Roldo Bartimole writes:

You are going to hear a lot of lies. There will be mucho money poured into telling these lies. The Greater Cleveland Partnership – Cleveland’s corporate voice – will try to Rope-a-Dope us again.

Some truth is therefore necessary.

So I’m going to reach back into the past to give some context to what will be the Cleveland Establishment’s biggest campaign. It’s already started months ahead of a ballot issue due in May. Be sure also to read the postscript.

They want to sell you an extension of the sales taxes for another 20 years. After you have been paying for 25 years already. The cost – hundreds of millions of dollars. In addition to sin taxes tens of millions still due bondholders. From both the city and county.

Before I get started I have the answer to the problem of financing our sports teams. It’s very simple. The City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County should do one thing: Sell each of the sport facilities to the respective team owners for $1 each. A great bargain. The facilities cost hundreds of millions to build. So, give ’em away. Then, as every other business, they pay their bills and get off welfare.

Why are we allowing Major League Baseball, National League Football and the National Basketball League, their billionaire owners and millionaire ballplayers to continue at the tax teat? We’re paying for A-Rod, LeBron and all the rest of the prima donnas.

True now as then.

Here is a transcript of my remarks of a 1997 City Club debate with Gateway’s then chairman Tom Chema. It was labeled “What Price Professional Sports.” Too high a price. Here it is:

In 1990, before the sin tax vote, Tom Chema and I had a little debate. I was wearing a button that said, ‘Let Jacobs Pay.’ Tom made Continue Reading »

Matt Taibbi writes:

“The president’s current ‘Bus Tour’ is just another, agonizing, frustrating whitewash, to be blunt,” is how Alan Collinge of studentloanjustice.org, who was a key source in a feature we ran on this very topic (skyrocketing college costs) just last week. Collinge too was unimpressed by the “feckless” proposal that might “eventually” be implemented. “The schools have come up against far stronger attempts to tie school performance to aid,” he said, “and they have reduced them to soft oatmeal.”

The problem with this proposal, which is the problem with many of this President’s proposals and speeches, is that you just never know. The plan he and his people come up with could, at least in theory, turn into something that significantly changes the landscape and helps reduce college costs. He could turn out to be right on this thing. But we most likely won’t have a hint one way or another until next year at least, and we apparently won’t know for sure until well into the second year of the Cory Booker or Ted Cruz presidency.

Taibbi concludes:

This is how you do politics in this country. You’re taking water over some monstrous screw-up (and my God, what have they been thinking with this Greenwald/Miranda/NSA business?), so you work fast to 1) change the subject, and 2) make sure the other party is tossed on the wrong side of whatever new set of goalposts you’ve just put up.

Barack Obama is so frustrating. He can give quite a speech. He says just enough of the right things to give pause, and sometimes genuinely seems to be in touch with the pain of the vanishing middle class. He has the appearance, on occasion, of the politician of your dreams – intelligent, forward-thinking, even-keeled, just. You want to believe in him, you really do.

But just taking this week for instance, there’s just no way around the math. This new education plan may or may not turn into something five years from now. But right now, it’s all words.

What’s not words is that the White House has been engaged all summer in a lunatic defense of a vast and apparently illegal domestic espionage program and tossed a young soldier in prison for three decades for exposing war crimes and torture. What’s also not words is that in a matter of months, not years, the President is going to need his base shored up and his poll numbers elevated to win what promises to be yet another drawn-out battle over the budget.

Does that mean the education proposal is insincere? That Obama will drop it once the NSA business cools down, or after the Democrats win the fiscal debate in congress? No, it doesn’t automatically mean that. But it is what it is. This President has a gift for talking about the future, but his record on right now is beginning to suck enough that you have to wonder.

This so reminds me of how our four dogs react when one of them sees a leaf get blown across the yard in an odd (or maybe just interesting) way: total chaos and a deafening cacophony of yips and barks that can only be translated as “Panic! Panic! Panic!”

I got here before 2012, but I’m happy that others, like Andrew Sullivan, have passed the tipping point.

