While House Republicans partied, We The People occupied the barricades to push the barbarians back through the gate and all but nine House Republicans are diving for cover. Adam Gabbatt, writing in Big, angry crowds to fight back against Trumpcare for The Guardian, has the details:

After working hard to pass a bill that would strip millions of Americans of their health insurance, Congress is taking a well-earned recess for the next week. The idea is that politicians return to their home districts to meet their constituents. But if your representative is a Republican, you’ll have a hard time finding them.

According to the Town Hall project, which tracks face-to-face meetings held by members of Congress, only nine out of the 217 Republicans who voted for Thursday’s healthcare bill [that, of course includes my representative, Jame Bupkis Renacci, JH] have plans to hold town halls during recess week.

In lieu of the great Republican no-show, Indivisible, a progressive group which aims to use Tea Party tactics to influence politicians, has posted the names and office telephone numbers of every Republican who voted for the bill. Indivisible is encouraging people to call those representatives.

Ralph Nader, in Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader Asks Why the Entire House Congressional Delegation from Connecticut Refuses to Sign HR 676 or Full Medicare for All Legislation, writes:

Dear Representatives Joe Courtney, Elizabeth Esty, Rosa DeLauro, Jim Himes and John Larson:

There are 109 colleagues of yours who are co-sponsors of HR 676, Congressman John Conyers’ single payer bill in the House that provides full Medicare for all with free choice of doctor and hospital.

Yet not one of you—members of the Connecticut Congressional delegation—has co-sponsored HR 676.

This despite majoritarian support, with a recent Pew poll showing 85 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents saying the federal government should be responsible for health care insurance.

Why are you not representing your constituents on this critical reform that, as demonstrated in other countries, is much more efficient, provides Continue Reading »

This is what he said to his constituents in his weekly newsletter:

This week, I took the first step in fulfilling a promise I made to the 16th District and was elected on: repealing and replacing Obamacare with a more patient-centered, affordable, and flexible health care system. Ohioans are suffering under Obamacare. Premiums have risen over 90 percent since 2013, deductibles are skyrocketing, and insurers are running for the door in the exchanges.

Please understand that there is a lot of misinformation out there and the AHCA does not allow insurers to discriminate against people because of their gender and pre-existing conditions, and no one can be denied coverage. [That’s true, AHCA does not do any of those things, HOWEVER, the AHCA—aka Trumpcare 2.0—gives states special permission to do those things if they so wish, so everyone should expect reduced services at higher costs for fewer people. JH] The bill is now in the Senate’s hands, where it will undergo more changes before its passed into law. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the other chamber on producing the strongest legislation possible to make healthcare accessible and affordable for all Americans.

Here’s what Jim Bupkis* Renacci said before the vote.

Note that at timemark 4:03 Renacci pretends that he’s already been elected governor of Ohio.

Can you say hubris?

Meanwhile, in the Senate…

*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…

We don’t realize the taxes and a fee that has been added during the tenure of this mayor who was supposed to represent the city’s underprivileged and needy. He doesn’t.

But he’s been the Man. Mayor Stagnant.

The Corporates Man. Full member of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. They love him over there.

He’s now talking neighborhoods. A little late Frank. Actually, too late.

Whatever they seem to upchuck, he finds reason to find just oh, so good for us.

Even the garbage is now costly in Cleveland. Jackson added an $8 a week fee. Why not? It’s regressive, isn’t it?

He gives away city assets with a yawn. To developers, to sports billionaires.

He found a way to charge Clevelanders for the trash they must throw away. What’s next? A tax on how much air you breathe?

Cleveland badly needs a no-nonsense mayor who actually believes its citizens deserve representation.

It’s time for some rabble rousing.

Jackson certainly has been a vigorous proponent of taxing what you buy.

He has stood aside when others raise taxes too.

Even though the man from the most impoverished ward in the city knows it has to hurt his people. It is what it is though, right?

Jackson is a fraud as a rep of the disadvantaged. He has been the puppet of the privileged.

He will, of course, be endorsed by the Plain Dealer, now a subsidiary of the GCP and about as concerned for the ordinary guy as our president.

