In the past I’ve asked if the DAPL protest could become this century’s Wounded Knee. I’m now thinking that Tienanmen Square might be the better comparison.

[Update @ 0539 on 18 December: When eminent domain crossed over from serving the public good to serving the corporate good, we went down a very wrong path, as farmers in Iowa are learning—Judge hears landowners’ challenge to Dakota Access pipeline.]

[Update @ 0424 on 17 December: Trumpists are learning they have less to sound off about than they thought they would—Iowans Make U-Turn Against Trump In Dakota Access Pipeline Fight.]

[Update @ 0503 on 16 December: Of course the NSA’s 21st century version of COINTELPRO is being used against the Water Protectors—EFF is gathering data on illegal surveillance of Dakota Access Pipeline water protectors]

[Update @ 0526 on 15 December: As I, and everyone else, expected, Rick Perry has deep financial ties to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Hen house meet fox—Rick Perry’s Dakota Access Pipeline business entanglements. President-elect Donald Trump seems bent on rubbing the noses of everyone who didn’t vote for him in his shit and daring us to do something about it.]

[Update @ 0533 on 14 December: Rick Perry? Fucking, I-can’t-remember-the-third-department-I’d-cut (Hint: he’s about to become the head of the agency he couldn’t remember) RICK PERRY? Yes, that Rick Perry—Trump’s Pick for Energy Secretary Sits on Board of Dakota Access Pipeline Company. We should not doubt for a moment that each and every Trump selection will, despite the Republican posturing, sail through the confirmation hearings and be prepared to rape, pillage and plunder on day one.] —More…

There are a number of stories and themes that I come back to again and again. My friend Eric Vessels once wrote that I do a consistently good job of following up, and Scene Magazine said that my daily posts remind the public of Cleveland controversies long after the local media gets bored and moves on.

So, that is what I’m attempting to do here with three stories: our ongoing conversation on Racism Xenophobia in America, the vital need to slam the brakes on Global Warming/Climate Change and the struggle to free Saudi blogger Raif Badawi.

While this post is stuck to the top of my blog as a constant reminder to my readers and myself, new stories on many other topics do appear below.

Enjoy. Think, Discuss, Act…

One Year Ago* at Have Coffee Will Write… Five Years Ago at Have Coffee Will Write… Ten Years Ago at Have Coffee Will Write… *As I post these reminders of the past year at Have Coffee Will Write, I want us all to be reminded of the presidential race and presidency that we might have had if Bernie had not been shut out by the DNC.

I get a bit of a bump when I read a some writing wisdom that I haven’t heard before. That’s what happened when I read this advice about removing scaffolding (those words necessary for the building of a story, but no longer needed when the story is finished) from one’s writing. I like how the imagery so well describes the drafting/rewriting/editing process.

Maggie O’Farrell, writing in My Writing Day for The Guardian, elucidates:

I am devoted to the practice of redrafting. I don’t plan too much but like to mould and alter as I go. In the mid-1990s, I went to weekly poetry classes given by the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy. He gave us two pieces of advice that I still hold close. The first: to make every word pull its weight. The second: you will need scaffolding to build your writing inside but must remember to take it down at the end.

It’s a solace, when you are cutting great swaths through your paragraphs, to think of them as a necessary but disposable part of construction. The tricky bit is working out what is scaffolding and what is brickwork. One can be mistaken for the other but that, I tell myself, is what multiple drafts are for.

E.B. White put the message this way:

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Who could ever argue with that?

Last week… Last last week…

Cal Newport hammers at this concept—what matters is doing the work, lots and lots of the work—again and again. There can be no magic formula or genie in the bottle that can ever substitute for doing the work. Oliver Burkeman—back from maternity leave (congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Burkeman)—writing in Are you too old to find success? for The Guardian explains:

At what age are you too old to achieve breakthrough success in your field? That question fascinates so many people, I suspect, because almost nobody considers themselves already entirely successful. The unpublished novelist longs to be published, the published one yearns for bestsellerdom, the bestselling superstar craves the Booker prize. (Also, everyone always thinks they’re just a few years from being “over the hill”. The web is cluttered with listicles offering the supposedly reassuring information that, say, JK Rowling wasn’t a publishing sensation until, well, her early 30s.)

But a huge new study [Newport discusses the study here, JH], examining the careers of nearly 3,000 physicists from 1893 on, reaches an unexpected result. It’s not that youth wins out, nor that years of experience lead to late triumphs. Rather, age just isn’t much of a factor. A physicist’s highest-impact work “could be the first publication, mid-career, or last publication”. What counted more was productivity. If you want to publish a celebrated physics paper, the crucial thing isn’t to be young and energetic, nor old and wise. It’s to publish a lot of papers.

