from the PD: how dare you say no to our big accounts!

The Plain Dealer editorial board inveighs against politicians who voted against a congressional give-away to some of the PD's major advertising accounts.

The irony is that, if the PD had had the guts to "just say no" in the first placeto the influencers behind the tainted advertising dollars, we might not all be in the pickle we're in today.

This "just say no" idea applies not only to the foreclosure mess but also to the MedicalMartConventionCenter sellout. The PD has not been an advocate for this community for a good long time, and it shows.

When it comes to advertising, they do not discriminate, except against the best interests of the majority of the public.

the unshockable P.J.

Extensive pornography found on Patrick O'Malley's computer - Cleveland Metro News - The Latest Breaking News, Photos and Stories from The Plain Dealer:

Having been involved in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County politics for most of his adult life, it seems that nothing much fazed P. J. Let's hope this case does not make history with what might be termed the O'Malley Weird Worksite Mitigation Defense: "Please, your honor, my work environment was so weird I thought this other stuff was kinda regular."

"The government found images of bestiality, bondage and other acts of sexual deviance on a computer seized from the home of former Cuyahoga County Recorder Patrick O'Malley in 2004.

A sentencing memorandum filed Monday by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan details the wide assortment of pornographic images and text that led to O'Malley's recent conviction."

Why is this blogsite hanging? Did SiteMeter sell me out?

For the past few days, this blogsite has been hanging up everybody who comes here. It started the day we posted the foreign-language renditions of commentary on Ohio's HB 477.

Toodling around the internet, I've found similar problems occurring over the past year for others due to something called dg.specificclick.net, which they say was introduced by Sitemeter, which we used until yesterday. Here's the story and the supposed cure for the malady: http://michaelsync.net/2007/04/11/things-you-should-know-before-using-sitemeter

I could actually see the dg.specificclick.net come in and take over the page loading process, so I got rid of its cookies and Sitemeter as well. Everything worked for a while.

Now, it's all hanging up all over again. Well-wishers are emailing me to say that, having entered here, they've abandoned all hope and will follow my progress even more vicariously than before, from other perspectives, in other ways, safely.

If anybody has some suggestions, and can post a comment here, I'd appreciate help finding a work-around. If you can't post, the I am emailable at taferrisATgmail.com.

Network Weaving: The Other Pentagon

Network Weaving: The Other Pentagon

This explains a lot. I remember being surprised at LaTourette's new spouse and her job a while back; I guess I shouldn't have been.

It seemed like such a blatant conflict of interest.

eejits

Eejit: Northern Ohio's idiot wind -- I've been reading Frank Delaney's Tipperary lately, and in it he talks of things Irish, things that have emigrated to this area as well, like Home Rule, blatant exploitation of one class by another, and eejits. I began to wonder about the residency issue, and began thinking that anybody who would lobby to give up residency in a city that not only has Home Rule but also controls all the water is a fool, and should be allowed to go seek his or her fortune elsewhere.

With the water issue, Lee Fisher came to mind, and how he, too, is part of the gale-force idiot wind blowing though here, trying to position himself as the arbiter of good sense and the broker of water rights for political and economic gain. As is his wont, he was heavy-handed again, and that works to our benefit. He's not different from all your other politicians; his impatience just gets the better of him quicker.

And now you also have an inkling of why our politicians allowed one class, the lenders, to exploit the American neighborhoods as they did: If they, and foreign investors, own the majority of the land, and we are their indentured servants, they can dispose of their water any way they please.

We've already been exploited on things that make our machines go, like oil, and we've paid for it and continue to pay for it dearly. Don't let them disenfranchise us on water, one of the things that make people go.

Remember: Oil makes our machines go, water makes people go (We'll have to work on rephrasing that a bit.). And remember: In the Great Lakes region, we are sitting on top of a lot of fresh-water assets. We are valuable now for the same reason we were valuable 100 and 200 years ago: our "natural" heritage, as in natural assets.

