In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… Naked Prey by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Joseph Andrews and Shamela by Henry Fielding; On My Computer… Body Bags by R. S. Gwynn; On My Screen… Homicide: Bop Gun (***) directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and written by David Simon and David Mills.

My Soundtrack: Dogs Of Lust by The The on WOXY.

get yours from: northern sun-products for progressives since 1979

If not Wal Mart why not: Destiny U.S.A.? Back on 4 June, I suggested that maybe a canal-orientated, inner-city village might make sense for Steelyard Commons. My imagining, however, pales before Roger Congel’s vision for the waterfront in Syracuse, New York.

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s The Mall That Would Save America, Amanda Griscom Little writes:

What Congel has in mind is an outsize and extremely unusual mega-mall. Destiny U.S.A., the retail-and-entertainment complex he is building in upstate New York, aspires to be not only the biggest man-made structure on the planet but also the most environmentally friendly.

Equal parts Disney World, Las Vegas, Bell Laboratories and Mall of America — with a splash of Walden Pond — the ”retail city” will include the usual shops and restaurants as well as an extensive research facility for testing advanced technologies and a 200-acre recreational biosphere complete with springlike temperatures and an artificial river for kayaking.

OK. Syracuse, New York, has a population of less than 150,000. Cleveland, Ohio, has more than three times that population and yet the best Mayor Jane Campbell can do is a Wal Mart?

Anybody want to lay odds that there isn’t a Wal Mart anywhere in Congel’s plans?

My Soundtrack: It’s Amiable by Benzos on WOXY.

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton, John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark. Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross. Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton, William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall and George Walton.

[Update: At 7:15 this morning, the staff of Morning Edition read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety. Hearing it brought tears to my eyes. I am truly among the most fortunate of Humans to have been born in this, the greatest nation that this world has ever known.]

In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… Naked Prey by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Joseph Andrews and Shamela by Henry Fielding; On My Computer… How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry; On My Screen… Homicide: Bop Gun (***) directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and written by David Simon and David Mills.

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

get yours from: northern sun-products for progressives since 1979

Megan is off on her Main Streets adventure. Her trip reminds me of a similar trip a friend took in the ’80s to visit all the old ball parks that were slated to be torn down. What Megan is visiting and documenting is what Wal Mart is destroying. Be sure to take a look at the pictures she’s taking.

Thanks to Christine at Really Bad Cleveland Accent for the tip.

My Soundtrack: 10 $ by M.I.A. on WOXY.

According to today’s New York Times, Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, conservatives think Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is too far to the left to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The people who still believe that Terry Schiavo was murdered want to make sure that a feeding tube is never again pulled.

My Soundtrack: Two Sides/Monsieur Valentine by Spoon on WOXY.

Last Thursday, President Bush delivered what had to be the worst speech of his presidency. Setting aside the faked applause issue, he spoke for nearly 30 minutes about an Iraq that doesn’t exist in any reality but his own. The girl blogger at Baghdad Burning writes at length about reactions to the speech. My favorite exchange is at the end where she writes:

Do the Americans continue to believe such speeches? I couldn”t help but wonder.

“They”ll believe anything.” E. sighed. “No matter what sort of absurdity they are fed, they”ll believe it. Think up the most outrageous lie… They have people who”ll believe it.”

The cousin sat up at this, his interest piqued. “The most outrageous lie? How about that Iraq was amassing aliens from Mareekh [Mars] and training them in the battle art of kung-fu to attack America in 2010!”

“They”d believe it.” E. nodded in the affirmative. “Or that Iraq was developing a mutant breed of rabid, man-eating bunnies to unleash upon the Western world. They”d believe that too.”

Hmmm… Do you suppose Scientologists are involved?

My Soundtrack: Art Is Hard by Cursive on WOXY.

Today is the birthday of Fraz Kafka who wrote: I need solitude for my writing. Not like a hermit-that wouldn’t be enough-but like a dead man; and I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

My Soundtrack: The Nurse by The White Stripes on WOXY.

For the record, I much prefer Milkbones.

My Soundtrack: Retrovertigo by Mr. Bungle on WOXY.

In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… Naked Prey by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Life Of Pi by Yann Martel; On My Computer… Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare; On My Screen… Homicide: Bop Gun (***) directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and written by David Simon and David Mills.

My Soundtrack: Phoebe’s Song by The Caulfield Sisters onWOXY.

[Update: The Newsweek story is online. Will the magazine redeem itself?]

Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source on the Valerie Plame story. So says Lawrence O’Donnell, a senior political analyst for MSNBC. O’Donnell made his revelation Friday during a taping of the McLaughlin Report which first aired Friday evening. Federal law imposes a mandatory federal prison sentance of not less than five years for naming a present or retired officer or employee of the CIA. In a brief statement under Rove Blew CIA Cover O’Donnel writes:

I revealed in yesterday’s taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine’s emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source. I have known this for months but didn’t want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.

McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don’t expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.

Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an ‘It’s Rove!’ story and will probably break it tomorrow.

Halderman, Liddy, Colson, Ehrlichman, Hunt, Nixon, Rove, Bush. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

My Soundtrack: The Distance by Cake on WOXY.

As a Cleveland blogger I’m on the periphery of the firing of Ed Morrison from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Mangement Center For Regional Economic Issues. This evening as I was reading more of George Nemeth’s excellent coverage I made the following comment.

Consider how this would have spun out even five years ago. The same people close to Ed would have known what really happened. Roldo, the Scene and The Free Times might have picked it up.

