I’m backing Aaron Godfrey to fill the seat for the 16th Congressional district to be vacated by James Bupkis Renacci at the end of this term.

Godfrey will be at the North Royalton library from 6:30 to 7:30 this Wednesday, 7 March.

If you miss talking with Aaron this week, he will be hosting similar gatherings at the libraries in Parma Heights on the 21st, in Fairview Park on the 28th and in Strongsville on 4 April.

And here, I thought thoughts and prayers was inane…

I’ve always been impressed with the words that conservatives use to mask their intent. One of the words that I’ve always been suspicious of is heritage. We heard a great deal about peoples’ heritage in recent months when discussing events like the march of white supremacists in North Carolina when people talked of taking down statues of Confederate war heroes and removing the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia from public spaces. The cry of “we must protect our heritage” has been heard from gun owners following the mass murder in Parkland, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada.

For my money, heritage is a dog whistle for those circling their wagons to protect their privilege. I am not the least surprised that one of the largest organizations whose mission is to protect all aspects of wealth and privilege has put the word up front in their name.

Ralph Nader, in Heritage’s Corporate Lobby Inside Trump’s Government is Not the People’s Heritage writes:

The Heritage Foundation, with an annual budget nearing $90 million a year (including over $1 million for the salary of its president), calls itself conservative, but more often than not it practices the kind of corporatism dear to the impulses of President Trump. The Washington-based “think tank/lobbying firm” has quite a score card with the failed gambling czar who lost the popular vote but won the vestigial Electoral College tally to become head of state. In fact, they’ve given him a checklist, and Continue Reading »

So, I thought I had the narrative of Omar Mateen’s mass murder at the Pulse nightclub clear in my head: crazed, homophobic Islamic terrorist kills 49 and wounds 58 others before police killed the criminal. Except, that’s not what happened.

Because Mateen was killed, there was no trial, not forensic examination of the evidence in an open courtroom. Until now.

For whatever reason, authorities in Orlando have brought charges against Noor Salman, Mateen’s widow and her trial is bringing formerly undisclosed facts to light.

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, reporting in As the Trial of Omar Mateen’s Wife Begins, New Evidence Undermines Beliefs About the Pulse Massacre, Including Motive for The Intercept, write:

Newly released evidence today calls into serious doubt many of the most widespread beliefs about the 2016 shooting by Omar Mateen at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which killed 49 people along with Mateen himself. Because the attack occurred on the club’s “Latin night,” the overwhelming majority of the victims were Latinos, primarily Puerto Ricans.

In particular, Mateen went to Pulse only after having scouted other venues that night that were wholly unrelated to the LGBT community, only to find that they were too defended by armed guards and police, and ultimately chose Pulse only after a generic Google search for “Orlando nightclubs” – not “gay clubs” – produced Pulse as the first search result.

Several journalists closely covering the Mateen investigation have, for some time now, noted the complete absence of any evidence suggesting that Mateen knew that Pulse was a gay club or that targeting LGBTs was part of his motive. These doubts have been strongly fortified by the new facts, previously under seal, that were revealed by today’s court filing.

As I’ve followed the news about this trial—admittedly with no great intensity—I’ve been puzzled why Salman was getting so much attention when other spouses/significant others of mass murderers have not. Greenwald and Hussain have also noted this discrepancy. They write:

The prosecution of Mateen’s wife is highly unusual and troubling, riddled with evidentiary holes, and seemingly designed to feed, and exploit, community outrage which demands that someone be punished for this massacre. The decision to prosecute Salman is particularly odd given the DOJ’s refusal to prosecute Marilou Danley, the girlfriend of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, despite far greater evidence suggesting her foreknowledge of his plans. Additionally, the DOJ refused to prosecute Katherine Russell, the white ex-Christian wife of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, also in the face of evidence of possible complicity that was far stronger than exists for Salman.

When these heinous crimes occur, we want to know why. We want to know why primarily so that we can somehow dismiss any chance that we might become a similar victim because, well, just because. Inconvenient facts that get in the way of our personal-safety narrative are really, really inconvenient, but they remain facts all the same. Facts like Mateen’s motive may have had nothing to do with homophobia.

