Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

Catching up on some things missed while Politics as Usual was out of action for a few weeks.

I approached House Speaker William Murphy after the RIPEC annual dinner last week and became what must be the 250th reporter to ask him whether he will leave the speakership early to make it easier for his second-in-command, Majority Leader Gordon Fox, to succeed him.
Murphy gave me the same response he seems to have given everyone else, about how he will be on the rostrum in January and will be there “through the budget.” But he pointedly did not say he was going to finish out the complete term until a new speaker is elected in January, 2011.
He expressed surprise and a bit of exasperation about the rumors that have arisen about his future plans and he wondered aloud about how such stories get started.
Well, I can help you out with that one, Mr. Speaker.
When you give artfully crafted, Clintonesque replies to direct questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no, the rumors will start flying.
Such lawyerly caution in the response fairly begs the listener to conclude, “Well, he’s got something up his sleeve.”
Staying until the budget is passed usually means until the General Assembly adjourns for the year, but as we have seen this year, that ain’t necessarily so. Is this marathon recess -- we’ll come back in July, no, September, no, mid-October, no, the end of October – going to play itself out again next year? Is it going to become a legislative tradition? 
Is Murphy, pleading the pressures of the economy, going to push through a budget mid-spring and bug out in April or May?
It’s all great grist for the rumor mill. 
I did have one idea that would focus attention on the speaker’s situation and could help the state’s budget woes at the same time. The R.I. Lottery could introduce a pool-type game — the kind you see at work and in bars when the Super Bowl is coming up -- where people could plunk down $10 or $20 and pick the exact date in 2010 when they think Murphy will officially step down as Speaker. The winner gets a percentage of what has been bet, and the rest goes toward the deficit.

A long, long time ago, when I was a much younger and greener reporter, I came back to the newsroom with what I thought was a great, stop-the-presses story. Someone had slipped me documents from a public official’s divorce proceedings, and they were chock full of all kinds of lurid detail.
When I went in to talk to the editor about it, instead of getting the enthusiastic, attaboy response I had hoped for, I got sat down and told why we weren’t going to run the story.
“Always be real careful about anything that comes out of a divorce case,” the editor counseled me. “Both sides will say the worst, most vicious, over-the-top things about each other and swear to them, whether they are true or not. That’s how divorces are. More often than not, you’ll never really know what the truth is.”
It seemed like sound advice at the time, so I took the editor’s word for it and to this day have been hinky about taking information from divorce cases for news stories.
I recalled that incident in the past couple of weeks as details have emerged from the ongoing divorce matter involving former Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams.
People seem to be quick to jump to a lot of conclusions from the puzzling revelations being spun out from Family Court and are saying things in public, on talk radio and in the newspaper that may not stand the test of time. We should be careful, is all I am saying.
As my old editor said at the time: “Not only might the newspaper have to run a correction, but you may have to one day apologize to someone for not only repeating a vile, hurtful lie about them, but doing it in print. Trust me, that won’t be pretty.”
That being said, the latest news about Williams finding a job at the court for the mother of the wife in the divorce case, which is documented and backed up with solid fact, is troubling and much harder to defend. It also drags what was once a personal family matter squarely into the public arena, where it becomes more legitimate fodder for the conclusion-jumpers.

What I don’t get is how a protest of the Columbus Day holiday has become a slur on Italo-Americans.
For the second year in a row, Brown University chose to recognize “Fall Weekend” last week while everyone else was celebrating Columbus Day. This is a stupid political/historical dispute about trying to enforce 21st Century values and morals on 15th Century behavior. It is political correctness run amok and it is a ringing reaffirmation of the old saying “a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
I remember an old Law & Order episode where there was a disturbance at a Columbus Day parade in New York City. The detective asked the uniformed cop “How do you know they were college students,” referring to the troublemakers. The cop replied, “Who else would protest a holiday?”
Columbus discovered the Americas for western civilization (yeah, that pretty much means white people; it’s not my fault that history is written by the winners, take it up with my 6th grade social studies teacher) and no matter how many asterisks you want to put on it (you Leif Erickson fans know who you are) that is a pretty significant achievement. For Americans, it is something worth celebrating with a holiday.
The students at Brown — and, even more inexcusably, many of their professors and other faculty — seem to think that is outweighed by the way Columbus and his men treated the indigenous people they found here.
It was the 15th Century, Columbus and his crew were explorers and conquerors. That is how it was done back then. Yes, mankind has evolved over the centuries since then, but those guys were all dead. I’m sure they would act differently today.
But just as silly as the Columbus derogators are the Italo-American groups and individuals who seem so intent on taking it as an ethnic and personal slur. Get a grip.
Yes, Columbus was Genoese (there wasn’t a country called Italy in 1492), but he did his exploration for  Spain. Why shouldn’t it be the Spanish who are up in arms?
The silly undergraduates with too much time on their hands are not protesting against the holiday because Columbus was of Italian origin, for Pete’s sake. It is because they are focusing on the behavior of conquistadors without considering historical context.
The question I would raise is: If the Brown students, and their faculty, don’t think Columbus’ achievement is worthy of a holiday, why do they insist on the bogus “Fall Weekend”? If you think it shouldn’t be a holiday, go to class like it was any other Monday.