Former Downeast Mag writer pimps Baldacci/Damon port plan

Downeast Magazine recently laid off seven writers from its staff. The ghost of one of them, Jeff Clark, lingers on, and has exuded a strange poisonous final downeast article, "How Sears Island was Saved" appeared in the May 2009 issue.

A slapback against getting the Downeast boot, Clark's article (editorial? or...consider the publication: puff piece) is a lengthy paean to MDOT (and to Governor Baldacci and his understudy-who-would-be-governor Senator Dennis Damon,) as they gaily bent state law, mocked the Maine Constitution and trampled over hundreds of small businesses over the last three years in an effort to rush installation of a supersize container port onto 940 acre Sears Island - including dredging away the nursery shoals at the headwaters of Maine's most lobster-rich bay,) Clarks missive-by-any-name stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Sears Island fantasies spun by other dogs on other laps.

A marvel of, no, what must be a purposely grotesque parody of Downeast's shameless chamber of commerce huggerism, Clark manages through dint of great labor to carefully get every fact wrong, and to reach precisely the wrong conclusion.

This may seem puzzling in the light of pronouncements by his admirers, such as a recent one calling him "a reporter with real news sense and serious writing chops" , Indeed Jeff was considered the Voice of Downeast Maine

Ah but that was the old Jeff Clark. The new Jeff Clark, cast adrift from his Downeast mooring, would much rather, it appears, find a public affairs slot in a Damon administration. Government public relations - the only media field that grows as the economy contracts.

A versatile scribbler, he would be as much at home flacking the Department of Corrections as he would the Governor's office. While DOC's Asst Commissioner for PR Denise Lord would not willingly give up her slot spinning happy faces onto reports of institutional mayhem at the state prison, it may be that Dan Cashman at the Governor's office has tired of spinning his Nibs' doings and little machinations.

There, Clark's obsequiousness to the aforementioned politicos trying to force a container port and railyard onto Sears Island would pay off. Notably the way this "reporter with real news sense and serious writing chops" tried to conceal the fact that it was Governor Baldacci himself who almost sneaked a Liquid Natural Gas port and plant onto Sears Island during his first term;
saddest and worst, that Jeff Clark couldn't trouble himself to contact or even once directly mention any of the opponents of the island splitting plan; and in a hundred other ways, played fast and loose with the facts in that inimitable hazy opium dream style that this suddenly former Downeast Magazine writer Jeff Clark perfected.

To be continued.