Bent Corner

Yes, this says what you think it says. Click here to see a larger image.  I don’t know what is more disturbing, that something like this could be found in Hagerstown’s own Rocky Ridge Collectibles or that the seller wants $45 for it.

And that was not the only piece of racist crap sitting on the shelf.  No, it was only the most agregous.  There were other similarly framed works of racism for sale along with this one.

Sorry for the crummy quality of the photo.  I took it with my camera phone.  I had to temporarily move a stack of cowboy hats to get a clear picture.  Who would have guessed that the same vendor that was selling this framed piece of historical hate would also be selling cowboy hats?

It’s 2008.  It would be nice if we could finally get past this type of stuff.

And to think I thought the city of Boston was bad when they treated a stupid Lite-Brite character flipping the bird as some sort of terrorist attack.   It turns out Hagerstown is a city of scardey cats too.

Someone left a black and white porcelain clown doll on the front steps of Hagerstown’s very own methadone clinic.  Someone called 911 and the Hagerstown City Police responded by shutting down traffic so they could investigate this vile terrorist threat. It rook them an hour to realize that it posed no threat.

A porcelain clown doll?  That’s what we’ve come to?

Link

Hagerstown has an all-star Little League team in the Little League World Series currently under way in scenic Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  People around here are very excited about this.  Some are more excited then others. I’m not really into Little League. I never played Little League.  No one in my family played Little League.  I really don’t necessarily understand the hoopla.

Speaking of things I don’t understand, the Washington County commissioners decided to award the team $10,000. This is from today’s Herald-Mail:

The money was approved by a 3-1 vote to help pay travel expenses for the Federal Little League 11-12 All Stars, who recently won the Mid-Atlantic Regional tournament and played their first game in the Little League World Series on Saturday.

This didn’t make any sense. I remember reading a while back that ABC and ESPN agreed to a long term deal with Little League for the rights to televise the Little League World Series. The deal was for millions of dollars. With all that money going to Little League, why can’t Little League pay for the travel expenses incurred by the team?

As it turns out, they do. From the official Little League website:

Who pays for the teams to travel to the Little League Baseball World Series?
There is no fee of any kind for any team in the Little League Baseball World Series. Neither the parents nor the local league are asked to pay anything for the team’s expenses.

All of the expenses for all teams, including travel, are paid by Little League International. While here, the teams are housed in dormitories on our complex, and food is provided at no charge. All teams are provided with exactly the same accommodations, without regard to their economic status.

So what’s the $10,000 going to?

It also appears that the money given to the team by the Washington County commissioners came from the “wrong” account.  It was supposedly taken from an account funded solely by a special county tax applied to area hotel rooms.  This money by law is to be only used to help develop tourism and support cultural and recreational projects in Washington County.  Paying for the out-of-state travel expenses of an all-star Little League team does not fall within the law.

One way to solve this problem would be for the three Washington County commissioners that voted to award the team with a $10,000 gift — Commissioners President John F. Barr, Vice President Terry L. Baker and Commissioner James F. Kercheval — pay the money out of their own pockets.  If they think the Little League all-star team deserves some extra travel money on top of what Little League is already providing, they each can come up with $3,333.33 on their own and award that to the team.  That way the team still gets the extra travel money and not one dime of tax dollars is spent.

It’s a win-win situation.

If the Herald-Mail newspaper is going to continue smearing the reputation of Hagerstown City Councilperson Kelly S. Cromer, I guess I will continue to blog about it.  Being that the Washington County Ethics Commission cleared Cromer of acting unethical the day she was pulled over by a Hagerstown police officer for speeding, I thought the Herald-Mail would move on.

Evidently I was wrong.

Today’s edition included a front page story reporting that the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) voted unanimously on July 16 to rescind Councilwoman Kelly S. Cromer’s associate membership. This was before the Washington County Ethics Commission even ruled on the matter. Their decision wasn’t made public until July 31.

Today’s article included something that appears to be factually wrong. It reads:

She also was quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her because she questioned the validity of a program under which some city employees are permitted to drive city-owned vehicles to and from work.

She was never quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her. Someone who claimed to have been with Cromer when she took a phone call from the reporter from the Herald-Mail asking about the incident claimed on a message board that at no time in the phone conversation did Cromer say the word “vendetta”.

Shortly after reading that, I emailed Dan Dearth, the reporter who wrote the article, and asked him if Cromer actually said the world “vendetta”.  He promptly replied:

Rick,

I never quoted her directly as saying that. I asked her whether she felt some city officials and some members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She said, “Yes.”

Thanks.

Dan

Dan Dearth was the one that chose the word vendetta, not Cromer.  She only answered in the affirmative when asked if she felt “some” city officials and “some” members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She did not answer in the affirmative that she felt that the entire police department had a vendetta against her.  The key word is “some”.  The way it reads in today’s paper is that Cromer was quoted as saying the entire Hagerstown police department had a vendetta against her.

She never said that.

