There's an interesting post up at RI Future about an anonymous web campaign calling on Board of Regents member Angus Davis to resign.

On February 27, Davis spoke at a conference held by the RI Statewide Coalition, the anti-tax group which is the statewide affiliate of Portsmouth's PCC. I covered it at the time with resigned humor. Since then, it has come out that Davis secretly paid a New York speechwriter $10,000 to ghost Commissioner Deborah Gist's April speech to the general assembly.

Now an unnamed local group has put up a web site, Beef Wtih Angus, calling on Davis to resign from the Board of Regents. You can visit and send him an e-mail with just one click. (I tried to track down the registration of the site, and it's private, but I discovered that it's hosted by a Providence-based web firm.)

I know that the composition of the Board of Regents seems pretty remote from what's happening here in Portsmouth, but these folks set all the rules and regulations to which our district must conform. The Board should be non-political. If you think it inappropriate for an appointed state school official to be courting the crowd at RISC, why not visit Beef Wtih Angus and drop him a note. He's a tech guy, so I'm sure he'll read the e-mail.

And just in case you're wondering, the Commissioner's ten-page speech contained 4,949 words, so Mr. Davis paid about two bucks a word. There was such deathless prose as "I learned that my Guinness World Record for most kisses in a minute had been broken." ($32) and "I can’t tell you how nice it was to be talking about a winning streak — or any streak, for that matter — other than the one in my hair." ($56). I would have done the job for a buck a word, and I'll leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions about quality.

Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with this site, nor do I have any idea who created it, and I disagree strongly with the page containing ad hominem attacks on Davis. In my opinion, they are unwarranted, inappropriate, and unnecessary. He is a respected and successful Web entrepreneur, and my "beef" with him relates solely to his actions as an appointed official.