By repeatedly emphasizing this anti-gay motive, U.S. media reports had the effect, if not the intent, of obscuring what appears to have been Mateen’s overriding, arguably exclusive motive: a desire for retribution and deterrence toward U.S. violence in Muslim countries. This highly dubious “anti-gay” storyline has also created a virtually unanimous climate in Orlando’s community that is demanding the punishment of anyone remotely connected to Mateen, a climate prosecutors have seized on to bring highly unusual, and very questionable, felony charges against Mateen’s wife that could send her to prison for decades despite scant evidence of her guilt.

Greenwald and Hussain lay out the the best evidence we have now.

Like it or not, this is what we know in the present.

Over the years I have learned a great deal about writing and writers by ferreting out what, and whom (stuff it, Emmy) they read. One of the aspects I’m very much enjoying reading my four-volume set of George Orwell’s writings is what he reveals in his letters. For instance, I came across this mention in a 12 January 1931 letter to Max Plowman, editor of Adelphi magazine. There, in part, Orwell wrote:

You ask what kind of thing I like reviewing. If you ever get any book (fiction or travel stuff) on India, or on low life in London, or on Villon, Swift, Smollett, Poe, Mark Twain, Zola, Anatole France or Conrad, or anything by M.P. Shiel or W. Somerset Maugham, I should enjoy reviewing it.

I was not surprised by Orwell’s mention of Émile Zola or Anatole France as topics. And, I suppose, François Villon and Jonathan Swift make sense as classics (as does Tobias Smollett, whom I did not recognize) but others on the list caught me off-guard.

That Orwell was a fan of M.P. Shiel and Edgar Allan Poe, as writers of horror, early Science Fiction and Fantasy, revealed a part of Orwell that I did not know. I knew Sheil as a historical figure, but have never read any of his stories. Correcting that error may be difficult, but I’ll at least give it a go. [Update: amazingly enough, I was able to find The Works of M. P. Shiel: Writings available in via intra-library loan. I do so love Ohio’s library system.]

On second reflection I do get his mention of Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham and Mark Twain because they are writers who explored colonialism and, as in Twain’s case, the exploitation of people of color. (More on this topic on Sunday when I look at Orwell’s Maarakech.)

From The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume One, An Age Like This—1920-1940, p. 33.

A few years ago I read George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia, published in 1938, and a footnote on page 69 stuck with me. Orwell wrote:

One of the dreariest effects of the war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as the Right.*

*I should like to make an exception of the Manchester Guardian. In connection with this book I have had to go through the files of a good many English papers. Of our larger papers, the Manchester Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty.

I mention that quote because Orwell’s 1937 essay deals primarily with the disinformation that came from the interlude between the 20th century’s two great wars.

Orwell begins his 2,993 word essay, Spilling The Spanish Beans, written in 1936, this way:

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the News Chronicle and the Daily Worker, with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

What struck in reading Orwell’s evaluation was the role of what I would call a faux left created by the Communists. In the second paragraph, Orwell continues:

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror–forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial–has been in progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes–the Communists.

Orwell is writing about a part of Spain that is very much in the news in 2018: Catalonia. I don’t think Americans have any concept of what happened there during the Spanish Civil War—high school and college history books generally ignore or gloss over those events to focus on the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—and how that history guides events 80 years later. These Democratic Socialists, the revolutionaries/left-wing Socialists who were at war with both Franco’s Fascists Stalin’s Communists in the 1930s are still there. Still fighting.

I see echo’s of that struggle in our own country, between the Republicans on the right and the Democrats in the center against Progressives on the left. Orwell continues:

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them.

Orwell lays bare the fallacy of the the enemy of my enemy is my friend meme when he writes:

For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for Socialism.

Now, Orwell was in a real shooting war—he returned to England after being shot through the neck, a wound that could have just as easily have ended his life—but I think Progressives here can learn much from reading this particular essay.

You know, learning/repeating history and all that.

Previously…

Coming next week: Marrakech….

[Note: some confusion has arisen regarding this three-part series. While I quote liberally from Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw throughout all three parts, this series is my own work. JH]

During the years that Dennis Kucinich was mayor of Cleveland, the city’s population was nearly 600,000—the 1980 census found 573,822 souls—of which, 43.8 percent, about 251,334, were African Americans. A decade later, census data showed a population loss of some 68,000 residents, a population drop of about 22 percent. The African-American population, however, was reduced by only about 16,300. Nearly half of Cleveland’s population accounted for less than a quarter of the exodus.

