Oh I”m on my way,
I know I am somewhere not;
so far from makom, smile

Salon’s Table Talk forum has a thread on the Wal Marting Of America with 95 responses and growing. Here are just a few:

I really liked shopping at Walmart… When I found out more about their politics and their practices as an employer, I stopped going.

Before I moved to The Big City, I lived in a series of little towns, dominated by dark, dirty Mom-and-Pop stores that got away with horrible service and over priced crap because they were the only game in town. Most of the local retail chains (Stuart’s, Caldor, and especially K-Mart) were the same. I was glad to see them close.

Mom-and-pop grocers and corner stores in poor areas charge out the wazoo for inferior food and carry very little produce. I’m not surprised that store got shut down. So all this Let them shop at mom-and-pop stores! comes off as Marie Antoinettish under the circumstances.

Lots and lots more there.

My Soundtrack: It’s You by PJ Harvey on WOXY.

In the ’90s there was a prediction that tea would replace coffee as America’s beverage, but that never happened. I don’t think you can underate the power of computers and the explosion of the Internet in the continued dominance of coffee. In the early days we would program at 3 a.m. in what we called Troglodyte mode. Look it up.

Peter Zale’s life may be in danger. Today he’s taken the courageous step of revealing the true secret of the ultimate cup of espresso. And now baristas the world over may have to hunt him down and give him such a case of caffeine shakes that that he’ll never draw again. Don’t make the coffee gods mad. They don’t get even, they get ahead.

I remember the moment when Starbucks ceased to be cool. It was during Jay Leno’s monologue on the Tonight Show when he told this joke:

Well, it’s finally happened. Starbucks announced today that it is opening a Starbucks inside a Starbucks.

While the joke certainly did not herald financial ruin for the company, it did mark the beginning of its slide to become the coffee house for people who didn’t get coffee but wanted others to think they did.

Last week I began to notice a growing flood of Wal Mart jokes. From New Rules by Bill Maher comes this one:

Krystal Knot: New Rule, Stop saying anybody or anything is like the Nazis. Republicans aren’t like the Nazis. Neo-Nazis aren’t even like the Nazis. Nothing is like the Nazis. Except for Wal-Mart.

Sure the company is laughing all the way to the bank, but it has to become a factor when recruiting top executives. Would you want to work for a company that’s become a joke horse?

My Soundtrack: All I Need Is Everything by Over The Rhine on WOXY.

Packing time with stuff
Absolves us of purpose;
to listen now, shema

The American Prospect reports this morning that Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice Presiden Dick Cheney was the White House leak who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Libby met with Miller on 8 July 2003 and discussed Plame six days before Robert Novak published his column. Murray Waas writes:

The new disclosure that Miller and Libby met on July 8, 2003, raises questions regarding claims by President Bush that he and everyone in his administration have done everything possible to assist Fitzgerald’s grand-jury probe. Sources close to the investigation, and private attorneys representing clients embroiled in the federal probe, said that Libby’s failure to produce a personal waiver may have played a significant role in Miller”s decision not to testify about her conversations with Libby, including the one on July 8, 2003.

Libby signed a more generalized waiver during the early course of the investigation granting journalists the right to testify about their conversations with him if they wished to do so. At least two reporters — Walter Pincus of The Washington Post and Tim Russert of NBC — have testified about their conversations with Libby.

But Miller has said she would not consider providing any information to investigators about conversations with Libby or anyone else without a more specific, or personal, waiver. She said she considers general waivers to be inherently coercive. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, has previously said Miller had not been granted any kind of a waiver … that she finds persuasive or believes was freely given.

How many fingers can the little Dutch boy put in the dike?

My Soundtrack: It’s Written In The Stars by Paul Weller on WOXY.

