So, Corey Lewandowski came to Cleveland to court Congress James Bupkis* Renacci and show his undying love for conservative politics money.

As the warmup for his yacht club smoochfest, Lewandowski scored a Renacci-assisted place at the podium of the City Club of Cleveland where he told the paying attendees:

If you want to have a discussion back and forth, we can do that, but let me tell you how that works. When you get the podium, you get to talk as long as you want.

Given the discussion on air and in the press on 19 July, there should be no one surprised at how this turned out.

Lewandowski got defensive when both the audience and local media wanted to know if he was taking money from a payday loan company: Community Choice Financial. People want to know because Lewandowski called for the removal of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director (and former Ohio Attorney General and possible Ohio gubertorial candidate) Richard Cordray last weekend.

One of the areas that Cordray has targeted has been predatory lenders. That, combined with the fear that Cordray could be serious threat to Renacci’s bid for governor, sheds a bright light on why Lewandowski was in Cleveland yesterday.

Writing in Corey Lewandowski Just as Worthless as Expected at the City Club for Scene, Sam Allard offers this take:

Whatever it was that former Republican strategist and deposed cable news commentator Corey Lewandowski hoped to communicate to the paying audience at the City Club of Cleveland Thursday afternoon, the takeaways from this controversial forum will have little to do with his remarks.

How could they? Lewandowski’s speech, and his wobbly answers to seven audience questions, were so destitute of worth and truth that the crowd could do little but sigh and shake their heads as they processed to the elevators after City Club CEO Dan Moulthrop glumly adjourned the forum just as tempers began to flare. The Donald Trump sympathizers in the audience had stumbled upon sporadic moments of applause that never quite rose to the level of rounds, but even they might have found it difficult to defend the charade on anything other than propaganda grounds.

Near the exits, some of the attendees remarked upon the “tension” in the room. Others felt Lewandowski had deflected most of the substantive questions, a feeling we shared and one we’d be remiss not to illustrate:

The third audience question invited Lewandowski to reflect on why Americans should believe anything Donald Trump says “if he can’t even be honest about his golf scores?”

Lewandowski ignored the question and replied that he’d never played golf with Trump, but that he was “probably the best golfer, as a President, that we have ever seen.”

The answer was in keeping with the speech’s fawning tone, in open defiance of seriousness. Among other superlatives, Donald Trump was described as the “greatest political phenomenon of all-time.” He was the best marketer, he was the most successful businessman, he had prevailed in the 2016 primaries against “the greatest Republican field of all-time.”

“In whatever he has sought to achieve,” Lewandowski remarked early on, “he has been successful.”

From where I sit, Lewandowski played The City Club the way President Donald John Trump played The Boy Scouts. Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh apologized for Trump’s speech. My question now is, will City Club CEO Dan Moulthrop do the same?

I suppose that if Lewandowski was good enough for Trump, then he’s good enough for Renacci. Birds of a feather and all that.

*After extensive searches, I have been unable to determine what Renacci’s middle initial stands for. Until I can find a reliable reference to Renacci full name, Bupkis will do.

Previously…

Not, of course, to be confused with these people…

Here in Cleveland we’ve grown used to, complacent at times, reading Roldo Bartimole’s singular journalism. We’re so used to Roldo’s ubiquitous messages that we forget, or perhaps don’t even realize, that Cleveland’s own has a national reach. Recently Roldo was invited on to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour to discuss, in part, a favorite Roldo Topic: taxes and Cleveland’s sports teams.

Yesterday, League Of Fans, a sports reform project founded by Ralph Nader to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports; and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture, posted Q & A with Roldo Bartimole, an interview with Roldo by League of Fans’ Sports Policy Director, Ken Reed.

Reed: What do you think is the root cause of all the publicly-financed stadium/arena schemes we see in this country?

Bartimole: It is difficult for me to speak of other cities but I suspect the reasoning and pressure for new major league sports facilities are similar to Cleveland’s.

The institutions—chambers of commerce, foundations, special committees—form a powerful unit to propose civic “needs”. These “needs” are clearly always seen as positive, community-benefiting and civic-minded interests by the usually supine news media.

The information providers—newspapers, television and radio—invariably act as cheerleaders for these efforts. Most often they take as reliable the pitch from such civic interests (who they are used to dealing with and believe to be honest brokers, not self-interested as they usually are).

