In 2000, Democrats, panicked and desperate to shift the blame for electing George W. Bush to the presidency and setting in motion the longest wars of our nation’s history—we were on track to invade Iraq from the moment Bush took the oath of office, 11 September was just an unplanned boost to the invasion—pointed fingers at Ralph Nader as the evil culprit.

He wasn’t.

Democrats only had themselves, and their surrogate, the Democratic National Committee infected with the New Democrat virus by the presidency of Bill Clinton, to blame for failing to garner a third term. Fast forward 16 years and the corrupt and willful DNC once again wants a third Clinton term and if Donald Trump wins in November, only the DNC will be to blame.

Steven W Thrasher, writing in If Hillary Clinton loses in November, it won’t be Bernie Sanders’ fault for The Guardian, agrees:

Democrats could lose the election this November: just watch Hillary Clinton being booed at her own party convention. But, if that happens, it won’t be the fault of Sanders’ supporters. No—the blame will fall on the DNC. They could have played to the future of our country and the economic vision we desire. Instead, they gave us “super-predator” Clinton and milquetoast, pro-banking Tim Kaine.

Thrasher goes on at some length, and the whole is worth the time to read, but he nails the moment that I turned my back on the New Democrats.

I had hoped Obama would deliver genuine economic change – but that didn’t happen. Before becoming a journalist, I even moved to Pennsylvania for a couple of months to volunteer for Barack Obama’s campaign. I was enamored by his intelligence and the beautiful ways he wrote and spoke about race. But I was also thrilled (naively) that Obama seemed to get his money from small donors, and that he might break Wall Street’s stranglehold on the Democrats.

I wanted Obama to turn his back on Bill Clinton’s disastrous deregulatory economic policies (that balanced budgets on the backs of the poor) and Hillary Clinton’s debts to finance. But, once in office, Obama offered no break from Clintonism: it was Clinton 2.0, with the veneer of hope that he’d be better on race.

Obama brought in Hillary Clinton to run his state department, hired Bill Clinton advisor Rahm Emanuel to run his White House and charged Clinton-era economists with running his economic teams. And whenever Obama has talked directly about Black Lives Matter, he has failed to deliver on changing police violence. Though his presidency has expanded the racial notion of what it means to be American, it is hard to see how Obama has made life better for Black America today.

Or for anyone other than the still revoltingly wealthy bankers and their minions.

Here in Ohio we had a mini-version of this in 2010 when the Ohio Democratic Party, under the leadership of Chris Redfern, lost the race for a seat in the Senate because the ODP favored the clueless and underwhelming Lee Fisher over the dynamic and insightful Jennifer Brunner. Fisher was smacked down by Rob Portman who, I expect, will be re-elected in November because the still clueless ODP has put another milquetoast candidate on the ballot as the sacrificial lamb.

There is a saying in presidential politics: as Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

A friend who is has been on the inside of Ohio politics for years told me that Barack Obama carried Ohio in 2008 despite the ODP. If Hillary carries Ohio in 2016, she will do so in spite of the DNC.

I don’t think that will happen, however, and when Democrats are gnashing their teeth and gnawing on skulls on November 9th, they will only have the DNC to blame.

I’m finding that the reporting coming from Mattathias Schwartz, Alice Speri, Rania Khalek, Zaid Jilani and the rest of the team at The Intercept to be the best of this year’s conventions. The comedians like Samantha Bee and Larry Wilmore (above and below) are doing excellent jobs as well, but the serious journalism is happening on The Intercept.

Here are some headlines and ledes:

“The People Want Bernie”—Sanders Supporters Protest Clinton Nomination at DNC

If the Democratic nominee were chosen by those who showed up in the streets of Philadelphia to protest the convention, there would be one uncontested winner. “The people want Bernie,” read a sign at a rally Sunday that drew the same enamored crowds that turned out for the Vermont senator along the primary trail. The sign summed up the general sentiment of the crowd, as the rally grew into the thousands and began marching from City Hall in 93-degree weather. As the DNC kicked off, downtown Philadelphia was all about Bernie.

“The Real Revolution Is Down the Street, to Your Left”—Green Party Rallies at the DNC

For many Bernie Sanders supporters, the move to the Green Party’s Jill Stein was easily laid out. On Monday afternoon, hours before their candidate took the Democratic convention stage to reiterate his support for Hillary Clinton to the boos of some of his own delegates, a young man with a loudspeaker directed protesters to a park down the road from the Wells Fargo Center.

