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 Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark by Carl Sagan.

This book is one of the 18 books that have changed my World.

When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. p. 207

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 Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark by Carl Sagan.

This book is one of the 18 books that have changed my World.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. when we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. p. 29

The battle lines are drawn over what I see as the soul of my country. Senators are a breed apart from the rest of politics. Their historic position has been to serve as the conscience of our nation. What happens on the Senate floor today will echo in History and I know the men and women there feel the weight they are about to lift. From one of the senators today:

“The light of our ideals shone dimly in those early dark days [of the Revolutionary War], years from an end to the conflict, years before our improbable triumph and the birth of our democracy. General Washington wasn’t that far from where the Continental Congress had met and signed the Declaration of Independence. But it’s easy to imagine how far that must have seemed. General Washington announced a decision unique in human history, sending the following order for handling prisoners:

“Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”

Therefore, George Washington, our commander-in-chief before he was our President, laid down the indelible marker of our nation’s values even as we were struggling as a nation – and his courageous act reminds us that America was born out of faith in certain basic principles. In fact, it is these principles that made and still make our country exceptional and allow us to serve as an example. We are not bound together as a nation by bloodlines. We are not bound by ancient history; our nation is a new nation. Above all, we are bound by our values.

George Washington understood that how you treat enemy combatants could reverberate around the world. We must convict and punish the guilty in a way that reinforces their guilt before the world and does not undermine our constitutional values.

Now these values – George Washington”s values, the values of our founding – are at stake. We are debating far-reaching legislation that would fundamentally alter our nation’s conduct in the world and the rights of Americans here at home. And we are debating it too hastily in a debate too steeped in electoral politics.

The Senate, under the authority of the Republican Majority and with the blessing and encouragement of the Bush-Cheney Administration, is doing a great disservice to our history, our principles, our citizens, and our soldiers. The deliberative process is being broken under the pressure of partisanship and the policy that results is a travesty.”

Got to Daily Dish to find out who delivered the speech and read Andrews assesment.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

If you do, you’re in a distinct minority. Consumer Reports ranked 54 grocery chains across America and Wal Mart came in at No. 45. The chains were rated by 24,000 shoppers on prices, cleanliness, service (with a focus on the helpfulness of employees and checkout speed) and the quality of meat, produce and fresh-baked goods. Cheap plastic crap indeed.

From Christian Right Propaganda Posters

Good news popped into my inbox this morning from Mike Taylor at the silenced WOXY: the Internet radio station is getting a third life. An Silcone Valley angel has stepped forward to not only resucitate the station, but to also expand its reach and programming with more live music. From yesterday’s Cincinnati Enquirer:

WOXY.com, the Cincinnati-based Internet radio station that signed off this month, could resume broadcasting in the next few weeks, pending the finalization of a deal with 35-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bill Nguyen.

The news comes two years after WOXY – then on 97.7 on the FM dial – stopped broadcasting. Its owners, Doug and Linda Balogh, had sold the broadcast license to the Oxford-based station. Two months later, two anonymous investors put up the money to resurrect its online broadcast.

WOXY.com stopped broadcasting Sept. 15, citing insufficient revenues from advertising and subscriber fees. Last Tuesday, Nguyen — whose most recent venture is used CD-trading Web site www. lala.com — posted a comment on the WOXY.com message boards saying he wanted to “save” the station, which he said he had just discovered.

After several days of online conversations, Nguyen flew into Cincinnati on Monday to meet with WOXY staff members and the anonymous investors. He also met with more than 60 WOXY.com listeners at the Hofbrauhaus in Newport on Monday night.

He fielded questions as people snapped photos and used a laptop to update other listeners on WOXY.com’s message boards.

Nguyen’s plan would involve investing $5 million to $10 million in WOXY.com over the next 12 months to:

Maintain its Cincinnati headquarters and give its DJs full editorial control.

Bring back its free online broadcast and improve its quality.

