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 and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

CHARGING…! CLEAR…! THUNK…! CHARGING…!If Wal Mart were a good corporate actor, it”s bid to get a banking license would probably have been a simple matter. But it isn”t and it hasn”t been. And now, after 15-months, things look grim and it appears that the Bentonvile Behemoth has no allies in sight. Keep reading…

BANKING ON CANADA…? Earlier I wrote about how Wal Mart”s quest for a banking license was all but dead on the table (I still don”t give up on the Frankenstein option, with the Bentonvile behemoth, you never know) but then I read this post from a blogging banker: Keep reading…

BLIZZARD…? MUSH IT… Wally World”s draconian employee attendance policy is attracting fire from so many angles that it”s hard to tell which way to duck. This morning the Washington Post ledes with how snow storms are handled. Then there”s the policy on absence due to death in the family: Keep reading…

MAYBE THIS IS WHY SALES ARE DOWN…? After five years of fear mongering and the waving of boogeymen men in the faces of people around the world, it”s only natural that people start believing the campfire tales and it starts to hurt business. Reader Jennifer Emick passed along this little gem from Spiegel: Keep reading…

LOW BALL AND HOPE TO BEAT THE WORST…? Wal Mart”s October sales figures were in the toilet and Wall Street was not pleased. Now, faced with what could be its worst sales month in six years, the Bentonvile Behemoth is getting out in front of the free fall. Keep reading…

AT THE WALLY PLEX… There are sound stages on Hollywood”s back lots smaller than Bentonvile”s behemoths, so it”s no surprise that budding video talent has been sneaking cameras in at odd hours. And now for the midnight show at the Wally Plex featuring Advancegroup. Keep reading…

IF THEY VOTE THIS WAY ON TUESDAY… IF THEY VOTE THIS WAY ON TUESDAY…Wal Mart”s voter education plan may have taken a twist that it never intended. While the Bentonvile behemoth thought it would educate it”s 1.4 million associates in the United States, it now looks like its shopper base is getting the real education. Keep reading…

BANKING ON CANADA… PARTIE DEUX… Could the Bentonvile Behemoth be planning an end run around banking regulations blocking its plans in the United States by getting clearance for owning a bank in Canada? Maybe. the Banking blogger at Bankwatch has this to say: Keep reading…

LET”S RAKE SOME MUCK…! Today is the birthday of one of America”s first muckraking jouranlists, Ida Tarbell. Her book The History of The Standard Oil Company helped to bring down John D. Rockefeller”s Stanard Oil. Now there”s a tradition to aspire to. From The Writer”s Almanac: Keep reading…

THAT”S REALLY HARSH… In the mid “90s I was involved with several companies in the Direct Mail Marketing industry: those who were spammers before there was spam; generators of junk mail with degrees. It wasn”t a pleasant experience. And now they”ve gotten really, really big. Keep reading…

BOYCOTT FUNGUS SPREADING… I have to wonder how long it will before corporate boards begin to demand Karl Rove”s head on a pike. Rove has been the mastermind behind the homophobic surge in the Republican party that has brought down two of its own: Mark Foley and Ted Haggard. Keep reading…

2 DOWN… 1,299,998 TO GO… A second Wal Mart employee has quit. NjournalistsStandardot wansbecause of unfair working conditions. Not because of always low wages. Not even because of being forced to work through breaks and lunches. No. Karin Laginess quite because the company made a smart business decision. Keep reading…

WHY SHOPPERS LOVE WAL MART… The consumer revolution is being blogged and one of the walls up against which retailers are being placed is My 3 Cents. Stop in and type a search for Wal-Mart and watch the search engine whir. I got 309 hits, like this one: Keep reading…

WHY SHOPPERS LOVE WAL MART… The consumer revolution is being blogged and one of the walls up against which retailers are being placed is My 3 Cents. Stop in and type a search for Wal-Mart and watch the search engine whir. I got 309 hits, unlike this one: Keep reading…

Because I’m devoting most of my time in November to the Novel In A Month Challenge, I’ve set up 30 items from my blogpile — items I once thought interesting but never blogged about — for everyone to discuss. Next up is Tweaking Windows XP. Scoop, lever, heave, scoop, lever…

[Update — 2000 — False alarm, I got left in the Green Room. Now I know how Harvey Pekar felt with Dave Letterman.]