That holds for everything. I’ve mentions before my father’s advice that it takes a long time to become an overnight success. Understanding this is why the first words you read at the top of my blog are four lines from one of my favorite Marge Piercy poems. (The second quote, from Rumi, is meant to emphasize and add urgency to Piercy’s words.

Now stop reading and go get your work done.

When I was an undergrad minoring in Political Science, my area of concentration was the Soviet Union. I remember one conversation in class when Dr. David Williams told us that one of the challenges in negotiations between the United States and the USSR was that Americans played poker, Russians played chess. The analogy seems forced, but Dr. Williams when on to explain that while poker is all about bluffing in the short term, there was no bluffing on the chess board, you couldn’t fake having an extra queen hidden somewhere. In addition, he said, poker is about many small games played serially while chess is a long game with the potential for total victory at the end.

Those two games shape us and the Russians. Vladimir Putin knows how to play chess and, I expect, poker. I doubt that is true about our next president.

Will Drabold, writing in Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin: Global chess match between Russia and the president-elect for Policy.Mic, explains the problem:

NBC News reported Wednesday that Vladimir Putin had a personal hand in directing how information hacked by Russian operatives was leaked to influence the election. The news was the latest in a string of revelations pointing toward Russian interference in the election. This detail comes as President-elect Donald Trump continues to show a friendlier posture toward Putin by refusing to specifically acknowledge the alleged interference — and nominating a certified friend of Russia for secretary of state.

In Politico, two homeland security experts detail how Moscow uses a combination of disinformation, volume, social media attacks and targeted posts online to influence the outcome of elections. The all-of-the-above approach to digital attacks, by thousands of pro-Russian operatives, swarms the internet to convince voters on the margin to follow a purportedly Putin-determined course of action — in this case, electing Trump.

Trump, of course, refuses to even discuss the possibility because even the mention threatens the legitimacy of his election. Trump is a deal maker, he may even be the best deal maker we have, but I don’t know that he’s prepared for playing his game when the table stakes are this high.

Last week… Last, last week…

Well, what a novelty. Who could have thought of it?

The Cleveland Cavaliers will PAY rent for the arena that the team owner “rents” from Gateway.

It will—these schemers of the latest theft of public assets—pay for half of a $282 million in renovations to the rental called Quicken Arena.

And you, the public, likely will pay NOTHING. Oh. Not really.

Unless you rent a hotel/motel room or go to some entertainment event that includes the city’s 8 percent admissions tax. (I’m reminded by a PD reporter that only admission taxes from the arena will be used in this arrangement but, of course, these are still taken from the city’s admissions tax total. In 2010, for example $4.1 million was already taken to pay of 1990 arena bonds. That has continued for years.)

What an incredible bargain though. Don’t go, don’t pay.

Who could have thought of this sweet deal? Mayor Frank Jackson? Hell no. County Executive Armond Budish? Of course not. These are not idea guys.

They don’t have the expertise or the ingenuity.

This game was a ploy of the deal-makers.

The Joe Romans of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. The Tim Offtermatts of Stifel, and formerly A.G. Edwards, long time hand in Gateway financing and its chairman until he had to avoid conflict of interest in this deal. And, of course, Fred Nance, big Continue Reading »

Well, President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated just two women (Elaine Chao for Secretary of Transportation, No. 13 in the line of succession; and Betsey DeVos for Secretary of Education, No. 15) and one non-white man (Dr. Ben Carson for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, No. 14) to his cabinet. As of this morning, the Secretary of Agriculture (No.8) and Secretary for Veterans Affairs (No. 16), remain open.

Amanda Terkel, writing in Donald Trump’s Proposed Cabinet Is Very White, And Very Male for Huffington Post, comments:

[T]he line of succession to the presidency—which includes the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore—is shaping up to consist of 12 white men unless Trump picks Heitkamp, or another woman or person of color, for agriculture secretary.

Trump’s proposed Cabinet would be far less diverse than those of the past three presidents when they first took office. Bill Clinton had eight people in his initial Cabinet who were not white men, George W. Bush had seven and Barack Obama had nine.

Trump does not like people who don’t support and echo his world views.

Those people get fired.

Could the Trump cabinet possibly look, and think, more like him?

