From CAPT Doug Traversa, USAF: I feel very much like the guys probably did in WWII who flew on bomber missions. They were safe at the home bases, but when they set out on their mission they were vulnerable. Whether they found their target or not, whether they hit the target or not, whether they even dropped their bombs or not, they still had to make the trip…,

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.

Apple Computer reported today that it has developed computer chips that can store and play music inside women’s breasts.

This is considered to be a major breakthrough because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.

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.

“Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein. p. 141

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.

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP… The shoes are dropping fast and furious as Wal Mart flails about looking to maximize the positive press it”s gotten from the limp $4/month generic drug program. Unlike previous announcements, I heard about this one on the radio.Keep reading…

THIS ISN”T WHAT I PREDICTED… …for next Thursday, but I”m not complaining. This is the flyer that Jonathan discusses below. Keep reading…

WE CAN”T BLAME THIS ONE ON EDELMAN… I don”t own a TV so I”ve not been abused by the campaign ads this season, but thanks to YouTube I have been able to see how disgusting they are. One of the particularly nasty one involves the Senate race in Tennessee. Here”s a fisking of the ad. Keep reading…

SPECIAL ATTARCTION AT THE WALLYPLEX… Be sure to get your ticket and queue up this evening at 11 o”clock, EDT, for a very special attraction at The Writing On The Wal”s Wally Plex. How can Edelman with Wal Mart”s millions battle the viral quality of this hilarious stuff? Keep reading…

AT THE WALLY PLEX… There are sound stages on Hollywood”s back lots smaller than Bentonvile”s behemoth’s, 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 walmartwatch. Keep reading…

NELSON FIRED (OR QUITS)… Last night Wal Mart gave Terry Nelson the boot (or he quit) depending upon which story you latch onto. But it doesn”t matter, he”s out the door. Wal Mart must feel a little like Diogenes now, searching for an honest Republican political consultant to replace Nelson. Keep reading…

TREMBLING AT THE BASE… This is what happens when you dig yourself into a marketing hole. While Wal Mart is to be commended for reaching out to the The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce last August some of the people who make up its base aren”t pleased. Keep reading…

THE WOLF IN SHEEP”S CLOTHING… Sometimes you couldn”t make this stuff up if you tried. Wal Mart”s new, $500 million-per-year advertising agency Draft FCB thinks it can turn the Bentonvile Behemoth into a folksy Mom ‘n” Pop store. According to Sandra Jones at the Chicago Tribune: Keep reading…

BYE, BYE SMILEY…? Buried in a Chicago Tribune story about Wal Mart”s new advertising agency Draft FCB was a quote from Julie Roehm, Wal-Mart”s senior vice president of marketing communications and the executive running the agency review. Keep reading…

WALING OFF ACROSS AMERICA… In the same week that President George Bush signs off on the plan to build a 700-mile-long wall fence along the Mexican border, the Crookston, Minnesota, Daily Times runs this construction photo of the Wal Mart Supercenter going up there. Keep reading…

CASH IT THERE… SPEND IT THERE… That”s the way it suppossed to work, of course. No need to stop at that pesky bank and actually deposit anything into your saving”s account or maybe set a little aside for the kids” college education. But then, if you”re a Wal Mart worker… Keep reading…

FIVE THINGS TO CONSIDER… In the nearly two years I”ve been blogging about Wal Mart, one the things that has kept me going has been the way real, everyday-people get it; how they understand what a Wal Mart will mean to their community. Real people like India Johnston: Keep reading…

SAVING THE TORTOISES… Last December Jonathan brought us the story about Wal Mart”s purchase of a $22,628 permit to pave over the burrows of five endangered gopher tortoises in North Palm Beasch County, Florida. The news out of Florida this morning is good. Keep reading…

WAL MART SOURING WALL STREET… Surfing through the Wal Mart stories I sense a pattern, and it”s one that the Bentonvile Behemoth isn”t going to like. Following closely on the heels of the company”s very disappointing October sales figures everyone is talking about how Wall Street is reacting: Keep reading…

PATIENCE HELL…! WE WANT OUR MONEY NOW…! After its disappointing sales figures put a frown on Wall Street, Wal Mart isn”t waiting for the traditional retail bustout the day after Thanksgiving. Screw Black Friday, Wally World wants its money now. I got the ad above yesterday. And it was just a warning shot. 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. First up is Lyndon LaRouche and the Waltons. Scoop, lever, heave, scoop, lever…

Yesterday President George Bush ordered American military forces in Iraq to not attempt to rescue on their own. Instead he ordered them to pull back to let the terrorists do what they would with the American soldier. The American military tradition is that we do not leave behind our dead. How much more so ought our president allow them to rescue the living?

We expect our men and women in uniform to willingly sacrafice their lives for the greater good of their families, their friends and their Constitution. They deserve better than this in return.

