Arthur Bisbane asks:

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

And people wonder why newspapers are dying…

From Superconductor:

Tuesday night’s New York Philharmonic performance of the Mahler Ninth was stopped dead by an unusual instrument–the iPhone.

An iPhone (using the marimba ring-tone) went off repeatedly in the fourth movement of Mahler’s final completed symphony. According to an eyewitness, the offending phone owner was in the front rows of Avery Fisher Hall when his phone went off, just 13 bars before the last page of the score. In other words, in the final moments of a 25-minute movement, that ends a 90-minute symphony.

“Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra,” the concert-goer reports. She related how the orchestra’s music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good “three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long.”

Mr. Gilbert asked the man, sitting in front of the concert-master: “Are you finished?” The man didn’t respond.

“Fine, we’ll wait,” Mr. Gilbert said.

The Avery Fisher Hall audience, ripped in an untimely fashion from Mahler’s complicated sound-world, reacted with “seething rage.” Someone shouted “Thousand dollar fine.”

This was followed by cries of ‘Get out!’ and ‘Kick him out!.’

Personally? I think the crowd should have made the ass hat eat the phone backwards.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

What has been written in the past often has relevance to the present and future.

I was struck (infuriated) recently by an article on the business pages of the New York Times. It revealed that the State of New Jersey was providing the developers of a luxury hotel/casino in Atlantic City with some $260 million in tax breaks.

It prompted me to seek out the foreclosure problem in New Jersey. People really in need. The number of foreclosures from 2009 projected through 2012: 235,881. That’s a lot of families. A lot of pain.

I wonder how they feel about Republican Gov. Chris Christy’s generosity to casino hotel developers. (It seems Republican politicians are against the dole unless it goes to wealthy interests.) What is surprising is that no one ever has to prove these generous subsidies ever really work.

Equally disturbing, the Times today reveals that “Mr. Ratner… would haul in $726 million in special public benefits” from development in NYC. Indeed, Mr. Ratner (Bruce) is related to our Forest City Ratners. The article points out he is “Developer No. 1” and “Developer No. 2” in two corruption cases in the city, though he isn’t charged in either. The article notes that Bruce Ratner “walked between the legal raindrops.”

Development and Corruption seem uniquely tied Continue Reading »

Tim Russo writes:

More email fun with foreclosure law firms!!!!

Pursuant to the Occupy Cleveland General Assembly expression of support and eviction defense of Cindy Moore in Canal Fulton – Felty & Lembright is the law firm representing Huntington Bank, which seeks to seize Cindy’s home.

Conveniently, Felty & Lembright is located at 1500 W. 3rd St., Suite 400, a short stroll from Occupy Cleveland’s tent on Public Square, across from the Ritz Carlton. Also conveniently, they list every attorney and staff email address on their website.

http://www.feltyandlembright.com/our-office.html

1500 West 3rd Street
Suite 400
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
216.588.1500

eomalley@feltyandlembright.com
dgauntner@feltyandlembright.com
asoni@feltyandlembright.com
clichtman@feltyandlembright.com
jkaplow@feltyandlembright.com
ascarlato@feltyandlembright.com
mlembright@feltyandlembright.com
kfelty@feltyandlembright.com
madzema@feltyandlembright.com
ldetmayer@feltyandlembright.com
jhorrocks@feltyandlembright.com
shiggins@feltyandlembright.com
knovick@feltyandlembright.com
aknapper@feltyandlembright.com
jwalters@feltyandlembright.com

So here’s an email I just sent to every address at Felty & Lembright, which all us Facebooker’s can do simply with a cut and paste! Get creative!

Dear Felty & Lembright,

Happy New Year from Occupy Cleveland! We understand your law firm is representing the bank attempting to throw Cindy Moore out of her home on January 13, who is currently suffering from late stage cancer. We’d like to invite you to visit us on Public Square so you can meet the people who intend to stop this eviction. Expect us.

Yours,

Occupy Cleveland – with Robin Johnny Adelmann and 9 others.

Felty & Lembright
Committed to Providing Outstanding Legal Representation
www.feltyandlembright.com

0819: Against Pepper

In the Hanlon family mystery gift exchange I scored the perfect gift: a five pack of hot sauces guaranteed to make my year spicy.

0948: The wonder of science

Last night 30,015 Republican Iowans made the only reasonalbe choice they could make, but they gave the win to Mitt Romney by only eight votes over a guy whose name is synonimous with the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

I’m sorry, msrs. Siepker and Benedict, no matter how nice Iowa’s Democrats may be, your Republicans have stolen the thunder in 2012. Though you may very well help to re-elect President Barack Hussein Obama in the fall, no one will notice.

Imagine trying to teach students in an English as as Second Language course this:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.

There’s much more…

Tim Russo writes:

Hello all from OC sick bay. I’d be at the Obama event tomorrow, but the OC flu has laid me out. As a veteran of these events, including the last one at Shaker High, some advice.

You will NOT be permitted to bring in signs, or bullhorns, or whatnot, so don’t bother. Sucks, but it’s a security thing. If you don’t have a ticket, you won’t get in. If you do have a ticket, get there at least two hours early. Parking is going to be a nightmare, there’s no easy spot near the high school, so prepare for a long walk to and from the school. Lots of standing around. So instead of standing around…

…Spend those two hours doing outreach – talk to the crowd, visit the media area, and let them know you’re there. Ask the advance people if OC can meet with Barack afterward for a minute…. why not? Hand out flyers, and mic check, mic check, mic check – bring those strong lungs! Shaker Hts. Dems are our natural allies, so put on that good ol’ OC charm. Smile! Mic check local issues like foreclosures, fracking, and jobs jobs jobs. This is one presidential crowd you can get to chant “WE ARE THE 99%”, and they’ll enjoy it. Make it fun. It’s a great opportunity to get support for OC in our most likely support group. If you interrupt the president, you may get thrown out, but that depends on how much support you’ve built within the crowd before the president takes the stage.