But let’s try to look at the taxes Jackson has watched or endorsed in the last few years.

Jackson has supported or remained mute as deprived people have been skewed by those that set our agenda.

You can start with the latest—the sordid Arena deal. The city will pass Continue Reading »

After Bernie Sanders withdrew from the 2016 race for the Democratic Party nomination the people who believe in the necessity for progressive policies directed towards the needs of the 99 percent and not the 1 percent stayed organized. As I’ve heard Steve Holecko say time and time again as part of his introduction at meetings around Cuyahoga County, progressives here in Cuyahoga County came together to form the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus. The CCPC is precisely the kind of organization that Ralph Nader describes when he discusses Citizen Lobbies below.

Nader, in It’s About Bringing Your Congress Back Home, Citizens!, writes:

The large marches, in Washington, DC and around the country, calling attention to importance of science and focusing on the calamitous impacts of climate change had impressive turnouts. But the protests would have been more productive if they concentrated more—in their slogans and signs—on 535 politicians to whom we have given immense power to influence policies relating to those issues, for ill or for good.

I’m speaking of Congress.

Congress cannot be ignored or neglected simply because we know it to be a corporate Congress, or a gridlocked Congress, or a Congress that is so collectively delinquent, or perk and PAC addicted, or beholden to commercial interests, or self-serving through gerrymandered electoral districts where they, through their party’s controlled state government, pick the voters to elect them.

Sure, there are probably 100 good legislators on Capitol Hill. But many of these progressive elected officials fail to effectively network with citizen groups, or organize left-right coalitions back home into an unstoppable political force. Issues that invite such left/right consensus are numerous, including raising the federal minimum wage, protecting civil liberties, tackling government waste and corruption, advancing solar energy, reforming the corporate tax system, full Medicare for all Continue Reading »

The one piece of advice I would offer to any writer would be to record every thought you can in a series of analog notebooks that you will be able to reference throughout your life. In reading Charles Johnson’s The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling I came across similar advice to his students. Johnson commended the notebooks of Nathanial Hawthorne and Albert Camus as examples.

I read Gav’s Akira Kurosawa: The Note Taker back in January and had meant to post this before now (but, well, so many posts, so little time, you know). The message, thankfully, is timeless. Gav writes:

…it was only when Kurosawa was a young Assistant Director, working under his mentor, the director Yamamoto Kajiro, did he approach reading in a new way. Kajiro told him “If you want to become a film director, first write scripts.” Kurosawa agreed, and after he had finished writing his first screenplay showed it to his mentor for feedback. Kajiro proceeded to quickly rewrite a scene in front of Kurosawa’s eyes that was vastly better. The young Kurosawa was “awed”. Inspired by his teacher’s ability, Kurosawa decided to re-educate himself: “From this point on, my approach to literature changed. I made a deliberate effort to change it. I began to read carefully, asking myself what the author was trying to say and how he was trying to express it. I thought while I read, and at the same time I kept notes on the passages that struck some emotional chord in me. When I reread in this new way things I had read in the past, I realised how superficial my initial reading had been.” [Emphasis mine, JH] —From Akira Kurosawa: Something Like An Autobiography.

To be a writer, you must first be a reader who then learns to read as a writer. That is a lesson a lot of writers never learn.

Thanks to Gav’s cartoon I’ve gone back this morning to read part of Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography. While I’ve put the entirety on my list for this weekend, here is the section from which Gav pulled his work:

I can testify to [Yamamoto Kajiro’s] writing abilities because of his precise criticisms and revisions on the scripts I later wrote. Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something. The first script I wrote under Yama-san’s supervision was based on Fujimori Nariyoshi’s story Mizuno Jurozaemon. In the original there is a scene where the eponymous hero tells his comrades of the Shiratsuka band about an edict he has seen put up on a signboard in front of Edo Castle. I followed the original closely and had Mizuno go back and report to his friends what he had seen. Yama-san read this and said if this were a novel it would be fine, but for a script it was too weak. He quickly dashed off something and showed it to me. Instead I having Mizuno do something dull like talk about the edict after having read it on the signboard, Yama-san had him uproot the sign-board and arrive carrying it over his shoulder. He plants it in front of his comrades and says, “Look at this!” I was awed.

