Found in my electronic chapbook.

…only a few of the most notable poets manage to escape the blocking influence of their literary parents, and they do so by misreading the predecessor”s work in a way that clears the imaginative space for their own work. In a crude sense, the successful poet invents a fault in the predecessor in the same way an adolescent invents reasons to criticize their parents as they try to become less dependent upon them. [Wow! JH] p. 105

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

In the midst of what may be the worst national disaster Myanmar have ever suffered, the military dictators went forward with their bogus vote on their sham constitution, and in a Stalinesque move rivaling the worst election frauds in history, declared that, in a landslide Republicans could only dream of, voters delivered a resounding yes vote.

From the Associated Press:

Myanmar announced Thursday that a constitution won massive support in a referendum — a claim slammed by a leading rights group as an insult to the country’s people.

The document, which critics say will cement nearly four decades of military rule, was approved by 92.4 percent of the 22 million eligible voters last Saturday, said Aung Toe, head of the Referendum Holding Committee on state radio. He put voter turnout at more than 99 percent.

The vote has also come under fire for being held while the country responds to a massive cyclone that has killed tens of thousands of people.

“This is really insulting to the people of Burma,” said David Mathewson, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch in Bangkok, Thailand, using an alternative name for Myanmar.

“There is simply no way that 92 percent … would have voted ‘yes’ on a document that they know very little about and that most have never read,” said Mathewson. Continue Reading »

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The Wrong Approach.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman, Peter Sayles and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

WHY THE RIGHT WRONG LOVES WAL-MART… I wrote earlier about the big whoop of Wal-Mart”s latest permutation of its prescription drug plan, but this morning I spent some time on Right Wrong Wing News reading blogger John Hawkins” take on the plan and the 150 comments his post has attracted. Keep reading…

WOULD HILLARY SHOP AT WAL-MART…? Peter Keating wrote: Giving some badly needed relief to truckers, farmers, and vacationers fit right in with the hash-slinger-in-a-Wal Mart-pantsuit image Hillary honed in Ohio, perfected in Pennsylvania, and was deploying all over Indiana. Keep reading…

WAL-MART IS AN APPLIANCE STORE…? We will always beat the appliance stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or Sears on all consumer electronic prices. Keep reading…

WAL-MART NIXED BY OLYMPIC COMMITTEE…? Is it possible that Wal-Mart is to Chicago as Tibet is to China? In the eyes of the International Olympic Committee, which is considering Chicago for the 2016 Summer Olympics, that”s the case that Sandra M. Jones attempts to make. Keep reading…

WHY DID A BANK FAIL IN BENTONVILLE…? A story about a bank failing in Bentonville, Arkansas, really has me scratching my head this morning. It could be nothing, pure coincidence, but I have to scratch my head a bit in light of a post from a clearly left-leaning blog that ties: Keep reading…

HOW MUCH CAN A COUPON REALLY BE WORTH…? I”m not a coupon clipper. I”ve tried in the past, but I very rarely ever see a coupon for something I”d actually buy, so the whole clipping obsession doesn”t work for me. But for some people, coupons are a religion and they”ll go to great lengths to redeem them. Keep reading…

THE NEWS IS GOOD…! NO IT”S BAD…! NO IT”S…! There”s a reason that politicians don”t pay a lot of attention to economists; they”re a lot like expert witnesses in civil suits, you can shop around and find one who will swear that your point of view is the right one supported by tons of empirical evidence. Keep reading…

0824 Scurrying signals & Canton Rep”s thoughtful editorial on embattled Ohio AG Marc Dann

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.

Tech support: What kind of computer do you have?
Female customer: A white one…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

…the solution is not to choose to stop cleaning and live in squalor – that would be misery. The solution is never to see the squalor because you are so wrapped up in your project. p. 103

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

Events in Myanmar following the devastation of Cyclone Nargis illustrate an major problem with foreign aid of all kinds: when the government is corrupt, there are no guarantees that aid will reach the people it is intended to help. In fact there is almost a certainty that the aid will not and that instead it will be used to benefit those in power and their minions.

From The Associated Press:

The United Nations said Tuesday that only a tiny portion of international aid needed for Myanmar’s cyclone victims is making it into the country, amid reports that the military regime is hoarding good-quality foreign aid for itself and doling out rotten food.

The country’s isolated military regime has agreed to accept relief shipments from the U.N. and foreign countries, but has largely refused entry to aidworkers who might distribute the aid. Continue Reading »

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The 15-Minute Tip: Err on the Side of More Air.

1249 Found in my 2002 journal
1218 You know you”re old when…
1201 Articles of impeachment w/9 counts filed against Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann

A Daily Dish reader wrote:

Not only is it 25 miles round trip just for me to go to the grocery store, hardware store–any store–but I drive for a living, 150,000 miles a year. With the economy in the dumps, freight has tanked. Because there are too many trucks and not enough freight, many freight rates are flat or lower–and have been since Christmas. Meanwhile, diesel has skyrocketed. It’s hard to tread water…most of the time I feel like I’m sinking. I lose being out on the road working but I cannot afford to stay home either.

