Bent Corner

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.

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.

Hagerstown city councilwoman Kelly Cromer on the the Herald-Mail online forum:

The Mayor doesn’t care one bit if we look bad, as a matter of fact he tries very hard and goes out of his way to try to make some of us look bad. He only cares about himself. He is a liar and a phony. His day is coming, I have an ace up my sleeve that will be life shattering for him.

Cromer is referring to Hagerstown’s mayor the honorable Robert E. Bruchey. Either they are playing a lot of poker or she doesn’t like him.

Not that there is anything particularly wrong with a city councilwoman not liking a mayor, especially if one is a Democrat and the other is a Republican. Sometimes I think government works better if everyone involved hates each other’s guts.

It’s not like this is unprecedented. In 2006, Hagerstown Mayor Richard Trump resigned after only nine months in office. It was reported that he quit because of his inability to get along with the city council. Bruchey — who already had one term as mayor under his belt — stepped in to fill Trump’s position of mayor.

I have no idea if Cromer’s criticism of Bruchey has any validity to it or not, but I do appreciate her candor. She is an elected official that says exactly what she thinks. And considering the fact that she is a criminal defense lawyer, I think she knows a thing or two about the legality nuances of libel and slander. If she says that Bruchey is a phony and a liar, I have to believe she has some kind of credible evidence to back it up.

We all know that people don’t say stuff on Internet message boards unless it’s true.

Who knew selling crack might result in the loss of your liquor license? From the Herald-Mail:

The Waterin’ Hole Tavern at 15 E. Baltimore St. in Hagerstown faces a $2,500 fine and the revocation of its liquor license after the owner and several patrons were charged recently for selling crack cocaine.

Therisa Lamp, owner of The Waterin’ Hole, appeared at a hearing Wednesday before the Board of License Commissioners for Washington County, also known as the liquor board, to answer the charges.

Board chairman Robert L. Everhart said a decision would be made within 30 days.

What’s to decide? It seems like a no-brainer.

I blogged a little yesterday about my troubles with the Herald-Mail message board. Mostly I told people to go to Steve Likes to Curse and read Steve Shives’ excellent breakdown on what went down.

I emailed the Herald-Mail website administrator explaining what happened. I’ve yet to get a response. My suspension was removed yesterday. I only knew this because I read about it in the comment section of Steve Likes to Curse. If they were going to remove my 2-day suspension, they ought to at least tell me. What good is announcing it on a message board I was led to believe I was suspended from?

When I went back to the message board, I found the following post from the moderator:

After careful consideration of all the factors involved, and rereading the initial post and the subsequent replies. I have reconsidered my original judgement [sic].

Bentcorner used the term “Negro” and not the other “N-word”, for the record.

After researching the term “Negro”, it does not appear to have the same connotation that the other “N-word” has. While his post may or may not have had anything to do with the nature of the thread is not being considered. It did not take the post off-topic (anymore than what anyone else has ever done).

Bentcorner has my sincerest apologies for my hasty decision and is hereby reinstated.

The moderator had to research the word Negro to learn that it didn’t have the same connotation as the N-word? This is the same person that thought removing all the letters except the letter “N” was a good way of making the word not racially offensive. There’s only one word in the English language that has the same connotation as the N-word.

It’s the N-word.

As soon as I found out that my suspension had been lifted, I began deleting all my posts from the Herald-Mail message forum. The reason? I don’t appreciate how the moderator is able to edit posts. He drastically altered my comment. He made it appear I wrote something all together different then what I really wrote. Who’s to say it won’t happen again?

If he truly thought my comment was racially offensive, he should have just deleted it. He didn’t do that.

I’m once again suspended from the Herald-Mail forum. This time it’s for a year. I can’t log back on again until March 25, 2009. The reason? I don’t know. Once again, I wasn’t informed of the reason. It can’t be for anything I’ve posted because I haven’t posted anything since my initial suspension. I’ve only been deleting my posts.

There is no rule against that.

Click here to see a screen capture showing that I was suspended for a year.

I was suspended from my local newspaper’s message forum yesterday for posting a comment they deeded to be “racially offensive“.

I’d like to explain what actually happened, but I’m still too pissed off to put it all into words. Luckily for me, fellow Hagerstown blogger Steve Shives of Steve Likes To Curse already blogged about it. He does a much better job then I ever could describing what actually happened.

I’m not even going to try.  Go read Steve’s blog post and let me know if you have any questions.

Link

The unbelievable has happened - I have found something that I agree with congressmen Roscoe Bartlett. I guess it was only a matter of time until the stars aligned and he said something that made sense to me. Not that I ever thought it would happen.

From Hagerstown’s award winning newspaper of record, the Herald-Mail:

As far as energy concerns, the country needs to find a “clearly sustainable” form of energy, he said.Until then, Bartlett said, he foresees a shift from trucks to trains as a way to move freight, driven by the high price of oil. Trains are five to six times more energy-efficient, he said.

Trains are the way to go to move stuff. It’s a shame that we don’t use the rails to move stuff from one place to another. It’s far more efficient then moving stuff with trucks.

I wouldn’t even have known about this if it wasn’t for Steve Shives of Steve Likes to Curse. I was reading the newspaper’s website about his mother and the pet rabbit that Steve saved from a friend’s landlord. Steve’s mom trained the rabbit to use a litter box and now the rabbit is free to roam the Shives’ home.

It’s a really cool story. Now I want a pet rabbit.