Can anyone even blame her if she does feel that some in the Hagerstown police department have a vendetta against her? How else did the newspaper learn about the traffic stop three weeks after it happened?  Someone leaked the story to the newspaper and it wasn’t because they were a supporter of Councilperson Kelly Cromer.  They did it to make her look bad and the Herald-Mail seems to be going out of their way to do everything they can to help.

People from the anti-choice group Face the Truth came to Hagerstown yesterday and terrorized people with giant scary abortion photos. Hagerstown is only one stop on their 15 city terror tour.  Who knows, maybe they will make a stop in your city too.

My biggest problem with groups like this is that they take photos from a medical procedure and blow them up to 100 times the actual size to make them look like something they are not. They then wave these giant posters in your face and demand (demand!) you look at them.

It doesn’t matter who you are.
It doesn’t matter how old you are.
It doesn’t matter how young you are.

They will force you to look at their ghastly pictures.

It’s as though their right to make you look at ginned up photos is more important than your right not to see the photos.

Some members of Face the Truth even dragged their young children to the event and made them hold signs denouncing a woman’s right to choose.

The members of Face the Truth and other similar anti-choice groups want you to think that a fetus is the same thing as a human baby.  The reality is that the two are not the same. Just because a gigantic posterized photo of a fetus might look like a human baby doesn’t make it an actual human baby. Have you ever seen a pig fetus? They too kind of look like a human baby. The same thing applies to a monkey fetus. They look remarkably similar to a human fetus.

That doesn’t mean they are human, even if they look like they are human.  Looks can be deceiving.

I blogged a while back about the local newspaper’s war against one of Hagerstown’s city elected councilmembers, Kelly Cromer. I read an editorial that was even more of a hack job then normal. I decided to temporarily lift my self-imposed ban on writing more letters to the newspaper. I originally blogged that if the newspaper didn’t publish my letter, I would go ahead and publish it here.

I don’t think they ever published my letter, so here it is:

I read the editorial published June 24 (Cromer’s apology for incident isn’t enough) and I was amazed at what I read. By demanding that Hagerstown City Councilwoman Kelly Cromer prove that her version of events concerning the May 26 traffic stop are true, you are in a very real sense demanding that she prove her own innocence. That’s not the way that it works. If Cromer committed some type crime or abuse of power, it’s up to her accusers – mainly the Hagerstown Police Department and the Herald-Mail — to prove her guilt. So far that hasn’t happened.

Much of what we know about this traffic stop was learned from reading a special supplemental report written by the officer that stopped Cromer, a supplemental report that was written the day after the actual traffic stop. We know from reading the supplemental report that the officer had to call his supervisor during the traffic stop and ask for advice. I wonder, did this officer receive any more advice the next day while writing the supplemental report? If so, how many people helped him write the supplemental report? Do any of them drive city owned take-home vehicles?

Cromer made no public mention of this incident until three weeks later when a reporter from the Herald-Mail contacted her while she was on vacation. The reporter asked if she believed there was a vendetta against her and she answered in the affirmative. Cromer didn’t choose that word “vendetta” to describe the situation, it was your reporter.

What I find to be the most peculiar thing – and that’s saying a lot — about this whole controversy is how the Herald-Mail found out about the traffic stop in the first place. It would appear that someone from the Hagerstown Police Department or some other city employee leaked the story to the Herald-Mail. Three weeks after the fact. It appears to me that this was done to make Cromer look bad in the eyes of her constituents. She is certainly taking a lot of heat for a word she herself never said. What would motivate someone to do such a thing? Maybe just maybe it was in response to her suggestion that the city investigate the validity of the take-home vehicle program. I can’t help but wonder if the person who leaked the story to the newspaper drives a city owned take-home vehicle. Since we will never know the identity of this person, we are left with only our suspicions.

Rick Rottman
Hagerstown

The local newspaper, The Herald-Mail runs a daily feature called Mail Call. It’s where they publish comments left on an answering machine, supposedly by people in and around the Hagerstown area.

I’ve had the theory for some time now that most of the calls are fake. I think they are made up by someone over at the Herald-Mail. Listening to a bunch of voice mails and transcribing them word for word sounds like a lot of work.

That’s something not often associated with the Herald-Mail.

This one cracked me up:

I’m a resident in the North End of Hagerstown, and I’d like to make a comment on this article in the paper this morning about shutting down the street to have a booze party. We can’t even have a nice Christmas tree in the square anymore because they said it interfered with the flow of traffic, but yet they want to have a booze party. I think it’s ridiculous. They call it an art district down there. How does that coincide with a booze party? Someone please tell me.

I’m going to out on a limb and take a guess that this fictitious caller doesn’t like booze parties. What he or she is referring to is the Downtown Live Hagerstown music festival. It’s a one day event where national bands and musical artists come and play on the square in downtown Hagerstown. They shut down Washington and Potomac street to vehicle traffic and make it a pedestrian-only area.

It’s been a huge success the first two years it’s been held. Though they serve beer, I don’t think any of the street vendors serve hard alcohol.