Jeff Jarvis writes:

What are you thinking, Mr. President?

Is this really the legacy you want for yourself: the chief executive who trampled rights, destroyed privacy, heightened secrecy, ruined trust, and worst of all, did not defend but instead detoured around so many of the fundamental principles on which this country is founded?

And I voted for you. I’ll confess you were a second choice. I supported Hillary Clinton first. I said at the time that your rhetoric about change was empty and that I feared you would be another Jimmy Carter: aggressively ineffectual.

Never did I imagine that you would instead become another Richard Nixon: imperial, secretive, vindictive, untrustworthy, inexplicable.

In an attempt to smear Edward Snowden, someone, at the NSA, at GCHQ, in the White House, at No. 10 Downing Street, is leaking precisely the kinds of information that Edward Snowden has not revealed.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The Independent this morning published an article – which it repeatedly claims comes from “documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden” – disclosing that “Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies.” This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it’s the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided.

That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure? Snowden this morning said he wants it to be clear that he was not the source for the Independent,

So, who goes to prison if a sanctioned government leak results in a death?

Robert Reich writes:

America no longer values public goods as we did decades ago.

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century, when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens and generate widespread prosperity.

Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good — improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

In subsequent decades — through the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War — this logic was expanded upon. Strong public institutions were seen as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism and then Soviet communism.

The public good was palpable: We were very much a society bound together by mutual needs and common threats. It was no coincidence that the greatest extensions of higher education after World War II were the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, or that the largest public works project in history was called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.

But in a post-Cold War America distended by global capital, distorted by concentrated income and wealth, undermined by unlimited campaign donations, and rocked by a wave of new immigrants easily cast by demagogues as “them,” the notion of the public good has faded.

A rising tide does indeed lift all boats. When we force more and more of our population into smaller and smaller craft riddled with holes, infested with rats and so over crowded that the tiny freeboard is overtopped by the smallest wavelet, however, the analogy fails.

Simon Jenkins writes:

Last week in Washington, Congressional investigators discovered that the America’s foreign intelligence surveillance court, a body set up specifically to oversee the NSA, had itself been defied by the agency “thousands of times”. It was victim to “a culture of misinformation” as orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files were simply disregarded; an intelligence community that seems neither intelligent nor a community commanding a global empire that could suborn the world’s largest corporations, draw up targets for drone assassination, blackmail US Muslims into becoming spies and haul passengers off planes.

Yet like all empires, this one has bred its own antibodies. The American (or Anglo-American?) surveillance industry has grown so big by exploiting laws to combat terrorism that it is as impossible to manage internally as it is to control externally. It cannot sustain its own security. Some two million people were reported to have had access to the WikiLeaks material disseminated by Bradley Manning from his Baghdad cell. Snowden himself was a mere employee of a subcontractor to the NSA, yet had full access to its data. The thousands, millions, billions of messages now being devoured daily by US data storage centres may be beyond the dreams of Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000. But even HAL proved vulnerable to human morality. Manning and Snowden cannot have been the only US officials to have pondered blowing a whistle on data abuse. There must be hundreds more waiting in the wings – and always will be.

If we don’t watch the watchmen, no one else will.

Bill Chappel writes:

The website Groklaw, which for 10 years demystified complex issues involving technology and the law, is shutting down. Editor Pamela Jones writes that she can’t run the site without email, and that since emails’ privacy can’t be guaranteed, she can no longer do the site’s work.

*Bush-Obama Security Scheme

Time to go analog.

Previously…

From this morning’s New York Times:

Elmore Leonard, the prolific crime novelist whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like “Get Shorty,” “Freaky Deaky” and “Glitz” established him as a modern master of American genre writing, died on Tuesday at his home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. He was 87.

I own many of Leonard’s books and, as a writer, I have studied his style and craft with an intense eye toward understanding how this master did what he did. His rules were simple to articulate, but might take a lifetime to fully understand and implement.

My personal favorite is Rule No. 10: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. The great writers, like Leonard, know how to do this in their very being. The rest of us struggle.