Open studios in San Francisco and other cities to broadcast live performances from bands.

Allow listeners to purchase music directly from independent artists they hear on WOXY.com through www.lala.com.

Allow listeners to create their own radio shows that they can share with other listeners.

Make WOXY.com more portable.

“What we want to do is give radio back to the listeners,” Nguyen said.

Woo Hoo!

[Update — 1458 — As expected, Andrew Sullivan is even more disgusted than I am:

“Congress isn’t driving the bus over a cliff — that’s what the administration asked for, but thanks to the bold rebellion of Senators McCain, Warner and Graham, [Congress] refused. Instead they simply removed the guard rail, fired the traffic cops, gave the keys to a drunk driver and closed their eyes,” — Obsidian Wings’ blog, on the torture and detention-without-charge bill.

Marty Lederman dissects the rightly blistering NYT editorial today here. They used my formulation:

“Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration. They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.”

Neither party comes out of this looking anything but cowardly, unprincipled and morally bankrupt.]

Our Congress has demonstarted in the last few days how cowardly and craven it really is. How it is willing to sell the soul of the greatest nation the world has ever known for a continuing paycheck. Every representative that voted to throw out our rule of law and the separation of powers ought to be ashamed.

From this morning’s New York Times:

Here”s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans” fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws – while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

These are the big issues:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret – there”s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable – already a contradiction in terms – and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

This is no longer the country I once swore to serve and protect with my life.

I want my country back.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

From Messenger by Mary Oliver.

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 Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Azar Nafisi”s Suggested Reading List:

1741 – Shamela by Henry Fielding.
1749 – Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.
1813 – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
1814 – Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.
1814 – Thousand and One Nights, A by Scheherazade.
1816 – Emma by Jane Austen.
1847 – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
1856 – Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
1857 – Confidence Man, The by Herman Melville.
1866 – Alice”s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
1879 – Daisy Miller by Henry James.
1881 – Washington Square by Henry James.
1884 – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
1896 – Country of the Pointed Firs, The by Sarah Orne Jewett.
1903 – Ambassadors, The by Henry James.
1911 – Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad.
1914 – In The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka.
1923 – Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo.
1925 – Great Gatsby, The by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1925 – The Trial by Franz Kafka.
1938 – Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov.
1939 – Address Unknown by Katherine Kressman Taylor.
1943 – Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank.
1955 – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
1957 – Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.
1961 – Prime of Miss Jane Brodie by Muriel Spark.
1977 – Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.
1981 – Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark.
1982 – Dean”s December, The by Saul Bellow.
1986 – Engineer of Human Souls, The by Joseph Skvorecky.
1986 – Summons to Memphis, A by Peter Taylor.
1987 – More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow.
1990 – Net of Dreams, The by Julie Salamon.
1992 – St. Maybe by Anne Tyler.
1995 – Stone Diaries, The by Carol Shields.
1996 – Emigrants, The by W.G. Sebald.
1996 – My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad.
2000 – Blind Assassin, The by Margaret Atwood.
2001 – Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler.
2003 – Baghdad Diaries by Nuha al-Radi.
2003 – Language Police, The by Diane Ravitch.
2003 – Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. pp. 355-6

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.

MERGER TO PUSH WAL MART TO NO. 3 IN JAPAN… Wal Mart has proposed a merger of it”s Seiyu supermarket chain in Japan with the competitor Daiei to create the third-largest supermarket chain with 411 stores and 2.6 trillion yen in annual sales. Only Aeon and Seven & I Holdings are larger. Keep reading…a

TARIFFS CUT BOTH WAYS… I don”t know how I feel about tariffs, specially when I consider their role in our War of Northern Aggression. In theory I”m generally against them, government too often gets it wrong. But then again there are people like Anita Dungey. Keep reading…