From this point on, my approach to literature changed. I made a liberate effort to change it. I began to read carefully, asking myself what the author was trying to say and how he was trying to express it. I thought while I read, and at the same time I kept notes on the usages that struck some emotional chord in me or that I considered r some reason important. When I reread in this new way things I had read in the past, I realized how superficial my initial reading had been. Not just literature but all the arts, as one matures, become gradually more comprehensible in their depth and subtlety. This is of course very commonplace notion, but for me at that time it was a revelation, and it was Yama-san who led me toward it. Before my very eyes he had taken his pen to my script in the midst of reading it and revised as he went along. I was not only surprised at his ability, and inspired to re-educate myself, but at the same time came to understand, something of the secrets of creation. Yama-san said: “If you want to become a film director, first write scripts,” I felt he was right, so I applied myself wholeheartedly to scriptwriting. Those who say an assistant director’s job doesn’t allow in any free time for writing are just cowards. Perhaps you can write only one page a day, but if you do it every day, at the end of the year you’ll have 365 pages of script. I began in this spirit, with a target of one page a day. There was nothing I could do about the nights I had to work till dawn, but when I had time to sleep, even after crawling into bed I would turn out two or three pages. Oddly enough, when I put my mind to writing, it came more easily than I had thought it would, and I wrote quite a few scripts.

One page, one paragraph, one sentence, one word at a time is all you need to do. All we have is this moment, right now, and all the writer has to do is write in this moment. Time takes care of the rest.

For the first time since I moved to Cleveland back in November of 1984, Cuyahoga County’s corporate elites may actually get their hands slapped for digging down to the bottom of the cookie jar and I think we have to thank President Donald John Trump because he created this toxic political climate that has progressives in Cleveland, the nation and, indeed, the rest of the world rising up in protest.

Sam Allard, writing in Toward Undercurrents: On Regional Leaders, the Media and the Rotten Deal they Cherry-picked Facts to Propagate for Scene, ledes:

During the riveting April 21st edition of WCPN’s Reporter’s Roundtable, Cleveland.com Editor Chris Quinn remarked upon Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish’s State of the County address.

“What was striking about the speech was that [Budish] took a real hard line, as firm as you ever hear from him, on the critics of the proposed Q deal,” Quinn said.

“He basically called a lot of the information out there ‘alt-facts.’ There’s been an undercurrent that somehow the Cavs aren’t paying for half of this, which they are. And he also talked about the idea that you would take the money that would go into this and spend it elsewhere as being wholly improper because the money largely comes from the Q taxes and from the hotel bed tax which has to go to tourism… The firmness of his statement was a bit of a shock.”

Indeed it was.

But Budish’s crusade against ‘alt-facts’ has failed to deter the coalition of citizen groups purportedly propagating them. That coalition, comprised of the Greater Cleveland Congregations, Service Employees International Union Local 1199, the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, AFSCME Ohio Council 8, and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 268, is now collecting signatures for a referendum on the deal. The petition must be filed within 30 days of the legislation’s passage. (CCPC Political Director Steve Holecko managed to get a bankable quote from Bernie Sanders in a Q&A after the Senator’s City Club remarks Monday morning: “I don’t like that idea,” Sanders said, speaking of public subsidies for arenas generally. “That smacks to me of corporate welfare. I think billionaires can fund their own endeavors, and when you talk about a city which has blight, which has educational problems, I think what government should be doing is investing in the needs of working people and low-income people.”)

Those are ideas that regional leaders would surely get behind in the abstract, or in other American cities. But in the event, our elected crop has sounded a great deal more like Donald Trump, preaching about jobs and trickle-down economics as they decry fake news and mock or ostracize legitimate dissent.

In examining Mayor Frank Jackson’s explainer in Sunday’s Plain Dealer, Allard writes:

Mayor explains why The Q Deal is ‘a forward-thinking investment, the headline read. It appeared in Forum, the PD’s opinion section, so regular readers should have known what to expect, but why not “the Mayor argues that…” or “believes that…” or even “explains why he thinks that…”?