Cleveland was getting darker and decades of continuing population losses would continue into the 21st century. Comedians would remember that the river burned, but the greater tragedy has been a school system starved for cash by an ever-shrinking tax base a ruling class that cared only for sports teams and spending other peoples’ money to build tax-exempt arenas and stadiums and casinos and hotels that enriched their fortunes while plunging Cleveland schools deeper and deeper under water.

In 1979, Mayor Dennis Kucinich, weeks away from a devastating defeat by Republican George Victor Voinovich, thought that staying the course would save his administration. What followed was ugly.

Roldo Bartimole, reporting in Race Becomes Major Kucinich As Mayor’s Aides Play To Anti-Busing Theme, wrote:

Mayor Dennis Kucinich continues to use calculated racism as a major campaign tactic in his mayoral re-election, thus jeopardizing his right to a second term as mayor of Cleveland.

While refusing to take a public stand on the safety of bused children for fear of alienating hard-core anti-busing people, Mayor Kucinich has given full authority to Bob Weissman, personnel director, and Betty Grdina, Community Development director, to operate a racist campaign at the neighborhood 1eve1.

The mayor’s failure to speak out on school busing safety was irresponsible, racist and unforgivable.

But his use of a strong, coordinated racist campaign in the wards of Cleve­ land at this time belies his concern for the city and its people.

In case you weren’t counting, in the 113 words following Mayor Dennis Kucinich continues Roldo uses racism once and racist three times. Roldo spoke truth to power. In a city that was nearly 50 percent African American, that was a damning indictment. In an era at the very dawn of the public Internet, paper still ruled. In the case of the Kucinich campaign, that paper covered Cleveland’s neighborhoods in the form of leaflets.

Weissman and Grdina, his closest advisors, have been personally directing the racist attack on city council members with Kucinich’s obvious blessing.

The attack takes the form of a leaflet being passed out by Kucinich’s campaign staff for various council candidates running under the Kucinich banner.

All the leaflets apply the same style and format, are on the same paper, and use the same language and placement in talking of votes for “forced school busing,” a vote that has never taken place in City Council. They come from Kucinich headquarters.

Each leaflet has a line that reads: “He (or she) voted three times for forced school busing when George Forbes needed his votes.” The claim is a complete misrepresentation of a vote to fund distribution of a film. [The film promoted desegregation, JH] The three votes apparently include committee votes, One of the leaflets was written by Betty Grdina and the others follow the pattern.

In his reporting Roldo specifically mentions Cleveland City Councilman Jim Rokakis [Who, nearly 40 years later, was the subject of a minor dustup here, JH]. Of Rokakis, he wrote:

The most racist of political literature has been aimed at Jim Rokakis, Ward 6, who has sided with the mayor on a number of important issues. He is snidely referred to as “our young ‘liberal’ councilman,” who, says the 1eaflet, “cares more about George Forbes interests than he does about our ward.

The leaflet, distributed by Kucinich volunteers, notes, “Jim Rokakis Sold Out on Busing.”

The area represented by Rokakis is strongly anti-busing.

The leaflet goes on to say that “Rokakis voted three times for forced school busing when George Forbes desperately needed his votes.”

Thus, it follows the same wording of other material handed out by the Kucinich troops in other city wards, all white.

It goes on: “Mayor Kucinich vetoed this legislation which was to spend city funds for a film promoting desegregation.

“If Jim Rokakis had children, would he want them going to school on the East Side?”

The last remark, of course, follows the racist line, “Would you want your daughter to marry one?”

Of course, there never was a vote on “forced busing” in the Cleveland City Council. Or any other kind of busing, for that matter.

There is much, much more in this particular piece—this is a must read in 2018—but I’ll allow Roldo to finish:

The mayor is either a racist an d follows racist policies, or he is not. It’s a simple matter for him to clear up. Withdraw the racist material and punish those responsible. Anything less calls for progressives to refuse to campaign at all for the mayor’s re-election. The choice is his.

