Well, not really, she said it was OK. I preach that change never occurs until an individual gets mad and spreads their rage to others. On the bulletin board on my front door I have the Margaret Mead quote: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

One of the people I’ve preached this to has been the blogger we know as Colette. Her real name is Colleen Liotta and according to this morning’s News Herald, she’s entered the ranks of activism.

Colleen Liotta said she’d call the current “political temperature” in the U.S. “lukewarm.”

“I’M NOT TRYING TO GET YOU TO STOP BUYING GAS!,” shouted Liotta, who said she lives up the street from the rally and walked there.

Remember, this was the way Elizabeth Cady Stanton got started.

My Soundtrack: Further Up On The Road by Johnny Cash on WOXY.

I am so getting tired of this debate. I would hope that if I were working full time as an editor or reporter that I would still feel this way, but I recognize that I might not. But this is starting to feel like the Flat Earth Society refusing to give up the fight because any feckin’ fool can see that the Earth is flat damn it.

From Jeff Jarvis on Helen Thomas at Media Giraffe:

I am going to ask as a convener of the first panel, with Vin Crosbie, that we take a pledge: This is not about bloggers v. journalists, damnit. It”s not about preserving the past, complaints, seeing the people as competition, working apart, us v. them.

Neither of us is the enemy.

My Soundtrack: Pull Shapes by The Pipettes on WOXY.

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 Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

The Polish Jews waiting for the Holocaust at the end of Isaac Bashevis Singer”s great novel The Family Moskat tell each other sadly that perhaps death is the only Messiah they can hope for. p. 134

My Soundtrack: Something Wrong by The Everyothers on WOXY.

[Update — 1746, 3 July — Andrew Sullivan compares the threat of Global Warming to President George Bush’s threat of Weapons Of Mass Destruction and writes: In both cases, however, the evidence is complicated and hard to pin down with absolute certainty. Here’s the problem with statements like that. No one can say with absolute certainty that the Sun will rise tomorrow. It could go nova any minute. The odds against that are astronomical (no pun intended) but they are not infinite.

That Vice President Dick Cheney relied on some 1 percent rule (if there is a 1 percent chance that the Iraqis have weapons of mass destruction then we must act as if they do have them) is very different from the solid scientific consensus that global warming is real and that the trends are clear on a global basis. There is no debate about what is happening. 99 percent sure is not absolute, but if somebody tells me that there is a 99 percent (hell 50 percent) chance I’ll be struck by lightning if I stand in a certain spot, I’m going to move.]

[Update — 1852, 29 June — Andrew Sullivan notes that CO2 emissions are down in the United States because rising gas prices are causing Americans to drive less. Andrew supports a $1/gallon gas tax. I think it’s a good idea with one provision: that we figure out how to allow those in say the bottom third of the economy to still get to their jobs and make a living.]

I’ve been talking about global warming for something like 36 years. It’s never been any big secret. The first clue was the break in the cycle of ice ages. We’re long, about 15,000 years, overdue for one. But when we moved from staving off an ice age to watching the ice caps melt, things got, well, hot.

I would defy anyone who thinks global warming is a liberal plot to produce a single peer-reviewed, scientific paper not sponsored by the petrochemical industry or its associates as supportive evidence.

Those of us old enough to remember when cigarettes were advertised on television also remember all the years that the tobacco industry trotted out its sock puppet scientists to refute the looming mountain of evidence that tobacco was killing Americans at an alarming rate.

Real scientists, men and women who work without the whip of corporate masters urging them on, agree.

First, the Earth is getting hotter;

Second, the temperature rise is a manmade catastrophe-in-the-making caused by the burning of fossil fuels; and

Third Al Gore gets it right in An Inconvenient Truth.

More than 1,000 scientists around the World know that there is no controversy; that the debate is all a straw man built by the lackeys and hacks.

We can all get angry at the politicians and the oil companies. We can all drive less and drive smaller cars. We can all turn the air conditioning off in the summer and wear sweaters in the winter. But what can we really do to get ourselves off the lube and the grid?

Well, here’s a good place to start.

My Soundtrack: Skip The Foreplay by Oh No! Oh My! on WOXY.

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 Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

The people who can drink moderately don”t have this problem, but they are probably not seekers of ecstasy, either. People who most crave ecstasy are probably least capable of moderation. p. 134

My Soundtrack: Astronomer by Owen Tromans on WOXY.

