We all want to grossly oversimplify and bifurcate our world into dichotomies, into black and white. There are, of course two kinds of people, those who embrace the aforementioned and those, wiser, people who think that is pure rubbish. Like determining if a person is a peach or a coconut.

Oliver Burkeman, writing in Are you wasting your warmth? for The Guardian, explains:

Peach people are soft on the outside, immediately friendly and familiar, but if you mistake that for real intimacy, you’ll soon hit the hard stone that protects their inner being. Coconuts have tougher exteriors, but get past that and they’re sweet inside. Americans, according to stereotype, are peaches; the French, like the Russians and Germans, are coconuts. Meyer’s faux pas was a case of the two messily colliding.

Like any attempt to split humanity neatly into two, the peach/coconut divide is absurdly oversimplified. But it’s also useful.

While Burkeman wrote this piece more than two years ago, I find relevance in our current political nightmare. Are Democrats Peaches? Are Republicans Coconuts? Does the dichotomy go the other way? What about those of us who supported Bernie? Is this just silly?

We live in a hyperconnected world; even if we’re annoyed by Those Other People, why also feel insulted, instead of just chalking it up to different customs? Why, in 2014, can an American still genuinely offend a Brit by not buying a round, or a Brit a South Korean by handling his business card too casually (I speak from experience)? Partly, Trompenaars shows, it’s because each side’s value system is logical, yet seems to render the other’s downright crazy. In one survey, he asked people if they’d lie for a friend whose driving got him in trouble with the police. Most Swiss wouldn’t dream of it: how can society survive if you can’t trust people to tell the authorities the truth? Venezuelans disagree: how can society survive if you can’t trust people to stay loyal to their friends? “Both logics are logical,” Trompenaars says, which is one reason multinational firms that try to impose woolly corporate values on their worker— “integrity”, say—are surprised to discover it doesn’t work.

That Republicans are idiots (if your a Democrat) and Democrats are evil (if your a Republican) (and that both Democrats and Republicans are mindless sheep if you’re third-party kind of person) does feel logical from your point of view, but is that logic helpful or simply easy?

I once got into a discussion with a friend over the non-mathematical use of the word rational. Am I rational to think what I think? The short answer is, of course I am. The longer answer, as we discovered over a couple of hours and a lot of coffee, is really, really complicated. Rationality, like the other r-word, reality, is twisted. Our wetware, our individual psychological history, requires that we see our world in certain lights. We are the sum of our experiences and not even twins share all experiences. If there are more than 7 billion individuals on the planet in this moment, then there are more than 7 billion realities.

How the fuck do we deal with that if we want to segregate those more than 7 billion realities into just two camps?

We don’t. We can’t.

What we can do is to be open to the limits of our own programming and seek to be our own coders by processing the constant torrent of data in ways that might help us not make easy, snap judgements.

That’s tough, but how else do you crack a coconut?

In this excerpt from his new book Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, Ralph Nader writes:

When I was a student at Princeton University I learned from my anthropology studies that the concentration of power in the hands of the few is common to all cultures, societies, nations, tribes, cities, towns, and villages. Even where the thirst for self-governance and democracy is strong (as was the case in New England towns before the American Revolution against King George III) wealthy Tories were there too. In Central and Western Massachusetts, the farmers used the term “the River Gods” to describe the rich merchants using the Connecticut River as a profitable trading route. These days, most people protesting for economic justice use the term “the One Percent” to describe the ultra-small group of people who wield enormous influence over our society today.

There is something about the differences in skill, determination, lineage, avarice, and pure luck that stratifies most people from the rulers who dominate them. In the political realm, the few become dominant because they hoard wealth and are driven to exercise power over others. When a small group of people rules a society the political system is considered an oligarchy; when only money and wealth determine how a society is controlled, the political system is a plutocracy.

From the standpoint of a democratic society, both oligarchy and plutocracy are inherently unjust and corrupt.

Of course there are variations in the degrees of authoritarianism and cruelty that each system exercises over the communities it relies upon for workers and wealth. Scholars have resorted to using phrases like “benign dictatorships” or “wise rulers” or “paternalistic hierarchies—” to describe lighter touches by those Continue Reading »

I found this podcast series via James Hamblin’s video for The Atlantic titled: Creative Ideas Happen When You Stop Checking Your Phone that features Note To Self host Manoush Zomorodi and artist Nina Katchadourian. (Katchadourian was one of Walter Mischel subjects in the marshmallow study.) I was taken by her exercise for creating a state of boredom by writing 1010101010101010101… as many times as you can, as small as you can on a piece of paper. (In the Bored-To-Brilliance Challenge she tasks participants to put a pot of water on the stove and watch the water come to a boil.)

