Slate’s Daniel Akst asks: You have $1. How should you spend it to do the most good? It’s a good question. We hear all the time about how this or that philanthropist is saving the world by writing a $1 million check, but what about $1? Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson was famous for passing out Sunday dollars.

I carry dollar coins to pass out to panhandlers. Terry keeps cans of tuna and other foodstuffs in her car to pass out. Where would your dollar go?

My Soundtrack: Fingernailed For You by Comet Gain on WOXY.

I can’t let go of the story I posted yesterday concerning Adam Harvey’s dilemma and Jay Yoo’s response to it. Here’s my conundrum: is it possible for an American entrepreneur to go, as Jay suggests, to Bangalore or Jakarta and not be an Ugly American exploiting Third World workers?

And by encouraging Adam to jump ship am I ignoring the real problems here in Ohio? What is our obligation to stay and fight in any situation? Can we blithely abandon others to their fate? What do you think?

My Soundtrack: Moonchild by Cibo Matto on WOXY.

There was a time when mining coal was a family business; sons, fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers all went down the shafts. Not anymore. According to WCPN this morning, there are new coal mines opening in Ohio and that, combined with an aging, retiring workforce, has created as many as 6,000 jobs openings.

The big question is, of course, will they hire 6,000 Ohioans, or, as I expect, will they hire 6,000 immigrants excited by the prospect of union wages?

(Side note: Dan Moulthrop read the story this morning on the news and I wanted to link to it, but there wasn’t any link. I thought I’d drop drop Dan a note — we’ve chatted a couple of times in coffee shops — but WCPN doesn’t post the email addresses for its staff. That is not acceptable in 2006. If you happen to read this Dan, please give me a shout.)

My Soundtrack: Jealous Girls by The Gossip on WOXY.

Adam Harvey is in a quandary. He’s involved, he’s smart, he’s doing all the right things, yet he can’t get any economic traction on the northcoast. Adam blogged his feelings this morning and George Nemeth picked up the post. I left comments on both Adam’s and George’s sites, but the best advice comes from Jay Yoo who writes:

I know what you mean. Consider picking up and moving to Jakarta or Bangalore. I just got back from Indonesia and was completely blown away by the growing number of expats living there. I met so many entrepreneurs that are playing at the top of this “flat economy.” Many of them were in “go-nowhere” corporate jobs in Southeast Asia and just went for it with less than $50,000 in cash (it”s really cheap to get things going).

They have multi-million dollar organizations now and are expanding into Hong Kong, Singapore and China. Then there are young expats that go to work for these companies that just want to be where the action is. It”s really amazing. If I were a young professional and single, I would be on a plane to China, India or Indonesia without thinking twice.

Should Adam become a Wal Mart Associate or follow Greeley’s sage advice and take passage waayyy west?

My Soundtrack: Can’t Lose by We Are Scientists on WOXY.

In March I’ll be making my annual pilgramage to Louisville, Kentucky for the Novels In Progress Workshop. It’s the only vacation I take each year. Today I hear from my friend Cavana Faithwalker of a great opportunity from the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cuyaghoga County Library System to stretch my creative muscles.

On 11 and 15 March the two organizations are offering a free, 90-minutes poetry workshop for high school teachers the day before I leave. According to the flyers, participants will:

Discover how you can incorporate videoconference technology into your classroom and how a program called SLAM IT! will teach your students about the connection between art and poetry while using this technology.

Nothing makes us push our muse and perhaps send her soaring like poetry. See you there?

My Soundtrack: Stars At Noon by Up The Empire on WOXY.

Via the post-enlightened one comes this bit of Bush Administration insanity: President George Bush wants to outsource the operations of our nation’s six largest seaports to a company in the United Arab Emirates Is this another case of frat-boy comradity? What is it going to be next? Will he say he needs his own Janissaries?

It’s not built of marble or granite. There’s no eternal flame or honor guard in dress blues and polished brass. The president and visiting dignateries don’t come to lay wreaths in front of it. But to East Clevelanders, it is their memorial. The names and pictures of more than 1,000 residents under the age of 25 who have died violently

But none of that matters.

From this morning’s New York Times:

Last year, City Council voted to tear down the memorial wall. A cleared lot, council members reasoned, would be more attractive to potential developers in a city where 15 percent of the 27,000 residents are unemployed.

It’s an abandoned building. It’s a health hazard. The roof is falling in, said Gladys Walcott, who was council president when the proposal passed. If anti-crime activists had shown they had the money to repair and maintain the building, Walcott said she would have voted to let the Wall of Sorrows stand.