Also, try not to get distracted if the Tea Party shows up outside. They were outside last time in Shaker. Might be worth reaching out to them if they are open to it. Make the 99% proud.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

With newspapers in such precipitous decline my thoughts have traveled back to my first newspaper job in Bridgeport Conn. in 1959.

It made me think that I was lucky enough to experience the days of old newspaper people and when the daily newspaper WAS the news. I had the opportunity to enjoy newspapers as we remember them.

I haven’t been in a modern newspaper since the inception of the internet and new technology. The newsroom I experienced has disappeared. So I don’t know how the modern newsroom works. I know it’s different, however. (The last time I was in a newspaper office I sort of snuck into the Plain Dealer news room. It was before the paper was in security lock-down. I got in the locked door by following Mary Strassmeyer as she went through. I remember Bob McGruder reacting in mock shock and telling others that I had a satchel that might be dangerous. What shocked me was the clean whiteness of the city room.)

I remember the huge and dingy old “city room.” I started working nights in the sports department for the Bridgeport Telegram, the name of the morning newspaper in Bridgeport, Conn. The afternoon paper was called the Bridgeport Post. Today Continue Reading »

From this morning’s Marietta Times:

Former council president Paul Bertram III was sworn in as the city’s new law director, and former chief deputy auditor Sheri Hess took the oath of office as city auditor from Common Pleas Judge Tim Williams.

My sis-in-law Sherry Hess is second from the right in the photo. Congratulations to Sherry and all the Hess family.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?) or grievance (you’re helping Mitt Romney by talking about this!!). The premise takes hold for a full 18 months — increasing each day in intensity until Election Day — that every discussion of the President’s actions must be driven solely by one’s preference for election outcomes (if you support the President’s re-election, then why criticize him?).

Worse still is the embrace of George W. Bush’s with-us-or-against-us mentality as the prism through which all political discussions are filtered. It’s literally impossible to discuss any of the candidates’ positions without having the simple-minded — who see all political issues exclusively as a Manichean struggle between the Big Bad Democrats and Good Kind Republicans or vice-versa — misapprehend “I agree with Candidate X’s position on Y” as “I support Candidate X for President” or “I disagree with Candidate X’s position on Y” as “I oppose Candidate X for President.” Even worse are the lying partisan enforcers who, like the Inquisitor Generals searching for any inkling of heresy, purposely distort any discrete praise for the Enemy as a general endorsement.

Greenwald goes on, in his comparison of President Barack Hussein Obama and U.S. Represtative (R-Texas) Ron Paul by proposing what he calls an honest line of reasoning. I would recast that reasoning as a question. Would you be:

willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court?

That very well be the central question of this election year, and no, I’m not willing to make that bargain.

From the Boston Globe:

A Suffolk Superior Court judge made a decision in a private conference during a hearing held yesterday about a Twitter user linked to Occupy Boston, but it will be stayed for 10 days to allow attorneys to appeal, a court official said yesterday.

At the court hearing, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union sought to quash a Dec. 14 subpoena from Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley for information from Twitter about a user, ‘‘p0isAn0N,’’ who is involved with the Occupy Boston movement.

Attorney Peter Krupp, working on behalf of the ACLU, filed a motion to invalidate the subpoena on First Amendment grounds.

After a sidebar conference that was closed to reporters and lasted more than 30 minutes, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Carol Ball made a decision yesterday on the motion to invalidate the subpoena, but the ruling was sealed.

The ACLU fills in some gaps:

That’s when the ACLU got involved. We, along with our client, decided that we would together challenge the meant-to-be secret subpoena in open court, and seek its dismissal on the grounds that it infringed on our client’s First Amendment rights.

That brought us to the courtroom this morning. I had been eagerly awaiting the hearing for days, expecting to hear our lawyers deliver stirring defenses of those constitutional protections we hold most dear: freedom of speech, the right to anonymity, and the right to be protected from unwarranted government search and seizure of our private information. Unfortunately my hopes were dashed. Instead of witnessing the hashing out of justice, I got a first hand illustration of government secrecy gone wild.

The One Percent and their lackeys understand that conducting their operations in public can only make them look, at best, petty and at worst, rabid, feral and evil.

0645: Antonio Damasio on the quest to understand consciousness

Frank Warren writes:

99% of the secrets created were in the spirit of PostSecret. Unfortunately, the scale of secrets was so large that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening.

Bad content caused users to complain to me, Apple and the FBI. I was contacted by law enforcement about bad content on the App. Threats were made against users, moderators and my family. (Two specific threats were made that I am unable to talk about). As much as we tried, we were unable to maintain a bully-free environment. Weeks ago I had to remove the App from my daughter’s phone.

Like many of you, I feel a great sense of loss from this.

I, for one, am very happy to see this experiment blow up. When money trumps good intentions, the result is never pretty.

Ian Welsh writes:

American consumers and workers, as a group, do not have pricing power and they do not have alternatives. They cannot charge more for their labor, because there is a huge surplus of workers. Because almost every major industry is an oligopoly or a local monopoly, as consumers, they cannot move from one company to another, as the companies are almost all in collusion and raising prices more or less in lockstep. There is no real competition on price in most industries (certainly not in telecom).

Until Americans have the ability to opt out, things will not get better. And tax cuts will do NOTHING. If you give money to ordinary people corporations with pricing power will take it away. If you give money to corporations or rich people, they will use it for leveraged financial plays (job destruction), offshoring or outsourcing (job destruction) or on luxury consumption like $50,000/night hotel rooms and private jets (some job creation, but destroying the quality of services you get.)

Emphasis mine, JH.