After watching the video I decided to try an experiment of my own with one of my math students in whom I’m attempting to instill a bit of wonder about math.

I downloaded and listened to this podcast series during my daily 80 minute, round-trip commute today and now I’ve even more pumped to try my own version of the bored-to-brilliance challenge. I’ve also found Zomorodi’s Bored and Brilliant, The Lost Art of Spacing Out video that I’ve begun to watch.

[Update at 1100]

Mano Singham nailed the moment in the debate when the spectacle started going off the rails.

It started when she got a question about what the WikiLeaks release of her campaign’s emails revealed about her views on trade and immigration. After a quick non-substantive response, she pivoted to talking about Russian involvement in the hacking and that they were trying to subvert the election and that Trump was Putin’s buddy. This was an obvious diversionary ploy by her to shift attention away from a serious vulnerability. And Trump immediately pointed out that this was an obvious pivot away from the question but then, incredibly, rather than ignore the diversionary tactic and press his advantage, he actually followed that squirrel and went on a rant about how she was outmaneuvered by Putin and calling her a liar. At one point in the heated cross-talk, she said that he was Putin’s puppet and he immediately shouted back, “You’re a puppet!” and then repeated it. It was like witnessing a playground exchange where a child flings the same accusation back at the accuser.

The world is watching with a little amusement and great horror as we eat our young.

Americans of a certain class and lineage were aghast when President John Kennedy went outside without a hat. What might those people think of Donald Trump?

Matt Taibbi in The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump for Rolling Stone, writes:Keeping up with Trump revelations is exhausting. By late October, he’ll be caught whacking it outside a nunnery. There are not many places left for this thing to go that don’t involve kids or cannibalism. We wait, miserably, for the dong shot.

Though, with those tiny, tiny hands, well. Taibbi focuses on Wisconsin congressman and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s annual “GOP Fall Fest,” where, he writes, “The modern Republican Party will perish.”

Speaker after speaker ascended the stage to urge Republican voters to vote. But with the exception of Attorney General Brad Schimel, who got a round of applause when he grudgingly asked the audience to back Trump for the sake of the Supreme Court, every last one of them tiptoed past the party nominee’s name. One by one, they talked around Trump, like an unmentionable uncle carted off on a kiddie-porn rap just before Thanksgiving dinner.

Metaphorically anyway, Trump supporters like Goril were right. Not one of these career politicians had the gumption to be frank with this crowd about what had happened to their party. Instead, the strategy seemed to be to pretend none of it had happened, and to hide behind piles of the same worn clichés that had driven these voters to rebel in the first place.

In two years House Republicans, as well as Senators and a whole slew of down-ticket candidates will carry on their backs how they responded to Donald Trump in 2016. Voters will want to know what they did to stop the cluster fuck of weak princes that was the GOP primary.

There wasn’t one capable or inspiring person in the infamous “Clown Car” lineup. All 16 of the non-Trump entrants were dunces, religious zealots, wimps or tyrants, all equally out of touch with voters. Scott Walker was a lipless sadist who in centuries past would have worn a leather jerkin and thrown dogs off the castle walls for recreation. Marco Rubio was the young rake with debts. Jeb Bush was the last offering in a fast-diminishing hereditary line. Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer.

Hell, forget two years from now, Republicans are already feeling the burn:

The House speaker had held a conference call with elected Republicans, telling them they were free to yank support from Trump if they thought it would help them win in November. This sounds like a good decision, until you consider that it’s one he should have made the moment Trump sealed the nomination. As always, the Republicans acted far too late in disavowing vicious and disgusting behavior in their ranks. Then again, it’s hard to keep the loons out when you’re scraping to find people willing to sell rich-friendly policies to a broke population. The reaction among hard-line legislators was predictable: You’re telling us now we can’t be pigs?

Taibbi follows on with a recitation of four political lies that underscore why I’m voting for Jill Stein:

Lie No. 1 is that there are only two political ideas in the world, Republican and Democrat. Lie No. 2 is that the parties are violent ideological opposites, and that during campaign season we can only speak about the areas where they differ (abortion, guns, etc.) and never the areas where there’s typically consensus (defense spending, surveillance, torture, trade, and so on). Lie No. 3, a corollary to No. 2, is that all problems are the fault of one party or the other, and never both. Assuming you watch the right channels, everything is always someone else’s fault. Lie No. 4, the reason America in campaign seasons looks like a place where everyone has great teeth and $1,000 haircuts, is that elections are about political personalities, not voters.