American men and women dying daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. AT&T deciding that it, not its customers, owns their private information. Oil companies raking in obscenely huge profits. The U.S. government engaging in the systematic torture of prisoners of war. President George Bush acting more like King George III.

And the Senate votes on flag burning?

Can you say Pander To The Base? What the feck?

Since 1990, the Senate has attempted and failed five times to pass a measure that would start the process of adding an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning the burning of the American flag. The House of Representatives has approved similar measures seven times in the same time frame. That’s more congressional votes than flags have been burned in protest during the same time.

Senator Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, (who proudly voted No said it best: While I take offense at disrespect to the flag. I nonetheless believe it is my continued duty as a veteran, as an American citizen and as a United States senator to defend the constitutional right of protesters to use the flag in non-violent speech.

Joining Inouye in voting against the proposed amendment were 29 Democrats and three Republicans. The Republicans were senators:

Bob Bennett, Utah;
Lincoln Chafee, Rhode Island;
and, very surprisingly, Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, Kentucky

I almost wish I lived in those states so I could cast a vote for Bennett, Chafee or McConnell.

No surprise, of course, was that my two senators, George Voinovich (senator_voinovich@voinovich.senate.gov) and Michael DeWine (senator_dewine@dewine.senate.gov), voted in favor of the amendment. I sent the following email to them this morning.

Dear Senator Voinovich/DeWine,

Jeff Hess

I’ve written to my senators before on this issue, so I don’t really expect any miracle turn around. But if we don’t protect our Constitutional rights, they will disappear in the fog.

My Soundtrack: Fascination Street by The Cure on WOXY.

Dell has captured (its word, not mine) the Dell from Hell. I have to wonder if the computer maker called its counter-consumerism team to capture the exploded lap top. Was the laptop being held it hostage? Was the laptop enroute to Bora Bora? Should President Bush enlist Dell’s crack team in the hunt for Terrorist No. 1? Osama ben Laden?

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 Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That”s why old men can send them to war. p. 76

My Soundtrack: They Took A Vote and Said No by Sunset Rubdown on WOXY.

The Beer Battered Deep Fried Bacon Double Quarter Pounder so has to go on the menu at The Town Fryer. I have to restrict my infusions of Southern Goodness to once a month, but this would definitely go well with a side of Frickles. I emailed the link to Susie. Maybe we’ll see it on the menu in time for Blogopoloza.

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 Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

The most promiscuous woman character in Sex And The City is rebuked with breast cancer. For all that Samantha bears it heroically, breast cancer is clearly a variant of the old dies-for-her-sins paradigm. p. 72

My Soundtrack: The Sporting Life by The Decemberists on WOXY.

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 Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

Fantasy has always fueled my hottest encounters. Without fantasies, sex is not much more than friction. p. 70

My Soundtrack: The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths on WOXY.

Have Coffee Will Write is not a political blog, but it does contain a fair share of political discussion. I depend upon others like Scott, Eric, Russell and Jason to keep me up on what’s going on. Russell has done a massive work in summerizing and analyzing the battle for political relevence in Ohio by the carpetbagging DailyKOS.

If you want to know what happened over the past eight months, kick back and enjoy: The Ohio “kosola” connection.

In wrapping up, Russell asks:

So what do I make of all of this ? First that Armstrong is a liability to a campaign and that both he and kos underestimated how much Ohio bloggers cared about Ohio as opposed to the “netroots”. We weren’t prepared to stand idly by and watch these two people who know nothing about Ohio come into the state and screw it all up without a fight. Ultimately Hackett was forced out of the race and questions remain about Brown – they can be answered in November. Questions about Armstrong and kos though could be answered now.

In the Age of American Idol, many are too quick to sell their souls for a little spotlight.

My Soundtrack: Ghosting by Isidore on WOXY.

First there were the self-named Neocons, the New Conservatives. That quickly morphed into the critics-tagged Theocons, in recognition of the dominance of Christianists knocking down the doors in the halls of Conservative power. And then things got ugly. Warrantless surveliance, torture and more.

All of this has led Stephen Masty, former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan, to declare the Conservatives now Neo-Soviet.

What would the Reagan White House have said had some Russian apparatchik decreed that an innocent victim of torture deserved neither a hearing nor redress? Two decades ago the cold war definitions were clear: the West was a pluralistic coalition of nations big and small. We stood four-square against a cruel superpower willing to torture, kidnap, slaughter and invade in order to install an ideologically driven, once-size-fits-all system claiming historical inevitability.

