In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… The Messiah Of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick; On My Computer… For the Thief by Alison Hawthorne Deming; On My Screen… Cobb (***) directed by Ron Shelton, written by Al Stump.

My Soundtrack: Stormwatch by Jethro Tull.

Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell will be speaking on the stweardship of our citizenship in 30-second Ohio For Jesus radio ads. The ads are being sponsored by The Ohio Restoration Project.

The Project’s plan is to recruit 2,000 Patriot Pastors in the state that will then:

seek God’s wisdom as they:

Register at least 300 New Voters able to shine a light for Godly candidates in the 2006 election cycle.

At the bottom of the groups webpage is this reminder:

America Has a Mission to Share a Living Savior With a Dying World.

Did you sign off on that mission? I sure didn’t. I’m going to have to go back to that pesky Constitution to see if I missed that one.

My Soundtrack: Broadsword And The Beast by Jethro Tull.

Robert Greenwald, the man who made the anti-Fox news movie: Outfoxed: Rupet Murcdoch’s War On Journalism, is now tackling Wal Mart. Greenwald has set up Wal Mart: The High Cost Of Low Price and is assembling financing and video to make this next movie. He expects to premeir the film on November 13th.

Greenwald says the movie will take:

the viewer on a deeply personal journey into the everyday lives of families struggling to fight goliath. From a small business owner in the Midwest to a preacher in California, from workers in Florida to a poet in Mexico, dozens of film crews on three continents bring the intensely personal stories of an assault on families and American values.

In his New York Times report Taking On A Giant (Whistleblowers Welcome), David Halbfinger writes:

The diminutive Mr. Greenwald, 61, is leading this assault on the retailing behemoth of Bentonville, Ark., from a converted hot-sheets motel in Culver City, Calif. There, where MGM executives once conducted their trysts, he and a dozen or so young producers and editors are compiling digital video from interviewing teams across the country, while spreading the word through advocacy groups and labor unions to invite whistleblowers to come forward.

Halbfinger asked Greenwald if he would strive for fairness in his documentary. Greenwald replied that:

he would offer top Wal-Mart executives the chance to be interviewed but did not see a reason to give them equal screen time. “I don’t feel an obligation, because they are spending $2 million a day now telling their side of the story,” he said, asserting that Wal-Mart spent that much on public relations.

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine likes the story and calls it an example of citizen journalism. Writes Jarvis:

Some way say it’s citizen journalism blowing the lid off the box with a smart mob, others may call it a new-media lynch mob. In any case, it’s a clever means of recruiting the audience to get behind the camera. To paraphrase Jay Rosen: Now the writers are readers, the readers are producers.

I’ve dropped an email to Greenwald to see how No Cleveland Wal Mart might become involved. Who are Cleveland’s smart videographers and how should they jump all over this?

Now, the real question is, will the Non-Union Cedar-Lee Theatre show the premeir?

My Soundtrack: A by Jethro Tull.

In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… The Messiah Of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick; On My Computer… Anniversary by Davi Walders; On My Screen… Cobb (***) directed by Ron Shelton, written by Al Stump.

My Soundtrack: Songs From The Wood by Jethro Tull.

If not a Wal Mart, why not…? That is the challenge issued by Adam Harvey on No Cleveland Wal Mart. Like Adam this is something I’ve been mulling over for a few days. Steelyard Commons is a big space: 126 acres, which, to put it in perspective, is only slightly smaller than the Cleveland Zoo’s 130 acres. So what would I do with it? I’d build a village.

Call it Schneider, or Campbell, Village.

As proof that eavesdropping is a good thing (we actually had exercises in it at journalism school), I learned of the New Urbanism movement several months ago while blogging from the then Arabica on Lee (now Cafe Chameleon). (See Overheard In A Coffeeshop… on Sunday, 20 February.) New Urbanism:

promotes the creation and restoration of diverse, walkable, compact, vibrant, mixed-use communities composed of the same components as conventional development, but assembled in a more integrated fashion, in the form of complete communities.

These contain housing, work places, shops, entertainment, schools, parks, and civic facilities essential to the daily lives of the residents, all within easy walking distance of each other. New Urbanism promotes the increased use of trains and light rail, instead of more highways and roads.

I would build a village with a European or New England feel. A place where the only motorized traffic is the trollery circulator. Where people walk and bike everywhere they want to go in the village. Where if you need to travel outside the village, you would actually consider hopping the light-rail connection to Tower City first.