So, where does Taibbi leave us?

In the absolute best-case scenario, the one in which he loses, this is what Trump’s run accomplished. He ran as an outsider antidote to a corrupt two-party system, and instead will leave that system more entrenched than ever. If he goes on to lose, he will be our Bonaparte, the monster who will continue to terrify us even in exile, reinforcing the authority of kings.

If you thought lesser-evilism was bad before, wait until the answer to every question you might have about your political leaders becomes, “Would you rather have Trump in office?”

Trump can’t win. Our national experiment can’t end because one aging narcissist got bored of sex and food. Not even America deserves that. But that doesn’t mean we come out ahead. We’re more divided than ever, sicker than ever, dumber than ever. And there’s no reason to think it won’t be worse the next time.

I don’t think we can fix what we’ve broken. We own this.

What we face now is how do we survive?

In addition to my daily early morning walks with Buster along the Cleveland Metroparks trail that passes adjacent to our backyard, I also spend time between students circling the campus at the high school where I teach. The primary goal is physical health, but I also recognize the mental health benefits of these walks.

While I do carry my cellphone with me, I don’t spend time chatting like many other walkers I see with their faces in their screens. I grew up in the quiet of the woods and I do my best to spend time there.

We all should

So, how clueless is the Alt-Right? Pretty fecking clueless given the failure to get an obviously satirical tweet from raandy on Sunday that read:

i love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio and ripping up absentee ballots that vote for trump

Of course the Trumpists went into full-blown pitchforks and torches mode at this obvious proof that their man was right when he said the election was rigged.

Here’s the problem. I vote by mail in Ohio and I know that my ballot is sealed inside an envelope inside an envelope so there’s no possible way for a postal worker to know whom I voted for that doesn’t involve destroying both envelopes and spoiling the ballots, regardless of who the voter picked to be our next president.

The Trumpists missed this little fact.

Robert Mackey, writing in State of Ohio to Investigate Satirical Tweet That Fooled Drudge and Limbaugh for The Intercept explains:

A chorus of outraged conservatives, including Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and Curt Schilling, expressed anger on Monday at what they wrongly called evidence that a postal worker in Ohio had destroyed absentee ballots cast in the Republican’s favor.

The satirist, who writes as @randygdub, describes himself only as a “cool and chill guy of online,” living in California. Within minutes of posting his tweet on Sunday, he was surprised and delighted that his joke was mistaken for a genuine confession by Trump supporters eager to find any evidence of the election rigging their candidate, falsely, claims is rampant.

By Monday morning, however, the satirist’s joy at confusing enraged conservatives reached new heights when his tweet was reported as genuine by the right-wing blogger Jim Hoft, who demanded to know if someone in a position of authority would “follow up on this.” It apparently never occurred to Hoft that he could have followed up himself, by attempting to contact the Californian who posted the tweet, or by scanning the rest of his Twitter feed, which is devoted to political comedy.

Within hours, the fictional story had also been discussed, as fact, by Rush Limbaugh, and prompted investigations from both the United States Postal Service and the Secretary of State of Ohio, Jon Husted.

Those are my Ohio tax dollars Husted is throwing in the fire and I’m not happy about that, but I realize that Husted doesn’t give a flying fuck if I’m happy or not since I never have and never will vote for him. There will be a few Republicans in the state, however, who will think that being trolled by a political satirist into wasting their tax dollars is lame and will not be happy.

*First Dog On The Moon…

My family and I sat together in a nursing home room late Wednesday afternoon and watched as my father drew his last breath. My readers know my father from the scores of emails he forward to me that I turned around and published here under the tag From My Dad. His death was not sudden or unexpected, but rather the result of more than year’s gradual decline. I remember thinking that the end days had begun when we were looking at his model railroad layout in the basement and he told me that he no longer had any interest in working on the ever expanding project.

I have previously marked other important milestones in my own life by measuring them against my father’s. Now I have a final milestone on my horizon.

When we were all sitting around with the pastor who will conduct the service tomorrow, my sister remarked that we could write a book with all our memories and I said that Dad had already written that book and the book was us.