No demolition date has been set. Supporters are trying to raise money to buy the building and the lot next door. They hope new Mayor Eric Brewer will help them convert the structure into a community center and build a park.

Brewer said he hasn’t fully studied the issue yet, but his goal is to totally overhaul the busy street where the memorial stands into a thoroughfare of upscale housing and businesses. He doesn’t think the wall fits in with his vision.

East Cleveland is a bleak place. That statistics are depressing. But I tutor 6th grade math there and I see students who haven’t been beaten down, who still can look to the future. Yesterday one of my students asked me: Mr. Hess, you like doing what you do, don’t you?

I told her Yes, I did. She asked, You like it because you got a job and you get money? No, I told her, that’s not why I do it. I do it because I see people everyday who 20 and 30 years ago were you. Some are successful and have good lives. Others are working at McJobs and worried if they’ll have a place to sleep at the end of the week. I want you to be in that first group, I told her. That’s why I like doing what I do.

My Soundtrack: Hiccup Lines by Mancino on WOXY.

You tell’m Winslow!

If they could have just figured out a way to make their products attractive to all those silly people buying new fangled automobiles, then the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Buggy Whip Makers could have kept their jobs and flourished. That’s the attitude of the dead-tree media world today. If it can just find that magic whatizt.

It’s all bull, of course, as Salon’s Farhad Manjoo writes this morning. The story’s subhead really says it all:

Facing a slow death, newspapers are desperately trying to reach young readers with dumbed-down tabloids full of stories about Kobe, Britney and dental bling.

Manjoo focuses on the Chicago Tribune’s tabloid RedEye as one of the broken-wing flappings of a once great media eagle.

Distributed for free around subway stops in the city, RedEye is meant to be a condensed, more fun version of a traditional daily newspaper. It features copy from the Tribune as well as original reporting, and though it does briefly cover major national and international news stories, it is heavy on local news, entertainment, fashion and sports. Brown calls it “super-convenient” and praises it for providing a nice balance of news she needs and wants.

RedEye represents the newspaper industry’s latest attempt to hook young readers. Newspaper executives have decided that if America’s youth, with their short attention spans, flagging interest in the news, and obsession with celebrity and sports, won’t come to newspapers, the papers will come to them.

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Assume your readership is stupid. That will boost revenues.

My Soundtrack: Calling Thermatico by Centro-Matic on WOXY

Slate’s Daniel Gross thinks that this month’s New York magazine heralds the beginning of the end for blogs; not as a social phenomenon, but as businesses. This leads me to the conclusion that Gross is yet another journalist who just doesn’t get it. Blogs are not now, nor have they ever been about business. Yes, some make money at it.

But that’s not the point. Gross quotes Clive Thompson, who he says:

…concludes that the blog industry has already tri-furcated into an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs-then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. In other words, a few people will make money – journalist money, not Wall Street money – and the hordes of late joiners will make nothing.

Thompson, like Gross, is clueless. There are, according to Technorati’s count, 27.2 million blogs around the world. If even 10 percent of them are good, that means that there are nearly 3 million world-changing blogs out there. That’s more than every dead-tree and talking-head media outlet in the world. And nobody is in charge.

Wall Street can’t get blogs any more than it got the Dot Coms. It will throw money in hopes that some of it comes back. A few fast talkers will collect the cash and run. And the blogosphere will continue to grow.

Blogs are changing the way patients talk with their doctors. Blogs are changing the way that politicians conduct their deals. Blogs are changing the way communities hoist snake oil salesman and charlatans onto rails and ride them out of town.

As our own Tim Russo wrote this morning: There are new rules in the blogosphere, and they were written in Ohio by Ohio bloggers.

Business as usual is falling like blocks in a daycare center. Invest in that.

My Soundtrack: Raising The Sparks by Akron/Family on WOXY.

…Cleveland. Ba duh bump. The Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall Of Fame reference saves Gary Trudeau from getting slapped with a bad-Cleveland-Joke tag, but, the McFriendly’s mention stings a bit this morning with the Pee Dee telling us that we are No. 10 on the nation’s lardass scale. (Boy, will Derf have fun with that one: can you say he-boobies?)

At 1100 today Have Coffee Will Write weclomed its 75,000 visitor. There are different ways to count; this includes those who came directly to my home page. The visitor was nolmstd-cadent1-69-166-157-23.clvdoh.adelphia.net and found my blog via Technorati. Welcome. I hope you found something you liked and that you’ll come again.