Truck and automotive traffic would access the village via a ring road that fed into an underground parking garage. If the water table is too high to allow extensive underground construction, then other alternatives could be found such as a parking structure regularly served by the trolley.

Streets would connect to public spaces like the squares in Savanah, Georgia. Sight lines along streets would be short, no longer than three-quarters of a block to encourage a feeling of intimacy and community. Access to the river would be completely public with green space separating the village from the water.

Structures would emphasize ground-floor commerical use with second and third story occumpany for business owners, employees and residents. Village services would be personal and connected. Police would walk their beat and kids would help to wash the fire trucks and EMT vehicles.

Public and private schooling at least through the 8th grade would allow children to walk to school and for teachers to live in the community. Village offices would be dispersed so that civil servants would be a part of the community.

Easy access to day-to-day shopping and health care professionals would encourage multi-generational families to live in the village. Cars could become something you use once a week or less for the rare item you can’t buy in the village.

Pie in the sky? Of course. But even pie has to subcumb to gravity eventually.

My Soundtrack: Bursting Out by Jethro Tull.

The piece about the whole gay marriage debate that has always puzzled me is precisely how do opponents think that legalizing homosexual marriage harms heterosexual marriage. Whenever I’ve raised the question I get vague pronouncements about how if marriage doesn’t mean something special, then people won’t get married.

Which is, of course, a load of crap.

(Full disclosure: I am no model for the ideal marriage. My marriage of nearly 15 years ended in a dissolution back in 2000.)

The real threat to marriage is a general lack of desire to honor the institution in any meaningful way as evidenced by the way people in our present society marry and divorce or never bother to marry in the first place.

In this week’s The New Republic, Jonathan Rauch writes in Family’s Value (subscription required):

Getting people to marry is hard. Just having sex is more fun. Just shacking up, as it was once called, is easier. Marriage is under threat, all right. The threat, however, comes not from gay couples who want to get married but from straight couples who either do not get married or do not stay married. A third of American children are born to unmarried parents.

Same-sex marriage may be the first opportunity the country has had in decades to climb back up the slippery slope and say, quite dramatically, that marriage – not co-habitation, not partnership, not civil union, but marriage – is society’s first choice. An American gay couple in their eighties got married in Canada in 2003 after 58 years together. Asked why they bothered, one of them replied, “The maximum is getting married.” That is a good pro-marriage signal to send.

In my book there are only two reasons for marriage: procreation and companionship. While marriage can be optional in the latter, I don’t think it should be in the former. Yes. I know that there are lots of single-parent families out there doing wonderful things (I grew up in one) but I can’t imagine anyone saying that such families are preferable to a two-parent family where both partners are engaged in a loving partnership.

Several months ago in one of our Socrates Cafe sessions I posed the question: if you knew that there was no possibility of divorce except under extreme cases of cruelty or abandonment, would you get married? There was a stunned silence and then everyone started shaking their heads no.

That is the kind of Gold Standard that Rauch is talking about, I think. Maybe what we need is some kind of mandatory marriage contract, the kind of pre-nuptial agreement that the wealthy get, that clearly spells out all of the rights and responsibilities of a proposed marriage.

We spend more time considering cell phone contracts than we do marriage because it’s more difficult to get out of a cell phone contract.

My Soundtrack: Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull.

The World first publicly learned of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution when Emanuel Ringelblum published his account of escaping from a death camp in a Polish underground newspaper, the Liberty Brigade. The Nazi’s had detailed Ringelblum to bury Jews murdered in mobile gas chambers that used carbon monoxide from engine exhaust.

In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… The Messiah Of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick; On My Computer… The Enigma We Answer by Living by Alison Hawthorne Deming; On My Screen… Cobb (***) directed by Ron Shelton, written by Al Stump.

My Soundtrack: A Passion Play by Jethor Tull.

[Update: As expected the story that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat is all over the Internet with lots of people letting us know that they were right all along. I found Timothy Noah’s Deep Throat, Antihero on Slate particularly interesting for this question-and-response:

Six years ago, I asked Felt (who at that point was still denying he was Deep Throat) whether, if he were Deep Throat, that would be so terrible. His reply:

That’s not my view at all. It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information.

Does this mean that Felt made his annoucement because he wanted to be right with the Bureau and his peers before he dies? It seems that that is the case.]

