UNCOOL: On Tuesday Brewed Fresh Daily reported that a link to my "Voices and Choices vs. storm windows" post in a Cool Cleveland article had been scrubbed by CC honcho Thomas Mulready, along with a link to this from democracy guy. Thomas told George "he wasn’t going to promote people who sit on the sidelines and carp while others are doing economic development."

The BFD post drew a string of comments and led to more carping from Tim on his new blog... which I'm sure means more comments at BFD today. And there was this. Boy, you just can't buy this kind of exposure! If Thomas isn't getting advertising money from V&C he certainly should be.

So I've been sitting over here in the the UnCool Kids' Corner, pondering the meaning of it all. Did I get "censored"? Does this mean Cleveland Diary is too cool for Cool Cleveland to handle? Should I give a crap? Why would Thomas give a crap?

Here's the thing: I've never actually expressed an opinion about Voices and Choices here. All I wrote in the post that offended Thomas so much was that Pho's account of their Town Meeting was great, that I wasn't there because I decided it was too nice a day to spend indoors, and that it didn't sound like I'd missed much. Not what you'd call a ringing denunciation of V&C.

Okay, I called it "groupthink". Hey, there were nine hundred people there, thinking together. If that isn't a "group think", what is it?

And after the last two days' weather, is there really any doubt that my storm windows were a higher priority?

I admit that I didn't think much of V&C before, but I also didn't think much about it. If some foundations want to spend $3 million of their own money on a big expensive talkfest, what's it to me? They spend money on a lot of things, including some things I understand and support, and some I don't. Nothing new there.

But now I'm kind of compelled to take a personal interest in V&C. So I went back and read the Town Meeting "Participant Guide". And then I re-scanned the rest of the V&C website... and had a phone conversation with Josiette White of the V&C staff... and looked at the interview on WVIZ's Ideas last night (I missed Abbott and Whitehead but caught the two staffers.)

And now I have many questions about Voices and Choices.

That's for another post... but here's a tickler. The following appears in the Participant Guide as a statement of fact:

The cost of government in Northeast Ohio, as a percent of Gross Domestic
Product (GDP), is more expensive than anywhere else in the country. Government
here costs taxpayers 21% of GDP. Nationwide the cost is 17% of GDP.

Pretty explosive, yes? But where does this "fact" come from? No source is cited. I googled the whole unattributed passage and found the same exact words, also unsourced, in this brochure from the Northeast Ohio Sourcing Office. (Is this plagiarism? Steve Koff, call your office.) So I called NEOSO and asked its director, David Akers, for the source. Akers wasn't sure -- he knew he'd read it in some study, he thought he had it in his file, and he'd get back to me. (Very nice guy, incidentally.) I haven't heard anything yet.

So... here we have Voices and Choices preparing its Town Hall participants for a discussion of "challenges" related to regional governance by giving them a dramatic -- indeed politically incendiary -- "fact" that's been lifted, uncredited, from another organization's material, which also offers it without a source and can't provide the source when asked.

Now where I come from, that's not cool.

More later.