Andrew Sullivan writes:

That may be true. But what if someone begins to ask: why do we have tens of thousands of troops still in Germany? And what if the dormant heartland right asks why we need to police the entire world when domestic infrastructure is crumbling, and we cannot afford social security and Medicare. This takes political skill – but I’m sure it could be done. Ron Paul got traction with this in the Republican base. Someone else could build on that. At some point, maintaining a cold War defense posture in a totally different world will require some kind of rebalancing. If nothing else does it, the fiscal crunch will.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

See it first, and then write it. p. 214

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

What does it suggest when a government has to hire foreign nationals for its state television channel? How about that the government is so vilified that even its own flacks can’t be trusted to spout the party line. That is the situation in Myanmar where the country’s military dictators are hiring talking heads from Singapore.

From the Democratic Voice of Burma:

The military government in Burma has launched a new international television channel, presented by foreigners, that sources say could be a means to counter “mistrust” of Burmese reporters.

Myanmar International TV is a product of the junta”s Ministry of Information, home to the notoriously draconian Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, the government”s censor board.

“The programmes are being presented by foreigners hired from Singapore who mainly promote travel and tourism in Burma,” said a Rangoon journalist close to the operating media group, Shwe Than Lwin.

He added that the majority of the daily two-hour programmes, which will broadcast inside Burma on the MRTV-3 channel and internationally via satellite, “are focused on culture, tradition and environment – topics that will gain interest from the international audience”.

The situation is really, really bad when you can’t trust your own toadies.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Tell me – of all the serious, debilitating problems of Cleveland – why has a $350 million – less than three mile road – become a major MUST for our community?

For the usual reasons.

The private people in charge of our public agenda want it.

With other roads, streets and bridges crumbling all over the place – with public transportation shriveling and dying – a short road traversing to University Circle and our medical giants has become No. 1 on our list of priority needs.

I don”t think so.

But Mayor Frank Jackson and the subservient City Council 19 appear not to notice. The usual ostrich position is assumed.

It reminds me of the time I arrived in Cleveland – 1965. That”s when the effects of the city”s urban renewal program began to show devastating impact on the city. A weight, by the way, that deserves an urban study that will show what happened to Cleveland, when and why. Don”t expect any university to make such a study. They would have to critically take on the Establishment. It won”t happen. Only private citizens could do it.

The same institutional forces and the people leading the push for this road made the disastrous decisions that help cripple Cleveland with urban renewal plans. Plans that helped certain interests and devastated others, particularly blacks. They felt the impact of urban renewal, or as it was often called then, Negro removal.

Our leaders and the Plain Dealer have given the road the fanciful name of “Opportunity Corridor.”

Let me quote from a study done in the late 1960s, probably available at the library. It was called The Cleveland Papers by the Illuminating Company, an apt but tongue in cheek reference to the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. It was done by an ad hoc group of Citizens.

Here is how it starts:

The notion of a local oligarchy may seem quaintly parochial or – worse – paranoid. Yet we contend that Cleveland, one of America”s great industrial cities, is dominated by a coherent, readily identifiable business oligarchy. Its power is not based in hereditary class prerogatives, but in direct control of the region”s industrial and financial corporations. It is a self-conscious oligarchy, capable of strategizing and of exercising collective authority in the pursuit of common interests. Just as its industries dominate the city”s physical aspect, the oligarchy itself dominates every phase of the city”s political and cultural life. And it is this oligarchy which is above all to blame for the city”s destruction.

Pretty strong stuff.

If you read the entire report – examining particularly the roles of the foundations and the medical empire – you will get an education of how the power today functions in just the same way. The purpose: public decision making to enable a similar oligarchy to control events and decisions.

Anyone who wants to know how Cleveland got as it is should read this booklet. Indeed, make a copy of it. If you are a teacher of civics, history or politics, assign it to your students.

Gov. Ted Strickland, one guesses to bolster Senate candidate Lee Fisher, recently announced some $4 million to help fund some design work on the road. It goes from I-490 at E. 55th Street to East 105th street.

Why do we need this road? Do we need more land for industry? Hell no. There”s land wasting away all over the place. Do we need more land for commercial? Hell no. Commercial real estate is devastated. Do we need more land for retail? Hell no. Retail is languishing, dying all over the place.

Is University Circle isolated? Unreachable by transportation? Hell no. Didn”t we just finish a $200 million plus transit system right up Euclid Avenue from downtown to University Circle and the medical empire? Yes we did. Even as RTA dumped routes transit-dependent people really need. Yes, we notice who is important. And who is not.

So why do we need a $350 million, less than three mile road? Because the same leadership that said we had to do urban renewal throughout the city back in the 1950s said so. We know that the Cleveland and Gund foundations gave $100,000 each to push for this road.

They were mistaken then. They are mistaken now.

Tell that to Terry Egger, publisher of the Plain Dealer and co-chair of the committee for the “opportunity” Side Street to University Circle. Tell that to Chris Roynane, head of University Circle Inc., and a candidate for the new Cuyahoga County Council.

Tell that to Joe Roman and the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

We are allowing the same oligarchy of corporate/foundation leadership to send us further into the hole. They have divined that we need a $350 million Side Street. And if you think the price is set, wait until we get the full bill.

Learn something from history. You won”t find it in the Plain Dealer. Check out the Cleveland Papers for a taste of reality. And think for yourself.

