Roldo Bartimole writes:

It was 45 years ago August. One of the biggest local stories the Plain Dealer missed. It was especially galling to the paper’s reporters, as the hero was a shy PD copy editor. I was a short-timer at the PD and saw the shame among colleagues. It said a lot about the paper’s leadership. None of it good. Much of it revealing. The truth did hurt.

Here is a piece, with some modifications, that I wrote in one of the now defunct Cleveland alternatives. Down in the story are links to actual film of the discovery at sea of Bob Manry by Ch. 5 reporter Bill Jorgenson and his cameraman Walt Glendenning. It is priceless and historic Cleveland journalism. Don’t miss it.

Twenty-five years ago, I was a staff member of the Pee Dee when its reporters were called “tigers.” I had come to Cleveland to work for a larger urban newspaper, and had been told that Cleveland was a very progressive city and the newspaper that then called itself The Cleveland Plain Dealer was headed by a progressive, young leader – Thomas Vail, the recently named publisher of the newspaper, which his family then owned.

In 1965, Newsweek magazine headlined a piece about the Pee Dee, “Tigerish,” quoting an editor saying, we’ve got a bunch of young tigers. Vail was called “tiger-in-chief.”

Vail – described as looking “more like an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero than a publisher,” – was quoted saying with bravado, “A newspaper should lead a community. Clevelanders have always been conservative. We are Continue Reading »

What if money didn’t matter – Alan Watts from Evoke & Evolve on Vimeo.

Principle No. 1: In short, successful optimists don’t feel embarrassed to say that things could be better. They have no qualms about imagining an improved world and advocating for it, no matter how much derision they may receive at the hands of the cynical. In short they are not ashamed to dream good dreams. After all, Martin Luther King did not stand on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and say, “I have a five point plan.”

Found in my Chapbook…

From The Guardian:

The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby (2008)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2007)
The Coast of Utopia (trilogy), Tom Stoppard (2007)
Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, Jon Savage (2007)
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (2002)
The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens (2001)
Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler (1997)
A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1890-1924, Orlando Figes (1997)
The Insult, Rupert Thomson (1996)
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon (1995) Continue Reading »

Mark Stevenson writes:

It’s not always easy to keep optimistic. As the famous military maxim goes “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, which is why successful military leaders give those under them the freedom to improvise, but make sure they always know what the goal is. Americans call this ‘Commander’s Intent’. What I have learnt from working with some of the people who actually get stuff done is that they all have ‘Commander’s Intent’. But they don’t call it that. Instead they say, “these are my principles” or “these are my values”. When things change or difficult decisions need to be made they refer back to their principles, their ‘Commander’s Intent’.

I’m generally an optimist, though I do succumb to cynicism on occasion, and I do think we will come out of the current tantrum in Washington before our nation falls apart, but I did not miss the significance of ensuring that military pay — money going to the people who actually have the real guns in our nation — was not affected. The last crisis the anyone in Washington wants to face is the threat of a military coup.

Greenwald begins:

This afternoon, along with Guardian US editor-in-chief Janine Gibson, I participated in Reddit’s “ask me anything” feature, where the highest rated questions rise to the top and the guest answers each of them. The questions focused on our NSA reporting, and were largely smart and provocative.

I’ll say…

Last week Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said:

“I don’t know what all the scenes are, but I’ve seen how this movie ends. We will end up not shutting the government down, and we will not defund Obamacare.”

McCain clearly underestimated the crazy factor of the beast he helped release in 2008 by putting Sarah Palin on his ticket. The question now is how long with the siege last?

Dan Roberts writes:

The US government was forced to begin closing swaths of non-essential services on Tuesday morning after frantic rounds of late night political sparring failed to avert the first federal shutdown in nearly two decades.

As a midnight deadline to extend Congressional spending authority ticked ever closer, Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend US health insurance.

Three separate attacks on the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, were staged by the House of Representatives, only to be rejected in turn by the Democrat-controlled Senate, which accused Republicans of holding the country to ransom.