American soldiers rolled up their barbed-wire barricades and lifted a near siege of the largest Shiite Muslim enclave in Baghdad on Tuesday, heeding the orders of a Shiite-led Iraqi government whose assertion of sovereignty had Shiites celebrating in the streets.

The order by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to lift the week-old blockade of Sadr City was one of the most overt expressions of self-determination by Iraqi leaders in the 3 1/2 -year-old U.S. occupation. It followed two weeks of increasingly pointed exchanges between Iraqi and U.S. officials, as well as a video conference between Maliki and President Bush on Saturday.

Maliki’s decision exposed the growing divergence between the U.S. and Iraqi administrations on some of the most critical issues facing the country, especially the burgeoning strength of Shiite militias. The militias are allied with the Shiite religious parties that form Maliki’s coalition government, and they are accused by Sunni Arab Iraqis and by Americans of kidnapping and killing countless Sunnis in the soaring violence between Iraq’s Shiite majority and Sunni minority.

This was a shameful and dispicable act. Iraq has descended into chaos and the President of the United States knows it.

It is so shameful that Conservative Andrew Sullivan writes:

[W]e have a president prepared to lie through his teeth about the central issue of our time. He is dishonoring his office and shirking his responsibility. In peacetime, this is disgrace enough. In wartime, it is unforgivable.

From CAPT Matt Smenos: Shimmering monoliths of glass and steel towering over the white sands of Qatar reflect in the lenses of my sunglasses as I climb out of tour bus number three. I gaze up at the skyscrapers, so mysterious and conspicuous in the middle of the great desert nation, and I let out a little “Wow.” I have seen cities; I was born in one. But…

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.

We hear this simplicity in the chanting during liturgy. Chants are monochromatic and follow the deep drone of a wooden drum. They tend to ground us, rather than lift us to higher states of consciousness, the way that Gregorian chants might do. The chanting has the sound of a heart beat or the pounding of the surf. p. 135

From SGT “Roy Batty”: I am sitting on my camp chair in the corner of my room, the laptop on my bunk, Ipod inserted deep within my ears. Hedley Moose is asleep next to me, exhausted after another night of avoiding the restless bulk of a snoring ex-Marine. The bed is cluttered with a 1:50,000 scale tactical map of Baghdad, my black cordura wallet, everpresent Camels…,

From The Miami Herald: Debra A. Reed voted… on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. …Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

[Update — 1236 — And it’s not just Florida. In Texas:

KFDM continues to get complaints from Jefferson County voters who say the electronic voting machines are not registering their votes correctly.

Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket.

Some of those voters including Lamar University professor, Dr. Bruce Drury, believe the problem is a programming error.

Saturday, KFDM spoke to another voter who says it’s not just happening with straight ticket voting, he says it’s happening on individual races as well, Jerry Stopher told us when he voted for a Democrat, the Republican’s name was highlighted.

Does anyone have reports of this going the other way, i.e. people voting straight Republican tickets and getting a straight Democratic ticket?

Why does anyone think this will not happen in Ohio?

Hat tip: I See Invisible People.]

We believed in our unions like some
trust in their priests. We believed
in Friday paychecks sure as
winter’s ice curb-to-curb

where older boys could play
hockey dodging-wooden
pucks, sticks cracking wood
on wood. A man came home

with a new car and other men
would collect around it like ants
in sugar. Women clumped for showers-
wedding and baby-wakes, funerals

care for the man brought home
with a hole ripped in him, children
coughing. We all coughed in Detroit.
We woke at dawn to my father’s hack.

That world is gone as a tableau
of wagon trains. Expressways carved
neighborhoods to shreds. Rich men
moved jobs south, then overseas.

Only the old anger lives there
bubbling up like chemicals dumped
seething now into the water
building now into the bones.

From Motown, Arsenal of Democracy by Marge Piercy.

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.

The answer to a koan is not a parcel of information. Rather, it”s one”s own intimate and direct experience of the universe and its infinite facets. In frustrating the intellect, koans dismantle the customary way of solving problems and open up new dimensions of human consciousness. p. 124

I just got the same robo call that Jill received this evening and I wish I had the tape recorder hooked up. If anyone out there is taping these suckers please let me know because I want to broadcast Jimmy Dimora lying through his teeth to every person I can find. Dimora flat out tells anyone who doesn’t slam the phone down in disgust:

$850 million dollars in college tuition assistance for Ohio graduate students.

Here’s the relevent section (12B) of the document:

For the first twelve such high school graduation classes, uniform tuition grants, in an amount not to exceed the average undergraduate tuition charged by Ohio public universities, shall be awarded to the top five percent of students at each accredited public and non-public high school who attend any public or independent not-for-profit institution of higher education authorized by the Ohio Board of Regents and that has its principal office within this state. Such tuition grants shall be based solely on academic merit.

