Nobody is stupid enough to pile on the grieving mother of a soldier who sacrificed his life for his country by suggesting that she’s some confused and exploited puppet of the hateful liberal forces of evil who can’t accept that President George Bush is leading our country in a crusade to save the world from terrorists. Uh, never mind. From Pharyngula:

The other weird thing about the critics is the way the phrase anti-Bush has become a recipe for automatic dismissal. Of course she’s anti-Bush; I’m also anti-Bush, as are many other people.

The man is a corrupt incompetent who has led us into a bloody and criminal war, enriching his corporate cronies and cheering his supporters in the lunatic Religious Right no end. It is our obligation as thinking citizens of a democracy to oppose bad leadership; do these people think the title of President of the US should confer immediate unanimous support and immunity from criticism?

What’s unnatural here are these people who ignore the poor performance and destructive actions of this pathetic excuse for a president to make opposition to stupidity a sin.

My Soundtrack: Heart Attack by Longwave on WOXY.

Ohio continues to be a political battleground in the conflict between the Theo/Neocon Wrong and Americans who still believe that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are pretty OK concepts. Three proposed amendments to the Ohio constitution promise to be the focus this fall of the ongoing struggle.

Reform Ohio Now successfully collected more than 500,000 signatures to get the amendment proposals on the November ballot. The opposition, however, is wielding its principle weapon — cash (including maybe a few of Tom Noe’s rare coins) — to keep Ohio voters from having a say in how their votes are counted and protected.

The amendments would:

Lower the cap on campaign contributions from the $10,000 boost passed by the Republican legislature in a recent reform move to a maximum of $2,000;

Create a State Board of Elections; and (most importantly)

Change the way election districts are drawn and redrawn for political gain.

Of the third amendment, the Dayton Daily News wrote in an editorial:

Anybody who relishes democracy and who sees elections as the heart of the democratic process ought to see the appeal of this reform. It would bring Ohio politics to life, creating contests where there are none now.

This letter-to-the editor concerning a Wal Mart shopper experience appeared in my hometown newspaper: The Marietta Times.

The clerk stopped us on the way into the store. It seems as if my husband”s shoes set off the “criminal detector.” The greeter made us both remove our shoes – mine were slip-on, his were bend-down-and-tie, and there was no bench to sit and do this.

Removing your shoes to go into a Wal Mart? You can’t make this stuff up.

My Soundtrack: Glitterball by Seachange on WOXY.

From Salon: A group that had hoped to build two museums to rebut the displays at the Clinton Presidential Library is folding. I’m giving up, said Houston businessman Richard Erickson, who established nonprofit Counterlibe Inc. last year to fund construction of a Counter Clinton Library… Nearly every dime raised has gone to professional fundraisers and lawyers.

Dan Savage has been guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan this week. His parting shot is a Bealesque scream: But it”s time to declare victory and get the fuck out. Thanks to the incompetence of this administration, we can no longer avoid the “Q” word. It”s a quagmire. Period. … And it just keeps coming back to manpower – just enough troops to lose…

No mountain high, no
Valley low, no river wide;
Dancing, lo dayenu

If you are an Ohio business owner providing health care to your employees, Wal Mart is jacking up your annual premiums $847 per employee with a family plan and $310 per employee with an individual plan.

How is this happening? By not providing affordable health care to it’s employees, Wal Mart pushes its costs off on private-sector health care providers who make up the difference by raising premiums.

That is the finding of a study conducted by Dr. Kenneth Thorpe, Robert W. Woodruff Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. Thorpe produced Paying A Premium: The Added Cost Of Care For The Uninsured for Families USA: a national not-for-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to the achievement of high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans.

What Thorpe found was that of the health care costs not covered by health insurance and not paid by the individuals receiving the health care some $43 billion annually. Of that bill, according to the study:

Roughly one-third is reimbursed by a number of government programs, and two-thirds is paid through higher premiums for people with health insurance.

If you are an employee receiving employer-funded health care, the study continues, Wal Mart’s practice threatens you and your family with a vicious swirly down the health care drain.

As the costs of care for the uninsured are added to health insurance premiums that are already rising steeply, more employers can be expected to drop coverage, leaving even more people without insurance. And as more people lose coverage and the cost of their care is added to premiums for the insured, still more employers will drop coverage. It”s a vicious circle that will not end until we as a nation take steps to solve the underlying problems.