Paul Craig Roberts writes:

The improprieties of Nixon and Clinton were minor, indeed of little consequence, when compared to the crimes of George W. Bush and Obama, their vice presidents, and the bulk of their presidential appointees. Yet, impeachment is “off the table,” as Nancy Pelosi infamously declared. [Roberts is, of course, disingenuous here by suggesting that Pelosi’s comment is in reference to President Obama when, in fact, in 2006 when she, as Speaker of the House, had standing to make such a statement, was referring to President George Walker Bush. JH] Why do Californian voters send a person to Congress who refuses to protect them from an unaccountable executive branch? Who does Nancy Pelosi serve? Certainly not the people of California. Most certainly not the US Constitution. Pelosi is in total violation of her oath of office. Will Californians re-elect her yet again? Little wonder America is failing.

The question demanding to be asked is: What is the purpose of the domestic surveillance of all Americans? This is surveillance out of all proportion to the alleged terrorist threat. The US Constitution is being ignored and domestic law violated. Why? Does the US government have an undeclared agenda for which the “terrorist threat” is a cover?

What is this agenda? Whose agenda is more important than the US Constitution and the accountability of government to law? No citizen is secure unless government is accountable to the Constitution and to law. It is an absurd idea that any American is more threatened by terrorism than by unaccountable government that can execute them, torture them, and throw them in prison for life without due process or any accountability whatsoever. Under Bush/Obama, the US has returned to the unaccountable power of caesars, czars, and autocrats.

My dad sent me Roberts’ essay. Roberts gets points for including President George Walker Bush in his accusations and has, I think, a case and I would not object to impeachment proceedings. The actions of President Barack Hussein Obama are more heinous than those of either presidents Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. He loses points for the bit of trickery involving, as I note above, the Pelosi quote. On balance, I think this is the right road to go down.

First, however, I would demand that Congress get its own house in order by immediately repealing the Patriot Act and all associated legislation, putting a strangle hold on the National Security Administration and dissolving the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security.

Then, having proven that it truly has the interests of the people of the United States at heart and is not, as was the case of Clinton, solely interested in attacking a president not of its own party, the House of Representatives should proceed with impeachment hearings.

The majority in the house, and particularly its leadership, must take steps to restore credibility to its institution before subjecting the nation to another politically motivated circus.

*The Bush-Obama Security Scheme…

[Update at 0814–The Guardian has a time line of events regarding David Miranda.]

The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts has also published a more extensive interview with Miranda.

My brother, Cavana Faithwalker let me know today of the passing of Teshima Walker Izrael, executive producer of NPR’s Tell Me More and wife of Jimi Izrael.

Today, the show’s staff broadcast a tribute to Teshima and wrote:

Teshima Walker Izrael was the executive producer of Tell Me More. She came to the end of a long battle with cancer on Friday at the age of 44. Tributes and tweets are coming in from all over the country with #TeamTeshima.

Tell Me More thought it would be fitting to hear her voice on the air again, sharing one of the many stories she reported over the years. In 2005, she and producer Nicole Child went to Montgomery, Ala., and toured the Cleveland Court Apartments where Rosa Parks and her husband lived. We air an excerpt from that story.

To add your tributes, use #TeamTeshima on Twitter or email tellmemore@npr.org.

I enjoyed listening to the show on WCPN while it was broadcast in the afternoons, but have missed the stories now that it airs Monday-Friday at 10 p.m. It was Jimi who lead me to the show.

We miss those who are gone, but it is for the living and their unknowable place, that we grieve.

Others are writing as well: Ray Salazar…

[Update: 19 August @ 0918 — Mano Singham joins the conversation:

Those of us who have been concerned with the massive assault on civil liberties have warned that all the so-called ‘anti-terror’ measures that are being rammed through for the ostensible purpose of fighting terrorism would be also used against anyone whom the government does not like, and that those who casually dismissed those concerns might one day find themselves in the cross-hairs. Those alleged realists who adopted a worldly-wise air and airily treated due process and constitutional protections as quaint relics of a bygone era that need to be dispensed with in our hard-eyed effort to protect ourselves from terrorism dismissed these arguments as fear-mongering, placing their trust in the supposed goodness of political leaders that they would not abuse the powers they had seized.