WAL MART BUYING AMAZAON…? The Bentonvile Behemoth denies that it has any interest in buying its Internet equivalent. Yet, there is a certain sense to the conclusion that Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed drew after hearing a speech given at Advance Micro Device”s conference yesterday. Keep reading…

DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS… Wal Mart does deserve a pat on the back for it”s $4/month generic drug plan. Anything that helps people who might have to decide between eating and buying their medications is a good thing. But let”s not queue the marching bands quite yet. Keep reading…

A PRESCRIPTION DRUG WAR…? Some of us remember the days of what were called Gas Wars: competing gas stations dropping prices, sometimes several times an hour, to out sell their competitors. Radio stations covered the wars with a sense of excitement akin to high school football. Keep reading…

IT”S ONLY TEENAGE BOYS AFTER ALL… The New York Post reported this morning on a story that my co-blogger and unpaid critic Robert Feinman first wrote about here back on 6 September. We”ve followed up on the 12th, 16th and 21st, doing our job as unpaid critics to keep our readers informed. 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 blamesocietyfilms. Keep reading…

A DOMESTICATED UNION…? We”ve made a great deal in recent months about Wal Mart recognizing unions in its stores in China. Sometimes when a story bubbles to the surface it can seem that events have transpired over night. With the dust clearing, it”s possible to see the roots of the tale. Keep reading…

ONE-WAY SHIPPING… Jonathan”s story about food miles made me think of a story I read this week having to do with those steel shipping containers everything comes to America in these days. We”ve all seen the pictures of huge ships with the metal boxes stacked high on their decks. Keep reading…

WHAT GOES UP, DOES COME DOWN… Mother nature stepped in this week in Pittsburgh and prompted a writer for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette to muse: Longtime opponents of River Pointe Plaza and a Wal-Mart Supercenter at the old Dixmont State Hospital site in Kilbuck may have won by a landslide. Keep reading…

A MARKET-BASED SOLUTION…? Here in Cleveland a lot of bloggers, including myself, cut their group social activism teeth on a cause we lost: keeping a Wal Mart super center out of Steelyard Commons. But we”re still passionate about Wally World as the responses to this local post indicate. Keep reading…

MEXICO SI…! WAL MART NO…! Wal Mart, seen as the new symbol of Yankee Imperialism, has become a target in the continuing political unrest in Mexico. Leftist supporters of defeated presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador stormed Wal Marts in Mexico City yesterday. Keep reading…

REPUBLICAN MUST TESTIFY IN WAL MART CASE… Republican Bob Corker wants to be the next senator from Tennessee. But back in 2003 his development company sold land for a proposed Wal Mart that local citizen and environmental groups claim ruined an adjacent nature preserve. Keep reading…

SHAREHOLDERS WIN CHANGE… Wal Mart”s shareholders won a change in how the Bentonvile Behemoth elects its board of directors yesterday. Previously board members could be elected by plurality. Now they must receive a majority in the annual elections to win or retain their seats. Keep reading…

WAL MART EXECS TESTIFY IN PENNSYLVANIA… When I was a teenager I worked for two discount retailers: Hart”s in Ohio and Kmart in Colorado. At both companies I got a 15 minute break for each four-hour shift and a 30 minute lunch for each six-hour or greater that I worked. And nobody complained. Keep reading…

OUCH…! THAT”S REALLY GOT TO HURT… Only about 20 percent of our population lives in rural communities. That means that 80 percent of Wal Mart”s potential customer base lives in America”s urban areas. And the further Bentonvile Behemoth attempts to penetrate the urban zone, the harder it gets. Keep reading…

SMALL CHANGE… Every day I read stories from around the country and around the world where dedicated citizens take Margaret Mead”s words to heart and stand their ground against the Bentonvile Behemoth. These are the ones I”m reading about today. Keep reading…

That’s the headline on Robert Kennedy’s second article for Rolling Stone on the subversion of American’s expectations of fair elections in their country. I confess that I feel self conscious knowing that I’m a voter living in the target county in the target state. We have less than six weeks remaining before the 7 November elections. Be very afraid.