My brother Chris suggested these words for the memorial card in lieu of scripture:

Do all the good you can,
by all the means you can,
in all the ways you can,
in all the places you can,
at all the times you can,
to all the people you can,
as long as ever you can. 

—attributed to John Wesley

Today I’ll be spending much of my time writing my remarks for the service. I’ll post those when I’m finished.

I am a writer. I became a writer because I am a reader and I became a reader because the two men who were most important in my life, my Grandfather and my Father, filled our home with books and started me down my path by reading to me.

As I grew, I read most of those books, many more than once, and there came a time when dad and i began to read the same books. I remember how special he made me feel when he brought home four paperbacks—these paperbacks—and we discovered Tolkien’s Middle Earth together. The tale of Bilbo and Frodo and Gandalf and all the rest is magical, but paled before my wonder in the times I spent with dad talking about Tolkien’s world.

When I was a little older, and had money of my own, I began buying books to share with Dad. The first I gave to him was this one: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. That book, along with Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, first put the thought in my head that I could be a writer, a journalist. All that reading broadened my horizons far beyond Marietta and I wanted to see what was out there.

My first adventurous steps were to Colorado State University in the foothills of the Rockies and a summer high up in the mountains working at a scout ranch. I hitch-hiked back to Marietta from Wyoming in August and when I showed up at the door, only the dog recognized me with my long hair and a straggly beard. Dad took my brief homecoming before returning to Colorado in stride and I can still hear the surprise in his voice when I called home three months later to tell him that I had stretched my horizons even further by joining the Navy. I didn’t ask Dad if I should enlist because he had instilled in me the confidence to make that choice myself. That decision opened a new chapter in our lives together as we shared experiences about military life.

When I let Dad know that I would be getting a security clearance to work with nuclear weapons, he told me about receiving his own clearance in the Army and how I needed to let all my friends know what was going on so that they would be prepared when the FBI showed up at their doors. Dad also gave me two important pieces of advice about serving: First, he said, when you’re in a foreign place, take at least one day away from the bars and see how people lived where I was visiting; second, he advised, if i decided to get a tattoo, don’t get a girl’s name. Both served me well and I was able to visit places as far north as the Sea of Okhotsk where we played cat-and-mouse games with the Russians, as far south as Australia where we waited for Skylab to come crashing down, and to Africa where I watched mated cheetahs hunt in the wild. I climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, SCUBA dove in the waters around the Philippine Islands and watched kick-boxing matches in Thailand. Each time I came home I would share my stories and photos with Dad and each time he would share more of his own with me.

After the Navy I went to Ohio University to earn my bachelor’s degree. I studied writing and journalism, political science, history and computer programming. Dad was the first person I called during my junior year to tell him that I was a bona fide writer because I had just received a $250 check for a magazine article. After four years I graduated with way better grades than I ever earned in high school but I was inclined to blow off graduation as meaningless theater. I couldn’t, however. Dad had been sick when I graduated from High School and unable to attend my graduation. I knew that I had to attend my college graduation for him; I wanted us to share the afternoon together.

I had a good career as a magazine writer and editor, but fiction was still in me and in the ‘90s I took what I saw as a Walkabout, a term I learned in Australia, for a journey of self-exploration. I wanted to see if I could write a novel. I did and Dad got to read the manuscript first. He told me he liked the book; no praise could be higher. I’ve since written three more novels. all as of yet unpublished, and I’m working on the fifth. I always say that I have no regrets about my life because I am the sum of all my experiences and I like who I am.

I regret now, however, that I will never be able to see my father’s face when he reads the words: This work is dedicated to Charles Benjamin Hess, my Father, the man who never stopped believing in me.

You can read his published obituary after the jump. Continue Reading »

I fully agree with the dozens of commenters that, at least based on this speech [Up to the 12:00 minute timemark where she loses me, JH] and what little else I know about Michelle Obama, she should be on the ticket, not Hillary.

(Also, check out the two men in the background at timemark 9:12)

So, what did the other woman in the race, Green Party Presidential (and my) Candidate Dr. Jill Stein have to say? This and this.

I had a conversation yesterday about whether or not Trump supporters were working or middle class. I came down on the side of working class because I think the people we see chanting at rallies and calling for revolutions are predominantly disaffected working class Americans.

Sarah Smarsh, writing in Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans for The Guardian, sets me straight:

Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000—higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33 percent among whites or 29 percent overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism—not income, education, gender, age or race—predicted Trump support.