One reason might be: this is not an issue that traditionally needs to be argued around here at all. It’s supposed to be self-evident that the sports teams are soulful community partners, and that the (publicly owned!) facilities they inhabit are massive economic [auto parts] in need of occasional public lubing if we want to Keep Cleveland Strong. One can see the epileptic fits into which elected leaders have lately descended, and it’s a good bet that they’re annoyed because they’re not accustomed to having to defend this sort of thing. They often resort to a patronizing posture, (one that the PD framing bolsters): that we would all agree with them if we were only more educated on the issue.

No one has worked tirelessly to educate Clevelanders on this topic than Roldo Bartimole. After 30-plus years of constant lessons on how Cuyahoga County’s corporate elites have built their own palaces on the backs of the 99.9 percent, Roldo, and the rest of us, may get to see real change.

President Donald John Trump famously changed his mind about nation building and America first and getting involved in civil wars in other countries—perhaps because he understands our own so well—after he saw tragic pictures of children injured and slaughtered in Syria. He was so moved that he ordered our Navy to launch nearly 60 million dollars worth of cruise missile in a symbolic attack on a Syrian airfield.

CLoser to home President Trump continues his fight to boot millions of Americans, and their children, to the healthcare curb because well, America’s first non-white president.

I checked this morning to see if Trump had tweeted about Kimmel’s monologue and didn’t find anything (although I did read former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh’s classic Republican response).

Former President Barack Hussein Obama, however have words to share.

I don’t know why I write. I can talk about needs and drives and magic and book store groupies (actually I just made that one up, although maybe there are hot, sexy women who hang out at bookstores for famous author signing; feck, who am I kidding?), but in the end I don’t have a good reason for doing what I do. I suppose we all have to do something and writing is just the card I drew. Kurt Vonnegut expressed the thought this way:

Let him talk to Darwinists, hat in hand. It’s educational, and pays off in the end. As Colonel Littauer said to me one time when I was bitter about being broke: “Who asked you to be a writer in the first place?” —to Knox Burger on 8 January 1973, p. 194 Kurt Vonnegut: Letters.

So I get what Vonnegut was saying. Writer’s who bitch about what they do should just get a day job. The world won’t miss our words. Ever.

This morning The Guardian launched a three-part series focusing on the mother of all pipelines: the Keystone XL. Why Keystone? Oliver Laughland, writing in in Part I—Life on the Keystone XL route: where opponents fear the ‘black snake—explains:

Framed as a victory over government regulation and a win for jobs creation by the Trump administration and those who support the [Keystone XL] project, critics characterize the reversal as a win for a foreign business over environmentalism and private land rights.

As the prospect of construction looms, The Guardian spent one recent week travelling along the proposed US route of the XL, meeting with those who will be directly affected by the expansion. The journey starts at the Fort Peck reserve, about 80 miles from the Canadian border and the first concentrated population in its pathway, where Tressa Welch and her group of “water protectors” believe it is a duty endowed upon them by their ancestors to resist the construction.

The men here are preparing the land for the Sun Dance festival in June, when the community will gather to pray for good health, fast without water for four days and offer parts of their flesh. “We give a little piece of ourself back to Mother Earth, because she supplies everything to us,” Welch says.

As for many of the young tribal members on this reserve, the election of Trump and the rebirth of Keystone has brought with it a renewed connection to history and culture through activism.

Welch is the focus of Laughland’s first installment and he begins from her point-of-view:

“Our people call it the black snake because it is evil,” says Tressa Welch, as thunder clouds steamroll the blue sky over the plains of Wolf Point. “And like snakes they come out of nowhere, they slither and strike unknown.”

She faces southwards where, a couple of miles away, forks of lightning crack over the Missouri River. The 2m acre Fort Peck Indian Reservation straddles this winding water source, providing sustenance for the almost 7,000 Assiniboine and Sioux tribe here and thousands of others throughout north-east Montana. It is the river that Welch and other Native American activists on the reserve say the Keystone XL oil pipeline – or the “black snake” – will corrupt.

