomas P. Brennan also have made this slanderous charge. And Mayor Schmidt, in an explosive outburst before customers at the Black Cow coffee house, lost his cool and repeated the hyperbolic charge before astonished customers.

On NCN’s Croton forum, Crotonblog’s respect for the principle of anonymity has been falsely compared to regrettable instances of false identity creation or identity theft on the Internet that have led to fatal consequences. It is interesting to note that the only recorded abuse of anonymity on Crotonblog was committed by one Maria Cudequest, who is now the principal contributor to NCN ‘s Croton forum.

Crotonblog’s initial reaction was to ignore the NCN forum’s incessant attacks. However there comes a time when an annoying horsefly’s buzzing persistence can no longer be ignored, and so we swatted it. Based on solid research, we exposed the ridiculous charade of the NCN forums in the article entitled, “The Phony Blogging Activities of The North County News.” We call this “running up the rattlesnake flag,” the famous 1775 Gadsden Flag. Its motto, “Don’t Tread on Me,” told King George III to exercise caution—angry colonists can strike back.

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The Phony Blogging Activities of The North County News

May 23, 2008

At first glance the forums of The North County News seem to be thriving. Closer examination, however, reveals that the whole operation is a Potemkin village. For readers unfamiliar with the allusion, so-called Potemkin villages were fake settlements consisting of little more than facades erected at the direction of Russian courtier Grigori Alexandovich Potemkin to impress Empress Catherine the Great during her visit to the Crimean peninsula in 1787.

The NCN forums had their inception in a single blog begun in 2006 by that newspaper, which boldly appropriated the name Croton Blog. We say, “boldly appropriated” because Crotonblog had commenced operation a year earlier, and its name was protected by copyright. The NCN blog’s sole purpose was to accommodate the small number of former contributors to Crotonblog who were unhappy with its policy of accepting anonymous contributions and comments. Eventually sensing that its initially naïve policy of insisting that all contributors must reveal their identities and sign their own names was inhibiting reader participation, the newspaper decided to follow the practice of the blogging world and accept anonymous contributions and comments on a new next generation of blogs.

Accordingly, in November of last year, the Croton Blog was mercifully killed and a dozen forums were set up—ten for communities in northern Westchester, one in southern Putnam County, and another to serve the whole of Westchester County. The result of this new effort to create a presence in northern tier communities has been a mixed bag, to say the least. Although a handful of Croton residents hijacked the Croton forum and now monopolize it like a chummy private fiefdom, the results for the other forums have been desultory.

Consider these statistics: In the seven months since the forums were started, of the eleven communities selected to host forums, three (Chappaqua, Mt. Kisco and Pleasantville) have had zero participation by readers. The postings in three other communities (Somers, 1; Katonah, 2; and Ossining 5) can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Here’s the rest of the dismal picture: Cortlandt, 11; Putnam Valley 12; Peekskill, 17, Yorktown, 21—or a total of only 69 postings. What is so curious about this numbers is that, with the exception of one Katonah posting by a resident of Croton about the Katonah Museum, someone in the employ of the North County News made each of these 69 spurious postings.

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On Civility and Censorship: An Essay and a Challenge

May 12, 2008

From time to time, Crotonblog has been attacked by commentators and by a competing chatroom on the grounds that there should be more “civility” in the content of its editorials, contributions and reader comments. Readers only have to look at the content of other media—partisan TV commentators and stations, partisan columnists and newspapers, and, most of all, the ultra-partisan exchanges between competing politicians—to know that civility is a scarce commodity everywhere in the United States, especially in the winner-take-all world of politics.

Mark Twain is reputed to have made the sage observation that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Crotonblog would paraphrase this to, “A few critics complain about a lack of civility on Crotonblog—but nobody seems to be able to define what they mean by civility.” Should Crotonblog be more civil than radio, TV, newspapers and magazines, the Internet, and political discourse? Compared to the Fox TV news channel or the New York Post, we are eminently civil, despite the fact that it is difficult to view kindly those who judge a person’s patriotism on the basis of his willingness to wear a flag pin. Their narrow-minded attitude would make Nikita Khrushev one of the most patriotic leaders of all time. It was he who pioneered the whole flag-pin nonsense.