There’s a good chance I’m going to be on Open Source this evening as part of a post-election story. It seems they liked my Morning In America post and called me this afternoon to talk about my feelings on the election. The funniest part was when the interviewer asked me for words of wisdom. It’s a good thing I wasn’t drinking coffee at the time.

WCPN doesn’t carry it but the show is live streamed. The show is also avaiable as a live stream or as an archived feed from a long list of stations.

From 1ST LT Will Mangham: I’m at the bookstore, and the woman at the table to my left has just finished rambling on to some poor guy about trying to find a 2006 Infiniti something or other because “it’s the only one with a navigation system that works in Hawaii.” And she wants the rear-facing camera when she backs up, because she hates the beeping, and you can…

November is a light-blogging month for me as I take part in the National Novel Writing Month and pound out 50,000 words in 30 days. During this time I’m relying on a cache of emails from my dad to help fill in the space so that Have Coffee Will Write doesn’t go dark. I’ll be back full-time on Friday, 1 December. B’shalom, Y’all.

All eyes were on the radiant bride as her father escorted her down the aisle. They reached the altar and the waiting groom; the bride kissed her father and placed something in his hand. The guests in the front pews responded with ripples of laughter. Even the priest smiled broadly. As her father gave her away in marriage, the bride gave him back his credit card.

Sunrise is near and my job as a citizen of these United States has become a hell of a lot tougher than it was at dusk. It’s been an easy six years. I didn’t have to pay too much attention to what politicians were doing; by definition it was bad. That is the luxury of the opposition. Starting this morning I am again responsible for what they do in my name.

I get the representatives I voted for; even if I didn’t.

The least I must demand is that they do no more damage. But staunching the bleeding cannot be enough. After six years of governmental rapine there is much to heal.

I cannot think of the specifics this morning; they’re too large: Iraq, budget deficits, civil rights, job loses, education, international relations, global warming…

At this moment I want to draw in a cleansing breath, savor my coffee and relish the return of the light.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori.

Practice, whether Zen or art, is a way of making the invisible visible. We are all complete, lacking absolutely nothing. This was the first teaching of the Buddha. It remains the first teaching of Zen. Some may realize the truth of this perfection, some may not, but nevertheless, we are all perfect. Practice is a way of making that fact visible. p. 231

Great work Ohio 2006

Because I’m devoting most of my time in November to the Novel In A Month Challenge, I’ve set up 30 items from my blogpile — items I once thought interesting but never blogged about — for everyone to discuss. Next up is Mind mapping. Scoop, lever, heave, scoop, lever…

From CAPT Matt Smenos: In general, I am a fan of the concept of the National Guard. So far, the majority of my experiences with the citizen-soldiery of our great nation have reinforced my belief in a nation of volunteers, a society of step-up and serve, as a model of success and a lesson to others. Yet there are inherent disconnects that will develop among the…

Thank you, Molly
I did this morning. In Cleveland Heights: Ward 4, Precinct M, where two of the four voting machines were down, one because it wouldn’t power up and the other because the seal on the memory card had been tampered with. The other eight machines for the other two precincts voting at Boulevard School were all working fine.

I triple checked my ballot and everything recorded fine, as near as I could tell. Here’s how I voted:

I voted third-party in the Governor’s Race. I decided months ago that Ted Strickland was no more trustworthy than his opponent.

I did not cast a vote for Senator because there was no third-party on the ballot. Again, I had decided months ago that Sherrod Brown was no more trustworthy than his opponent.

I did not vote for Stephanie Tubbs Jones nor Jimmy Dimora because of their support for Issue 3. In my book any politician who spoke in favor of Issue 3 deserves to be run out of town on a rail. It is the worst kind of pandering and sell-out that this state has seen in a very long time.

In other races where the Democrat had not endorsed Issue 3, I voted for the Democrat. If the candidate had endorsed Issue 3, I voted for the Republican.