By the standards of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, our neoconservatives are not conservative, they are neosoviet.

Who will rise up to knock down this wall?

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

My Soundtrack: The Funeral by Band Of Horses on WOXY.

NEOBabble’s Chas Rich noted yesterday that both houses of Congress have Federal Shield Laws under consideration. Shield laws grant certain privileges of confidentiality to journalists in recognition of their public service as watchdogs of politicians and others who might violate the public trust.

Currently there is a hodge podge of laws that vary from state to state. There is no Federal Shield Law.

House Resolution 3323, the Free Flow of Information Act of 2005 and Senate 2831, the Free Flow of Information Act of 2006 both contain language intended to create the missing Federal Shield Law. And that is a good thing. But as Chas notes, both bills very narrowly define those people protected.

The House version reads:

(2) COVERED PERSON- The term `covered person’ means —

(C) an employee, contractor, or other person who gathers, edits, photographs, records, prepares, or disseminates news or information for such an entity.

The Senate version reads:

(3) the term ‘journalist’ means a person who, for financial gain or livelihood, is engaged in gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing news or information as a salaried employee of or independent contractor for a newspaper, news journal, news agency, book publisher, press association, wire service, radio or television station, network, magazine, Internet news service, or other professional medium or agency which has as 1 of its regular functions the processing and researching of news or information intended for dissemination to the public.

Which means, as Chas rightly observes, he, as a blogger getting paid by Cleveland.com, would be covered. Roldo Bartimole, Cleveland’s preeminent citizen journalist, would not be. That’s wrong.

And it’s all Thomas Jefferson’s the fault. Why? Because the first Amendment (with my own emphasis) reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It all comes down to one word: Press. What does that word mean?

In the 20th, and now 21st, century we understand that name to describe people who are involved in the discovery, illumination and dissemination of news. But that’s not what Jefferson meant. He used the term quite literally. If you owned a printing press, then the Congress was prohibited from making laws that prevented you from using that piece of hardware as you saw fit.

And printing presses were expensive pieces of equipment. Add to that the cost of the paper and ink and you had an enterprise that involved no little sum of money. Over the next 200 years that slowly changed. The mimeograph machine (and later the photocopier) gave basement movements access to printed handbills and newsletters. Yet such Citizen Journalism was often short lived and restricted in scope.

It was radio and television that gouged the first potholes in the road. They used no printing presses but these news organization engaged in the same kind of Press activities. Only the means of distribution changed. The members of the Press, the staffs of our nation’s newspapers and magazines grudgingly recognized this and welcomed these electronic siblings to the hunt.

All of these permutations of Press, however, required capital. The cost varies from hundreds to millions of dollars, but some money must be spent. Not so with the Internet.

It is possible, in this summer of 2006, for an individual with something to say to make use of a public access computer and distribute their thoughts and observations to billions of readers around the globe and not spend a single penny. That kind of bowel-watering power terrifies those who have held the keys to information and power.

Rightly, as Chas writes, organization such as Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Radio Television News Directors Association and the Society of Professional Journalists all support the bills because they are beneficial to their members. But I’ve yet to discovers these, or any other news organizations, calling for the shield’s extension to all.

Would doing that be problematic? Hell yes. But it’s an issue we must wrestle with.

Recently, Jill Miller Zimon blogged about the conflict presented when she paid her $150 to attend the Ohio Democratic Party dinner earlier this month but received a blogger credential when she signed in. Not a general admission credential. Not a media credential. A blogger credential. Jill’s observations on the evening are very illuminating.

But this is at least clear: in the eyes of the professional staff of the Ohio Democratic Party, bloggers are not media, not members of the Press, and as such, not worthy of protection under shield laws.

All of this was further compounded by another event this month. Some 1,000 bloggers traveled in real time to Las Vegas to take part in Yearly Kos. I’ve been trying for weeks to wrap my head around what I want to say about the convention and what I think it means to bloggers.

What does Markos Moulitsas and his blog Daily Kos have to do with shield laws?

Moulitsas would be no Mercutio, yet his message in Las Vegas does resonate. Republicans have failed us because they can’t govern. Democrats have failed because they can’t get elected. So now it’s our turn, he said.

This failure seems less in governance and more in the giving of props.In abasement, Democrats stumbled all over themselves ensure the good wishes of the perceived Moulitsas money machine.