From today’s London Times comes the story that: An undercover investigation has caught leaders of a radical Islamic group inciting young British Muslims to become terrorists and praising the Tube bombers as the fantastic four. A Sunday Times reporter spent two months as a recruit inside the Saviour Sect to reveal for the first time how the…

Under water need,
struggle and will to stretch, claw;
Light, air, freedom: tikvah

From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac comes: It was on this day in 1912 that Teddy Roosevelt was nominated by the Progressive Party to run for President, an election that went on to define the Republican Party for the rest of the 20th Century. Republicans had dominated politics ever since the Civil War. A Republican had been in the White House…

Back in February in A Century Of Genocide… I wrote about a school trip to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit. The moment of the trip came when a survior implored the student to pay attention to Darfur. From the Organic Mechanic Adam Harvey comes this link to the words and drawings of Abd al-Rahman, age 13, in Darfur:

I am looking at the sheep in the wadi. I see Janjaweed coming-quickly, on horses and camels, with Kalashnikovs-shooting and yelling, ‘kill the slaves, kill the blacks.” They killed many of the men with the animals. I saw people falling on the ground and bleeding. They chased after children. Some of us were taken, some we didn”t see again. All our animals were taken: camels, cows, sheep, and goats. Then the planes came and bombed the village.

Save Darfur.

My Soundtrack: George Eliot by Zykos on WOXY.

My Soundtrack: Move Your Feet by Junior Senior on WOXY.

Via Dan Wismar I’ve learned that Air America Radio has problems. It’s impossible to tell yet how serious they are, or even if the problems are image-based and fabricated. But, according to today’s New York Post, they’re serious enough that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has opened an investigation into the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, a Bronx social services agency that loaned $875,000 to Evan Montvel Cohen.

According to The New York Sun:

Cohen, who for a time served simultaneously as the liberal radio network’s director, appealed to the organization for two loans worth $35,000. Another member of the executive committee said Mr. Cohen told the executive director of the organization that he needed the money to pay for chemotherapy for himself and other medical expenses for his ill father.

[Jeannette] Graves [president of Gloria Wise] said that Mr. Cohen also received another $213,000 loan for Air America in a check that was approved without her authorization and stamped with an imprint of her signature, and that the club wired more than $400,000 to him without her knowledge.

Yes, I know, that only adds up to $683,000, but there appears to be a great deal of confusion concerning exactly how much money went to whom. That, I expect, will be one of the first things that Spitzer’s office sorts out.

Michelle Malkin has been taking the lead on covering the story so far. Daily KOS has weighed in and Air America has issued an official media release on it’s position.

There is, of course, a lot of hand wringing over little boys and girls being deprived of stick-ball bats and such, and that may in fact be the case. From the reading I’ve done since Thursday, however, I think the case is going to turn out to be boring enough to make chewing Kerry For President posters enjoyable.

For a hint at how exciting this stuff can be, take a look at Air America And Matters Legal.

My Soundtrack: Now by Lab Partners on WOXY.

This past Wednesday, according to the Associated Press, Steven Vincent: An American freelance journalist, who accused Basra”s police of being infiltrated by Shiite militiamen in a recent New York Times column and his Internet blog, was found shot to death in the southern city after being abducted by armed men driving a police car.

Steven Vincent, whose work also has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, and his female Iraqi translator were abducted at gunpoint by five men Tuesday evening as they left a currency exchange shop, police Lt. Col. Karim al-Zaidi said Wednesday.

The translator, Nour Weidi, was seriously wounded.

Vincent was in Iraq to take part in a panel discussion sponsored by David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine. Shortly before his murder, Vincent had this to say on the panel:

With respects to you and Karl [Zinsmeister, editor-in-chief of The American Enterprise], Jamie [Glazov, panel moderator and managing editor of Front Page Magazine], I have to give the war effort a B-. Judging the conflict by Saddam’s removal-and thank Allah the monster is gone-is setting a pretty low bar. I mean, let’s face it: military-wise Iraq was not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Then you have to factor in U.S failures, such as not sealing the borders or halting the looting-not to mention the fact that American military tactics have widely alienated the very people we liberated. Something’s not working right.

Insurgents win by not losing. If they keep Iraqis living in misery, then no matter how many “insurgents” we dispatch to Paradise, Amir Zarqawi gets the prize. In assessing the war effort, then, we must also include the quality of Iraqis’ lives. Want a grade for that? F.