Finally, on 10 November 1979, after Kucinich lost to Republican Voinovich, Roldo wrote his postmortem and made predictions about what would follow for the single-term major. Writing in Racism Fails: Weissman Tactics Lose, he begins:

Dennis Kucinich may now go about the nation playing the role of the Cleveland martyr robbed of the office of mayor by a coup of the news media and corporate power.

That will be a lie, a misrepresentation that activists will believe only to their jeopardy.

His defeat, in fact, should stand as a model of how progressive administrations cannot be both reactionary and racist on one hand and progressive and anti-corporate on the other. You can’t raise the banner “Of the People,” with one hand and slap people, even your own supporters, with the other.

Kucinich, in the end, could not straddle the gap between his stand for economic justice and his own inability to advance or understand human justice.

In his postmortem, Roldo covers the final days of the campaign and the election-day leaflets.

Of these two portions of leaflets distributed days before the 1979 election, Roldo wrote:

The two leaflets put out in the final weekend of the mayoral campaign, one in the black community and one in the white community, reveals the racist duplicity of the Kucinich administration. That Kucinich would use this tactic while traveling the black community with former Mayor Carl Stokes reveals the regard Kucinich/Weissman have for people. The above portion of a leaflet was delivered on the west side and the below on the east side to appeal to racial differences.

The day after the loss, Kucinich presented himself as a changed man.

Kucinich met with the hated news media the day after the election and was contrite, so much so that Herb Kamm, Press [Cleveland’s evening paper which folded in 1982, JH ] editor-columnist and Kucinich-hater, praised Dennis as “boyish, charming, disarming, warm and unpretentious,” all in one sentence. Kamm waxed at Kucinich’s soft approach to the news media and the mayor’s statement of “no hard feelings,” toward news people. Kamm responded, “The sentiment is mutual, as far as I’m concerned.” Such hypocrites deserve each other.

Much of the rest of the news media also found the New Kucinich admirable. The over-used word for his new found humility and affection for the news media was “class.” All of a sudden Kucinich’s bow out became a “classy act.” The emphasis should have been on the second word.

So, did Dennis Kucinich learn to be a better actor during the ’90s or did he learn humility, service and the error of his ways?

I can’t tell.

by Jeff Hess

Previously: Part I and Part II…

One of my secret delights is reading Michael Harriot’s weekly Clapback Mailbag in The Root. This week, in Blame Obama and My Mama, Harriot relates the story of being the only black guy working on the shop floor of a paper factory where his nickname was Worm in his response to Joe:

One guy couldn’t stand to ask for help from me. I suspect it was because he was so racist that he couldn’t accept the fact that a black guy could figure out a problem that he couldn’t. He would ask anyone for help except me, but they would always tell him to “ask Worm.” This motherfucker was so resistant that he started losing his production bonus rather than ask me for help. He would rather be broke.

That’s the Obama effect.

I believe that much of the hate Obama received had nothing to do with politics. It was because these people had never had a black guy telling them what to do, and despite the fact that he fixed the economy, killed America’s greatest enemy and gave millions of Americans health care, they would rather fuck up themselves and the country than admit that he was a decent president.

That’s how Obama ruined race relations. For white people like you, Joe, racism was this country’s secret shame, like a man with a small penis. But Obama’s simple existence pulled down America’s pants and exposed its flaccid inferiority complex to the world.

But Joe, it’s not your fault that you were born that way. And it’s not Obama’s fault that America is this way.

Also, sorry about your penis.

I blame Obama.

Time and time again I return to the story related to me by a friend regarding her uncle in Iowa who was a dirt farmer who once said to her: “I may be poor, but at least I’m no damn nigger.”

If you set your sights really, really low and squint really, really hard, you can make yourself feel good about being in next to last place.

[Note: some confusion has arisen regarding this three-part series. While I quote liberally from Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw throughout all three parts, this series is my own work. JH]

Last evening, in DOES DENNIS NEED A RED CAP FOR HIS BAGGAGE…? I began to a three-part series on the historical Dennis Kucinich as seen through the eyes of Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw. In Part II I’ll take a look at Vol. 11, No. 4 and Vol. 12, No. 3 of Roldo’s publication.