Shortly before midnight, Senate majority leader Harry Reid marked the end of the process by rejecting House calls for formal talks to reconcile their conflicting positions, arguing it was impossible to negotiate with a “gun to our heads”.

“This is a very serious time in the history of our country,” Reid said. “Millions of people are going to be affected tomorrow and the Republicans are still playing games”

In 1995, the Republicans ensured the re-election of President Bill Clinton and trimmed their 1994 gains by shutting down the government for 28 days. Clearly, history is not their long suit.

From Michael Cohen:

There is a frustrating tendency in American political reporting to adopt a position of “both sides-ism” – as in, “both sides” are equally to blame for the nation’s chronic political dysfunction. Sometimes, it must be said, this assessment is correct. After all, the US political system was practically designed to breed legislative gridlock.

Not this time, however.

There is one party that is solely to blame for the first government shutdown in 17 years. And it’s the Republican party.

Indeed, the debate happening in Washington right now is not even between Democrats and Republicans. It’s not even about the deficit, or the budget, or government spending priorities. Rather, it is one strictly occurring between Republicans who are trying to find some magic bullet to destroy “Obamacare” – the country’s fiscal health be damned.

So much for the supposed love of small businesses which are the least able to survive Republicans sucking $300 million a day out of the economy.

Then: Republican leaders have put ideology ahead of common sense and now: House Republicans continue to tie funding of the government to ideological demands.

The Guardian is blogging the shut down live…

In How To Change The World, John-Paul Flintoff writes:

…[In t]he Borda count—named for French scientist Jean-Charles de Borda (1733-99), or preferendum, voters simply express their preferences on a range of options, ranking them from highest to lowest. The winning option may not have been any individual voter’s first choice, but will have won higher overall approval. The losing option, though it may have been some voter’s first choice, will have the lowest overall approval. … Whatever the context, people usually have the same basic interests, [Peter] Emerson says, but in a different order of priority. The preferendum allows them to recognize this. They may not agree on the first choice, but will quickly agree on the second or third.

What is particularly interesting about Emerson’s experience is that adopting a different technique for finding common ground can change the way individuals regard people they formerly saw as opponents. They start to see them as more like colleagues. This is because, in the preferendum, nobody votes against anything. Instead, you vote for every option, but in your own order of preference. No matter how strongly voters disagree, they must give at least on point to those of an opposite persuasion. “The effect of having to accept literally everyone as a neighbor may make an incalculable contribution towards mutual understanding and accommodation,” says Emerson. “Every individual starts the reconciliation process … with himself.” If someone wants a particular policy to be adopted, he or she must persuade not only the mild supporter to become more committed, and give 9 or 10 points instead of 6 or 7—but also the opponents must warm a little, to give 6 or 7 instead of 1 or 2. Rather than merely preach to the converted, there is more to be gained by gently wooing those who would previously have been seen as political adversaries, and ignored. Thus the very use of a consensual system will in itself promote consensus, both in the course of a civilized debate and in the resolutions that may follow.

Eventually, as people discover their common interests, they find themselves able to overlook differences that previously seemed so important. p. 149-51

Paul Lewis writes:

A National Security Agency employee was able to secretly intercept the phone calls of nine foreign women for six years without ever being detected by his managers, the agency’s internal watchdog has revealed.

The unauthorised abuse of the NSA’s surveillance tools only came to light after one of the women, who happened to be a US government employee, told a colleague that she suspected the man – with whom she was having a sexual relationship – was listening to her calls.

The case is among 12 documented in a letter from the NSA’s inspector general to a leading member of Congress, who asked for a breakdown of cases in which the agency’s powerful surveillance apparatus was deliberately abused by staff. One relates to a member of the US military who, on the first day he gained access to the surveillance system, used it to spy on six email addresses belonging to former girlfriends.

Will this be the next lie exposed by the Snowden documents?