The river maintains the deer, the fish, the native plants, sweet grasses and sacred sage. “Anything that threatens my way of life and my spiritual well-being, I consider myself at war with,” she says, her two-year-old daughter by her side. “I will do whatever it takes.”

This is the existential threat that people still emotionally tied to the land face. Privileged Americans, perennially mobile and able to buy and sell houses as they see fit, who can wake up in the morning and not really know where they’re living unless they check the addresses on their snail mail, who think they are are wonderfully urbane and 21st century because they can do their job from anywhere (and who have jobs that can be done from anywhere), see such attachments to the land as quaint, retro and so-last-century.

They ask with no sense of irony: why don’t these people just move?

Where I live, on America’s North Coast, adjacent to the Great Lakes—which contain 84 percent of North America’s surface fresh water and about 21 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water—we don’t think as much about water as we ought to. (Although the two spills on our on pipeline—the Rover—could change that.) In the West, however, water is life in ways that people who think that staying hydrated means buying cases of bottle water every week at the grocery store do not grasp.

The purpose of the Guardian’s series (and my intent in drawing attention to the series) is to expand the protests and galvanize opposition to the deadly black snake that is the Keystone XL.

Read. Act.

Sam Allard, reporting in Bernie Sanders Promotes Progressive Agenda, Disses Trump, at City Club Event for Scene, writes:

In a lively question and answer period—it was the longest line for questions we’ve ever seen at a City Club event—Sanders touched on issues of political activism, gerrymandering, the national Democratic agenda, his support for a Pro-Life candidate in Nebraska, and even the Q deal.

“I don’t want to get too involved in the local issue,” said Senator Sanders, in response to the question posed by the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, “but I will tell you this. You have, all over this country, in many cases billionaires, people who own professional teams, who are going to taxpayers to ask for money. I don’t like that idea. That smacks to me of corporate welfare. I think billionaires can fund their own endeavors, and when you talk about a city which has blight, which has educational problems, I think what government should be doing is investing in the needs of working people and low-income people.”

This has always been the core of Bernie’s message. This will always be the core of Bernie’s message. This is why Bernie is, as Allard ledes, the most popular politician in the United States.

The really gross crime of Barbara Byrd Bennett wasn’t that she was brazenly stealing, even from school children, but the trail of supposedly high-standard people and institutions she dragged along with her. Or that accompanied her knowing what they were supporting. Indeed, subsidizing her and her games.

That’s not in the trial record.

And how often it happens in this town and so many others reveals our civic corruption. It’s really festering here.

Leeches, aided by the Presentable People and their Respected Institutions, abound here.

Our “leaders” knew the real quality of Barbara Byrd Bennett. They had to. But she was doing their bidding. Effectively.

Her specialness was hinted when she showed up here in 1998 and didn’t take the title of Superintendent of Schools. No, she was above that. Mayor Michael White knew what he had and she took the title CEO, a corporate title. Appropriately.

It fit what he and the corporate/foundation gang wanted.

They soon dismissed elected boards of education. Can anyone recite the names of the school board’s members now?

But BBB had confidence in their dishonesty. So much so that she apparently thought she could simply get away with what has now put her in jail for four-and-a-half Continue Reading »

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9.

And if you really feel like you need to see the pale imitation of Not The White House Correspondent’s Dinner, you can watch that sham here.

I first, knowingly, encountered clinical depression in the early ’90s when a co-worker shared that she was taking Prozac so that she didn’t need to spend her lunch hours crying in her car parked at the back of the parking lot. Since then I’ve known quite a few people who suffer from Depression, some so severe that they took their own lives. I’ve come think of the affliction as a spectrum, much like Autism, that affect many more, including, in my experience, writers and other creative types.