Kucinich is best known—in Cleveland, in Ohio and in the United States—for one event: Cleveland default forced by Kucinich’s refusal to sell Muny Light. You can read much about that time in POV, but for this series I want to look at the two issue above and what the tell us about Mayor Dennis Kucinich because the what Cleveland elites objected to—a Mayor Kucinich who threatened their plans for expanded wealth—grossly overshadowed what they did not object to: a Mayor Kucinich who was a racist.

First, in Toppling A Mayor, Roldo writes:

There are many criticism to be made about Kucinich and his administration, particularly their continual use of racism. But unfair criticism merely jeopardizes the credibility of the news media. Kucinich probably gained votes because it was apparent reasonable people that the news media, particularly the trend-setting PD, was dumping on the mayor. And they asked themselves, “Why?” Kucinich gave them the ready answer: Because I’m opposing the big guys who dump on you.

Second, in Kucinich Shrinks From Moral Leadership Bu Silence On Possible Violence To Youth Roldo fast forwards a year, after Cleveland survived the default, to examine who Mayor Kucinich handles busing violence in his city. He begins:

Mayor Dennis Kucinich cannot avoid taking moral leadership on the issue of school busing violence without seriously and possibly permanently damaging his reputation as a political figure with a future.

Kucinich simply cannot be allowed to posture as a new political commodity if he ignores the rights of half of the people of Cleveland and sits by silently without comment on the possible violence to bused children.

His Left supporters cannot overlook the inherent racism in the anti-busing support Kucinich presently fears to alienate. A statement demanding non-violence is a mini­ mum action and absolutely necessary from the mayor.

Politically, by his silence, Kucinich has allowed the Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Board of Education—both institutions with poor records for three years on creating a climate of peaceful acceptance of school desegregation and busing—to shift public attention, and blame, from the board’s lack of preparation to the Mayor’s failure to speak out against violence to children.

Mayor Kucinich seemed to be learning. Roldo continues:

Black political leaders are concerned about Kucinich’s inroads in the black community. While using racism in the white community, Kucinich has played conventional politics in winning black support through old-fashioned patronage.

Kucinich doesn’t isolate himself from the black community as other politicians have.

As an example, Kucinich recently spoke at a party for a black Baptist minister. His speech was short and non-political. But the mayor remained for the entire affair. Each speaker then began by addressing the mayor, a reminder of to the 500 that he had remained. It also made further impact because this was at the height of the FBI search for Melvin Guyon and his attendance was comforting at this tense time, a fact mentioned by some.

Along with the issue of racism, the Kucinich Administration’s inability to deal with people as human beings remains troubling.

The administration keeps forcing people out who show signs of being humanistic. They seem to want haters or young dupes, particularly those who go along with Weissman’s political lead.

No one follows that leadership more than munity Development Director Betty Grdina. She thrives on trying to imitate Weissman. But so sloppily.

In the past few months because of her stupidity (to say nothing of her lack of humanity) she’s lost a number of people the administration badly needs, starting with Norm Krumholz, former planning director.

Actually, I think Weissman was envious of Krumholz and saw him as a potential rival among a number of the young people in the administration,

After Krumholz left, Bill Whitney, who guide much of the of spending of neighborhood community development funds for Grdina, quit reported1y in complete disgust of her handling of the department. He outlined disagreements in a several page letter to the mayor.

Others who have left with Krumholz or from Community Development include Stan Freeman, of the CASH program, John Linner, John Finke and Susan Hoffman. (Whitney and Linner held the department together after Kucinich demoted Krumholz to reward Grdina with the community development directorship).

Are Dennis’ leadership skills better at age 71 than they were at 32?

Who is he surrounding himself with now?

How long will they remain there?

Tomorrow, Part 3 of this series will conclude with Race Becomes Mayor Kucinich Weapon As Mayor’s Aides Play To Anti-Bus Theme and Racism Fails: Weissman Tactics Lose

by Jeff Hess

[Note: some confusion has arisen regarding this three-part series. While I quote liberally from Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw throughout all three parts, this series is my own work. JH]

On 23 February, me lede on SUPPORT A SPOILER AND THE REPUBLICANS WIN… read:

That’s the message I’ve heard from a few sources since I declared my support for Dennis Kucinich as the next governor of Ohio. I recognize that Dennis has his own baggage, hell, the man has his own moving van, but—as the members of the Cuyahoga Country Progressive Caucus demonstrated when they voted to endorse Kucinich—his credentials as a progressive are solid. Those of his key Democratic opponent, however, are not. Events on Valentine’s Day created a seismic shift in National and State politics.

