SUBVERSIVE BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY…
1508 by Jeff Hess
20 July 2005
20 July 2005
EGG ON THE CHICKEN SHIT…?
1447 by Jeff Hess
The Cleveland Scene claims to have one of two stories that Plain Dealer editor Doug Clifton has been exercising editorial judgment on: that’s withholding according to the New York Times. If you’re not up to speed on this on-going story, you’ll find the background on Chicken Shit update. Be sure to check inside for details.
City For Sale, written by edtior Peter Kotz, begins: If you believe a secret affidavit authored by the FBI, the City of Cleveland was open for business during the reign of former Mayor Mike White. And that business was extortion.
The affidavit — sealed by a federal judge but obtained by Scene — was written in 2002 by FBI Agent Christine Oliver as part of a wiretap request targeting multiple people. Its 64 pages are loaded with damning allegations against White, contending there’s probable cause to believe the mayor headed an extortion ring, whereby businesses were forced to pay bribes in exchange for city, school, and airport contracts. It also contains confessions of bribery by Cleveland businessmen.
What have Cleveland journalists (that includes us bloggers) learned from all of this?
My Soundtrack: This Past Week by The Radio Department on WOXY.
20 July 2005
THE YEAR OF COFFEE BLOG…
1427 by Jeff Hess
Via Brewed Fresh Daily comes Lloyd Y. Asato, who writes: My first two cups of the Year of Coffee were brewed at home with the start button being pressed at midnight on the first. The idea of posting photos of each and every cup I consume this year just seemed to make sense. More truth and a reason will hopefully be revealed.
20 July 2005
ONE FOR THE TRIBE…
1310 by Jeff Hess
Recently, while going through an airport during one of his many trips, President Bush encountered a man with long gray hair, wearing a white robe and sandals, holding a staff. President Bush went up to the man and said, “Has anyone told you that you look like Moses?” The man never answered. He just kept staring straight ahead.
The president said, “Moses!” in a loud voice.
The man just stared ahead, never acknowledging the president.
The president pulled a Secret Service agent aside and, pointing to the robed man, asked him, “Am I crazy or does that man not look like Moses to you?”
The Secret Service agent looked at the man carefully and agreed.
“Well,” said the president, “every time I say his name, he ignores me and stares straight ahead, refusing to speak. “Watch!” Again the president yelled, “Moses!” and again the man ignored him.
The Secret Service agent went up to the man in the white robe and whispered, “You look just like Moses. Are you Moses?”
The man leaned over and whispered back, “Yes, I am Moses. However, the last time I talked to a bush, I spent 40 years wandering in the desert and ended up leading my people to the only spot in the entire Middle East where there is no oil.”
20 July 2005
IN YOUR FACE VOWELL…
1245 by Jeff Hess
You know things are sad when a New Yorker like Sarah Vowell, in Ask Me About Cleveland, needs to get a self-esteem boost from uber-lame shots at Ohio and Cleveland. She writes: The Democratic nominee finally noticed that my town can be unfair to black people, too. In your face, Cleveland. I’m sorry. This is the paper of record? Please.
19 July 2005
SUBVERSIVE BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY…
1405 by Jeff Hess
19 July 2005
ON THE MEDIA ON CLIFTON TRANSCRIPT…
1201 by Jeff Hess
On the Media has posted the transcript of the Doug Clifton interview. Because I think it is important enough, I’ve taken the precaution of archiving the interveiw on Have Coffee Will Write complete with his: …it galls me that a bunch of armchair people who haven”t a clue are suggesting that I just rolled over. That pisses me off mightily.
19 July 2005
MMMMM… CAFFEINE…
0733 by Jeff Hess
Via Sandy comes everything you want to know about the magic drug. Caffeine is an alkaloid. There are numerous compounds called alkaloids, among them we have the methylxanthines, with three distinguished compounds: caffeine, theophylline, and theobromine, found in cola nuts, coffee, tea, cacao beans, mate and other plants.
19 July 2005
BOOM, BOOM, BOOMAH, BOOM, BOOMAH…
0545 by Jeff Hess
It was the Oxford, Mississippi postmaster (and writer) William Faulkner who said: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. The Community Land Use and Economics Group likes the quote well enough to make it the epigram for its website.
CLUE Group is a consulting firm that helps communities create vibrant, dynamic downtowns and neighborhoods.
We help local and state governments, developers, and nonprofits design innovative downtown economic development strategies, cultivate independent businesses, recycle historic buildings, attract young talent, strengthen downtown management programs, and craft planning and land use tools that mitigate sprawl and stimulate town center development.
Amazingly enough, the folks at the CLUE Group don’t care much for Wal Mart. On its website today, CLUE Group lists five Wal Mart battles for the week in: Bakersfield, California; San Bruno, California; Westminster, Colorado; Pittsboro, North Carolina; Belleville, Illinois and Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Cleveland could use a little bit of innovative downtown economic development strategy.
My Soundtrack: Sixty Lives by Aberdeen City on WOXY.
19 July 2005
ON THE MEDIA ON CLIFTON…
0518 by Jeff Hess
The audio file of the Plain Dealer editor Doug Clifton’s interview with On The Media’s Bob Garfield is now up. The transcript is not yet available, but On The Media now promises that it will be available this afternoon. Fast forward to 3:32 minutes into the broadcast to hear Clifton. His Dumbest thing outburst comes at 10:27.