Where We Stand
First, let us state Crotonblog’s position: We do not censor speech, however derogatory, mean-spirited, or offending it may be. We do attempt to intercept statements that could be libelous, but since the targets of criticism or satire on Crotonblog have been public officials or public figures, and because satire cannot be libelous, we have seen almost nothing that has had to be excluded. We can exert no initial control over comments made through the TypeKey commenting authentication service.

Having encouraged readers to speak their minds freely without let or hindrance, we are made uncomfortable by any suggestion that we should pass judgment on what others may say or write, or the manner in which it is expressed. Regrettably, we have been largely unsuccessful in our campaign to get commentators to restrict their comments to the subject of an article or letter to the editor, and to refrain from attacking one another.

It is our considered feeling that we need open dialogue in this country more than ever, especially after the repeated assaults on freedom of speech by the present administration under the guise of the global war on terrorism. Moreover, we see no advantage to attempting to define what can be said under arbitrary rules for so-called civility when no such rules govern the public discourse being carried on everywhere around us. Wait till you see the excesses of the coming electoral campaign.

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Meet Tony Conetta: Robert Moses He Ain't

May 4, 2008

One almost expects to be assailed with fear mongering by politicians in the nation’s capital. Scare tactics, a standard operating procedure in Washington, are de rigueur nowadays. But one doesn’t expect to experience them in the Village of Croton-on-Hudson from a would-be contractor to the village.

Yet that’s exactly the unseemly tactic Anthony O. Conetta, 60, vice president of the Long Island-based engineering firm of Dvirka and Bartilucci, tried to employ at last Monday’s sparsely attended work session of the village board. Dvirka and Bartilucci have done work for this village before. They should know better.

It seems that some 700 parking spaces may continue to be lost to use from time to time if the flood-prone area of the parking lot (Sections G and H) at the Croton-Harmon station is not renovated at a cost to Croton of more than $2 million. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, has already unequivocally turned down Croton’s application for a grant to make improvements that would forestall future flooding events.

The federal government is obviously not anxious to open its coffers for the repair of a parking lot built over a filled-in marsh and with a long history of flooding—one that probably should never have been placed there. Where were environmentalists when this wetland area was originally filled in? Croton is appealing the decision, but getting an inept FEMA to acknowledge that it made a mistake is unlikely. It still won’t admit that anything was wrong with the hundreds of thousands of formaldehyde-contaminated trailer homes it supplied to Katrina hurricane victims, causing many to sicken or die.

Dvirka and Bartilucci have their eyes fixed on a heftily remunerative contract to raise sunken portions of the parking lot by five or six feet. Mr. Conetta conjured up his mushroom cloud at Monday night’s work session. Unethically trying to scare board members and the public, he claimed that the loss of the sinking parking spaces would mean that some 700 current parkers would be driving to New York City instead of taking the train.

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Where We Stand: Crotonblog Responds to Mayor Schmidt's Irrational Outburst

April 27, 2008

In the period euphemistically characterized as “citizen participation” at Croton’s village board of trustees evening meeting on April 21, Kevin Davis, 18, made a reference to this being the period known as Passover. He then asked Mayor Gregory Schmidt and the trustees a series of questions keyed to numbered matzos in a box of matzos he handed to board members. The questions precipitated a heated exchange between the Mayor and Mr. Davis, during which the mayor’s voice rose increasingly higher, sounding more like a coloratura soprano the more excited he became. Maria Callas would have been envious of his range.

First, we want to make clear that Crotonblog holds no brief for Kevin Davis’s unfortunate introduction of a religious holiday and religious symbolism into a purely secular discussion. Mr. Davis is a young man with laudable aspirations to political activism. Unfortunately, he has not yet learned the wisdom embodied in the well-known Madison Avenue maxim called “the KISS Principle.” (“Keep It Simple, Stupid” is what the acronym KISS stands for.)

And, to give the devil his due, Mayor Schmidt was in the right in declining to submit to a finger-pointing interrogation of him and the members of the board of trustees about their participation in an activity called “ghostwriting.” Properly speaking, a ghostwriter is someone who writes a literary work for another, usually for money or other consideration, and who yields claim of authorship to that other person. Quite frankly, we do not know where Mr. Davis was going with this line of questioning, although we believe it was an attempt on his part to get one or more of the Republican trustees to admit to posting messages anonymously on the NCN chat room that masquerades as a blog.