The case of David Miranda will, I hope, open their eyes.

Surprisingly, one of President Obama’s strongest supporters, Andrew Sullivan, is also glimpsing the dark side:

When the NSA leaks burst onto the scene, I was skeptical of many of the large claims made by civil libertarians and queasily sympathetic to a program that relied on meta-data alone, as long as it was transparent, had Congressional buy-in, did not accidentally expose innocent civilians to grotesque privacy loss, and was watched by a strong FISA court.

Since then, I’ve watched the debate closely and almost all the checks I supported have been proven illusory. The spying is vastly more extensive than anyone fully comprehended before; the FISA court has been revealed as toothless and crippled; and many civilians have had their privacy accidentally violated over 3000 times. The president, in defending the indefensible, has damaged himself and his core reputation for honesty and candor. These cumulative revelations have exposed this program as, at a minimum, dangerous to core liberties and vulnerable to rank abuse. I’ve found myself moving further and further to Glenn’s position.

What has kept me from embracing it entirely has been the absence of any real proof than any deliberate abuse has taken place and arguments that it has helped prevent terror attacks. This may be too forgiving a standard. If a system is ripe for abuse, history tells us the only question is not if such abuse will occur, but when. So it is a strange and awful irony that the Coalition government in Britain has today clinched the case for Glenn.

Power, in any form, if subject to abuse will be abused. Full stop.]

[Update: 19 August @ 0552 — So far this morning, I’m seeing only the New York Times with the story here in Amerika.]

Glenn Greenwald writes:

[T]hey obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop “the terrorists”, and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day – as every hour passed – worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

Before letting him go, they seized numerous possessions of his, including his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks, and other materials. They did not say when they would return any of it, or if they would.

This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It’s bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It’s worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.

*Bush-Obama Security Scheme…

Mano Singham writes:

NBC News reports that Ladar Levinson, the head of encrypted mail service provider Lavabit, who shut down his company rather than comply with a secret government demand, was threatened with arrest for taking that action.

Secrecy, has, as Mano suggests, gone crazy.

*Bush-Obama Security Scheme

Previously…

If you see and understand something, be sure that it is something you’ll be able to release in the future in order to get to a higher kind of truth. p. 47

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

I grew up in and around Ohio’s first town: Marietta. My hometown has a population of 14,080 and is the county seat of Washington County (population 61,755). Where I spent my first 17 years (and where my parents, three siblings and their families still live) the is opposite of the greater-Cleveland area where I’ve lived since 1984–first in Cleveland Heights and now North Royalton–geographically, politically and culturally.

Geographically Cleveland and Marietta are at opposite ends of Ohio’s section of I-77 and marked by water barriers (Lake Erie to the north and the Ohio River to the south). Politically, Marietta is as Republican (one of my sister-in-laws won election as the town’s Republican auditor in 2011) as Cleveland Heights is Democratic. Culturally, I grew up in a place as rural as where I’ve lived these past 28 years is urban.

In recent years I’ve made a daily habit of reading The Marietta Times online. The Times publishes six days a week and a typical day’s paper would probably be the size of one section of the Plain Dealer (before recent cuts) and I’m sure that that is quite enough news.

This month I stopped listening to WCPN on my car’s radio–I’ve been listening to Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe on CD instead– and a few days ago I deleted Salon from my favorites bar because I’ve grown tired of all the click–bait there.

I’ve decided to continue to listen to books on CD while driving and I’m restricting my news sources to London’s The Guardian and The Marietta Times. My reasons are tied back to one of the guiding texts in my life, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. In 1854, after 10 years and eight drafts, Thoreau published his great work which included this passage in the second chapter: “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life–I wrote this some years ago–that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

My time is better spent at tasks other than gossiping.

As I look at The Times this morning, I checked the obituaries, now that I am of the age of those who do so, and noted an editorial, a letter-to-the-editor (often enlightening and entertaining in The Times) and one national news story.

That is quite enough.