[Update — 0746 — Connie will be on WCPN between 0800 and 0900.]

The only question here has to be: what took so long? In this morning’s Pee Dee Connie Shultz writes that she is taking an extended vacation because she can’t write anything without being accussed of shilling for her husband, senate canditate Sherrod Brown. There is much she could have written that wouldn’t have raised issues.

She chose not to.

Writes Shultz:

Then my husband, U. S. Rep. Sherrod Brown, announced in October that he was running for the Senate.

Since then, a lot has changed.

My husband and I share the same values on just about everything that matters to us, which is how we fell in love and why we married two years ago.

What makes for a strong marriage, though, can really complicate a career when you are a columnist at the largest newspaper in the same state where your husband is running for elected office.

I still want to write about what’s on my mind, but that is becoming increasingly difficult. Each passing week brings more limitations in my choice of topics because there is a concern that some will accuse me of using my column to stump for my husband.

[Update 0618, 16 February.]

Yet more photos this morning from Salon.

From The Sydney Morning Herald…

Back in the ’90s a Republican actually won a race in Cleveland Heights. How did she do it? She ran in a race where seven Democrats were also running. They so badly split the vote that the city’s Republican minority was able to vote its single candidate into office. On the morning after the moan rose up:

Why hadn’t Cleveland Heights Democrats enforced party discipline and made all but one candidate withdraw?

That’s the way party discipline is suppossed to work. And it stinks.

I’m sure that the figures in Ohio’s Democratic Party who engineered the events of the past few days feel that what they did was for the good of the party. The problem is that continuing down this path seems to me to be a sure route to extinction.

In our Meet The Bloggers discussion with Roldo Bartimole, Roldo talked about how the Black leadership in Cleveland systimatically cut out the young, energized leaders of the future in the ’60s and ’70s. In order to protect their own turf, they created a political environment in Cleveland where the same people just keep playing musical chairs with powe positions.

I think the Democratic Party, with this latest move to enforce party discipline is doing precisely the same thing. If 20 years from now we have the same tired old politicians running for the same tired old offices, and losing, we’ll be able to look back to the party’s leadership today and ask, was covering their butts really worth all this?

My Soundtrack: Every Party Has A Winner And A Loser by Erlend Oye on WOXY.

The Republican”s Secret Weapon Strikes Again

Senator DeWine had problems in Ohio,
but Democrats solved it. They made
Iraq war veteran, Paul Hackett, who
almost won a seat in congress, so angry
he quit the senate race, and politics.

Senators Schumer and Reid claim
they were avoiding a costly primary.
More likely, they wanted to get rid of
an audacious straight talker who says
unkind things about Republicans.

One of the great shames of Americans is our gross inability to speak others’ langauges. While I speak a smattering of other tongues, I do not consider myself fluent in any of them. So when I come across something like this comment below, I’m stumped. Babel Fish is no help. Any readers out there able to tell what’s being said?

Bagaimana kalau FOX menayangkan Bencana Yahudi? Atau serial pembunuhan terhadap orang-orang Yahudi oleh Nazi? Kebebasan berekspresi? Cobalah dulu terapkan itu ke diri anda, baru bereksperimen kepada orang lain!

Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

My Soundtrack: Already Elsewhere by The Six Parts Seven on WOXY.

After a week of simulations, the Department of Homeland Security completed exercises designed to test the country’s readiness for cyber attacks from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and, wait for it, bloggers. According to the Associated Press’ Ted Bridis, the government wanted to test its responses.

Do you suppose it will pay more attention to these responses than it did to the pre-Hurricane Katrina drills?

Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose Web logs include political rantings and musings about current events.

Remember, the Federal Government owns the trunk lines, the backbone of the Internet. We are not as safe in our rights as we would like to think we are.

My Soundtrack: Steady As She Goes by The Raonteurs on WOXY.

From the Sardonic One this morning comes the startling news that gasp! consultant’s projections on revenue associated with Gateway were, uh, a little high? And guess what? These projections are coming from the same folks who are telling us how a new convention center and hotel in Cleveland is just going to shower the city with money.

Jill alerted me this morning to The Atheist Mama’s post on the New Monkey Trial In Ohio. While Ohio’s law is not as blatant as the one proposed and slapped down in Dover, Pennsylvania, it is even more important because it is a state standard. Given the actions of individuals like Ken Ham and the 10 legislators Ohio’s Wall Of Shame.