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The Facts Behind the Thornton Case

April 14, 2008

Because so much misinformation is being bandied about what we now call the Thornton Case, Crotonblog should like to set the record straight by recounting the facts as they occurred:

1. The Thorntons were among the original group who founded Crotonblog, which began publishing on January 14, 2005.

2. Little more than a year later in March of 2006 the Thorntons decided to resign from the group. Their reason was they objected to an anonymous comment that accused a Croton trustee of helping himself to a can or cans of the soft drink Dr. Pepper from the vending machine in the Stanley H. Kellerhouse Municipal Building. The Thorntons and Mr. Steinberg worship at the same church. Mr. Steinberg had been appointed a trustee by Mayor Schmidt upon the latter’s election as mayor. Mr. Steinberg was decisively defeated in his bid for election as trustee in the following election.

3. Crotonblog accepted the Thornton’s resignation with regret.

4. On April 5, 2008, Crotonblog received an e-mail from Mrs. Thornton to the effect that an e-mail from a friend in which the writer had the impression that they were still associated with Crotonblog. She suggested that Crotonblog “announce” their earlier resignation and describe Crotonblog as “The New Crotonblog.”

5. Crotonblog does not publish a traditional masthead listing staff and ownership as newspapers do, and, like newspapers, neither do we report the resignation of individual staff members. Announcing the resignation of the Thorntons more than two years earlier hardly seems like a news item of interest to Crotonblog’s readers.

6. Accordingly, in our response to Mrs. Thornton on April 6, we pointed out that since receipt of such messages by the Thorntons was surely infrequent, it would seem to be more practicable if the Thorntons merely announced in their response that they no longer had any connection to Crotonblog. We declined, as a matter of policy, to publish the requested news item.

7. Mr. Thornton responded with a comment left on Crotonblog, and in reply we reiterated our feelings about making a news item of their resignation.

The above states the facts as they pertain to the resignations of the Thorntons from Crotonblog, more than two years ago. The Thorntons were never “banned” from Crotonblog, as one of the lies being circulated on a local chatroom has it. And it is a matter of record that the Thorntons initiated all actions relating to the termination of their association with Crotonblog. The Thorntons have had no association with Crotonblog since March of 2006.

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When Is a Blog Not a Blog?

March 31, 2008

The answer: When it’s virtually a chatroom.

Out of curiosity we looked in at The North County News blogs, particularly the one that would like to be a competitor of Crotonblog. It has a lazy, East European quality about it that we found off-putting. It turns out that The North County News blogs are not true blogs, but really are virtual “chat rooms”—a derisive term that some North County News posters from time to time have applied to Crotonblog, a true blog. What they call “forums” have been set up for a few of the communities in the newspaper’s coverage area, but many have simply ignored the opportunity to participate in the forums.

In fact, of the dozen regional forums created by the newspaper, only one seems to show any real activity—the one devoted to Croton-on-Hudson. It’s preoccupied mainly with what can best be described as “talk between ships,” and a few individuals monopolize this boring back-and-forth chatter. Some of the monopolizing individuals are former Crotonblog users—or rather Crotonblog abusers who later took Crotonblog to task for allowing anonymous postings.

Crotonblog is always interested in statistics, so we compiled a few about the usage of the North County News forums. Here’s the doleful picture:

Town	Topics	Posts
Chappaqua	0	0
Cortlandt	4	4
Croton-on-Hudson	73	449
Katonah	2	2
Mt. Kisco	0	0
Ossining	2	2
Pleasantville	0	0
Peekskill	10	10
Putnam Valley	6	6
Somers	1	1
Yorktown	12	12
Westchester County	7	7

We were interested in the names used by posters on The North County News forum set aside for Crotonites and their frequency of use. Here are the most frequent posters:

Rank	Name	Posts	Since
1.	Maria	183	November 8, 2007
2.	Bob Wintermeier	73	November 12, 2007
3.	Carolyn G.	59	January 19, 2008
4.	Notorc	57	November 12, 2007
5.	William b r	42	November 16, 2007
6.	Elise Sasso	10	November 22, 2007

Readers who may be interested in back-fence gossip between this small clique may find tidbits of chitchat there. Frankly, we found it all very tiresome. Since only some 140 days have passed since November 8, it is evident that at least one poster has been working overtime.

