Roldo Bartimole writes:

If there”s going to be an investigation of the integrity of commercial property appraisals here, we ought to also probe tax reductions awarded to downtown property owners by official County and State of Ohio agents.

County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, concerned about the validity of commercial property appraisals because of the corruption charges involving County Auditor Frank Russo, has requested a probe by state officials. Rokakis apparently doesn”t trust the values on commercial properties. Who would?

The values given properties, of course, provide the measure of the taxes property owner”s pay. The lower the value the lesser taxes are due to be paid.

Commercial property owners are expected to seek large reductions in property values next year. They have lawyers and ability – far greater than ordinary homeowners – to pursue reductions. This could have a serious impact on Cleveland schools and the city. Cleveland schools get the majority share of property tax revenue.

It will be most important for the news media, particularly the Plain Dealer, to closely follow and report request by the big property owners for reductions. The slow economy suggests that many commercial entities will seek reductions by claiming tough economic circumstances.

A watchful eye provides needed oversight of both public agencies and private interests. Continue Reading »

Mark Bowden writes:

With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What”s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery.

Keep reading…

I was particularly taken by these two paragraphs near the end of Bowden’s piece:

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger”s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromise-only innocence or degrees of guilt or responsibility. But isn”t this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isn”t there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isn”t the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport.

Well, Rome did have its circuses, but Bowden concludes that the post-journalism journalist:

because he is drawn to the work primarily out of political conviction, not curiosity, is less likely to experience the pleasure of finding something new, or of arriving at a completely original, unexpected insight, one that surprises even himself. He is missing out on the great fun of speaking wholly for himself, without fear or favor. This is what gives reporters the power to stir up trouble wherever they go. They can shake preconceptions and poke holes in presumption. They can celebrate the unnoticed and puncture the hyped. They can, as the old saying goes, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. A reporter who thinks and speaks for himself, whose preeminent goal is providing deeper understanding, aspires even in political argument to persuade, which requires at the very least being seen as fair-minded and trustworthy by those-and this is the key-who are inclined to disagree with him. The honest, disinterested voice of a true journalist carries an authority that no self-branded liberal or conservative can have. “For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote. Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power. They are missing the most joyful part of the job.

This is what H. L. Mencken was getting at when he famously described his early years as a Baltimore Sun reporter. He called it “the life of kings.”

Via Mano Singham…

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

What we need, Obama argued, is a different strategy, one that connects our practical interests with the practical interests of the broader country–less energy on Don Imus and more on Harlem hospital. This sounds like a surrender, but it’s really a re-affirmation of strategy that goes back to Douglass. The point was never to wash white people, (an arrogant pursuit, at any rate) but to free ourselves. My interest in anti-racism is passing. My interest in black people is essential.

Via I See Invisible People…

0824: Newsflash – I was in WCPN”s building today!! On BBC air!!

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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.

When I got home last night, my wife demanded that I take her someplace expensive, so I took her to a gas station.

And then the fight started.

***
After retiring, I went to the Social Security office to apply for Social Security. The woman behind the counter asked me for my driver’s license to verify my age. I looked in my pockets and realized I had left my wallet at home. I told the woman that I was very sorry, but I would have to go home and come back later.

The woman said, “Unbutton your shirt.” So I opened my shirt revealing my curly silver hair.

She said, “That silver hair on your chest is proof enough for me” and she processed my Social Security application. Continue Reading »

Found in my electronic chapbook.

“… witness, outsider….” p. 64

From Living The Writer’s Life: by Eric Maisel.

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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.

(Snopes check)

A teacher in New York decided to honor each of her seniors in high school by telling them the difference they each made.

She called each student to the front of the class, one at a time. First she told each of them how they had made a difference to her and the class. Then she presented each of them with a blue ribbon imprinted with gold letters which read, “Who I Am Makes a Difference.”

Afterward the teacher decided to do a class project to see what kind of impact recognition would have on a community. She gave each of the students three more ribbons and instructed them to go out and spread this acknowledgment ceremony. Then they were to follow up on the results, see who honored whom and report back to the class in about a week. Continue Reading »

Found in my electronic chapbook.

“Writers are people who live free, try to make sense of the world and reject just fitting in. They are the people who are compelled to ask why – the ones who”ve embarked on a lifelong meaning-seeking odyssey. They write because it is meaningful to write…. They write in order to manifest the freedom they are determined to champion.” p. 61

From Living The Writer’s Life: by Eric Maisel.

From this…

To this…

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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.

A winter statistic: 98 percent of Americans say “oh shit” before going in the ditch on a slippery road. The other 2 percent are from West Wirginia and they say, “‘Hold my beer and watch this.”

Found in my electronic chapbook.

“For Otto Rank [Anais Nin”s psychologist?], creative people are those people who come to accept the responsibilities of freedom and will themselves to make meaning.” p. 61

From Living The Writer’s Life: by Eric Maisel.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The fact that Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the National Basketball Association will own casinos is reason for a NO vote against the casino issue on the November ballot.

I can”t understand how NBA chief David Stern can look the other way when one of his franchise owners combines basketball in Cleveland with a casino.

The NBA and Stern were marred when the FBI investigated and found that NBA referee Tim Donaghy was betting on games he officiated.

It seems to me that not only does it put the NBA in a ticklish situation but it also puts Cleveland Cavalier players in a bad position.

Would LeBron James, for example, spend some time in Gilbert”s casino after Cavs games? Would he be barred? If he were barred, why would he be barred? Or Delonte West? Continue Reading »

Before we boomers got to run everything, one motto was never trust anyone over 30. Now that most of us can’t remember what being 30 was like, the saying seems to have passed to the post-boomer generations and our first post-boomer president.

Our world view, forged by the Cold and Vietnam wars, the Civil Rights movement and to a lesser extent the Feminist and Gay Rights movements is giving way to generations with a world view that is not restricted by a nationalistic lens.

In what I think is yet another example of how the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama is changing the way the world works, James Traub’s piece in the New York Times Magazine, The New Israel Lobby details how the members of Generation We are helping to challenge the assumptions of Neo-conservative fear mongers.

Traub writes:

J Street, by contrast, is wide open to the public. Visitors must thread their way through a graphic-design studio with which the organization shares office space. There appears to be nothing worth guarding. The average age of the dozen or so staff members is about 30.

Ben-Ami speaks for, and to, this post-Holocaust generation. “They”re all intermarried,” he says. “They”re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are, he adds, baffled by the notion of “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.”

Living in a world of blogs, they”re similarly skeptical of the premise that “we”re still on too-shaky ground” to permit public disagreement. There”s a curious and striking analogy with the situation of Cuban-Americans, whose politics until quite recently were dominated by the generation that fled Castro”s revolution and were grimly determined to see his regime overthrown.

Obama has not had to pay a price for moderating the American embargo, as his predecessors would have, because Cuban-American opinion is no longer in thrall to the older generation – precisely J Street”s goal in regard to the Middle East.

Earlier today I replied to a comment by Mark Keating by suggesting that President Obama has some kind of political kung fu going that I can’t wrap my head around. Our evolving relationships with the government of Israel, the people of Israel and all those peoples and governments in the Middle East is just one example of how the rules of the past cannot apply because we’re now taking part in a different political reality, one where the positions, strategies and tactics of the past are so far removed from the present reality as to be worse than worthless.

This is more than change we can believe in, this reality is change that believes in us.