Will Bernie’s Supporters Stay Home on Election Day? We Asked Them.

Tuesday morning was a rough one for Bernie Sanders, but maybe an even rougher one for the people who helped make him a household name.

For many, the road to Sanders’s Monday speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia stretched back nearly five years, to Zuccotti Park, when a motley collective of anarchists, labor organizers, and intellectuals sparked Continue Reading »

In the summer of 1966, three American soldiers patrol Hue, Vietnam Cleveland, Ohio.

There has been a lot of media coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Hough riots. But not much about causes or the real actors of that period.

Nothing happens in a vacuum.

It didn’t just happen because someone was denied a glass of water.

It was, as usual, part of the community power struggle, always in motion.

It always has to do with Who Rules. And for what purposes. And to whose benefit, of course.

Hough became the option for many Negroes (as they African-American blacks were called then) pushed out of other areas of Cleveland.

Cleveland’s top corporate leadership desired the return of the city to its pre-war or earlier status—a thriving business city. I was able to write that Cleveland once was “The third largest headquarters city; third largest advertising center; sixth largest industrial market with a value added by manufacturing of $7.5 billion, greater than 70 percent of the nations of the world; and sixth largest retail center with $5 billion in sales annually. Not to mention that it ranks eight as a distribution center and ninth in export of manufactured products.”

It wanted to revive the Cleveland that was past.

Urban renewal became a major tool. (At one point activists pursued with what they called “instant urban renewal,” fire bombing.)

Cleveland has always been a strong institutional town. I have written about this aspect of the powerful corporate/foundation influence here in a number of publications, including local and national. Some of the material here comes from those writings.

Sometimes business leaders are more honest in their talk than I expect they intended to be. They, as do politicians, rely on the press to clean it up. Or keep it to themselves. Cafeteria talk. Not for publication.

Back before riots, the business/foundation community created an entity called the Cleveland Development Foundation. Eighty-three Cleveland corporations funded it Continue Reading »

So, I’ve listened to the speech with the three minutes of applause and multiple instances of booing and Bernie’s assurances regarding by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party and while I’m emotionally moved—I really, really want to trust Bernie—I’m unconvinced.

I think the mention of the platform pulled me back from drinking the Hillary Kool Aid. Party platforms are meaningless documents that no one will give a flying fuck about after the banging of the closing gavel. Hell, the paper is probably being recycled into toilet paper as I write this.

Educate me if I’m wrong. When was the last time, if ever, when a party’s convention platform carried any weight in the general election, or, even less likely, in the administration of a President.

Here’s the email I received from Bernie after the speech.

Jeff,

Our campaign has always been about a grassroots movement of Americans standing up and saying: “Enough is enough. This country and our government belong to all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.”

I just finished speaking at the Democratic National Convention, where I addressed the historic nature of our grassroots movement and what’s next for our political revolution.

I hope that I made you proud. I know that Jane and I are very proud of you.

Our work will continue in the form of a new group called Our Revolution. The goal of this organization will be no different from the goal of our campaign: we must transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families.

We cannot do this alone. All of us must be a part of Our Revolution.

Join Our Revolution and help continue our critical work to create a government which represents all of us, and not just the 1 percent—a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.

When we started this campaign a little more than a year ago, the media and the political establishment considered us to be a “fringe” campaign. Well, we’re not fringe anymore.

Thanks to your tireless work and generous contributions, we won 23 primaries and caucuses with more than 13 million votes, all of which led to the 1900 delegates we have on the floor this week at the Democratic convention.

What we have done together is absolutely unprecedented, but there is so much more to do. It starts with defeating Donald Trump in November, and then continuing to fight for every single one of our issues in order to transform America.

We are going to fight to make sure that the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party becomes law. This means working for a $15 federal minimum wage, fighting for a national fracking ban, and so many more progressive priorities.

The political revolution needs you in order to make all this happen and more.

Thank you for being a part of the continued political revolution.

In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders

I donated more money to Bernie’s campaign than I did to all the other campaigns during my voting life combined. I willingly gave more money than I could afford in the hope, against hope, that we could make this election the election.

We failed.

Perhaps 2016 will be our 1856 and 2020 will be our 1860.

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 7” with Joyce Cary:

INTERVIEWER: That’s what you meant, then, when you said that what makes men tick should be the main concern of the novelist? The character’s principle of unity?