We don’t have confidence that we will be able to vote in a timely manner, that we’ll be able to vote at all or that our vote will be counted correctly.

Kennedy writes:

The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM.

Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation’s election systems – with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America’s 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better.

Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election – and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised “sleepovers” before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering.

And in Ohio — where, as I recently reported in Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency — a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.

We will be voting in a fish bowl this time. And that is a good thing. But in 2004 everyone was looking at Florida while chaos reined in Ohio. On 7 November when we’ll have a reporter or political observer for watching over every voter’s shoulder, what will be happening in some state? It’s like living in a game of three-card Monte.

And it all keeps coming back to Ohio and Ohio politicians. Like Rep. Bob Ney.

In October 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states and counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic machines and giving vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the tightknit cabal of largely Republican vendors.

The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines.

Ney’s former chief of staff, David DiStefano, also worked as a registered lobbyist for Diebold, receiving at least $180,000 from the firm to lobby for HAVA and “other election reform issues.” Ney – who accepted campaign contributions from DiStefano and counted Diebold’s then-CEO O’Dell among his constituents – made sure that HAVA strongly favored the use of the company’s machines.

Ney also made sure that Diebold and other companies would not be required to equip their machines with printers to provide paper records that could be verified by voters. In a clever twist, HAVA effectively pressures every precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper trail – supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy.

The provision was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the National Federation of the Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold to build a new research institute, and the American Association of People with Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from voting-machine companies. The NFB maintained that a paper voting receipt would jeopardize its members’ civil rights — a position not shared by other groups that advocate for the blind.

Sinking in the sewage of the Abramoff scandal, Ney agreed on September 15th to plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges – but he has already done one last favor for his friends at Diebold. When 212 congressmen from both parties sponsored a bill to mandate a paper trail for all votes, Ney used his position as chairman to prevent the measure from even getting a hearing before his committee.

And then, of course, there is our secretary of state and the governor’s race.

The widespread glitches didn’t deter Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell — who also chaired Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio — from cutting a deal in 2005 that would have guaranteed Diebold a virtual monopoly on vote counting in the state. Local election officials alleged that the deal, which came only a few months after Blackwell bought nearly $10,000 in Diebold stock, was a violation of state rules requiring a fair and competitive bidding process.

Facing a lawsuit, Blackwell agreed to allow other companies to provide machines as well. This November, voters in forty-seven counties will cast their ballots on Diebold machines — in a pivotal election in which Blackwell is running as the Republican candidate for governor.

The cynical, tin-hat-wearing, conspiracy pondering part of me has to think that Blackwell may be the sacrificial goat in 2006. By pushing such an easy target up in a key election, Blackwell serves as the perfect distraction. His actions in 2004 and earlier this year are buffoonish and all too obvious. He’s the candidate waving his arms and shouting: watch the lady, watch the lady!

And while the Grand Oil Party might lose a governor’s seat, it could retain a Congress. And that is what counts.

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 Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe. p. 329

Note to all frat boys: remember all those jokes you and your brothers shared over beer bongs in the basement? When you’re sober and in the real world? They’re not funny. The folks at Dennis Mitsubishi need to tape that message above the sink in the washroom and maybe even chant it before opening the doors for business in the morning.

A car dealership that planned to air a radio advertisement calling for “a jihad on the automotive market” issued an apology and promised not to use the commercial.

Several stations had already rejected the spot from Dennis Mitsubishi, which boasted that sales representatives wearing burqas — head-to-toe traditional dress for Islamic women — would sell vehicles that can “comfortably seat 12 jihadists in the back.”

I kind of like the head-to-toe covering idea, it would hide all the comb overs.

Via Brewed Fresh Daily comes this little fun bit of fisking of the lies and equivocations brought to Ohioans by a tiny cabal of uber rich families who want to enrich themselves even more at the expense of the good citizens of our state. This is yet another example of the power the Internet has put in the hands of those who wish to speak out.

