Roldo Bartimole writes:

I”ve got a bridge to sell you. Cheap. Just send along a big check. We”ll tell you how helpful it was some time in the future.

Mayor Frank Jackson and City Council are ready to give $1.1 million to Nehst Studios to help finance three movies the company expects to make in just over a year, according to a piece by Jay Miller of Crain”s Cleveland Business. It”s a loan that will allow Nehst to arrange $11 million in financing.

(PLEASE, CITY OFFICIALS, SAVE THIS $1.1 MILLION AND SEND SOMEONE OVER TO THE CASINO WHEN IT”S BUILT. BET IT ON SOMETHING. MAKES BETTER BUSINESS SENSE.)

I wonder who at City Hall has the expertise to invest more than a million bucks on some Hollywood (made in Cleveland) movies. Oh, hell, details, details. Continue Reading »

Found in my electronic chapbook.

…[I]t is possible for significant things to happen to the narrator without their being reported to the reader. This can be important in suspense fiction. While it”s not fair or dramatically satisfying to withhold important information forever, you can pick your time to reveal it. In The Sins Of The Father, for instance, I have Matt Scudder enter an apartment illegally to look for evidence. He reports: The window wasn”t locked. I opened it, let myself in, closed it after me. An hour later I went out the window and back up the fire escape… Now what Scudder found in the apartment is important, and a couple of chapters later he lets the reader know about it. But it would have slowed things down to report on his discoveries when he made them, so I postponed the revelations accordingly. More important, in the same book, there”s a point where he figures out What Really Happened-but that explanation”s postponed until a confrontation with the evil-doer rather than disclosed by having Scudder think aloud. p. 158

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

At some level I suppose I ought to be pleased that it only took two days for the State Peace and Development Council (aka, Myanmar’s military dictators) to publish the rules for mythical elections this fall, but no one is surprised that the generals have everything all locked up except, perhaps, the bands for the inaugural parties..

From The London Times:

Burma”s military dictatorship has set out laws governing a general election promised later this year, reinforcing the predictions of its opponents that it will be a hollow exercise intended to consolidate military power under a democratic façade.

The country”s state-run newspapers today published the election commission law, the first of five pieces of legislation which were formally passed on Monday. Under its terms, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the military Government calls itself, will appoint the five-person commission responsible for supervising the election.

“This demonstrate that the generals will dominate the entire process,” said Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK. “If this election were a football match the generals would be playing in both teams, as well as being the referee.”

Each of its five members must be aged over 50, and “shall be deemed by the SPDC to be an eminent person, to have integrity and experience, to be loyal to the state and its citizens and shall not be a member of a political party”.

The commission is responsible for drawing up constituencies, compiling electoral rolls, and monitoring the conduct of political parties. It has the power to postpone voting in individual constituencies in cases of “natural disaster or due to the local security situation”.

What I’d like to know is how the feck they’ll pull of the not be a member of a political party bit.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich is being singled out to change his vote on President Barack Obama”s health reform measure. President Obama himself pitched to Kucinich, telling him a form of single-payer option – Kucinich”s desire – is in the reform bill.

Kucinich was a no vote on the measure that passed the House. He has been pressing for an ideal single-payer measure.

Kucinich has the reputation of being a politician with strong beliefs. He has also been a rather selfish politician who thinks of his standing when making his decisions.

His intransigence not only endangers health reform – weakened as it is – but damages the Obama administration and possibly Democrats in general for the coming election.

The delayed health reform battle has set back President Obama”s ability to deal with the jobs and other issues. Republicans have denied Obama a single vote in the U. S. Senate in an attempt to fatally damage his presidency.

Rep. Bernie Sanders told the Huffington Post that he had talked to Kucinich, albeit “a while back,” about his provision that gives states the ability to provide a single-payer option using federal funds to do so.

The article said that President Obama directly addressed Kucinich”s concern about lack of a single-payer aspect, telling him a form was in the bill and that the Congressman “wrote it down.”

Dennis and a few other Democrats – mostly more conservative ones – are holding up health insurance for some 40 million people and many others facing a jobless future without health insurance.

Democrats want to pass a revised health bill under circumstances that allow the U.S. Senate, which has already passed a bill (as has the House) to dodge a Republican filibuster. A revised Senate bill from the House would require only 50 Senate votes. Democrats believe they can produce 50 votes.

C”mon Dennis, let”s not be your usual selfish self and think about the general good.

Tim Russo also weighs in on Kucinich and the Health Care Bill…

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.