In the early ’90s I worked for a small, family-owned business with about 25 employees. We had very good health care with low deductibles. But I know the company’s owner struggled with that cost. If only 1/3 of those employees had families on the company plan, that would mean today the owner would have to bear an additional $12,893 in annual premiums.

For a company with seven-figure sales, that may not seem like a lot. But I know how close margins were shaved and even that small amount could make a big difference.

But translate those costs to Wal Mart with its nation-sized annual revenues and you can see how the company is saving money hand-over-fist and keeping Sam Walton’s heirs among the wealthiest people on the planet.

So, why would hard-working business people want to subsidize Wal Mart this way? Beats me.

My Soundtrack: Tito’s Way by The Juan Maclean on WOXY.

[Update –1850, 12 August 05 — OK folks, Phase I was a success. Now it’s time to let the Federal Communications Commission know that Breast is not one of the Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Radio.

Contact the FCC and tell them what you think.]

[Update — 1711, 12 August 05 — Jeff Jarvis, of course, has weighed in on the story.]

[Update — 1644, 12 August 05 — Received from Tom Godall, general manager of WUKY:

Dear Mr. Hess,

Our goal at WUKY is community service. We”ve heard from many of our listeners today about the value and importance of Garrison Keillor”s Writer”s Almanac. In response, we are restoring the program to WUKY”s schedule at a new — and we hope better — time. It will air Monday through Friday at 7:01 p.m. during NPR”s Fresh Air, which is consistently one of our more popular programs.

Tom Godell
WUKY General Manager]

All three of my regular readers know that I link to and read daily Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. I discovered this morning via Sherry Chandler that the University of Kentucky’s public radio station has canceled the program because it used the word — wait for it — breast!. Here’s the poem from Pulitzer-Prize winner Donald Justice:

(the offending word has been censored for innocent eyes)

Thinking about the Past

Certain moments will never change, nor stop being-
My mother’s face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune-
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
That red-haired girl with wide mouth-Eleanor-
Forgotten thirty years-her freckled shoulders, hands.
The [censored] of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit,
Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery’s, a small, caught bird-
Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward.
O marvelous early cigarettes! O bitter smoke, Benton…
And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky,
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
Dusks, dawns; waves; the ends of songs…

If you are offended that uttering the word breast in a poem is offenive, then please drop a note to WUKY and let them know.

[As one reader has suggested, since WUKY is affiliated with the University of Kentucky, dropping a note to it’s president and board of trustees might be a good idea as well. You’ll find email addresses for them on the administration page.]

My Soundtrack: Cold Wind by The Arcade Fire on WOXY.

Not a few people have asked why our president’s daughters haven’t enlisted in the armed services. To be fair, as far as I know, President George Bush is the only child of a president, since General John Eisenhower followed his father into the Army, who has served. From Pittsburgh comes what may be an honest answer:

Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, 26, a Marine recruiter in Pittsburgh, went to the home of a high school student who had expressed interest in joining the Marine Reserve to talk to his parents.

It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect’s mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.

I want you to know we support you, she gushed.

Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.

Military service isn’t for our son. It isn’t for our kind of people, she told him.

And what kind of people are those?

My Soundtrack: Someone Like Me by Royksopp on WOXY.

Wal Mart has become the Blond of corporate America, This Top 10 list of names for Wal Mart wines came in this morning from my dad, the connoisseur.

Wal Mart recently announced that they will soon be offering customers a new discount item: Wal Mart’s own brand of wine. The world’s largest retail chain is teaming up with E&J Gallo Winery of California to produce some fruit of the vine at an affordable price, in the $2-5 range.

The beauty of Wal-Mart wine is that it can be served with either white meat(Possum) or red meat (Squirrel)

And here’s an even bigger list of names.

My Soundtrack: Love Is A Game by The Magic Numbers on WOXY.

We call people, experiences, objects, into our lives. I first learned this lesson nearly 30 years ago from Richard Bach’s Illusions. I plopped down 50 cents at the library this week to buy a nearly new copy of the book I’d read so long ago. I called. It came. I think I got it right. And today I’ll set it free again at Phoenix on Lee.

Chapter 17

On the Jeff Sykes radio talk show, I saw a Donald Shimoda I had never seen before. The show began at 9:00 p.m. and went till midnight, from a room no bigger than a watchmaker”s, lined about with dials and knobs and racks of tape-cartridge commercial spots.

The answer is no, there is nothing illegal about it, the airplanes are inspected as carefully as any jet transport. They are safer and stronger than most sheet-metal modern airplane, and all that”s needed is a license and a farmer”s permission. But Shimoda didn”t say that. No, one can stop us from doing what we want to do, Jeff, he said.