“The press claimed evidence of thousands of privacy violations. This is false and misleading,” [NSA director, Gen Keith Alexander] said.

So, which is true: the statement is false or the statement is misleading? Or, as I believe, did Alexander mean to claim that his own statement is false and misleading? Is there is evidence for fewer than 2,000 violations or more than 10,999 violations?

Why hasn’t this man been fired and prosecuted?

Lisa O’Carroll writes:

For students of journalism [Seymour Hersh’s] message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been “despoiled”.

“I went five months looking for a document, because without a document, there’s nothing there, it doesn’t go anywhere.”

Hersh returns to US president Barack Obama. He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.

“Do you think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on [with journalists]?” he asks.

He says investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what the job entails.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

We continually hear parents are the big problem of the Cleveland schools. Likely there’s some truth to that.

What we seem to forget, however, is that the parents of today were the children of yesterday that we didn’t educate and the children of today will be the ill-educated parents of tomorrow who we will blame for their children’s lack of learning.

This started long ago with a very bad system that including segregation and poverty with all its wrenching consequences. Nothing we didn’t know. Just something we didn’t correct.

The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons is one version of an oft quoted declaration. The sins of our leaders have led to today’s “leaders.”

It’s hard to see any “school reform” that overcomes the treatment of today’s children and their parents because yesterday already determines today.

As a young sailor nearly 40 years ago I remember living through a threatened government shutdown. The Navy Exchange made plans to feed families on credit, sailors reached out to shipmates and extended families to pay rents, we prepared to take care of our own.

Congress blinked and we all got paid.

Now, in 2013, we stand at the brink again.

Robert Reich writes:

As a child I was bullied by bigger boys who threatened to beat me up if I didn’t give them what they wanted. But every time I gave in to their demands their subsequent demands grew larger. First they wanted the change in my pocket. Next it was the dessert in my lunchbox. Then my new Davy Crockett cap. Then the softball and bat I got for my birthday.

Finally I stopped giving in. When the bullies began roughing me up on the playground some older boys came to my rescue and threatened my tormenters with black eyes if they ever touched me again. That ended their extortion racket.

What’s happening in Washington these days may seem far removed from my boyhood memories, but Washington is really just another childhood playground. Its current bullies are rightwing Republicans, now threatening that if they don’t get their way they’ll close down the government and cause the nation to default on its debts.

“The American people don’t want a government shutdown, and they don’t want Obamacare,” House Republican leaders said in a statement over the weekend. “We will do our job and send this bill over, and then it’s up to the Senate to pass it and stop a government showdown.”

Really? The American people don’t want Obamacare as much as I didn’t want my softball and bat.

Okay, maybe not quite as much. But the only settled way we know what the American people want is through the democratic process. And the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is the law of the land. A majority of the House and Senate voted for it, the President signed it into law, its constitutionality has been upheld by the Supreme Court, and a majority of Americans reelected the President after an election battle in which the Affordable Care Act was a central issue.

Moreover, we don’t repeal laws in this country by holding hostage the entire government of the United States.

The bullies are a faction inside the Republican Party – extremists who are threatening more reasonable Republicans with primary challenges if they don’t go along.

And where are the Tea Party extremists getting their dough? From even bigger bullies – a handful of hugely wealthy Americans who are sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into this extortion racket.

Are Americans so cowed by shadowy figures who threaten our way of life that we allow the tiniest of minorities to demand our lunch money? I’m not against a reasoned debate about the direction our country is to take. I am against allowing anyone to believe they can buy my country.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

We have a new convention center. But we lost our historic Mall.

Now we’ll have a double whammy. We face a money-losing Convention Center and Cuyahoga County promises to build and own a big money-losing hotel.

Are we on a roll or not?

First, I looked and walk on what used to be Cleveland’s historic Mall area. You once could look from Mall A past Mall B (aside the old convention center) out to Mall C (between city hall and the County courthouse). No more.

It has been shattered.