Some of the posters are using less than their “true legal names,” the former requirement of The North County News predecessor blog. These are the same people who raised a stink over Crotonblog’s acceptance of both signed and anonymous postings, a common practice on the Internet. For some reason, they are more interested in the identity of the person who made a comment rather than the content of the comment.

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Another North County News 'Goof of the Week'

March 22, 2008

In a feature story on the Croton election, we find the following in this week’s North County News:

Olver said he plans to spend his first days in office meeting village staff and listening to their concerns. He also plans to pour over the budget as hearings begin March 24 and culminate with the board’s vote on April 28.

Pour, of course, means to spill from a container. Pore means to study intently. One pores over a book, but pours water. In the North County News excerpt one is tempted to ask what Mr. Olver intends to pour over the budget.

After Bruce Apar, who likes to show off his title as Editor + Publisher, took over the North County News, he managed to eject the prize-winning staff of the newspaper and substituted an entirely new staff, largely neophytes to the newspaper business like himself. He now has clear-cut proof of the adage that you get what you pay for. From our vantage point it’s obvious that he should have given them all spelling and comprehension tests.

Recently, the North County News advertised in the Pennysaver for several weeks seeking a copy editor. The newspaper definitely still needs a good copy editor.

Here’s what The American Heritage Dictionary says about pour and pore:

pour

v.tr.

1. To make (a liquid or granular solid) stream or flow, as from a container.
2. To send forth, produce, express, or utter copiously, as if in a stream or flood: poured money into the project; poured out my inner thoughts.

v.intr.

1. To stream or flow continuously or profusely.
2. To rain hard or heavily.
3. To pass or proceed in large numbers or quantity: Students poured into the auditorium.
4. To serve a beverage, such as tea or coffee, to a gathering: We need someone to pour.

[Middle English pouren, perhaps from Old North French purer, to sift, pour out, from Latin pūrāre, to purify, from pūrus, pure; see peuə- in Indo-European roots.]

pore

intr.v. pored, por·ing, pores

1. To read or study carefully and attentively: pored over the classified ads in search of a new job.
2. To gaze intently; stare.
3. To meditate deeply; ponder: pored on the matter.

[Middle English pouren.]

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Notes on the Recent Croton Election

March 19, 2008

We were tempted to begin this editorial with the trite phrase, “The people have spoken.” But the people have done more than speak in yesterday’s election. By an almost two-to-one margin, the people of Croton let out a roar of disapproval and unhappiness with the Republican Party for trying to fob off a pair of ersatz candidates for the post of Trustee.

We accept that Mr. Streany spent many hours training for and being on call as a volunteer firefighter. We accept that for many years Mrs. Minett has been unhappy with one situation after another in the Village and has publicly expressed her discontent. But in each case, voters recognized that such credentials alone were not enough to qualify these candidates to formulate the policies of the Village and to dispense its funds. In addition, however, it was one candidate’s unsavory baggage and the other candidate’s perpetually narrow contrariness and lack of experience in dealing with anything more complicated than a household budget that doomed them both to such a decisive defeat.

That old warhorse Winston Churchill had an expression that fits this election. He said, “The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.” This brings to mind another Churchill quotation: “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.” The Democrats may think that the battle is over and the time has come to be magnanimous. This is sheer nonsense. The battle for the next election in 2009 has just begun. The 2008 election was the first skirmish in that battle. Only the same spirited willingness of the Democrats to carry the attack to the opposition can hope to eject the do-nothing Schmidt administration from office.

No matter how uncomfortable we make Trustee Brennan and others with political ambitions, Crotonblog will continue to be an aggressive force for truth. And since when is the truth “mudslinging?” Our research in public records has revealed information that, while embarrassing for those under our spotlight, has never been refuted. We shall continue our investigative research in future campaigns and let the devil take the hindmost.

We are not going away. If future candidates have anything questionable in their past, our advice to them is to reconsider their decisions to run for office. Harry Truman once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Crotonblog would modify that to, “If you can’t stand the spotlight, get off the stage.”

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