In recent weeks I’ve made several trips to my hometown of Marietta, Ohio, and I’ve noted that the reasonably prosperous suburb of North Royalton, Ohio, where I now live, has way more Trump/Pence yard signs than Marietta. Marietta is conservative and Republican, but that does not mean the community is driven by a white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on—hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags—must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

So why if they’re not representative, do these images predominate? Because, Smarsh believes, of the cognitive dissonance of Big Media:

In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs [Like North Royalton and the adjacent communities of Strongsville and Brunswick. JH]. But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

Mirrors can be very scary.

Sheriff David Clark chose very poorly when he picked this stock photo for his tweet exclaiming:

It’s incredible that our institutions of gov, WH, Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch. Pitchforks and torches time

Lois Beckett, reporting in Milwaukee sheriff says it’s ‘pitchforks and torches time’ and stands by Trump for The Guardian, writes:

Clarke’s comments come at a time of growing anxiety over Trump’s repeated claims, without evidence, that the presidential election is rigged against him. At least one Trump supporter at a rally in Cincinnati on Friday was quoted by the Boston Globe as saying that if Clinton is elected, “I hope we can start a coup.”

“We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office, if that’s what it takes,” the supporter said.

At a rally for Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence on Thursday, a woman from the audience told the candidate she, too, would rather take action than allow a Democrat to win. “I don’t want this to happen – but I will tell you for me, personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in,” she warned, “I’m ready for a revolution because we can’t have her in.”

“You don’t want – don’t say that,” Pence replied.

Noting a history of violence at Trump rallies by his supporters, some online observers took Clarke’s call for “pitchforks and torches” seriously, asking whether he was inciting violence and whether his comments constituted sedition against the government. His remarks also raised concerns that it was inappropriate for a law enforcement official famous for his “law and order” political views to be calling for citizens to take to the streets.

Robert Post, a first amendment expert and the dean of Yale Law School, said Clarke’s comments were “horrible and despicable” but that “an American court would view this as venting, basically.”

I agree. I’ve used the pitchforks and torches/tumbrels and Phrygian caps metaphors myself more than once. The difference is that I expected my readers to understand the metaphor. I’m not so sure that Clarke’s audience—like the woman in Cincinnati who addressed Mike Pence—are all that clear on the concept.

I have no problem with the exercise of anyone’s guaranteed, first amendment right to practice their personal religion as long as that practice does not stomp all over the rights of others. Campaigning, and voting for, individuals who you feel represent you’re personal values is good. Expecting the people you elect to curb, or outlaw, the personal values of others is not.

White Christian Americans have nothing to fear from becoming a minority since our nation has always treated minorities with acceptance and respect. Right?

Big carbon really, really hates is scared shitless by the far bigger hydrogen because you can’t turn an obscene profit off of the Sun the way you can by extracting coal, oil and gas from the ground. Advocates of solar power, are getting their message out and burning through the flack-generated waves of dis-information that would make a tobacco executive blush.

Ralph Nader writes:

If Mother Sun were to select a favorite son on Planet Earth, Ken Bossong would be high on the list. Operating for over forty years on a tiny budget from a tiny office in Takoma Park, Maryland, the unsung solar energy advocate has been a one-man informing and organizing machine.

He founded the Sun Day campaign in 1992, in his words, “to aggressively promote sustainable energy technologies as cost-effective alternatives to nuclear power and fossil fuels.”

With renewables like solar and wind energy becoming the fastest growing sources of new energy in many areas of the world, Bossong is now seeing his long and often frustrating battles against the traditional corporate skeptics Continue Reading »

I thought America would brush off the Trump-Bush tape because so much equally, or even more, hideous material had already been revealed in the past year and my assessment of the effect of Trump’s locker room talk—despite what other have very publicly claimed, I have heard plenty of such talk (particularly in the Military) before—was that this too would blow over.

Boy, was I wrong. Or maybe not.

David A. Graham, writing in Independents and Women Bail on Trump, Giving Clinton a Double-Digit Lead for The Atlantic, tells us:

With less than a month to go until Election Day, Donald Trump’s standing has plummeted with likely voters, falling from a dead heat just two weeks ago to a double-digit deficit behind Hillary Clinton, according to a [Public Religion Research Institute]/The Atlantic poll released Tuesday.