I promised myself a while back that I would stop writing letters to my local newspaper, the Herald-Mail. I wrote a letter last year where I referred to the deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell as “an idiot”. My comment was edited by someone at the Herald-Mail to read that I called him “a fool”.

They made me sound like Mr. T.

I read something this morning that made me do a reversal on my self imposed no-letter to the editor policy. It was a heavy-handed piece of drivel pretending to be an editorial calling for, among other things, Cromer to write a check to the United Way (huh?) for claiming that a Hagerstown police officer was “lying” when he submitted a report stating that she asked him if he “knew who she was” when he stopped her for speeding.

I doubt they will publish my letter. If they do, I will make sure to link to it. If don’t publish it, I will post it here.

This isn’t the first time the Herald-Mail has editorialized about the Cromer traffic stop. On June 14th they published an editorial accusing Cromer of being too quick in accusing the police of a vendetta.

What they failed to mention was that it was the Herald-Mail — not Cromer — that came up with the word “‘vendetta’.

I read a post over on the Herald-Mail message board written by someone claiming to be a friend of Cromer’s. Among other things, this person claimed to have been with Cromer when she received the phone call from the Heard-Mail reporter asking about the incident. This person claimed that at no time did she hear Cromer use the word “vendetta” when talking with the reporter.

Huh?

Last week I emailed the reporter who wrote the story and asked him if Cromer said the word “vendetta”. I got a response almost immediately. He wrote:

I never quoted her directly as saying that. I asked her whether she felt some city officials and some members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She said, “Yes.”

So there you have it. The mystery is solved.

Hagerstown Police Chief Arthur Smith is weighing in on comments made by Hagerstown City Councilwoman Kelly Cromer concerning a supposed vendetta against her for looking into the city’s take-home vehicle program.

He wrote a memo to Hagerstown City Administrator Bruce Zimmerman asking that something be done.

From the Herald-Mail:

“This traffic stop was conducted on May 26, well before any contentious debate in reference to take-home vehicles.”

That’s not entirely correct. I remember reading about Councilwoman Cromer’s interest in the take-home vehicle program before May 26. In fact, I emailed both Councilwoman Cromer and Herald-Mail reporter Dan Dearth about this subject on May 19. Something I read in the article caught my attention:

In February, The Herald-Mail filed a public information request seeking the cost the city incurred to provide employees with vehicles for fiscal year 2006-07 and to date for fiscal year 2007-08. The city responded almost a month later, saying, “There is no document that satisfies your request.”

This didn’t sound right to me. I used to have a job where I was given a company car. One of the things I had to do was to keep a detailed record of the miles I drove each week. I had to keep track of both the miles I drove on company business and the miles I drove for personal reasons, such as driving back and forth from my home. These personal miles had to be kept track of so that a dollar value could be determined and then this dollar amount would be reported on my W-2 as taxable income.

The City of Hagerstown has to keep track of the cost of all personal mileage. Otherwise they would not be able to correctly report this figure to the IRS. That’s something they simply don’t have a choice in doing.

As far as vendettas are concerned, why did someone from the Hagerstown Police Department leak the story about the traffic stop to the Herald-Mail three weeks after it happened? If Police Chief Arthur Smith doesn’t appreciate what Councilwoman Cromer is saying about one of his officers, maybe his police department shouldn’t have leaked the story to the newspaper.

From the Herald-Mail:

A Hagerstown resident told the City Council on Tuesday that she intends to file an ethics complaint against Councilwoman Kelly S. Cromer over a traffic stop in which Cromer was given a warning for allegedly speeding last month near City Park.

During a council meeting, Cathy Ridenour said a “can of worms” had been opened after Cromer was given a warning rather that a ticket on May 26 for allegedly driving 43 mph in a 25-mph zone — an infraction that carries a $90 fine.

“I, as a tax-paying citizen of Hagerstown, am asking that the (Washington County Ethics Commission) investigate in full the incident that occurred in regards to Councilwoman Cromer being stopped …,” Ridenour said. “My belief … is that no one is above the law and using one’s position of authority is inexcusable, unprofessional and wrong.”

Now this is just getting silly. Unless Cathy Ridenour knows something that the rest of us don’t, she has no basis to accuse Cromer of anything. She certainly has no basis of going to the Washington County Ethics Commission.

Even if Cromer somehow used her position on the City Council to get out of a ticket — and there currently is no evidence showing that she did — it’s the police officer that made the decision to NOT give her a ticket.

I think I’m going to do my best John Kerry impersonation now and flip-flop on this. At first I was ready to criticize Cromer for trying to get out of ticket, but now I’m not so sure if she has anything to be criticized about. She claims she didn’t say “Don’t you know who I am“. She claims that since the officer obviously knew who she was, she asked him if she needed to look through her luggage for her license.

The more I think about it, the more I believe she didn’t ask the officer if he knew who she was. She obviously knew the shit-storm that was created when her fellow City Council member Alesia Parson-McBean said that when she was stopped by the police.

Of the two versions of the story — Cromer’s and the officer’s — it’s Cromer’s that makes the most sense.