{news} Plenty of fingers can be pointed in Krayeske issue--ken dixon a friend?

[clifford thornton]

http://www.connpost.com/kendixon/ci_5155736<http://www.connpost.com/kendixon/ci_5155736>


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Plenty of fingers can be pointed in Krayeske issue
KEN DIXON
Article Last Updated: 02/04/2007 09:39:04 AM EST


Ken Krayeske, pseudo- journalist, itinerant rabble-rouser and impotent political provocateur, is no poster boy for the First Amendment. And yet, too many issues around his arrest and confinement by Hartford police really stink to high heaven. 
First, beware of people who call themselves "journalists." It's a highfalutin appellation. Real journalists are too busy working, gathering information to share with readers, to cop existential 'tudes. 

I know a journalist who's in Baghdad right now and nowhere near the relative safety of the Green Zone. I hope he's not bleeding somewhere as I write this. He calls himself a reporter, not a journalist. 

Krayeske, whose resume reads like the table of contents for "A Slacker's Guide to the Galaxy," is no journalist. 

He is, however, a bit of a counter-cultural Renaissance man, having written about Amsterdam hash bars for High Times and taught snowboarding and non-violent civil disobedience for mass protesters. An occasional freelance writer who has a computer, a digital camera and blahg, maybe, but he's neither reporter nor working journalist. 

"I was acting under the color of a journalist," he says, in one of the many things I find amusing as if the First Amendment, in his case, was more than a fig leaf. He's a 34-year-old student at the Quinnipiac University School of Law who parlayed a sore-loser attitude after the November elections into a self-promotional tour of Hartford court houses, howling like a banshee about the First Amendment. 

He's even tried to shame the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists into funding his little winter promo campaign. Krayeske should be happy that the Hartford police did not massage his noggin when he peddled the bike up to Gov. M. Jodi Rell's Jan. 3 inaugural parade, put the thing down on the ground and squeezed off photos as Rell headed south, toward the Civil War Arch on Trinity Street on her way to the Capitol. 

There are a few things I find interesting about his arrest. 

First, breach of peace and interfering with officers seems way overstated, since he apparently never said anything until he was startled from behind by man in a bomb squad jumpsuit and readily surrendered when he figured out it was a cop. 

During a recent hearing before the Legislature's Public Safety Committee, Hartford Police Chief Daryl Roberts defended the bust, then showed extensive ignorance of the facts, all the while insisting that Krayeske had "breached" a parade route where marchers outnumbered the scattered spectators. 

Krayeske's name and two driver's license photos, were on a pre-parade list of possible troublemakers. Handed out to officers assigned to the parade route, it referred to him as a Green Party organizer and included reports from State Police who monitored his blahg. 

So while voters generally ignored the Green Party in November, State Police listed him as a person of interest and Hartford police were all over him in January. 

The $75,000 bond was hilarious, since Krayeske (pronounced cray-ES-key) presented less potential escalation to the ambient danger of Hartford streets, than his former boss, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Cliff Thornton, was to Connecticut's political status quo. 

Krayeske was way too intense during the campaign, a true believer who never recovered when New Haven Mayor John DeStefano intimidated The Day newspaper of New London into dropping Thornton from a televised gubernatorial debate with Rell. 

One of the things that eroded my patience with Krayeske during the campaign was when he crossed the line and literally got into Rell's face late in the campaign. It was at a Rell "event" in Windsor, at the train station there, when she issued a proclamation about responsible growth late in the election campaign as part of her rose garden election strategy. 

Some union activists were assembled across the street, along with Thornton. Krayeske, who has a weird intensity in the field, pushed the envelope and actually joined a few reporters for a brief Q and A with the governor. 

This is a no-no and working reporters don't like civilians - let alone opposing campaign managers - chiming in as if they were reporters too. 

I also find humor in the way police detained the 34-year-old Hartford resident long enough for him to miss the inaugural ball. They were nice enough to keep him in a meeting room, not the usually crowded lockup. 

On Krayeske's blahg, he had issued a call to arms for other sore losers to demonstrate outside the Connecticut Expo Center, a concrete and corrugated-aluminum dump that was a desperate back-up plan for a ball. 

Those who didn't get there early, were consigned to park their cars in the hinterlands of Hartford's North End, where more than one guest, who paid $150 each for the event, trashed their dancing pumps in the mud on the way in, even before knocking down their first cocktail at one of the cash bars. 

So why should you taxpayers care about the criminal record of a Green Party whack job who uses the title of journalist like a bath towel, when he needs it? 

For one thing, that state police officer who saw Krayeske's blahg on the Internet and wrote him up as a potential threat, could have helped us a lot more if he were stopping speeders on Interstate 95. 

Ken Dixon's Capitol View appears Sundays in the Connecticut Post. You may reach him in the Capitol at 860-549-4670 or e-mail him at kdixon at ctpost.com<mailto:kdixon at ctpost.com>


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