Back on Sunday, 13 February, I told of my extremely peripheral connection to the person who brought down President Richard Nixon: Deep Throat. The subject arose when during Ohio University’s annual Communication Week Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee visited Dr. Dru Evart’s undergraduate communication law class. What I said then in Deep Throat was:

After a few softball questions, Deep Throat came up and my recollection is that Bradlee said this: there was no one person who was Deep Throat. The figure was a composite, the code name was a cover for a number of sources inside and close to the Nixon administration.

At that time, because Bradlee had said in an interview that Deep Throat was near death and that the Post already had his obituary written, I asked the question: was Bradlee having a little fun at the expense of a class of naive Woodward wannabes?

Well, now I know.

The Washington Post has confirmed today that W. Mark Felt, former No. 2 man at the FBI, was, in fact, Deep Throat.

Felt came forward on his own and Vanity Fair broke the story first.

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine has a good blow-by-blow as to how this broke in Deep Throated.

While it’s not something I’ve ever dwelled upon, Watergate was the story that sent many in my generation to jouranlism school. No other confidential source could ever have as cool a name as Deep Throat. And no other reporters could be as cool as Redford and Hoffm, err… Woodward and Bernstein.

I wonder if this how kids feel when they figure out there is no Santa Claus?

My Soundtrack: Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull.

We’ve all seen the motivational posters. They appear on the walls in our offices and in our schools. The central message harkens back to word of Napoleon Hill, the grandfather of all self-help books: what the mind can conceive and believe, the body can achieve. Bull shit, of course, but it plays really well when you’re charging $450 for an afternoon of platitudes.

These appeal to my sick, twisted sense that nothing is sacred. Despair Inc. has Harvard Lampoon written all over it, but hey, it could be real. E. Lawrence Kersten is a hoot.

Thanks to Dan Wismar at Wizblog for the heads-up.

My Soundtrack: Aqualung by Jethro Tull.

One of the aspects of a Wal Mart invasion that gets missed is what happens on the bloody morning after. When all other local retail has dried up and blown away and a town is left only with its Big Box, what do you do if Wal Mart threatens to leave town? You drop to your knees and beg.

That’s the straights the town of McGehee, Arkansas, finds itself in.

According to Jennifer Barnett Reed’s Arkansas Times article Don’t Dare Take Our Wal Mart the small town of 4,310 has learned that its :

small, outdated Wal-Mart will shut down if the company decides to build a Supercenter in a rival town 20 miles up the highway. Everyone from the mayor to students at the high school starts throwing everything they can at the corporate Wal-Mart wall – Census figures and crime statistics, barrages of phone calls and e-mails, the implied threat of a whole bunch of bad PR – hoping enough will stick to convince Wal-Mart to stay.

The words of Mayor Bain Poole should be carved in stone in front of every city hall in the country.

…when you reach the point where Wal-Mart”s all you got left – we”re trying to keep it.

And one tin soldeir rides away.

My Soundtrack: Yer Album by The James Gang.

In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… Seizure by Robin Cook; On My Nightstand… The Messiah Of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick; On My Computer… Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Walt Whitman; On My Screen… Cobb (***) directed by Ron Shelton, written by Al Stump.

My Soundtrack: Dreamboat Annie by Heart.

No. I’m not talking about shadowy, and not-so-shadowy, figures around the world threatening to destroy the great satan. No. I’m talking about tax-paying citizens who benefit every day from everything our country does for them.

The 4th highest public official in our nation, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, makes it clear that:

Disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States. We honor the sacred books of all the world’s great religions. Disrespect for the Holy Koran is abhorrent to us all.

Yet, we have people who are obviously not with the program. As reported by Josh Humphries in Rutherford County, North Carolina’s , Digital Courier, Pastor Creighton Lovelace believes that the Koran should be flushed down the toilet and posted a sign to that effect in front of his Danieltown Baptist Church. In Church Sign Sparks Debate, Pastor Lovelace says:

I believe that it is a statement supporting the word of God and that it (the Bible) is above all and that any other religious book that does not teach Christ as savior and lord as the 66 books of the Bible teaches it, is wrong. I knew that whenever we decided to put that sign up that there would be people who wouldn’t agree with it, and there would be some that would, and so we just have to stand up for what’s right.

Do you suppose Homeland Security Agents can take time away from chasing down the latest Weapon of Mass Capitalism Destruction – pirated copies of Revenge of the Sith – for a conversation with Pastor Lovelace?

Me neither.

My Soundtrack: Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie.

Let me tell you a story. As long as I have lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, I’ve always been the person in the household who did the grocery shopping. For many years my choice spot was Russo’s at the top of Cedar Hill.