I moved to Cleveland Heights from rural Washington County, Ohio, in November 1984, so I knew nothing of Dennis Kucinich’s early political career. I was, of course, here for his time in the Ohio Senate, 1995-1997, and the U.S. Congress, 1997-2013 but lived in neither of his districts. I’m also friends with someone who knew Dennis during his Shirley McClain days and who shared several interesting anecdotes of those times with me. To fill in the gaps, I did what any journalist—or citizen considering casting a vote—would do, I went back to examine the record.

To learn more about Kucinich’s record, I went to Cleveland’s memory: Roldo Bartimole and the back issues of Point Of Viəw archived at the Cleveland Memory Project at Cleveland State University. What I found there for Part I of this three-part series, is telling.

From Point Of Viəw, Vol. 3, No. 1, 20 July 1970:

With [former Air Force pilot William] Hendrickson was Dennis Kucinich, Tremont councilman who is always alert and willing to exploit a situation. However, looking meek and concerned in front of reporters and TV cameras, Dennis has been strangely silent during this tense period and has spurned invitations to meet with constituents until they came to City Hall. Dennis said he had toured the tense area but residents curiously had never seen him.

Kucinich’s silence might well be taken as tacit approval by neighborhood troublemakers. He has said that his concern in Ward 7 was with the “stable white community,” not the blacks and white Appalachians.

The Tremont harassment follows too closely the bitter battle-against public housing in Cleveland being led by reactionary white politicians (Kucinich, Richard Harmody, Jim Stanton) who see local benefits in a Wallace-Agnew approach. Most of the threats in Tremont demand removal of Blacks from public housing.

Kucinich, who has been carefully building a city-wide reputation as a youthful, anti-black politician, blames, as might be expected, left-wing radicals for the Tremont troubles. At the meeting he hid behind Gen. Davis, obsequiously· applauding the Safety Director and placing full confidence in him.

The black women [present at the meeting, JH] had an opinion different from their white councilman.

So, how bad were relations in Tremont in the Summer of 1970? In a second piece, Background, in the same POV issue, Roldo wrote:

The apartment of a man who took petitions out ior a recall of the area’s councilman, Dennis Kucinich, was set afire and a black woman was called and told of the fire in “her friend’s,” before fire engines arrived. Children “go to pieces” from threats and obscenities by telephone. (At a meeting discussing the problems in a church basement a tap on the window was heard. Almost immediately one of the black women slumped to the floor out of fear).

Jump forward to 17 September 1977 when Roldo asked, Can Dennis Kucinich Be Trusted? He wrote:

Why do so many people instinctively distrust Dennis Kucinich? Probably the earliest to recognize Kucinich’ greatest failing was Naida Sutch, then a minister for the West Side Methodist Parish in Tremont where the present Municipal Court clerk was first elected to public office as ward 7 councilman.

She met a young campaigning Kucinich and felt he might benefit the depressed area but she ended up voting for his opponent because Dennis soon revealed himself to be a racist.

Even as she supported him, she noticed that “What he said sounded learned, or memorized,” A she told Terry Sheridan (Cleveland Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1)

And that’s Dennis Kucinich in a sentence. He has to rehearse human feelings that come normally to others, or he has to rehearse to cover his real feelings.

Roldo goes on to drill down on Kucinich:

His robot emotions make it impossible for him to really care about people. They also allow him to use people and issues with no real feeling about what happens to them.

The lack of compassion is more than a personal problem in a public official. It makes for a cold, insensitive use of power that puts personal advancement ahead of community good. It also usually means less empathy for the poor and minority interests.

Cleveland is a city of varied people but it has large numbers of low income people and blacks who have special needs not met in Cleveland by government.

Dennis has a poor record with both groups.

Has Dennis grown since the ’70s? Of course he has. Has he changed? That question I can’t answer.