When I served on board the USS Bainbridge, CGN-25, I smoked three packs a day of Marlboros at (while underway) 20 cents a pack, except for when I was on duty. My primary duty station was the after missile house and the Navy had this silly rule about not smoking near the 40 Terrier SAMs I was responsible for.

If I, or any of the sailors in my crew, wanted a cigarette, we had to step outside and dog the door down behind us. We smoked before our feet hit the deck in the morning, with our breakfast coffee and after every meal. There were times when the smoke was so thick on the mess decks where movies were shown in the evening, that you would barely see the screen.

I must have quit smoking at least once a month. I even once went more than 100 days without lighting up, but it wasn’t until 5 December 1981, that I became a recovering tobaccoholic, clean now for nearly 30 years.

Now the bubble heads have until 31 December to kick their habits.

In 1996, I cast my presidential vote for Ralph Nader, not because I thought he could win, but because I was not happy with the first term of President Bill Clinton, and I thought I might nudge the Democratic Party back toward the left. That didn’t work.

I almost voted for Nader again in 2000, but the idea of even four years of George W. Bush were too terrible to contemplate (and worse than I ever imagined). After the election, Democrats wanted to pile on to Nader to blame him for their loss. The clear light of day has since shown that they had only themselves to blame.

When I was a teenager, Nader was one of my heroes because of his consumer and environmental activism. Public Citizen made sense to me.

Time and time again, I’ve railed against the corpritization of America, and indeed the world, at The Writing On The Wal, using Walmart as the poster-child for how corporations continue to fundamentally change us.

Nader took on the corporations and won, initially. Then corporate Earth realized how great a threat he was and fought back. This week, another man I greatly admire, Roldo Bartimole, sent me a link to a story published by Truthdig about how Corporate Earth buried Nader and turned him into a pariah that even his own organization, Public Citizen, has attempted to distance itself from.

Roldo wrote to me:

This is a striking report on the silencing of Ralph Nader by the American Press. I”ve often said that Nader was the best journalist of our era. Now Nader acknowledges that Corporate America silence him. And us.

It”s an important piece on American journalism of our times. To our shame. To the shame of every journalist.

I agree.

In his examination of Nader and the Corporate Earth that feared him, Chris Hedges writes:

The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who represented the best of our democracy was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published “Unsafe at Any Speed” in 1965, it took nine months to federally regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Two years after the collapse of Bear Stearns there is still no financial reform. The large hedge funds and banks are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to once again engage in the speculative games that triggered the first financial crisis and will almost certainly trigger a second. The corporate press, which abets our vast historical amnesia, does nothing to remind us how we got here. It speaks in the hollow and empty slogans handed to it by public relations firms, its corporate paymasters and the sound-bite society.

“If you organize 1 percent of the people in this country along progressive lines you can turn the country around, as long as you give them infrastructure,” Nader said. “They represent a large percentage of the population. Take all the conservatives who work in Wal-Mart: How many would be against a living wage? Take all the conservatives who have pre-existing conditions: How many would be for single-payer not-for-profit health insurance? When you get down to the concrete, when you have an active movement that is visible and media-savvy, when you have a community, a lot of people will join. And lots more will support it. The problem is that most liberals are estranged from the working class. They largely have the good jobs. They are not hurting.”

Please read the whole piece.

Tim Russo writes:

Some bad habits remain. Still smoking, which sucks. But the biggest remaining bad habit is the same thing which got me into trouble in the first place – my own hard wired self defenses. No need to get into it, but having the benefit of years of therapy, the good news is that I can identify these tendencies in little things before they become big things, solve them, and carry on.

The problem is that much of what makes my campaign so….how to put this…..worth doing, is derived from the experience of the past 9 years. The challenge is to balance that “me” with the previous “me” – balance the hard nosed professional, constantly building toward a goal, with the nothing-to-lose abandon that has helped put me in a position to become that professional again. That”s going to be a constant struggle, with some bad days and good days, but I suspect it”ll get easier going forward.

[Update @ 1807: Dang, this didn’t take long…]

And then on the macro level…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Sometimes my mental picture will be more painting than photograph with details alternately stressed or blurred. I have found, though, that the more completely I realized scenes before writing them, the more at ease I am in recreating them for the reader, the more apt I am to be satisfied with my work. p. 214

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

Putting the faux elections in Myanmar this fall at the top of the agenda during the meeting in Hanoi of the Association of South East Asian Nations makes sense, but the growing crisis in Thailand and ASEAN’s past impotence when dealing with Myanmar’s State Peace and Development Council (aka the generals), make any shifts unlikely.

From the BBC:

The Asean summit is expected to focus largely on improving relations between the neighbours and regional trading partners.

Forming a free market group of 600 million people by 2015 is a key theme, although wide differences remain between the delegates.

A petition signed by more than 100 legislators in the region has appealed to the summit to take decisive action against Burma – a fellow member – with the aim of ensuring the elections are free and fair.

Burma’s military junta has not yet given a date for the polls – the first in the country in 20 years – but they are expected to take place later this year.

Politically instability does not instill confidence in extra-regional, or even regional, trading partners.

In Cleveland on WEWS, Channel 5 @ 11:30 p.m.

Written by Sherry Chandler, read by Sherry Chandler…