Read the whole Constitutional Amendment here. Search it carefully. I’ll buy a Geraci’s pizza for anyone who can show me where any student, other than a student who jumps through all the hoops and has a grade point average that puts them in the top 5 percent of their class will benefit from this disgraceful financial rape of Ohio’s citizens.

From CH (CPT) Brad P. Lewis: I can’t imagine that there is anyone over here that does not want to go home. It’s very fulfilling to be a part of something so big and to play a role in the freeing of an entire nation. But it’s like Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home.” They treat us pretty well here, but there are some things that just can’t be replaced. As I sit down for…

Karl Rove fully expects to be popping champaign corks and slapping on backs in the early morning hours of Wednesday, 8 November. In the Rovian Universe Democrats will be wailing and gnashing their teeth because once again George Bush’s Brain will have masterminded a stunning Republican victory. In Rove’s America that’s the way things work.

From The Los Angeles Times:

During a whirlwind five-hour trip to bolster an endangered GOP congressman’s reelection prospects, White House political guru Karl Rove last week delivered a fiery speech to 500 party activists, then shook every available hand and posed for snapshots like a rock star. He toured suburbs recently trashed by a snowstorm. He also found time to huddle with local strategists.

But the most significant element of Rove’s effort to help four-term Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds keep his job may have occurred behind closed doors, when the White House strategist met with a federal disaster relief official contemplating how to respond to the storm. Four days later, Reynolds announced that President Bush would authorize millions of dollars in federal disaster aid for the area.

And from The Washington Post:

By many calculations, Democrats are ready to make big gains in the midterm elections, enough to take over the House and possibly the Senate. But White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten says there is one reason he is feeling upbeat amid so much Republican gloom.

“I believe Karl Rove,” Bolten said in an interview in his West Wing office Friday. “Karl Rove, somewhere inside that massive brain of his, has figured out the political landscape more clearly than the entire collection of conventional-wisdom pundits and pollsters in the entire city of Washington.”

Don’t think it can happen? I’ve got some slot machines to sell you.

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.

… working with barriers can”t be rushed. We have to trust our feelings, and the natural timing of the body, even as we work toward that release through engaging the creative process…
Art koans are a unique way of addressing our barriers, making them both visible and workable through the creative process. In using koans, our intuitive aspect of consciousness must be engaged in order to reach any depth of insight into the problem we are facing. p. 124

From CAPT Lee Kelley: Yesterday was a good day. I had a lot of work to do, the minutes sped past me unnoticed, and I was able to do something to strengthen both mind and body, which means I did some writing and hit the gym when I went off shift. No one in my unit was hurt or killed yesterday, no mortars or rockets hit the FOB, and I fell asleep with a satisfying sense…

Have you checked to see if Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, or his dark lord Karl Rove, has managed to successfully challenge your right to vote on Tuesday, 7 November? If you haven’t — I did, three times — it’s very important that you do. Voters are discovering that their right to vote has been stolen. Subodh Chandra is in the fight.

Dear folks concerned about potential Election Day chaos:

The lawyers managing the lawsuit challenging the Ohio Voter ID law — Subodh Chandra, Caroline Gentry and Ritchey Hollenbaugh — are trying to quickly gather even more evidence that will help with the suit. We need this information as soon as possible. If you think you might have first-hand information about the different ways this law is being interpreted and applied across Ohio, we ask you to send an email to: VotingProblems AT gmail DOT com . The information to be included in your email is set out below.

We are particularly looking for individuals who fit into any of the following categories:

1) On or after October 3, when you went to your local Board of Elections to vote:

a) You were not allowed to vote until you showed some sort of ID; or

b) You were permitted to vote after showing a military ID; or

c) Even if you were ultimately allowed to vote, you were told that there was some kind of problem with an ID you wanted to use to vote. This might include an attempt to use a utility bill, paycheck, bank statement, government check, other government document, photo ID, or any other kind of identifying document you used or hoped to use.

2) You sent in an absentee ballot through the mail and:

a) On the front of the envelope containing your ballot you checked the box in front of “My Ohio Drivers License number is:” and then filled in the blank with the number above your photo in the upper right hand corner of your license; or

b) You enclosed with your ballot some kind of identifying document rather than providing a Drivers License Number or Social Security Number on the front of the envelope containing your ballot.

3) You are planning to vote at your polling place on November 7, but you don’t have any of the following forms of identification with your name and address: a drivers license, photo ID, military ID, utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document.

4) Your absentee ballot application was returned to you by your Board of Elections.

If you fit any of the above categories, or you experienced any other problem concerning your effort to cast an early vote associated with the November 7 Ohio election, we’d like to hear from you. Please send an email to VotingProblems AT gmail DOT com. In that email, please tell us:

a) Your name;

b) A phone number where we can call you to talk about the problem you had (or if you’d prefer that we communicate with you by email, we’ll try to work that way); and

c) Which of the categories above you fit in and/or a little bit of information about the problem you had.

We may not be able to get back to everyone who sends us an email, but we thank you, in advance, for your help.