Tomorrow, in Part II of this series, I’ll look at more of Dennis’ past from Toppling A Mayor and Kucinich Shrinks From Moral Leadership By Silence On Possible Violence To Youth.

by Jeff Hess

With all the crazy shit going on in the big chair at the White House, we could be forgiven for missing all the insanity fostered by the Republican—stop wasting our tax dollars—Party. Like the news out about how Housing And Urban Development Secretary Benjamin Solomon Carson is spending money like he’s sitting on a throne. Senator Edward William Proxmire is spinning in his grave. In addition to yesterday’s story below, here are the other headlines that Noah references: US housing department to spend $165,000 on own furniture as it faces $6.8bn budget cut, Emails show Carson family fingerprints at HUD despite warnings and HUD inspector general looking into role Ben Carson’s family has played.

Jon Swaine, reporting in Congress investigates Ben Carson’s housing department over staffing claims for The Guardian, writes:

Congress on Wednesday began investigating allegations that an official at Ben Carson’s department of housing and urban development (Hud) was demoted for refusing to approve expensive redecorations to his office.

Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who chairs the powerful House oversight committee, asked Carson, the Hud secretary, for information on the allegations by Helen Foster, revealed by the Guardian on Tuesday.

Gowdy told Carson in a letter that his committee wanted to “determine whether Hud adhered to the applicable spending limitations while redecorating your office” and instructed him to turn over files on decoration work and Foster’s demotion.

Foster alleged to a whistleblower-protection watchdog that she lost her job as Hud’s chief administrative last year partly as retaliation for her refusal to exceed a $5,000 legal cap for spending on Carson’s office.

She said she was told by Craig Clemmensen, who was Hud’s acting director while Carson went through the Senate confirmation process, to find more money for use by Carson’s wife, Candy, and that “$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair”.

OK, any nurse will tell that there is no one in a hospital more arrogant and insufferable than a surgeon, and that a neurosurgeon is the worst of the worst. I get that. You have to confident as all hell to cut into a person’s brain. But damn, Secretary Carson, you’re not in the operating theater anymore. Swaine continues:

Carson’s department also signed a contract last year to spend $165,000 on “lounge furniture” for its Washington headquarters from the retailer OFS Brands of Huntingburg, Indiana, according to federal procurement records.

An inventory provided by the department said that the order comprised 38 lounge sofas and 76 lounge chairs. It said 30 of the items were taken from OFS’s “Realm” range, which the company describes as “glamorous, with a beau mondes presence”.

Democrats and campaigners from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) earlier on Wednesday urged Hud’s inspector general, Helen Albert, to investigate the allegations made by Foster.

The senior senator from Ohio is on the case:

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the senior Democrat on the Senate’s banking committee, said Albert should expand an inquiry that he and colleagues asked for this month after reports on Carson’s involvement of his family members in government affairs.

“Ranking member Brown believes this should be looked into as part of the comprehensive IG investigation he and other members of the banking committee have already requested,” Ashley Lewis, a spokeswoman for the committee’s Democrats, said in an email.

Echoing Brown’s request, Crew said in a letter to Albert that the Guardian’s reporting had highlighted “new examples of the potentially undue influence” of Candy Carson at Hud and “further evidence of Secretary Carson’s apparent disregard for governing rules”.

Clearly, the secretary lacks the principle trait attributed to his namesake.

The good news is that someone, I can’t tell if it’s Carson or not, has some shame…

Events in Florida changed the campaign in Ohio for gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich.

Sam Allard, reporting in Kucinich Takes Gloves Off at City Club, Lays out Platform, Bashes Cordray on Gun Record for Scene, writes:

Kucinich said he would have been content to run on his existing platform and the 48 specific initiatives he has laid out on his website thus far: initiatives like ridding the state of fracking, ending for-profit charters and for-profit prisons, instituting free college tuition (for two years), legalizing marijuana, reforming the criminal justice system, promoting regenerative agriculture (to sequester carbon in nutrient-rich soil?) and worker rights, all while working to secure state broadband access, public transit funding and healthcare for all.

But the election changed, Kucinich said, with the shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 people dead earlier this month. Kucinich and his running mate, Akron City Councilwoman Tara Samples, are now pushing for a statewide assault weapons ban.