CARY: And action, their beliefs. You’ve got to find out what people believe, what is pushing them on … And of course it’s a matter, too, of the simpler emotional drives—like ambition and love. These are the real stuff of the novel, and you can’t have any sort of real form unless you’ve got an ordered attitude towards them.

Robert Olen Butler offered this distinction between genre fiction and literature: that genre fiction—mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction, &c.–is about what the central character wants; literature is about what the central character yearns for.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

Bernie Sanders’ remarks at Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia

Sebastian Faulks, in I used to pull the curtains and put in earplugs, but what kind of life is that? for The Guardian, doesn’t write:

Another excellent way of not writing is to update your website. There are so many parts of it that need attention now—the last three novels are lacking summaries, the audio-visual is out of date and so on. Going on Twitter is helpful, too, as I can then link into learned articles recommended by people I follow. I like to read about the Sykes-Picot pact. This often takes up more time than the compulsory Times crossword.

In summer the test matches demand commitment. If I leave the room before Joe Root is established at the crease I feel it’s my fault if he’s out cheaply and a middle order collapse follows. Joe needs my active support. Regrettably, the aggressive style of modern cricket means the five-day matches seldom go the distance, so there is, hypothetically, a danger of doing some writing on a Monday. But the email backlog takes care of that.

Once I used to draw the curtains, put in earplugs, take the phone off the hook, and make tea in a Thermos so there was no excuse to leave the desk. Once, on a roll with Human Traces, I even toyed with the idea of installing a catheter.

But, really. I ask you. What sort of existence is that? Drilling down 50 fathoms into the internal lives of people who don’t exist? Not writing, by contrast, is more various and more challenging. It’s a life.

The irony involved in not writing by posting a excerpt from an article about not writing which includes the advice to update your website as a way of not writing to my website is not lost on me.

So, here’s the nut. Feelings trump facts 99.999 percent of the time, just ask anyone who has ever uttered a prayer or ridden a little faster through Sleepy Hollow.

This is my exercise in shoveling out the blogpile…

Scott Adams thinks so:

Do you remember all of those policy details Clinton talked about this week? Me neither. She’s done with that uselessness now. She went full-Voldemort on Trump this week and unleashed a “dark” spell. It’s a good one.

Let me tell you why “dark” is so good.

1. It’s unique. That’s a Trump trick. You haven’t heard “dark” used before in a political context. That makes it memorable and sticky. And it brings no baggage with it to this domain because no other politician has been so labelled.

2. Dark makes you think of black, and black makes you think of racism (in the political season anyway), and that makes you reflexively pair Trump with racism even though it makes no sense.

3. Dark can describe anything scary. It invites the listener to fill in the nightmare with whatever scares them the most about Trump. That’s a hypnosis trick. Leave out the details and let people fill in the story that persuades them the most.

4. Repetition. Dark is the kind of word that pundits can work into almost any answer when talking about Trump. That means you’ll hear it a lot.

I don’t think this one word will change the election by much. But it’s a sign that Clinton has at least one world-class persuader/advisor on the team. I have a feeling I know who. This linguistic kill shot has a partial fingerprint. If I’m right, Godzilla just got into the game.

If you haven’t been following Adams’ analysis of Donald Trump as a Master Persuader this may make no sense, but within the reality Adams has built over the last year, we’ll all want to know who this Godzilla is.

After playing Hillary Clinton’s stooge as chair of the Democratic National Committee and ensuring her coronation next week, Hillary Clinton (through unnamed party officials ) has kicked Debbie Wasserman Schultz to the curb. Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge will chair next week’s convention in Philadelphia.

Theodore Schleifer, Eugene Scott and Jeff Zeleny, reporting in Debbie Wasserman Schultz not presiding over Democratic convention for CNN write:

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will not speak at or preside over the party’s convention this week, a decision reached by party officials Saturday after emails surfaced that raised questions about the committee’s impartiality during the Democratic primary.

The DNC Rules Committee on Saturday named Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, as permanent chair of the convention, according to a DNC source. She will gavel each session to order and will gavel each session closed, a role that had been expected to be held by Wasserman Schultz.

“She’s been quarantined,” another top Democrat said of Wasserman Schultz, following a meeting Saturday night.

CNN wants to blames the mass email leak—which Hillary is spinning as the fault of the Russians but The Intercept hangs on hacker Guccifer 2.0—but I think that is just the convenient excuse.