This combination of institutions and information providers typically makes it almost impossible for the political leaders to buck such interests and say no. It’s difficult to fight all these interests and the news media’s highly effective support propaganda. Politicians typically see—or are forced to see—such public investment as necessary. Little real concern is given to the actual public benefits versus public costs.

And typically, the taxes chosen to finance these projects are Continue Reading »

Personally I have greater faith in individuals like Bernie Sanders than I do anyone with more money than they know what to do with, but maybe Ralph Nader has insights that I lack.

Writing in Will a Mega-Billionaire Rescue America from GOP’s Insurance Mayhem?, Nader explores his question:

Before recommending a practical way to reverse the devastating impact of Congressional Republicans’ attempts to strip tens of millions of Americans of health insurance coverage, and the non-stop anxiety and dread that comes with such cruel and vicious legislation, note the impact of having gerrymandered (the politicians pick the voters) Washington rulers.

The arrogant Republicans in Congress have good health insurance, life insurance, pensions, salaries and expense accounts paid by you the taxpayers. This perversely has led them to drop any empathy their residual consciences might have possessed before they came to Capitol Hill—many as millionaires.

At the same time, in a country that spends well over $3 trillion a year on ‘healthcare’, the GOP’s various bills leave millions of families fearing loss of insurance, reduced coverage, larger deductibles, unaffordable co-pays and inscrutable insurance and billing fine-print trap doors. This is producing serious fear, anxiety, depression and in many cases absolute terror for sick children and ailing parents.

We have the New York Times to thank for bringing this vast human toll, day after day, night after night, to their readers. In a recent article, reporter Jan Hoffman interviews people who are wondering “whether they would be able to continue screenings and treatment.” Hoffman writes that patients “are postponing”—so as Continue Reading »

It was classy, just as Umberto feels about himself. And he tries to convince others.

He didn’t complain about protesters in front of his fancy European-style house. He’d outsmart them. He’d treat them princely.

Offer them pizza from his basement Italian restaurant. Why be testy.

Rather classy, no? Better than cake.

Whose party was this?

This was the party of the TAKERS. Jackson’s contributions with this early filing hit $550,367. He has on hand a war chest of $703,782.07.

The kid from the most impoverished area of Cleveland out at Republican Umberto’s palatial Hunting Valley house.

Why? Collecting $$$, of course.

Mayor Frank Jackson acts like a man who knows he’s in trouble.

The establishment apparently feels that way, too. They’re overloading him with dollars. The $5,000 contributions are flooding in.

Clevelanders in many neighborhoods are angry, feeling left out. It’s the Continue Reading »

I recently purchased Gavin Aung Than’s In The Mood For Work to add to the walls above my typewriter. When I placed the order, Gav asked me to share a photo that he could post on his Instagram page.

While I’m certainly far from the company of those that The Guardian has chosen to feature in its Writers’ Rooms series, I like to think that I’ve taken appropriate care to creating and maintaining a space that works for me.

Working from the upper left in the photo, you can see my reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portait (purchased at the 1996 Codex Leicester exhibition); three black-and-white photos of my constant companion Buster Wu—he’s part Alsatian (not to be confused with German Shepherds) and part Shar Pei—the best Christmas present I’ve ever received (the photos, not Buster Wo); a copy of Walter Mosley’s For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day (I suggested to Gav that Mosley’s line: 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. was worthy of his work, but he said he was thinking of an illustration from my procrastination quote instead); a photo of my father as a young artist working at his drawing board; the cover of Rolling Stone featuring one of my writing heroes, Hunter S. Thompson, whose Hell’s Angels convinced me that I had to be a writer; and finally, of course Gav’s In The Mood For Work. I particularly liked panels two and seven because I’ve so been there in my my writing life.

One of my favorite authors—one I think of as a kind of mentor—plays solitaire (with real cards, not on the computer) when he’s stuck. I like that idea, but I can see the advantage of simply putting your head down.

Louise Welsh, writing in I work best when I reach a mild degree of boredom for The Guardian, explains:

The writing itself is hard to relate. It is a process of adding and taking away; deep thought and waking dreams; hard technical graft and the occasional leap of realisation. I drink lots of tea, chew gum and occasionally stand up and stretch. When I feel stuck, I put my head on the desk and try to reach that place between dreams and awareness, where the unconscious lives.