I knew that I was paying about 10 percent more there than I would if I shopped at one of the bigger chains like Tops or Finast. But the managers and staff at Russo’s made it special. I came to know most of the staff by name over the years, and my shopping experience was a good one.

Then Giant Eagle descended and gobbled up the locally owned, independent grocery. There wasn’t any immediate change. Everybody seemed happy and staying in place.

Then, one Saturday I was in line with two cart loads, about $200 in groceries, and perusing the tabloids while the ever efficient cashier rang my purchases through. At $212.63 the tally stopped and I pulled out my check book, an exercise I had been performing about 18 times a year since I moved to Cleveland Heights in 1985.

I made the check out to Russo’s Giant Eagle, signed it and handed it over to cashier, who smiled and asked” May I have your Giant Eagle card, please?”

When I told her I didn’t have a Giant Eagle card but that the manager already bagging my groceries could vouch for me, we both turned.

The manager had obviously been listening to the conversation. He looked at me with a helpless expression. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hess, but it’s the corporate policy from Pittsburgh. You have to have a Giant Eagle card before we can cash your check.”

I nodded, turned back to the cashier, retrieved my check and tore it in half.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” I said. “You can put it all back on the shelf.” And then I left Russo’s.

I’ve never been back.

I relate this story because of something I read this morning from Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Bill Clinton. In his op-ed piece Don’t Blame Wal Mart for the New York Times, Reich asks a critical question while writing about a successful campaign to keep Wal Mart out of Queens:

But isn’t Wal-Mart really being punished for our sins? After all, it’s not as if Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, and his successors created the world’s largest retailer by putting a gun to our heads and forcing us to shop there.

Reich goes on to write:

…many of us pressure companies to give us even better bargains. I look on the Internet to find the lowest price I can and buy airline tickets, books, merchandise from just about anywhere with a click of a mouse. Don’t you?

We can blame big corporations, but we’re mostly making this bargain with ourselves. The easier it is for us to get great deals, the stronger the downward pressure on wages and benefits.

One of my favorite observations by Dear Abby has always been that no one can take advantage of you without your permission. Wal Mart grew to be the giant it is because we became besotted with getting the absolutely best deal.

Well folks, there are a lot of ways of defining best deal. Price, while it may be the obvious choice, is seldom the best choice. We all get what we pay for and by paying little, look what we get? We all have to take some responsibility for the way our demand for low, low prices results in low, low wages for Wal Mart associates.

My Soundtrack: The Empire Strikes Back by John Williams.

In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… Seizure by Robin Cook; On My Nightstand… The Messiah Of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick; On My Computer… Achilles’ Heel by William Kloefkorn; On My Screen… Cobb (***) directed by Ron Shelton, written by Al Stump.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by Bob Dylan.

[Update: Tuesday, 31 May. From Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish:

As a former Marine officer I can tell you that your criticism of the inscription on the tank was proper. The officer or NCO in charge of that tank should at a minimum be reprimanded.

However, I suggest, it may have been better had you not printed that misguided and vile email. It may give some the idea that the opinion of that one soldier, probably someone ensconced in the safety of the Green Zone, represents more than just his or her immature braggadocio. I have great doubt it represents the thinking of the great majority of our soldiers and Marines.

I have no doubt that this Marine officer is sincere and correct in what he says. But it’s not the great majority of service personnel I’m concerned with. It’s the lunatic fringe that scares me.]

Last Tuesday, 24 May, Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish linked to this photograph of an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank from the Marines 4th tank battalion in Iraq. I served in the Navy and Army and I’m familiar with the tradition of unorthodox, and often not-suitable-for-family-viewing, names given to hardware.

But given the West’s history of crusading in the Middle East, you have to wonder what the commanding officer of the tank platoon was thinking.

At least one soldier in Iraq took exception to Sullivan’s reporting. The soldier wrote:

“I would hope to see you over here in theater running your pie-hole about your calls to remove Marines from their post for the ‘New Testament’ inscription on the main battle tank. You would be buried with your insurgent ‘friends’ that you support, through your criticism of our men and women dying for this mission with a bulldozer.

Most of us are Christians and will continue to support our faith in any way we see fit. Do the right thing: support us or STFU !!!!!!!!!!” – from a soldier in Iraq.

This line scares me:

Most of us are Christians and will continue to support our faith in any way we see fit.

Not as set forth and allowable by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not as established and defined by the Constitution of the United States, but rather in any way we see fit.

Anyone else sense a problem here?

My Soundtrack: In Session by GRP.