Now that is quite true, but it had none of the tact that is called for when you are talking with a radio audience that is wondering what is going on, these airplanes flying around. A minute after he said that, the call-director telephone began lighting up on Sykes desk.

We have a caller on line one, Sykes said. Go ahead, ma”am.

Am I on the air?

Yes ma”am, you are on the air and our guest is Mr. Donald Shimoda, the airplane flier. Go ahead, you are on the air.

Well, I”d like to tell that fellow that not everybody gets to do what they want to do and that some people have to work for their living and hold down a little more responsibility that flying around with some carnival.

The people who work for a living are doing what they most want to do, Shimoda said. Just as the people who play for a living…

Scripture says by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn they bread, and in sorrow shalt thou eat it.

We”re free to do that, too, if we want.

Read The Rest…

My Soundtrack: A Sad Man’s Face by Koufax on WOXY.

My arms know your space,
The trombone’s fifth position;
With lids lowered, zachor

My Soundtrack: Girl by Silver Sunshine on WOXY.

It was pathetic. And it makes me angry and sad. Angry because the cause is just. Sad because there are no new ideas; something we seriously need

Yesterday at noon, some two dozen or so union members and a handful of children gathered at the Case Elementary school at the corner East 40th and Superior to protest Wal Mart and to ask people to not buy school supplies from Wal Mart.

Contrast that to the Kids Helping Kids Back To School action this weekend in Spokane, Washington.

In the first case we have a national group — Wake-Up Wal Mart — organizing rallies in 34 cities to educate consumers on the threats that the Bentonville Behemoth presents to their communities. Wake-Up Wal Mart is asking parents to spend more of their income on school supplies in protest.

In the second case we have a children’s group — Camp Fire USA — collecting school supplies from Wal Mart (and other retail) shoppers that will be distributed through the local Second Harvest Food Bank to school kids whose parents can’t even afford to shop at Wal Mart.

While the first action addresses injustice and could lead to a more secure future for many, many children; the second answers an immediate need.

According to Wake-Up Wal Mart, more than 65,000 people have associated themselves with the Send Wal Mart Back To School campaign; the group has a goal of 150,000. Compare that to the effort of Internet cartoonist Chris Muir who in less than 24 hours passed the 100,000 mark in calling for support for a cancer clinic that is treating his sister.

One man, one website and one cartoon: 100,000 clicks. (Yes, I know, a click is not a signature; people can click numerous times; it’s easier to click than sign — those are all legitimate criticisms. But anybody want to guess when Muir’s website passes half a million?

Wake-Up Wal Mart’s cause is a good one. But it needs to do a little waking up of its own.

My Soundtrack: 99.9 F by Suzanne Vega on WOXY.

The white page demands
Its purpose from me, its slave;
I ask for simplest or

Last night at our monthly Socrates Cafe gathering — Nighttown, second Tuesday of the month, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., and open to everyone — the topic was What Is Poverty And What Does It Mean To Live Above The Poverty Line? This morning on The Writer’s Almanac, I found these thoughts on the topic from Herman Mellville:

…he noticed that though they were forced to live off the land and build their own homes, there were no poor people. Nobody went hungry. He wrote, “There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations… There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no bills payable…or to sum it all up in one word-no money.” He found his life luxurious, but he was worried if he stayed too long he’d never leave.

Can money be the cause and not the solution to poverty?

My Soundtrack: Forever Lost by The Magic Numbers on WOXY.

Wal Mart CEO Lee Scott has a Napoleonic dream. According to an interview he recently gave to New York magazine’s John Heilemann:

Lee Scott knows that Wal-Mart must become more politically adept, more sensitive to local fears. But his belief in Wal-Mart”s manifest destiny is sturdy – and not a little unnerving.

There”s no reason we shouldn”t be at least twice as big in the U.S. as we are today, he told me. And whether you in New York get a store this year or next year or five years from now, if we do the things we should do, then ultimately we will prevail.

We will previal. Does Wal Mart have a manifest destiny?

My Soundtrack: Love Is The New Feel Awful by The Dandy Warhols on WOXY.

It starts with a scrap.
Piles explode across the floor/
Buried, our ghehenna

Actually we did mean “I am a jelly donut” Jeff. :)

Jim

Alll righty then.

My Soundtrack: So Little To Give by Creeper Lagoon.

My Soundtrack: 16 Military Wives by The Decemberists on WOXY.