In the judicial races I primarily used the Judge For Yourself website. If a judge was endorsed on this site, I voted for whomever was running against them. I did not have an issue with the site per se, but I have trust issues with the people behind it.

On the issues I voted:

No on Issue 1;

Yes on Issue 2;

No on Issue 3;

No on Issue 4;

Yes on Issue 5;

Yes on Issue 18; and

Yes on Issue 19.

The only one I agonized over was Issue 5. I went back and forth several times, but finally decided that, for me, it was a workplace issue. People in bars and restaurants often don’t have a lot of choice about where they work. We wouldn’t force someone to work in a chemical factory where they would be exposed to dangerous chemicals. Why should we allow employers to expose their workers to dangerous second-hand smoke?

I’ll be at the Town Fryer this evening with a lot of other bloggers, prepared to cry in my beer or pop a champagne cork.

November is a light-blogging month for me as I take part in the National Novel Writing Month and pound out 50,000 words in 30 days. During this time I’m relying on a cache of emails from my dad to help fill in the space so that Have Coffee Will Write doesn’t go dark. I’ll be back full-time on Friday, 1 December. B’shalom, Y’all.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori.

Life is nothing more than searching for and acting out the myriad possibilities of meaning with which the self and the world are pregnant.” Dogen. p. 226

From Wiley Miller

Because I’m devoting most of my time in November to the Novel In A Month Challenge, I’ve set up 30 items from my blogpile — items I once thought interesting but never blogged about — for everyone to discuss. Next up is 20-minute winter workout. Scoop, lever, heave, scoop, lever…

[Update — 1331 — MetaFilter has a good round up: Foley was a Republican, but those Dems are TELEMARKETERS!]

Karl Rove and the National Republican Congressional Committee are hearing the whoosh and the law be damned in their fanatical quest to hold onto power and their corporate graft. The latest tactic is harrassing robocalls that are masked to appear to be coming from Democratic candidates. This is no longer politics by anyone’s definition.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is all over it:

GOP dinged for illegal calls in NH.

A bit more info on the robocall scam coming out of New York state.

A columnist in Philly discusses the GOP’s scam robocalls.

More and more reports coming in of irate voters calling various House Democratic campaigns complaining about the repeat-call-back robocalls.

It now appears that isolated reports of the NRCC’s robocall tactics began emerging a week or so ago, but the reports were sporadic, and it didn’t become apparent that the repeat phone calls were part of a coordinated national campaign until over the weekend.

You can hear one of the NRCC robocalls here, from the race in the New York 19th Congressional District.

Here’s a list of the twenty districts those NRCC robo calls have been hitting.

From CAPT Lee Kelley: There is a saying in the Army about not sticking your nose in other soldiers’ professional business. It’s called “staying in your lane.” But there are times as a leader when you must step in. For example, if I see a soldier committing an unsafe act, it doesn’t matter what his job is or even if he is in my unit. As an officer, I am obligated to point…

November is a light-blogging month for me as I take part in the National Novel Writing Month and pound out 50,000 words in 30 days. During this time I’m relying on a cache of emails from my dad to help fill in the space so that Have Coffee Will Write doesn’t go dark. I’ll be back full-time on Friday, 1 December. B’shalom, Y’all.

The reason congressmen try so hard to get reelected is that they would hate to have to make a living under the laws they’ve passed.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori.

To write haiku, to become this intimate with the moment, the poet must completely disengage, if only for a moment, all of her interpretive facilities. The mind must become one with the world, a detail of the world – the splash, a peach blossom, a neon sign flashing along the highway, the sound of a mountain stream.

The poet”s craft has to slip through the intellectual filters and instinctively record the image that has been perceived. As Basho said, “In writing, do not let a hair”s breadth separate you from the subject. Speak your mind directly; go to it without wandering thought.” For an instant, the artist opens to the ineffable truth of Zen. With the self out of the way, the world advances a step.

Basho”s haiku expresses the ideal that haiku poets have since striven to attain: to share with the audience, through the medium of the written or spoken word, the essential nature of the subject at hand. In other words, to close the gap between [sic] the artist, the subject and the audience perceiving the piece of art. p. 219