Hillary Clinton has no friends, only allies (and a spouse) of convenience.

No one is safe.

This is my exercise in shoveling out the blogpile…

I wonder if Mike realizes that when he went all in for John Anderson in 1980 that he was one of the butterflies that helped to produce Hurricane Donald?

The ignorant, the disingenuous and people who make their living selling what other people produce fall may back on some form of the dictum: There are lies, damn lies and statistics whenever their pitch is challenged.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

To help the rest of us spot the frauds, David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge and president elect of the Royal Statistical Society writing for The Guardian offers Our nine-point guide to spotting a dodgy statistic.

I love numbers. They allow us to get a sense of magnitude, to measure change, to put claims in context. But despite their bold and confident exterior, numbers are delicate things and that’s why it upsets me when they are abused. And since there’s been a fair amount of number abuse going on recently, it seems a good time to have a look at the classic ways in which politicians and spin doctors meddle with statistics.

Every statistician is familiar with the tedious “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” gibe, but the economist, writer and presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less, Tim Harford, has identified the habit of some politicians as not so much lying—to lie means having some knowledge of the truth—as “bullshitting”: a carefree disregard of whether the number is appropriate or not.

So here, with some help from the UK fact-checking organisation Full Fact, is a nine-point guide to what’s really going on.

When politicians bullshit us they:

1. Use a real number, but change its meaning;
2. Make the number look big (but not too big);
3. Casually imply causation from correlation;
4. Choose their definitions carefully;
5. Use total numbers rather than proportions (or whichever way suits their argument);
6. Don’t provide any relevant context;
7. Exaggerate the importance of a possibly illusory change;
8. Prematurely announce the success of a policy initiative using unofficial selected data;
9. If all else fails, just make the numbers up.

Spiegelhalter concludes:

We deserve to have statistical evidence presented in a fair and balanced way, and it’s only by public scrutiny and exposure that anything will ever change. There are noble efforts to dam the flood of naughty numbers. The BBC’s More or Less team take apart dodgy data, organisations such as Full Fact and Channel 4’s FactCheck expose flagrant abuses, the UK Statistics Authority write admonishing letters. The Royal Statistical Society offers statistical training for MPs, and the House of Commons library publishes a Statistical Literacy Guide: how to spot spin and inappropriate use of statistics.

They are all doing great work, but the shabby statistics keep on coming. Maybe these nine points can provide a checklist, or even the basis for a competition—how many points can your favourite minister score? In my angrier moments I feel that number abuse should be made a criminal offence. But that’s a law unlikely to be passed by politicians.

While here in the former colonies, we have Politifact with the infamous Pants On Fire! rating, locally we have Roldo Bartimole as our master of the numbers for cutting through the bullshit. If you want an education on how the rich and the powerful (often through their political minions) use all nine of the tools devote your reading time to what he’s written over the years.

Oscar Wilde reportedly lamented on the insertion and deletion (or perhaps the deletion and the insertion) of a single comma that made up the entirely of his day’s work writing. To someone who is not a writer, that must sound like the height of absurdity, and they might be right, but there we are.

Mark Haddon, writing in ‘I’m not a terribly good writer, but I’m a persistent editor’ for The Guardian, shares:

The problem, I think, is that I’m not a terribly good writer. I am, however, a very persistent and bloody-minded editor (who, providentially, happens to be married to an even better editor). I’m also ruthless about culling anything that isn’t working. I throw away at least three quarters of what I write, then I draft and redraft what remains until hopefully, somewhere between versions 15 and 25, something happens. That frisson you get when you read your words back and they seem to have been written by someone—or something—that is not quite you. A rightness like a heavy oak door clicking softly home on to its latch.

In the age of the word processor this is a problem for people who aren’t writers. Before word processors (think about that term a bit, we don’t call a lathe a metal processor or a table saw a wood processor) there was constant evidence of a writer’s labor: piles of paper on the floor or in the wastebasket. Now that, for the most part, is all gone. Perhaps for the good, perhaps for the ill, I’m uncertain.

I can spend four hours at the keyboard, having written, and then deleted thousands of words, and be left with a single sentence, or a blank screen. I know what I’ve done, and perhaps that must be good enough, because, as Walter Mosley reminds me each and every morning:

The act of writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory. You are, you fear, like that homeless man, likely to be defeated by your fondest dreams.

But then the next day comes, and the words are waiting. You pick up where you left off, in the cool and shifting mists of morning.