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 Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

“None of us can live in and survive this fantasy world-we all need to create a paradise to escape into. Besides,” he said, “there is something you can do about it.”

“There I?” I said eagerly, still dejected and dying for once to be told what to do.

“Yes, there is, and you are in fact doing it in this class, if you don”t spoil it. Do what all poets do with their philosopher-kings. You don”t need to create a parallel fantasy of the West, Give them the best of what that other world can offer: give them pure fiction — give them back their imagination!” he ended triumphantly, and looked at me as if he expected hurrahs and the clapping of hands for his wise advice. “You know it might do you some good if you practiced what you preached for a change. Take the example of one Jane Austen,” he said with what appeared to me a patronizing munificence.

“You used to preach to us all that she ignored politics, not because she didn”t know any better but because she didn”t allow her work, her imagination, to be swallowed up by the society around her. At a time when the world was engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars, she create her own independent world, a world that you, two centuries later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, teach as the fictional ideal of democracy.

Remember all that talk of yours about how the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?” he continued patiently. “You keep talking about democratic spaces, about the need for personal and creative spaces. Well, go and create them, woman! Stop nagging and focusing your energy on what the Islamic Republic does or says and start focusing on your Austen.” p. 282

Gambling is a net loss of $572,123,533 to the State of Missouri. What makes us think we’ll be any different? Thanks to she who Writes Like She Talks.

The PDF of the study on which this table is based seems to no longer be availabe on line. A summary, however, is.

[Update — 0926 — OK, so I’m starting to do some more checking and duh! this is all part of Ohio’s version of the Patriot Act. Sen. Eric Fingerhut has an excellent overview of the process and the offending legislation is SB 9, passed on 9 March. The bill was sponsored by Sen. Jeff Jacobson.]

A week ago I had expected to begin training to become a substitute for the Cuyahoga County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities. I had a pleasant interview the Friday before and took home a packet of information and forms to look over. Everything was fine until I came to the form above. (Click image to view PDF.)

I thought long and hard about signing it. Going to work for the board would have been a nice fill-in between my tutoring sessions. And the money for the two-week training alone would have put a chunk of change in my pocket.

But I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t do it because all I kept hearing in my head was the junior senator from Minnesota intoning:

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

This morning I sent the following email to the person with whom I interviewed.

Shalom [Redacted],

I had been looking forward to the training with the Cuyahoga County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities and to working with your clients, but after looking over the packet of materials you asked me to review, I must thank you for the opportunity but respectfully decline.

My reason is that I found the Ohio Department Of Public Safety”s Declaration Regarding Material Assistance/Nonassistance To A Terrorist Organization offensive.

As an 11-year veteran of our armed services who held a Secret clearance for handling nuclear weapons I am personally offended that the State of Ohio feels it can ask me to declare I have no associations with terrorist organizations on a federal government list.

I realize that you and the board have no choice in this matter and that this is an issue that can only be resolved by the state legislature which was responsible for the passage of division (A)(2)(b) of Section 2909.32 the Ohio Revised Code.

Thank you for your time and kind consideration,

B”shalom,

Jeff Hess

Section 2909.32 entered the Ohio Revised Code only this year. It became effective on 14 April. There are also related provisions under Section 2909.33-34 and sections 5502.01.1 and 5502.11.

The board did not provide me with a copy of the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion list, but I found it easily on line. The list is not nearly as long as I had expected. There are only 48 groups tagged as terrorists. And after reading the list I could state that to the best of my knowledge I have never donated money to nor assisted any of these organizations in any way.

But that’s just not the point.

My follow up is to find out which Republican legislators sponsored this and to contact my own state representative and senator to let them know that I’m offended by this and that I think it was a bad move for our state.

I encourage my readers who are of a like mind to please do the same.