"I'm gonna be right here waiting for you. Oh yeah."

It's too bad Windham Town Councilor Bob Muir spit out those words in December, otherwise we'd have an early frontrunner for this year's best Maine phrase. Oh well, at least it's on YouTube.

The Lakes Region Weekly reported last Friday that fellow Town Councilor Blaine Davis posted about forty-five minutes of the December 11 Windham Town Council meeting on YouTube, including the charged monologue referred to above and a testy exchange between Councilors Muir and Kaile Warren. Click here to watch the clips (to save you from enduring mundane arguments about the merits of a pickup truck vs. a utility truck, among other things, the interesting parts are about 3:00 into clip seven and throughout much of clip eight).

Now, a few thoughts. First, a criticism of the Lakes Region Weekly: I understand it probably considers itself a family newspaper, but it is also a newspaper of record. Thus, if Councilor Blaine Davis was inspired to throw the videos online because a Windham resident accosted him at the grocery store by saying, "You shithead, you bitch, you asshole!" please don't print "You (expletive), you (expletive), you (expletive)!" My personal opinion regarding vulgar language is the less you use it, the more powerful it is, so I am not advocating the devolution of the paper into a filthy rag (insert joke here). But when it's a direct quote, please don't scrub the actual words and replace them with euphemisms. Printing the exact words is important. Language is fluid, so what may be considered an expletive today is tomorrow's pleasant greeting. In the future, please do historians a favor and print all the quotes--even the unpleasant ones--verbatim.

As for Councilor Davis's decision to post the Town Council meetings, I applaud him for wanting to bring the council into the twenty-first century and for expanding the visibility of the Council to the voters of Windham (among others). I look forward to the Westbrook City Council talking about making its own move onto the Internet. However, I think the way he went about it was amateurish. Posting meetings on YouTube, especially by a member of the Council, should result only after institutional deliberation. It took years of internal debate and argument before the U.S. House and Senate televised their proceedings, for example, and I think similar caution should have been exercised before there was an official WindhamCouncil handle added to YouTube. And second, Councilor Davis should remove the forty-seven second video entitled "12-11-07 Council Preview." The clip was cut from the longer version without context and can fairly be viewed as an attack on Councilor Muir. The strength of C-SPAN and public access channels around the country is that they are shown in long-form and generally televise the entirety of a public event. The same standard should be applied when bringing government to the Internet.

- John C.L. Morgan

(Update: In the interest of intellectual honesty, I guess I've got to rap WGME-13 on the wrist, too. Parts of two interviews with hungover, pissed-off revelers whose cars had been towed in Portland were broadcast with accompanying bleeps this afternoon to cover the interviewees' naughty language. To be fair, though, Kim Block and Co. and anyone else on television or radio have to always be cautious about fines from the Federal Communications Commission.)