Glazov responded to Vincent’s grade with:

Thanks Mr. Vincent. You are going to give a B- to the Bush administration because the terrorists have wreaked violence and mayhem and made nation building extremely difficult? We are at war. You are judging the Bush administration because there are terrorists trying to destroy Iraq at every turn. You blame America that you can”t leave your hotel. But Mr. Vincent, sorry, you can”t leave your hotel because the terrorists are a threat to you. Blame the terrorists, not America.

An F to America for the quality of Iraqis” lives? The terrorists are waging war on the country and doing everything in their power to destroy the quality of life. We need to blame the terrorists for that, not the side that is sacrificing its young boys and girls to give Iraq liberty and to nurture and protect its growth. The premise here is the height of the pathology of anti-Americanism – blaming America for what the terrorists are doing. Isn”t it?

When he next had the opportunity to speak, Vincent, upon reflection, lowered his grade further:

Jamie, before pulling the rhetorical wagons around the Bush Administration, go back and look over my first response. I’ll try it again:

You can blame terrorists all you want for ruining Iraq, but at the end of the day, it’s our responsibility to make things right–or at least get Iraqis to do the job themselves. Oh, and Jamie? You damn well better feel sorry I can’t leave my Basra hotel without Iraqi protection–because last year I could. Six months after the January 30th elections, lawlessness in this city is on the rise, whether by Iranian agents, rouge policemen or opportunistic tribal gangs. Hmmm, considering the bang-up job the Brits are doing here, I think I’ll lower my estimation of the war effort to a C+.

To which Glazov replied:

Sheesh. Okay Steven, I”m almost afraid what will happen in the next round of this discussion.

Ok, seriously though, I hope you take care over there.

In reading through the complete transcript of the discussion, it is clear that Glazov did not get the glowing high marks that he expected from a cadre of conservative panelists.

Slowly, very slowly, eyes are opening.

My Soundtrack: Believe by Earl Slick on WOXY.

George Esseff Sr. is a good example of why I have conservative friends. In his What I Am… there are things that Mr. Esseff and I disagree on, but we’re both Americans and we both love our country and that should be enough for reasonable people. When we halt the conversation, that’s when the serious troubles begin.

Breath in, breath out, re-
peatedly empty and fill;
Counting up to echad

Forget tort reform, nail Wal Mart for rising health care costs. That’s the claim made by Tennessee state senator Tim Burchett (R-Knoxville) in Should Wal-Mart share blame for TennCare crisis?

During a town hall meeting sponsored by WATE, channel 6, Knoxville, Burchett said:

A large percentage of their employees are on TennCare and I’d like to see them use some of their profits to support some of their people, and things like that.

Could Wal Mart be turning into a non-partisan issue?

My Soundtrack: Summertime by Galaxie 500 on WOXY Vintage.

If you were at last month’s blogger meet-up — and if you weren’t, why the hell weren’t you? — you heard the discussion on reading website statistics. I check mine two or three times a month. After a small slump in June, my numbers are back up and have surpassed those from May, the previous high-water mark. Here’re the numbers:

Unique visitors — July: 3,794; June: 3,259

Number Of Visits — July: 8,842 June:6,794

Pages — July: 43,707; June: 30,376

Hits — July: 182,613; June: 117,214

Bandwidth — July: 1.52 GB; June: 2.4 GB

My Soundtrack: This Mess We’re In by PJ Harvey on WOXY.

Discovery astronaut Steve Robinson took this snap shot after his space walk to repair protuding fabric from the shuttle’s belly. The photos that stuck with me as an adolescent were of the Gemini astronauts during the first American space walks. I can’t imagine the discipline it takes to stay on task amongst such beauty.

OK, Cleveland Public Schools are in a seven-year death spiral and the principle architect of that plummet resigns. What will Mayor Jane Campbell do? She intends to follow the course Dr. Byrd-Bennett has set. The lesson of Tuesday”s levy defeat is that there is more work to be done in the Cleveland community, she said. Oh really?