Then there’s Rachel Maddow’s take…

Last week… Last last week…

Bernie didn’t go away. Bernie voters didn’t go away (I’m working on a longer piece on that topic right now). Scott Goodman (whose firm Revolution Messaging played a yuugggeee roll in Bernie’s campaign), writing in Blaming millennials for Trump—99 problems but the kids ain’t one for Policy.Mic, offers [Hint, a mirror would be helpful here, JH] his post mortem:

Having exhausted a number of storylines blaming others for Trump’s victory, the consulting class in Washington, D.C., is now pointing a finger at millennial voters.

“That’s why we lost,” Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook recently pronounced at Harvard’s Institute of Politics during a campaign manager event in which he blamed young voters for supporting third party candidates. Similarly, founder of Media Matters for America David Brock expressed his anger at the “disaffected millennials who sat on their hands in the most consequential election of our lives” during the first major gathering of Democratic Party lawmakers since the election, which took place earlier this week.

But while Mook and Brock tried to make millennials the scapegoat for Trump’s victory, neither explained the full story. Here is why they are wrong.

Young voters were the only age bracket that Clinton actually won. We need to stop blaming them. Far from sitting on their hands, today’s young voters are actively engaged. I saw that first-hand during the Democratic primary, during which my firm worked with Bernie Sanders’ campaign. From organizing their friends to show up to rallies en masse, to pitching in $27 at a time, young voters were as active throughout this election cycle as ever. In fact, early general election data suggests young voters turned out to the polls at similar levels to 2012. They just didn’t favor Hillary as much as her campaign would have liked.

If the Clinton campaign is dissatisfied with their level of millennial support, they should take a hard look at where their young voter strategy failed.

Goodman’s analysis is spot on (I wish I were young enough to ask for a job with his firm) and I think his conclusion—that Clinton failed because of her arrogance and sense of entitlement—speaks louder than any other I’ve read.

Fifth, the campaign failed to develop an effective social media strategy. Back in 2012, Mitt Romney’s tweets were famously filtered through over 20 staffers. Too often, Clinton’s social media presence felt similarly scripted and out-of-touch. The full power of social media is only unleashed when candidates use these platforms to have real conversations and establish emotional connections. But when Clinton’s campaign used social media, it too often felt like a bad marketing campaign that fell flat. For example, tweets like “Tell us in three emojis or less … How does your student loan debt make you feel?” were patronizing and did not show Clinton’s empathy.

Finally, the Clinton campaign was patronizing to Bernie Sanders supporters, many of whom were young voters. Clinton once said she felt “sorry for” young Bernie Sanders supporters and claimed they didn’t “do their own research.” Her surrogates suggested young women were supporting Sanders to meet boys and that there was a “special place in hell” for women who failed to support other women. Similarly, I was in the room when Clinton supporter and CNN contributor Paul Begala told an audience full of millennials in California to fall in line, respect their elders and stop whining.

Anyone considering a run, or thinking they’ll get re-elected in2018, who believes they can ignore Goodman’s advice in 2018, has another think coming.

Last week…

[Update at 1009—Roldo comments: This deal is worse than I thought. The PD this a.m. says the County will borrow the full $140 million with interest a cost of $244 million. JH]

Our sports robber barons are at it again. On the loose.

What phonies and what liars.

Now they want another $70 million with an unknown borrowing cost to be paid to fancy up the Quicken Arena for billionaire Dan Gilbert. That doesn’t include 18 years of bond payments, likely to double the cost.

Both Mayor Frank Jackson and County Executive Armond Budish appeared at the Q to sell the deal, or sellout their constituents. The thing these two do.

The County is more than $1 billion in debt and has, as the city, many unmet needs. Not basketballs, baseballs or footballs.

They are going to tap the bed tax, having extended it for 40 years. Forty years! Can you imagine extending a tax for 40 years for a sports billionaire? The vote by the County Council was 10-1 with only Sunny Simon showing some common sense.

If it comes in at about $15 million a year, as it has, it will be $600 million! That’s $600 million. $600 million that could be used for real needs in this city & county.

Don’t forget that you voters already passed a sin tax that will add some $260 million to your taxes but apparently not enough to satisfy Gilbert, Jackson and Budish Continue Reading »

Last week… and last, last week…

So, as President-Elect Donald Trump tweets towards inauguration day, what’s real in his head? Ralph Nader, writing in Trump Trumpets His Real Plans, has some thoughts:

Even for a failed gambling czar, Donald Trump has been surprisingly quick to show his hand as he sets the course of his forthcoming presidency. With a reactionary fervor, he is bursting backwards into the future. He has accomplished this feat through the first wave of nominations to his Cabinet and White House staff.