Clinton holds a 49-38 lead over the Republican. Two weeks ago, a previous PRRI/Atlantic poll found Trump and Clinton tied at 43-43. Following the first presidential debate in Hempstead, New York, the Democrat broke out to a 47-41 lead. She has now built on that lead.

That’s the bad news for Trump. The worse news is that this poll likely does not include the full impact of a video, published Friday afternoon by The Washington Post, in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women. The poll was conducted Wednesday through Sunday, meaning some respondents were interviewed before the video’s release and some afterward. It also does not take into account the second presidential debate, in which Trump’s performance drew widely varying reviews.

The even worser news is that a hailstorm of sweaty gym shoes may be about to pummel The Donald.

Nigel M Smith, in Demand mounts for Trump Apprentice tapes that may hold ‘far worse’ footage for The Guardian, writes:

The repercussions were swift following last Friday’s leak of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Donald Trump can be heard bragging about sexually assaulting women: House speaker Paul Ryan told fellow Republicans that he would no longer defend the party’s nominee, while hordes of party members distanced themselves from Trump’s comments with some—including Senator John McCain—even saying they could no longer vote for Trump.

Supposedly, things could get even worse for the Republican nominee.

Following the release of the footage by the Washington Post, Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, the NBC reality show Trump hosted from 2004-2015, tweeted that there are “far worse” behind-the-scenes tapes of Trump on the program. Emmy award-winning producer Chris Nee has alleged that Trump says the n-word in the recordings.

Yet, I have thought so many times that Trump was toast that I feel gun shy, expecting him to come striding out from the exploding bombs and rockets like some movie monster the heroes thought was certainly dead.

Cognitive dissonance is a very strong psychological force and I think that nothing short of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell standing on the capital steps with the entire Republican Caucus arrayed behind them—joined by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and their entire cabinets—holding We’re With Her signs is likely to send Trumpzilla back into the deep.

It’s not who the Plain Dealer endorsed. It’s how.

The choice is enough to question the seriousness of top editors.

Atop the Forum page, this past Sunday’s editorial section of the PD, was a 7-inch deep, page-wide photograph of a smiling LeBron James. He is holding, of course, a basketball. What that has to do with a Presidential election you decide.

The photo proclaimed with these words: “In the matter of our endorsement for president of the United States of America…” and then opposite James’ smiling face, “We agree with his choice: Hillary Clinton.”

What more proof would you need?

What does he have to do with the Presidential election, you may also ask?

Really nothing. Absolutely nothing.

It was the introduction to a “most unconventional endorsement,” we are told by Chris Quinn, vice president of content and writer of the endorsement. (VP, whatever happened to editors by the way?) Please bring them back, Advance Ohio, and stop this corporate speak.

Even Quinn apparently recognized the folly of his approach, writing, “Yes, this is a stunt, a gimmick.”

Are we going high school, Chris?

Sports have long become the model of this daily newspaper. It’s so much easier to put out a sports paper than a newspaper.

They can’t seem to avoid this kind of lowering the quality of journalism in town.

“We say, quite simply, we agree with LeBron James’ choice of Hillary Clinton,” Quinn writes of the PD‘s endorsement of the former Senator and Secretary of State.

Do you really have to hang this decision on the choice of a sports hero? Don’t we have enough pandering of sports figures?

By the way, editorial board member Kevin O’Brien was one of a couple of board members who didn’t write his take on this election.

Hard to believe that hard-right Kevin couldn’t come up with a reason to vote for the deplorable Donald Trump.

By Roldo Bartimole…

Trevor needs to watch Mad Men. (Watch No. 4 closely for the signature Don Draper move.)

If Clevelanders vote to increase the income (payroll) tax two things will happen that won’t be very helpful to the city. In my opinion anyway.

The ballot issue asks for a 25 percent increase in the 2 percent regressive payroll tax. Much too much. That means 2.25 percent of your first earned dollar—and every one after—goes to the city.

What does it say to us or me at least?

First, it will encourage Mayor Frank Jackson to run for re-election next year. Why not? The coffers will be full for spending—full speed ahead.

It would be an unprecedented fourth four-year term for Jackson. It would make him—a sleepy, sloppy city leader—the longest serving in the city’s history. Four more years of caretaker government.

What a vacancy of leadership we are experiencing.

Second, it will serve to grease the skids for East Cleveland to join Cleveland.

This will be done with little proper examination by anyone.

The city of Cleveland should not have to absorb all of E. Cleveland without some compensation. East Cleveland certainly doesn’t have it. Only the State Continue Reading »