Other writers (I remember Walter Mosley making this point in his This Year You Write Your Novel) also talk about the near-dream state they slip into at times. For me, this is often the way I feel when I’m meditating. That is, of course, frustrating because I can’t spring to my notebook or keyboard to note any revelations because that would defeat the purpose of meditating.

Oh well.

Writing is never like a beeline. Well almost never, Isaac Asimov claimed to write single drafts, and there may be other unicorns out there; but for the rest of us, writing is a meandering journey marked by innumerable dead ends and lost paths. We meander like Billy on a mission. (My own pre-dawn excursions with Buster Wu are like that.) What that means, of course, that all the meanderings end up in the (real or virtual) trash.

Scott Turow, writing in My characters, like me, find society’s problems in the law for The Guardian, muses:

The simple truth, I’m pleased to acknowledge, is that most days writing makes me happy. Usually what’s ahead of me flashes through my mind not long after waking, igniting a triumphal fantasy: I will imagine epically, think precisely and, like an underwater swimmer with elastic lungs, breaststroke through the murk until I unseal the buried treasure chest of perfect words.

Of course, it is almost never like that. In fact, at my current stage, when I’m starting a new novel, I know that most of what I write will not appear in the finished book, since I chew my work over relentlessly like a ruminating cow. But I understand my own process. Each day inches me closer to the goal of harnessing soul and self and producing something that is, for better or worse, quintessentially me.

I keep my major—whole sentences, paragraphs, chapters—deletions in a morgue file for each work; if for no other purpose to remind myself that I have written 100,000 words in the past month. That’s how I keep score until I get to the point, like Turow, where I can sit back for a moment and reflect in the glory of publishing the 1,000 words that I didn’t delete.

Matt Taibbi, writing in Anthony Scaramucci Era Will Be Freakish, Embarrassing, Short for Rolling Stone…

Oh, of fuck trying to excerpt and comment on Taibbi. Just read the whole fucking thing.

(I have to say, however, that the last three paragraphs are particularly tasty.)

So, if your week hasn’t been gloomy enough with all the brinkmanship in the senate, Ralph Nader serves up four more existential threats. Answering his own rhetorical question in Can the World Defend Itself from Omnicide? Nader writes:

Notice how more frequently we hear scientists tell us that we’re “wholly unprepared” for this peril or for that rising fatality toll? Turning away from such warnings may reduce immediate tension or anxiety, but only weakens the public awareness and distracts us from addressing the great challenges of our time, such as calamitous climate change, pandemics, and the rise of a host of other self-inflicted disasters.

Here are some warnings about rising and looming risks.

1. The opioid epidemic is here now, and poised to become further exacerbated. It is the US’s deadliest drug overdose crisis ever, taking over 1000 lives a week. Even that figure is underestimated, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control. These fatalities, many of them affecting people in the prime of their life, stem from legally prescribed drugs taken to relieve chronic pain. Tragically ironic!

Congress is figuring out how to budget for many billions of dollars to combat this toll – much greater than the deaths by traffic crashes or AIDS. Republican and Democratic state officials are suing the drug companies for excessive, misleading promotion for profit. Still, the awful toll keeps rising.

2. Cyberattacks and cyberwarfare are increasingly becoming a Continue Reading »

From the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus:

WHEN: Noon, Today, Wednesday, 26 July.
WHERE: PNC Bank, 1900 E. 9th St., Cleveland.

PNC is a major financier of the Rover Pipeline. Why is this a bad thing? The Rover Pipeline will run 365 miles across Ohio to transport fracked gas to the Gulf of Mexico and Canada from Marcellus and Utica shale deposits in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It will cross—and endanger the integrity—of 18 major streams and rivers in Ohio. It will further delay our shift to renewable sources of energy, and the methane coming from wells will accelerate global warming.

PNC is financing the pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners. ETP has a reputation for reckless disregard of environmental protections, numerous oil and drilling fluid spills and utter contempt for any community or landowner who gets in its way. During the first five weeks of the project in Ohio, ETP crews racked up 18 violations of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

The worst spill happened in April, when a 2 million-gallon ETP spill of drilling fluid buried a protected Ohio wetland in Stark County under an area equivalent to 8 football fields. Areas that have suffered such spills never recover. Ohio has fined ETP for this spill, and the Federal Energy Resource Commission has suspended ETP from any drilling for the project.

Energy Transfer Partners was a prime backer of the DAPL pipeline that the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a coalition of native American tribes fought through 2016 in the face of militarized police and security agencies, and mass arrests that have been repudiated by the courts.