This is not to encourage you to have regular depressions, to be proud of the family disease. Get rid of it, if you can. I intend to try. i can at least know it for what it is, something I couldn’t do before. Again—I don’t want you to really dig the disease, so I shouldn’t tell you too much about my experiences with it. i have found, though, that I handle it best in solitude. People often find this insulting, the way we retreat. It’s a way of hanging onto dignity, though. there are better ways, maybe. I’ll ask a doctor what they are. —to Nanny Vonnegut on 2 November 1972, p. 190 Kurt Vonnegut: Letters.

In a conversation yesterday, I talked about the number of writers at conferences I’d attended over the years who openly discuss that they’ve gone off their meds for the duration so that they could write. The balance between mental health (often externally defined) and creativity is a terrible razor’s edge.

I only just discovered Slow TV yesterday thanks to PRI’s The World. The Guardian also did this piece: The ultimate slow TV: a 168-hour show on reindeer migration.

Let me be clear. I voted for Bill Clinton once (I voted for Ralph Nader in 1996) and I would have voted for the proverbial yellow dog down the street before I would have voted for Hillary Clinton. Fool me once, well, you know, but I’m not about to get fooled again. As events happily unfolded, I was able to vote for Bernie in the primaries and ended up voting for Jill Stein in the general election and no, my vote didn’t elect Donald Trump. Even if ever non-major party voter in Ohio had gone for Hillary, she would still have lost the state.

The Clinton’s are venal hucksters who make a mockery of the country they pretend to love. Donald Trump, at least, is marginally honest about his avarice.

I’m reading this morning Matt Taibbi’s take on Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. I won’t be reading the book, not because I don’t think Allen and Parnes have a story to tell, but because, as I told my grandmother when she asked if I was watching the Watergate Hearings, I don’t think there’s any news there.

Hillary Clinton’s view of the world is, as this case with many politicians (Democrats and Republicans), warped. Toward the end of his piece, Taibbi provides a window to how bent Allen and Parnes found her to be.

The Clinton campaign in 2016, for instance, never saw the Bernie Sanders campaign as being driven by millions of people who over the course of decades had become dissatisfied with the party. They instead saw one cheap stunt pulled by an illegitimate back-bencher, foolishness that would be ended if Sanders himself could somehow be removed.

“Bill and Hillary had wanted to put [Sanders] down like a junkyard dog early on,” Allen and Parnes wrote. The only reason they didn’t, they explained, was an irritating chance problem: Sanders “was liked,” which meant going negative would backfire.

Hillary had had the same problem with Barack Obama, with whom she and her husband had elected to go heavily negative in 2008, only to see that strategy go very wrong. “It boomeranged,” as it’s put in Shattered.

The Clinton campaign was convinced that Obama won in 2008 not because he was a better candidate, or buoyed by an electorate that was disgusted with the Iraq War. Obama won, they believed, because he had a better campaign operation—i.e., better Washingtonian puppeteers. In The Right Stuff terms, Obama’s Germans were better than Hillary’s Germans.

In the end, the Clintons—not Bernie Sanders—cost the Clintons the election. Very early on I said that the 2016 election was Jeb Bush’s and Hillary Clinton’s to lose. They both performed as if that was their only goal. Yes, we got President Donald John Trump as a result, but neither vanilla candidates would have energized protest the way Trump has, and I think that if we can’t have President Sanders, then President Trump is the better outcome.

Taibbi concludes:

If the ending to this story were anything other than Donald Trump being elected president, Shattered would be an awesome comedy, like a Kafka novel—a lunatic bureaucracy devouring itself. But since the ending is the opposite of funny, it will likely be consumed as a cautionary tale.

Shattered is what happens when political parties become too disconnected from their voters. Even if you think the election was stolen, any Democrat who reads this book will come away believing he or she belongs to a party stuck in a profound identity crisis. Trump or no Trump, the Democrats need therapy—and soon.

The other night at a political meeting, a Democrat lamented that the left wasn’t supporting the party, scaring trusted followers (I’ve seen this up close and personal at other meetings where Hillary supporters have become frightened that they were at the wrong meeting) and that that was a problem. Damn right. The party cannot continue doing business in the way of the New Democrats. Just like New Labor, New Democrats are simply Republican pigs with badly applied lipstick.

Bernie is the therapist they need. They should listen.