But it’s also possible that Ed might have had second thoughts about bucking the machine in Cleveland and decided that saying he was fired was the less politic thing to say. If George had been a print journalist, or even a broadcast journalist, with a deadline hours or days away, Ed might have been able to put the genie back in the bottle.

But George is a blogger, a citizen journalist whose deadline is minutes or even seconds away. By the time Ed had a chance to rethink what he’d said, I, and I don’t know how many others had read the story and repeated it in our own blogs.

Now, I don’t know Ed. But maybe, just maybe, the fact that his words were flying around Cleveland like so many Canadian soldiers helped to embolden him a bit. Perhaps that fact caused him to realize he couldn’t stop the wave so he’d best start paddling like hell so that he could ride the curl.

I like to think that a lot of people like Dean Myron Roomkin at Case Western Reserve University and elsewhere in Cleveland are thinking about how they no longer control the message. And maybe this will cause the dean to consider practicing a little transparency that Lee Batdorff is wishing for, instead of issuing bullshit press releases. Maybe we”ll get to know what the dean”s true motivations were. Maybe.

I just Googled +”Ed Morrison” +Case and got 4,040 hits. The first screen is loaded with blog entries about the firing. The same search on Techorati came up with 22 posts in the last five days.

The dean and Ed will be dealing with this information for the rest of their lives. Regardless of how each might wish to spin the story one, two or ten years from now, anyone curious enough to know what happened will have all the facts at their finger tip in a matter of seconds.

That”s Citizen Journalism.

My Soundtrack: Red Tan by The Ravonettes on WOXY.

I don’t normally anticipate the release of new albums, but since I’ve been posting my soundtrack to here, I’ve found myself reading a lot more early-release notes on CD Universe and listening to early-release tracks on WOXY, which is where I heard songs from Willie Nelsons 12 July release-date Reggae album: Countryman.

My Soundtrack: Take Ecstasy With Me by !!! on WOXY.

get yours from: northern sun-products for progressives since 1979

For those of you who care about this kind of thing, here’s a few of my May/June numbers. Unique visitors: 3,674/3,259; number of visits: 7,436/6,794; pages: 34,182/30,376; hits: 127,124/117,214; bandwidth: 1.42 GB/1.52 GB. Spain topped my list for page looks from outside the United States with 512 peeks. Olé!

My Soundtrack: Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt by We Are Scientists on WOXY.

Superbarista Sarah Wilson-Jones is pulling together a gathering of baristas and people really serious about their espresso to pull naked shots and delve into espresso phases. It’ll be at the downtown Phoenix Coffee house on Sunday, 10 July. If you’d like an invitation, let me know and I’ll pass your name along to Sarah.

My Soundtrack: Shake Those Windows by Athlete on WOXY.

Late last year James Randi wrote about how DriMark, maker of the Smart Money Counterfeit Detector Pen, has managed to scam people into believing that its pen can identify phony money. The pens use common iodine to check for the presence of common starch, the assumption being that counterfeiters would use cheap paper with high starch content to print their money.

DriMark says its pens are:

Simple to use and very reliable. While no method of counterfeit detection is perfect, Smart Money Counterfeit Pens are an excellent deterrent for the passing of counterfeit currency, and will detect a great majority of false notes.

Randi contacted the Secret Service, which, in addition to protecting the president, is responsible for dealing with counterfeit money. The exchange between Randi and the agent went like this:

RANDI: Does [the pen] work as advertised?

AGENT: It is not dependable.

RANDI: Not dependable, like, 100 percent not dependable?

AGENT: You might say that.

This week Randi, in Starch Discovered At Shaw’s Supermarket, tells us about what may be the greatest prank of the 21st century.

I regularly go to my bank and take out a couple thousand dollars in $50 bills. I bring them back to the JREF library, lay them out on the large table there, and spray them with canned spray-starch. I let them dry, then turn them over and treat the other side.

When they’re all prepared, I put them back in the same wrappers, make out a deposit slip, and trot out to my bank again. I admit that the folks there are quite mystified by this sequence, and probably examine those bills very carefully before mixing them back in with the currency population.

But just picture the result: all over the state of Florida and beyond, innocent customers are offering very real currency in return for goods and services – and being accused of proffering counterfeit bills. If this happens enough times, with the bills being checked and validated, people are going to become convinced that this phony device just doesn’t work.

There will be exceptions, of course. One will be our local German restaurant, the Old Heidelberg, where I unknowingly tried to pass one of my own treated bills, and was lectured by the dunderhead in charge on how useful the pen was.

They even called in a local cop, who agreed that this was a legitimate means of detecting phony bills, was not at all swayed by a call I made to the Secret Service – they verified that the pen didn’t work – and trotted me off to the local bank.

The manager there validated the bill, and the cop ushered me out and told me to not do that again. I guess he meant dining at the Old Heidelberg – and I’ve obeyed that order carefully. If they’re that uninformed at that restaurant, they may not know the difference between a bratwurst and a tube of caulking. And that could be fatal.

It’s too bad that they don’t use those pens on $2 bills. That could make the prank double fun.

My Soundtrack: The Skin Of My Yellow Country by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on WOXY.

Jimi Izrael got a column killed, the third in 10 years by his count. His editor didn’t like Izrael’s spin on the nasty divorce of author Terry McMillan and her Groove husband John Plummer. Except for one line on responsibility, Jamaican boy friends and AIDS, I didn’t see what the big deal was. What do you think?

My Soundtrack: Good Reason by Seafood on WOXY.