For more information call Randy Cunningham at 216.245.1073 or email at randino49@gmail.com. Demonstration sponsored by the Cleveland Environmental Action Network

For much, much more on Energy Transfer Partners and the Rover Pipe line visit: GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHANGE… and other continuing coverage.

From The National Review:

[President Donald Joh]Trump is not a victim. He is the hamster spinning the wheel in the massive Rube Goldberg machine that is the spectacle of presidential dysfunction. —Jonah Goldberg

I should have called Senator Robert Jones Portman yesterday, but I didn’t. That’s on me. This morning, however, I did call (and write) the senator’s office and left this message:

Good morning.

My name is Jeff Hess and I live in North Royalton, Ohio.

I’m calling this morning to encourage Senator Rob Portman to not fear the blatant threat President Donald Trump hurled yesterday in Youngstown.

The health, and very lives, of tens-of-thousands of Ohioans are at risk and I need my senator to stand with the people of Ohio and vote no on any plan to repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act until such a time as he and Senator Sherrod Brown can present a plan to all Ohioans and say that have done what is right.

If half the Republican Party faithful can speak to Senator Portman at a dinner and tell him that voting to repeal the ACA—without a thoughtful and responsible replacement ready to fill the gap—is a bad idea, what does Senator Portman think the rest of Ohioans are thinking?

Please Mr. Portman. Do what is right and vote no.

Thank you.

You should call too.

Last week as I listened to the discussion on WCPN’s Sound Of Ideas concerning the invitation extended by the City Club to Corey Lewandowski to speak, the first question that came to my mind was: who thought that inviting Corey Lewandowski was a good idea. Only after the show did I discover the answer: my congressman, Jim Bupkis* Renacci thought getting Lewandowski to speak was a good idea. He, along with Lewandowski and President Donald John Trump, are part of a very small group that agree.

Henry Gomez has been covering the story in his new post at BuzzFeed. In Corey Lewandowski To Raise Money For Pro-Trump Ohio Gubernatorial Candidate Gomez writes:

Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager who maintains an influential role in the president’s political orbit, will headline a fundraiser next week for US Rep. Jim Renacci, a candidate in Ohio’s competitive Republican primary for governor.

An invitation obtained Tuesday by BuzzFeed News advertises Lewandowski as a “special guest” for the Aug. 3 reception and dinner at a yacht club just outside Cleveland.

A Renacci spokesman confirmed the event.

Trump has not endorsed in the 2018 race to succeed term-limited Gov. John Kasich. But Lewandowski’s involvement with the Renacci fundraiser is the latest evidence that the congressman could be the White House favorite.

So, Renacci has managed to dupe the board of the City Club into inviting Lewandowski to what is tantamount to a campaign speech for Renacci.

Gomez concludes:

Renacci is an underdog in the GOP primary. He has the lowest name-recognition in a four-candidate field that also features Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, Secretary of State Jon Husted, and Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor. But he is the only contender who enthusiastically embraced Trump’s campaign last year after Kasich failed to win the presidential nomination.

Next week’s fundraiser will follow Lewandowski’s speech to the City Club of Cleveland, which has been criticized for providing a forum for the controversial political operative. (He was, for example, accused of grabbing a reporter last year, but simple battery charges were dropped.)

Renacci helped arrange the City Club gig for Lewandowski, who in recent weeks has helped push the health care legislation on Capitol Hill.

Cleveland, we’re being played.

*After extensive searches, I have been unable to determine what Renacci’s middle initial stands for. Until I can find a reliable reference to Renacci full name, Bupkis will do.

Previously…

Oliver Burkeman, writing in On being tempted by the call of the perverse for The Guardian, quotes a bit of Edgar Allan Poe on productivity’s hoariest demon: procrastination. Burkeman pulls only a few words from Poe but I was motivated to read the entire work—an essay-cum-short story titled The Imp of the Perverse. There Poe writes:

We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us,—of the definite with the indefinite—of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails,—we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies—it disappears—we are free. The old energy returns. We will labour now. Alas, it is too late!

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss — we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness, and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapour from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the Perverse.

I know that The Raven was about a completely different subject, but I can not help to think that that singular black bird was Poe’s Imp made flesh.

Mayor Frank Jackson has spent most of his decade plus service to Cleveland catering to its corporate community.

It’s difficult to find where he has ever said, “NO” to the corporate czars here.