Kucinich is a principled, people-first politician, but he’s also a savvy one. He understands the sharp fault line that separates him and Cordray on this hot-button issue, and he has been quick to make guns the central plank of his campaign. Indeed, he used the bulk of his speech Tuesday to tout the merits of a statewide assault weapons ban and to decry Richard Cordray’s efforts as Ohio Attorney General, in which capacity Cordray initiated legal action that overturned a Cleveland assault weapons ban enacted in 1991.

I willing to accept that Kucinich is playing a card that neither Cordray nor anyone else in the race expected to deal with. Despite our own school shooting exactly 6 years and a day ago, gun violence has not gained traction with politicians bought and paid for by the lobbyists representing the gun manufacturers. (That would be the National Rifle Association, in case you were confused.)

Allard continues:

[Kucinich] was not shy about ruthlessly chronicling Cordray’s pro-gun record. That record included making Ohio’s home rule authority subservient to the gun lobby and once, according to Kucinich’s research, even greenlighting an armed rally on statehouse grounds.

“For his efforts in the Ohio Supreme Court on behalf of the gun lobby, he earned an ‘A’ from the NRA, and was the first Democratic state official in the nation to work with them.” Kucinich reported, talking about a specific case. “As attorney general, Richard Cordray clearly used his office as an extension of the NRA, even bragging that he seized the opportunity to use the power of his office to represent gun owners’ interests on assault weapons and all gun issues.”

Kucinich also rejected Cordray’s claim that he had been “legally obligated” as AG to work against Cleveland’s assault weapons ban. If Cordray had had any “pangs of conscience,” Kucinich said, he could have hired outside counsel in that matter, as the Attorney General is independently elected and has sole discretion over the legal action he or she pursues.

I admire Cordray for his other stands, but in 2018, I simply can’t forget this part of his record.

This is one of the ideas that I’m sure gets Stoics in serious trouble. Until you take a breath.

Indifferents are everything outside of an individuals excellence of character or virtue… p. 64

From How To Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy To Live A Modern Life by Massimo Picliucci

This idea of indifferents intrigues me. The concept is not that we are indifferent to a person, event or idea, our of callousness, but rather that we ought to be indifferent because we are truly powerless to affect any influence on that person, event or idea. This is yet again the first line of the serenity prayer on steroids. We should not just accept what we cannot change, we shouldn’t even give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. That which we cannot affect, that which we cannot change shouldn’t be allowed to take up a nanosecond of our lives.

I can get behind that.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

THIS is President Donald John Trump…

Ralph Nader lays bear the lie beneath the lamestream media myth. Some would have us believe that the media is somehow liberal and bent on taking away our guns, women and gawd-given right to be assholes. Here’s the problem. Every major media outlet is a business driven by a single credo: make money. And nowhere does this become more evident than when news directors decide who gets airtime and column inches.

Nader in Experts for the People—Shut Out by the Mass Media, writes:

Ever wonder how the television, radio and newspaper people select whom they are going to interview or get quotes from when they are reporting the news or producing a feature? I do. What I’ve learned is that they go to guests that are connected with the established powers—such as think tanks in Washington, D.C. that work on “the military industrial complex” policy (to borrow President Eisenhower’s words) and somehow lean toward more war mongering (e.g. NPR and the U.S.-Iran relationship) or backing more weapon systems (such as a new nuclear bomb arsenal and more F-35s and air craft carriers).

You won’t be hearing from MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postal on the chronic failures of the anti-ballistic missile program (spending $13 billion this coming year).

Whether it is NPR, PBS, the network news programs, the Sunday news interview shows and too often the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal their interviewees are the defenders of the status quo or those with corporatists’ viewpoints.

These news outlets seem oblivious to the blatant economic conflicts of interest inherent in groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and professors who moonlight with corporations. These interviewees have economic and ideological axes to grind that are not disclosed to the general viewers, listeners and Continue Reading »

So, I’m reading Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man Omnibus Plus and on page 248 I found the above. Honoré de Balzac treated coffee like crystal meth and is notorious for drinking 100 cups of coffee—most likely 4 oz. cups, but still, that’s 400 ounces, the equivalent of 20, 20-ounce large coffees—a day. No wonder he wrote from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m. each night.