(Often, I suspect, the reader winds up seeing the narrator as looking rather like himself. That”s as vital a process in fiction as transference is in psychoanalysis, and the last thing you want to do is impede it.) p. 157

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

Please donate… Get very cool art…

Do you think we have campaign finance reform problems in the United States? Imagine for a moment if the political party in the White House were to begin selling off national assets — vacation sites in the national parks, artifacts in the Smithsonian, etc. — to raise money for the next presidential elections.

From The New York Times:

Myanmar”s military government has quietly begun the largest sell-off of state assets in the country”s history, including more than 100 government buildings, port facilities and a large stake in the national airline, diplomats and businessmen here say.

The sell-off, analysts say, appears to be part of a political transition as the government introduces elections for the first time in 20 years and a new Constitution under which the military seems likely to perpetuate its rule, though more from behind the scenes.

Diplomats and businessmen say that the sales may allow ruling generals to build up cash for election campaigns to the new Parliament, where they will hold 25 percent of seats, or to pay for salary increases for civil servants and other populist measures. Many of the assets are being sold to businessmen allied with the military, reinforcing the strength of a class of oligarchs and military cronies.

There is, fortunately a downside, or even possibly a real risk, for Myanmar’s military dictators in all this.

But the privatizations could also have the effect of injecting some competition into what is an almost Soviet-style economic system, and some analysts here say they may herald a shift in direction. Reformers in the government, they say, may be hoping to follow a path similar to that of China or Vietnam, where the economies have been liberalized but the ruling party has remained firmly in charge and has tolerated little dissent.

Since the generals originally obtained most of these assets in the 1962 coup, I see little danger of the above however. Given the generals’ history, possible buyers should be very leery of simply having their property re-nationalized.

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.

Characterization in general comes more easily for me in first person books because it”s such a natural matter. You don”t observe from without. Instead, you get under your character”s skin and speak to the reader in his voice, and by doing this you not only make the character come alive for the reader. You make him come alive for your own self as you write. p. 156

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

So the secretive and very paranoid State Peace and Development Council (aka, Myanmar’s military dictators) pass election laws but fails to publish them. Are they perhaps on display in the cellar with the lights gone in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard?

From the BBC:

Burma’s military government has passed long-awaited election laws which pave the way for polls expected this year.

Details of the laws have not yet been revealed but they are likely to include issues such as campaigning and the number of candidates per constituency.

No date has been given for the polls, although the junta has previously said the elections will be held this year.

Is everything clear now?

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The Plain Dealer’s Michelle Jarboe reported this morning about the troubled downtown commercial properties in: Commercial real estate’s challenges are apparent in downtown Cleveland corridor. Empty and emptying buildings. It’s a shame.

Yet the Plain Dealer – with business and political leaders – has been pushing for more and more subsidies to build new. That”s just one of the major reasons there are so many empty buildings. We are helping to create excess.

You can”t build new when you can”t even keep the old relevant.

At the same time retail and commercial properties go into foreclosure Cleveland political leaders are using hefty subsidies Continue Reading »

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.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if this bias against the first person isn”t very much part of our Puritan tradition. Mencken defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy, and I don”t think he”d mind amending the definition to include the fear that someone somewhere my doing what comes naturally. After all, if something”s easy to do, if it comes naturally and simply and works like a charm, there must be something wrong with it. It”ll give you hair on your palms, or make you blind or something. p. 155

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

Women from Myanmar marched in Sydney, Australia Manila, Philippines and other cities around the world as part of the World March of Women. At home and in border refugee camps, politically active women continue to risk, and suffer, imprisonment and the not-yet revolutionized struggle to hold their families together.

From Huffington Post:

For Riya, life in the refugee camps in Bangladesh isn’t much better than Burma. Her shelter rests on the side of a hill pieced together with scraps of tarp and chunks of mud, and she only has access to water for one hour a day.

Since being born, her son has been inflicted with numerous illnesses. He suffers from continuous bouts of diarrhea, his belly is distended from malnourishment, his scrotum enlarged, and his thighs and lower belly covered in red pustules. Riya scrounges for food from relatives, collects and sells firewood from the local forest, and begs for money outside the camp just to avoid hunger.

Under these conditions, she cannot seek medical care for her son because of the constant need to find food to avoid starvation. Riya shares the common sentiment in the refugee camp that the choice between living in Burma or fleeing to refugee camps in Bangladesh, is “like a choice between a crocodile and a snake.”

Where are those who decry the plight of the Palestinians in this?