Here’s a paragraph from Eric Johannesen’s Cleveland Architecture – 1876-1976:

The last remaining older structure within the mall area was demolished in 1935, and the Mall was used for the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. The fact that the Mall was finally realized a third of a century after the conception of the Group Plan is an affirmation of Burnham’s famous assertion that “a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.

Not anymore.

I used to walk from the rapid at Tower City, across Public Square to Mall A and then B to Cleveland City Hall, just east of Mall C. Mall C was often badly treated. Sometimes as a parking lot. Now its makeover has Continue Reading »

Note: I’m not sure when this change was made, but I noticed that YouTube now offers a privacy-enhanced mode. Sounds good, right? Here’s what YouTube says its privacy-enhanced mode entails:

Enabling [the privacy-enhanced mode] option means that YouTube won’t store information about visitors on your web page unless they play the video.

Won’t store, but might very well forward that information to someone who does; and all bets are off if someone actually watches the video you embed. I’ll sleep more soundly tonight, won’t you?

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Underscoring the purpose of yesterday’s hearing (and the purpose of [California Sen. Dianne] Feinstein’s Committee more broadly): the witnesses the Committee first heard from were all Obama officials – Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander, Deputy Attorney James Cole – who vehemently defended every aspect of the NSA. At the conclusion of their testimony, Feinstein announced that it was very, very important to hear from the two non-governmental witnesses the Committee had invited: virulent NSA defender Ben Wittes of the Brooking Institution and virulent NSA defender Timothy Edgar, a former Obama national security official. Hearing only from dedicated NSA apologists as witnesses: that’s “oversight” for Dianne Feinstein and her oversight Committee.

Politicians run for office, promising to deliver law and order, safe and clean streets, and good schools. Then they get elected, and instead of paying for the cops, garbagemen, teachers and firefighters they only just 10 minutes ago promised voters, they intercept taxpayer money allocated for those workers and blow it on other stuff. It’s the governmental equivalent of stealing from your kids’ college fund to buy lap dances.
—Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi writes:

There are really three main themes to follow in this pension scandal:

1) Many states and cities have been under-paying or non-paying their required contributions into public pension funds for years, causing massive shortfalls that are seldom reported upon by local outlets.

2) As a solution to the fiscal crises, unions and voters are being told that a key solution is seeking higher yields or more diversity through “alternative investments,” whose high fees cost nearly as much as the cuts being demanded of workers, making this a pretty straightforward wealth transfer. A series of other middlemen are also in on this game, siphoning off millions in fees from states that are publicly claiming to be broke.

3) Many of the “alternative investments” these funds end up putting their money in are hedge funds or PE funds run by men and women who have lobbied politically against traditional union pension plans in the past, meaning union members have been giving away millions of their own retirement money essentially to fund political movements against them.

There are many other themes, but those are the three that I found most interesting in this complicated story.

From a creative artist point of view, I’m in awe of Keith Knight because he does the work. I’ve followed his work for years (and was totally bummed that I missed his visit to Cleveland several years ago) and think he is a genius on many levels. He’s been missing in action for more than month, posting cartoons only sporadically, and now we know why.

Matt Taibbi writes:

First of all, any white guy anywhere, rich or poor, who steps out in public wearing the mantle of 400 years of black suffering instantly shoots to the very top of the world asshole pyramid. Most white people grasp this instinctively. If they don’t already teach it in kindergarten to make sure the rest get it, they ought to.

But when you’re a white guy who just presided over a year of declining across-the-board sales but got a 24% pay raise anyway, to $13 million a year, largely because your company is invested in a market that’s overheating due to massive Fed intervention, and you’re so grateful for your cosmic good fortune that you immediately go out and publicly nail yourself to the cross of black victimhood – and not while stone drunk and with buddies at a bar, mind you, but sober and sitting in front of a Wall Street Journal reporter – that’s like a whole new category of asshole. Try to compute just exactly how obnoxious that is – you’ll be doing it until the end of time, like someone trying to figure pi.

This IS terrible…