Only if there is a superlative to the word “nightmare” can the dictionary provide a description of his bizarre selection of men and women marinated either in corporatism or militarism, with strains of racism, class cruelty and ideological rigidity. Many of Mr. Trump’s nominees lack an appreciation of the awesome responsibilities of public office.

Let’s run through Trump’s “picks”:

First there are the selections that will make it easier to co-opt the Republicans in Congress. He has appointed Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for Secretary of Transportation. Ms. Chao does not like regulation of big business, such as those for auto, aviation, railroad and pipeline safety. Next is Congressman Tom Price (R-GA) to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Price wants to dump Obamacare, turn over control of Medicaid to the states—including Governors who dislike Medicaid—and even privatize (eg. corporatize) Medicare itself into the hands of the business sector already defrauding just that Continue Reading »

And, last week…

Last week…

One of the aspects of The Guardian’s My Writing Day series that I appreciate most is that some writers, like Sarah Perry, are honest about being horrible unproductive, of procrastinating, of flat out fucking off instead of writing. Writers need to know that we’re not all writing dynamos like Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates producing wordcounts that make our heads spin. Perry writes:

Ten months later I had a draft ready to put into the hands of my agent, and then my editor, grateful for their ability to guide me. By then the cycle had begun again: another book, far beyond my reach at first—another year of no writing, not of the kind you’d recognise, until one morning I found I could recite the opening paragraph, and knew the final words: the crisis had come, and I was ready to begin. Not much has changed—there is the lit candle, the 55 minutes of freedom from the internet, the bouts of Netflix—but this time I have a notebook that I carry with me everywhere, and have not yet lost.

The question is, of course, is there anything inside the not-yet-lost notebooks and, perhaps more importantly, does that matter

While the voyage began here, we can’t know yet where Wiley Miller is taking Anoesis News Service founder Captain Eddie and his intrepid reporters fantasists…

Now we know.

You can find earlier episodes below the fold. Continue Reading »

Sometime this morning ping backs began flowing in for Roldo’s piece on Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s desire for a new facility as tribute for winning a single championship as if a single win in 40-plus years was a momentous achievement.

The first link to arrive came from Even when Cleveland sports teams win, the city loses by Jason Notte.

Notte brings Roldo into the story in the fifth paragraph, about 250 words into the piece:

Roldo Bartimole, a reporter and blogger who’s been covering Cleveland for the better part of half a century, notes that the county took in $240 million from the initial sin tax, but has since extended it twice to reel in another $375 million to cover cost overruns on those projects. It has also offered tax abatements for Quicken Loans Arena, Progressive Field and the FirstEnergy Stadium (home of the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns since opening in 1999) that take $16 million out of the county’s coffers each year, half of which Bartimole says would go to Cleveland schools.

The second obstacle between Gilbert and the county’s money is that it has none left to give. By throwing public money at everything including the three sports facilities mentioned above, hotels, the Ohio Theater, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the House of Blues and an aquarium, Cuyahoga County has plunged itself into nearly $1.1 billion in debt. Now, Gilbert, who threw the county some free arena renovations when he bought the Cavaliers in 2005, wants more and is likely going to get it. County executives are now suggesting that Destination Cleveland, the county’s tax-funded tourist agency, can step in and help pay the $70 million that Gilbert’s seeking. Considering that Cavaliers Chief Executive Officer Len Komoroski sits on Destination Cleveland’s board — and that nobody seems to care about conflicts of interest anymore — there’s a good chance the Cavs get what they’re looking for.

Considering that Bartimole puts the payoff date for the city’s current stadium and arena debt sometime in 2023 — and that the Gateway projects were already bailed out of bankruptcy [Notte’s link to Roldo’s piece, JH] once before — this is an obviously terrible deal for both Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. Throw in the fact that Gilbert alone is worth $4.9 billion and there shouldn’t be one additional dime of public money dropped into that facility.

Dan Gilbert does not come out smelling so sweet in Notte’s story.

Notte’s piece was republished in rapid succession on seven additional websites: QuanTwo; Jeffrey Lipton Barbados; OpenFinTech; Open-Banking; AsianFinTech; Sport Fine Mall; and Stocks And Trading.

What all seven seem to have in common is that they are looking for investors suckers to risk their money on the stock market. Still, from my read, Notte’s has done a credible, if derivative, job in reporting.