Brad Rourke

Brad Rourke’s Blog

  • Watch Where You Stay

    My friends at the Silver Spring Penguin have a great recap of the complaint filed against a pair of hot-sheet motels in Silver Spring that truly seemed to be dens of iniquity. We’re talking rampant prostitution, drug overdoses and sales at a Days Inn and a Travelodge. One commenter says they “feel bad for out-of-towners…

  • Senator Kennedy: What Do We Know And When Will We Know It?

    My friend Steve Clemons has written a great piece that well describes my misgivings as I watch the Caroline Kennedy train gathering steam. It’s not that she is not the right person to take the open Senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton — it’s that we don’t know yet, and we have not had much…

  • Cruising For A Bruising

    The groups poised to capitalize on president-elect Obama’s sympathy for their causes — are liable to be sorely disappointed. Peter Levine points this out here. Now comes word that pro-life pastor Rick Warren will be delivering the Inaugural invocation. And here is the disappointment (outrage, really). So many people have poured so much of what…

  • How Will Civic Groups Stay In The Game?

    Monday night, a decent and good proposal for a new source of affordable housing in my neighborhood got defeated in our town’s City Council. I was personally in favor of it and spoke in favor of it (which a rarely do). In fact, fifty of my neighbors spoke one way or another on it —…

  • Reading With Their feet

    Monday I wrote about the crumbling “paper” part of the news business. Here’s more evidence. My hometown newspapers, the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press (I was a Freep reader growing up) are curtailing their home delivery to just three days per week: Thursday, Friday and Sunday. David Hunke, chief executive of the company that…

  • A Dozen Years Of Blogging

    The other day I got to looking back at all the online activity in my past, and saw how entwined my day-to-day life has been with the Web since way back. First off, I recall I started a blog in 1996, a year before the word was invented. In 1996, during the Clinton-Dole presidential race,…

  • Crumbling Paper

    Seth Godin points out that bloggers aren’t going to be winning any Pulitzers — unless they are posting at major news sites already. He says: So, Tom Friedman can win a well-deserved prize for writing what is essentially a blog for the NY Times, but if he goes off on his own, he’s out. What…

  • Home Economics

    I’ve been staying up late, working into the wee hours, and all day on weekend days, crunching to get a project done. It’s got me thinking about working at home versus working at an office — and how the lines are blurring more and more. My own “work life” is tightly integrated into my “home…

  • Changing The Meaning Of "Community Work"

    I do a lot of work with organizations trying to change how they relate to — and work with — communities. As a result, I write a lot of reports about “changing work habits in order to make change in communities” and whatnot. There’s a challenge in writing such things. Often, it is hard to…