18 July 2005
SUBVERSIVE BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY…
1402 by Jeff Hess
18 July 2005
BOOM, BOOM, BOOMAH, BOOM, BOOMAH…
0344 by Jeff HessMr. Smith, meet Mr. Walton. Frank Capra, of course, is doing cartwheels six feet under with this newest march on Washington. According to The New Republic Online’s Wal Mart Comes To Washington by Clay Risen (subscription required), the Bentonville Behemoth has discovered the magic of lobbying in our nation’s capital. Risen writes:
As recently as 1998, for example, [Wal Mart] spent less than $50,000 on federal lobbying, a minuscule amount compared with outlays by other top-ten U.S. companies. In the late ’90s, at the urging of Senator Trent Lott, it set up a small government relations office and opened the PAC spigot a bit, but its 2000 givings didn’t even place it among the top 100 donors.
Last year, however, that began to change.
Partly in response to growing public antipathy and the change in union strategy, it has greatly expanded its Washington office. It has hired several new lobbyists and replaced its government affairs chief with Lee Culpepper, the former head lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association and a key player in backroom GOP politics (among other things, he was instrumental in organizing support for John Thune, the conservative Republican who unseated Tom Daschle).
And it has quickly developed a network of well-connected outside lobbyists; according to lobbying disclosure records, it has retained more than a dozen of them, including two Bush pioneers, two former staffers for House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, Tennessee Representative Harold Ford Jr.’s former chief of staff, and George Koch, father of George W. Bush’s brother-in-law.
But with increased influence comes increased exposure. Riven writes:
…it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Wal-Mart will become an issue in the next elections. For one thing, as Kerry found last year, the company makes a great stand-in for the issues that many Democrats want to focus on: Health care, wages, and offshore outsourcing.
They will be held up as bad guys in ’06 on particular issues, says Jennifer Palmieri, a 2004 presidential campaign veteran now with the Center for American Progress. They’re Democrats’ best talking point on why we need more progressive policy.
Risen thinks that Wal Mart taking center stage in this manner is going to hurt it. He writes:
With most of Wal-Mart’s lobbyists coming from Republican ranks–and more than 80 percent of its contributions going to the GOP–Democrats will have an easy time linking their opponents to Wal-Mart’s misdeeds. All the money in the world isn’t going to change the facts, says Paul Blank director of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. It’s their business decisions that are coming back to haunt them.
Boo!
My Soundtrack: Motivation by Tommy Stinson on WOXY.
17 July 2005
ON THE MEDIA ON CLIFTON, AFTER…
0925 by Jeff Hess
“The dumbest thing I”ve ever done was to put those two paragraphs at the end of that editorial,” Plain Dealer editor Doug Clifton told Bob Garfield in a nine-minute interview on this week’s On The Media. The MP3 and transcripts are not yet posted, but you can read my on-the-fly notes on the story in Chicken Shit Updates.
17 July 2005
BOOM, BOOM, BOOMAH, BOOM, BOOMAH…
0847 by Jeff HessIn Cleveland it’s Steelyard Commons. In Sandy, Utah, it’s the Gravel Pit. And Wal Mart wants them both.
According to Wal-Mart Foes Win The Right To A Vote by Kersten Swinyard in the Deseret Morning News:
The state’s high court said Friday that Save Our Communities, a group of Sandy residents who have fought big box development, had enough signatures to force a referendum on a zoning change that would allow development on a 107-acre former gravel pit…
At issue was the percentage of signatures needed for referendum petitions. The court clarified that zoning changes are not land-use laws, which require referendum petitions to have signatures of 20 percent of residents who voted in the last gubernatorial election. After this decision, zoning law referenda need signatures from 10 percent of voters.
Voters in the town will now have their chance to say Yea or Nay to Wal Mart on 8 November.
Isn’t democracy a wonderful thing?
My Soundtrack: Can I Unwind? by The Blood Arm on WOXY.
17 July 2005
SUBVERSIVE BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY…
0756 by Jeff Hess
17 July 2005
17 July 2005
ADVISORY BOARD ON CLIFTON…
0404 by Jeff Hess
In Advisory network weighs in on confidential sources The Plain Dealer reports that a consensus of self-selected readers sent a message to editor Doug Clifton and told him that It is the paper”s duty to publish stories in the public interest so long as the information was reliable. That’s a surprise. Maybe he should have asked earlier?
16 July 2005
BOOM, BOOM, BOOMAH, BOOM, BOOMAH…
1018 by Jeff HessIn Wal Mart Comes To Washington by Clay Risen, The New Republic Online (subscription required) offers us this insight about organizing workers at the Bentonville Behemoth:
When Wal-Mart became a major blip on labor’s radar screen in the early ’90s, the obvious answer was, of course, to organize. But organizing retail is different from organizing, say, a factory. Even large stores require much less capital than industrial plants, a fact that allows Wal-Mart to easily shutter upstart stores or departments (in 2000, for example, when the UFCW organized the meat-cutting department of a Texas store, Wal-Mart closed its meat-cutting departments nationwide two weeks later).
Not that many stores have ever gotten to that point. Wal-Mart–which is the nation’s largest private employer and the world’s largest company (with annual revenue that exceeds the GDP of Sweden)–trains its managers in anti-union tactics and, as a last resort, even dispatches anti-union response teams. Straight-up organizing in this country is difficult enough under the law, says one UFCW representative. And, when you’re going up against a nation-state company, it doesn’t behoove you to go after one store at a time.
Nation-State Company? Is Wal Mart covered under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty?
My Soundtrack: Brigitte by Stereolab on WOXY.
16 July 2005
ON THE MEDIA ON CLIFTON, BEFORE…
0947 by Jeff HessOn The Media host Bob Garfield interviews Plain Dealer editor Doug Clifton this afternoon at 4 p.m. on WCPN, 90.3 FM. I’m beginning to wonder if any local story has gotten this much national and international attention. Does anyone out there with really long memeories of Cleveland know of a local story that generated this kind of buzz?
16 July 2005
SUBVERSIVE BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY…
0944 by Jeff Hess