New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney described the simpering hoard as a parade of prospective Democratic presidential candidates and party leaders, their presence a tribute to just how much the often rowdy voices of the Web have been absorbed into the very political process they frequently disdain….

And still another oberserver of the Las Vegas convention, Jeff Jarvis writes:

The Kos event is a fascinating clash of lines:

And what is the line between Democrat and Democrat? The Kossaks, like the Deaniacs before them, push orthodoxy over the dialectic. They are the outsiders who want to be in and who decide who”s in and who”s out. When asked about whether Hillary Clinton would be welcome at his event, Kos said, “Oh, my God, no way!” Nagourney said she declined an invitation. The outsiders declare she”s in the wrong crowd so she”s out with them.

Perhaps it is time to recognize that when everyone has the potential to own a press, then we are all the Press. Shield laws be damned. What has been preserved as a special protection for a few should now be the general protection assured for all.

More voices:

Bloglash!

Reporters and Bloggers: Synergies and Divergencies

The Markos Regime

My Soundtrack: Possibly Maybe by Bjork on WOXY.

Well, not really. But something much more exciting has occurred. After a six-moth hiatus, Mary Beth Matthews’s Street Smarts is back. Prompted by an post-graduate class assignment Mary Beth spent this last week out and about talking to strangers and discovering what she could learn from them. She writes in Part No. 6 of the experience:

Many people who choose teaching as a career do so because they are very comfortable with a highly structured environment; the schedules, the bells, and the rules. Experiential learning, especially when self-directed, asks teachers to step outside of a comfort zone and into a situation where they are not always in control of the outcome. That can be very scary for some folks.

Creativity requires thinking, it requires work.

Keep reading so that you can meet the kids on the big green bus, Suzi, Phillip, Abby and the rest.

Welcome back, Mary Beth. Don’t be such a stranger.

My Soundtrack: Sometimes by Ash on WOXY.

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 Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

When [Henry Miller] was most broke in the thirties, his lover Anais Nin put him in touch with a rich connoisseur of the pornographic what was willing to pay handsomely and by the page. Henry Miller didn”t meet the connoisseur”s standards. Too much literature apparently distracted him from his tepid lust. Nin was able to do it. The Little Birds is the result of her commission. p. 68

My Soundtrack: The Melting Moon by VHS Or Beta on WOXY.

In my life I have had few close friends. I much prefer to have a tiny circle of, or even one, confidants, rather than a larger gathering of casual friends. A close friend is one willing to get up at 3 a.m. and go for a walk. A close friend is one who can listen to your most depressing imaginings and not need to fix you. A close friend is there.

I raise this because, according to USA Today, Americans have fewer close friends than they did 20 years ago.

In 1985, the average American had three people in whom to confide matters that were important to them, says a study in today’s American Sociological Review. In 2004, that number dropped to two, and one in four had no close confidants at all.

I was speaking about this just the other day as it pertains to my students. They live in cocoons. Their bedrooms have telephones, televisions, stereos and Internet linked computers. We have little need to get out.

This is one of the reasons I hang out in coffee houses. It is there that I can talk with people about the events of the day. Most of my friends fit into one of two groups: coffee house folks and writer (which includes bloggers) folks.

Where are your close friends?

My Soundtrack: Playboy Playgirl by Pizzicato Five on WOXY.

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 Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

I”m often asked what the difference is between pornography and literature? I have a simple distinction. If a piece of work is merely utilitarian, if it stimulates and facilitates only masturbation, it is pornography. If it illustrates human feelings, it is something more. That something more may not rise to the level of art but at least it aspires to it. p. 68

My Soundtrack: The Fallen by Franz Ferdinand on WOXY.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir might as well have been waving a copy of the fictitious Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion when he told a delegation from the United Nations and the African Union that Jews were responsible for the threat of deploying peace keeping troops in his country.

I’m not sure who’s taking tips from whom. The Ohio Republican Party from al-Bashir or the other way around. Regardless, both are despicable.

From JTA.

“If we return to the last demonstrations in the United States, and the groups that organized the demonstrations, we find that they are all Jewish organizations,” Omar al-Bashir said.

Evil men are never able to see their own evil. They believe with all their heart that they are right. And someone else must be responsible for their persecution.

Email hat tip: Jill.

My Soundtrack: Life During Wartime by Talking Heads on WOXY.