Now, he’s trying to make up to the neighborhoods he has neglected.

To me his actions come not only as surprising but shocking. I knew Jackson when he was a champion of impoverished neighborhoods. He was a man of the people.

He doesn’t fit description now and hasn’t for a long time.

Now, he’s trying to make up for lost time.

The above photograph was taken on a rainy day. At 8 a.m. The mayor, alone, not with staff, waves at passersby at 140th & Kinsman.

It’s as sad as it is depressing. He can’t make up what he’s neglected with a hand wave.

It’s impossible to make up for the time he has spent catering to a very different clientele.

His consent to whatever the Greater Cleveland Partnership bloc wanted leaves him at a disadvantage.

GCP, made up of the corporate community, plying their desires, can give him campaign funds. But not votes. They live elsewhere.

So weighing against him is his support for anything the GCP gang desired.

Be it the $50 million Public Square; be it the $300 million plus Opportunity Corridor; be it disrupting and costing RTA public transit; be it help to finance a new Continue Reading »

Every morning as I sit down to this keyboard I remind myself of Walter Mosley’s revelation that:

Writing is a kind of guerilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory.

Nick Laird, writing in My lists say things like 1. buy milk. 2. call Dad. 3. finish novel for The Guardian, echoes Mosley sentiment:

A writer’s life is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back—or at least mine is. I imagine it’s quite something to hear a musician make music or watch an artist paint, but the writer practising their art is someone engaged in failure. Or mostly in failure. There are no hard and fast rules about writing but certain principles can be discerned.

Yes they can. Laird concludes:

Reading through this, I sound vaguely competent and productive. Well, I don’t feel like that. I feel like a mess. My lists are scattered round the flat and say things like—1. buy milk, 2. call Dad, 3. finish novel—so perhaps it is no wonder that I only ever get a few things checked off. This mess of life is something you just have to wade through: the art of life is in the writing, is in scraping pattern out of that chaos of daily circumstance, is in finding the right details to speak for the whole, and when that happens, when a kind of flow state emerges, and you’re completely lost in your work, there’s an immense happiness in getting it down right.

Yes.

What is Ohio Republican Senator Robert Jones Portman to think when the grand ol’ lady of Conservatism calls his legislation mind-boggingly stupid? That being the tool of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee might not be a smart path? That accepting political contributions from some lobbyists might come with negative consequences? That the Constitution of The United States of America is actually an important document not to be played with? I vote for all of the above.

Noah Daponte-Smith, writing in BDS, Hypocrisy, and Our Barren Public Sphere for the National Review, ledes:

Sometimes in the course of our political life, someone proposes something so mind-bogglingly stupid that it’s hard to know exactly what to say about it. Senate Bill 720 is one of those things.

Regular readers of the National Review (or Conservatives in general) probably don’t recognize Daponte-Smith’s name and that’s understandable. He’s an intern. Rob Portman and his fellow sycophants can’t use that as an excuse to dismiss Daponte-Smith’s assessment, however, because his words were vetted by the editorial staff and, ultimately, Editor Rich Lowery. Daponte-Smith writes what he thinks, but Lowery decides whether or not those thoughts are read in his magazine.

Sen. Portman: withdraw your support.

Ralph Nader argues that half of democracy is showing up. I put the number much higher, up around an Allenesque 80 percent. Showing up, in my book, includes doing your homework, understanding how to form a defensible argument; skills that are hard to find on Facebook or Twitter. We are powerless only if we choose to be.

In Detecting What Unravels Our Society—Bottom-up and Top-down, Nader writes:

The unraveling of a society’s institutions, stability and reasonable order does not sound alarms to forewarn the citizenry, apart from economic yardsticks measuring poverty, jobs, wages, health, savings, profits and other matters economic.

However, we do have some signs that we should not allow ourselves to ignore. Maliciousness, profiteering and willful ignorance on the part of our political and corporate rulers undoubtedly contribute to worsening injustice. Let’s consider some ways that we as citizens, far too often, collectively allow this to happen.

1. Democracy is threatened when citizens refuse to participate in power, whether by not voting, not thinking critically about important issues, not showing up for civic activities or allowing emotional false appeals and flattery by candidates and parties to sway them on important issues. Without an informed and motivated citizenry, the society starts to splinter.

2. If people do not do their homework before Election Day and know what to expect of candidates and of themselves, the political TV ads and the Continue Reading »