So, while the wealthy can afford the increases in fuel and food, and city people at the very least have alternative ways to get around, those of us in the country (and those of us who haul the stuff that everyone buys) are having a very, very hard time. I’d love ‘research into alternatives’; I’d love alternatives period. But while I wait for those–and oil continues to rise–I’ll likely lose my truck and my home of twenty years.

As gas hits $3.959 a gallon in Cleveland.

I have long argued that the America I live in is a classist society, not a racist one. The fact that a disproportionate number or our lower class is made up of minorities, predominantly African American, masks this reality. Richard D. Kahlenberg suggests that Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama embrace this concept in suggesting a class-based, rather than race-based form of affirmative action.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Affirmative action is a highly charged issue, which most politicians stay away from. But nothing could carry more potent symbolic value with Reagan Democrats than for Obama to end the Democratic Party”s 40 years of support for racial preferences and to argue, instead, for preferences – in college admissions and elsewhere – based on economic status.

Obama needs to do something dramatic. Right now, while people inside and outside the Obama campaign are making the RFK comparison, working-class whites aren”t buying it. The results in Tuesday”s Indiana primary are particularly poignant. Obama won handily among black Hoosiers, but lost the non-college educated white vote to Hillary Clinton by 66-34 percent.

Forty years earlier, by contrast, Kennedy astonished observers by forging a coalition of blacks and working class whites, the likes of which we have rarely seen since then.

On May 6, 1968, the day before the Indiana primary, Kennedy participated in an iconic motorcade through industrial Lake County, with black mayor Richard Hatcher sitting on one side of Kennedy and boxer Tony Zale, the native son hero of Gary”s Slavic steelworkers on the other.

On primary election day, running against Eugene McCarthy and a stand in for Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy swept the black vote but also white working-class wards which four years earlier had supported Alabama Governor George Wallace”s presidential bid. Author Robert Coles told Kennedy, “There is something going on here that has to do with real class politics.”

There was, now maybe, forty years later, we can do something about it.

With the exception of occasional in-line notes from my original reading, I don’t comment on my chapbook series. But re-reading the quote from this morning caused me to have a Wow! moment. The passage, taken from The Midnight Disease by Alice W. Flaherty, offers an insight into America’s greatest writer: Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was blocked for eight years in the writing of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because he had Huck and Jim going up the Ohio River. When he sent them down the Mississippi, the block disappeared.

Up river, down river, what was the difference? Up river was the enlightened North. The North that had fought and won a bloody civil war. Down river was the South. A South still dominated by Jim Crow laws keeping black men and women in economic and political bondage.

It was a choice between avoiding or facing what Twain knew was the heart of his story: racism in America.

It took eight years for Twain to get up the courage to take Huck and Nigger Jim into the darkness.

Reading the note this morning made me wonder what I’m avoiding in my own writing? What darkness have I turned away from? What river do I need to go down?

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.

Polish Digital Clock

I signed on to a letter this week concerning the wrong-wing’s attempts to paint Senator Barack Obama as, if not anti-semitic, at least anti-Israel. Marc Ambinder illustrates in The Atlantic just how they’ll flat out, bald-faced lie, to win.

Here’s how an interview between Jeffrey Goldberg and Obama went:

Goldberg: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America”s reputation overseas?

Obama: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.

And here’s how the wrong-wing responded:

From the Republican Jewish Coalition: “Once again, Senator Obama demonstrates his questionable grasp of America’s foreign policy. Senator Obama manages to excuse the inexcusable actions of anti-American militant jihadists by putting the blame for their actions on America’s foreign policy. America stands with Israel because it is one of our strongest allies and the only democracy in the Middle East. Senator Obama naively believes that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will solve the global scourge of radical Islamic extremism. Yet Senator Obama never says how he will reign in Hamas’ daily onslaught on Israel or Iran’s scurrilous condemnations of Israel. Is it any wonder Hamas has endorsed him for president?”

Truth has no role in wrong-wing politics.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Mark Twain was blocked for eight years in the writing of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because he had Huck and Jim going up the Ohio River. When he sent them down the Mississippi, the block disappeared. p. 89

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

The death toll from Cyclone Nargis continues its climb, but I expect that it will me months, if ever, before anyone (with the possible exception of the generals who aren’t likely to make the results public) knows the full cost of the storm. The generals continue to low-ball the figure.

From the Associated Press:

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Myanmar’s state television says the death toll in this month’s cyclone has gone up to 31,938.

It said Monday that the number of missing now stands at 29,770. The death toll is 3,480 more than the number reported on Sunday.

The United Nations said Monday that the actual death toll could be between 62,000 and 100,000.

The United States delivered its first relief supplies to Myanmar on Monday.

Foreign aid workers have so far been barred from entering the country, and relief supplies are piling up in Yangon and outside Myanmar. Continue Reading »

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The World’s First Coffee Pot.