Our "built" heritage is something we need to conserve, as well, and that's what the lenders have been going after and what they now sit on top of and hold, letting it lie fallow because our governments allow it. Are you starting to see the connections?

Natural heritage. Built heritage. What makes us great. What makes us valuable.

new perspective on CPAC

I was talking to an academic last night at Edgewater Park about Tom Schorgl and the payback price for Issue 18, and found out there is a new interpretation of the acronym CPAC around town lately: Commissioners' Political Action Committee.

these are the same people who bring you SB117

Wait a minute! Where'd my phone card time go? - cleveland.com -- Let's start putting two and two together for a change, around here. Here's a story of how AT&T cheats customers on their calling-card phone minutes, perfectly legally, using "the fine print." This is one of the ways they help transfer wealth out of our hands and into theirs, where they can then use it in a lobbying and advertising effort to get SB117 passed, ostensibly in the interests of increased competition which would benefit us, the consumers.

Basically, all we should know about AT&T is that they're not trustworthy, and on that basis, out of hand, we should have our legislators bounce SB117 right out of the legislative process. Make no mistake, these two issues are related; they speak to the character of a corporation that has a history of exploitation of the public and quibbling over legalisms.

Get ready to defend yourselves, if your legislators down in Columbus don't. Here's part of the PD article; the bold emphasis is mine:

AT&T sells a card good for 500 minutes of long-distance calling. But if you use it to call from Mayfield Heights to Cincinnati, your minutes will be used up three times faster than you'd expect.

The reason's in the very fine print on the back of the card.

"Minute value applies to state-to-state calls only. . . . For calls that begin and end in the same state, minutes are deducted at these rates . . ." What follows is a long list that says in-state calls are charged at the regular 60-second minute in a handful of places, including the U.S. Virgin Islands, but it's 3-for-1 in most states, including Ohio; 5-for-1 in many others, including Pennsylvania; and a blazing 8-for-1 in Missouri, New Mexico and North and South Dakota.

This time manipulation is beyond government regulation. State agencies have no jurisdiction over long-distance carriers. And the Federal Communications Commission doesn't regulate long-distance rates. AT&T says it's the FCC's fault. In June 2006, an agency ruling required AT&T to pay state access fees for in-state calls. It decided to pass those fees along by speeding up the clock.

A spokesman for the Ohio Consumers' Counsel said AT&T is the only company it knows is compressing time. But there are other kinds of hidden fees, and the Counsel's office offers fact sheets; call 1-877-742-5622 or check online at www.pickocc.org.

time for that style makeover

While watching my minimalist concession to television viewing, Boston Legal, I got hooked by the news teaser about another police shooting.

Now, I've just got done with watching Ted Henry on Cleveland's Channel 5 deliver an innuendo-laden "news" report about the shooting of a young man over here in the vicinity of West 82nd and Denison. For my money, these TV stations are not our friends, and they're bad for the community at large. Go to Channel 5 on your own if you want to see the video clip, because I'm not going to link there.

The news whizzes at 5 gave scads of coverage to the decedent's girlfriend who says that everybody carries a gun, because it's "the style" these days. Instead of arguing for a style makeover, Ted goes through some stylin' himself in recounting, in detail, every other police shooting over the past 2-3 years, hinting at justice served up poorly. I'm fairly sure Ted doesn't live over here on Denison; he's clueless, yet he has the bully pulpit, if only for a few short moments. He's a menace, and I wonder if he's even aware.

Three officers, the early reports say, at 3 PM today simultaneously fired on 23-year-old Aaron Steele as he went for his stylish gun, 23-year-old Aaron with a history of assaulting police.

I don't think the question should be why did the police all shoot simultaneously, or whether they were justified. I think it should be why Aaron thought it was feasible or desirable or honorable to commit suicide by cop. Could sappy, sensational, unbalanced reportage like old Ted's have something to do with it? If they think this sad display of community bias is the equivalent of championing the underdog, they need to think again.

Turn off your TV; your life will improve immensely in 2-3 days. Send this to 12 of your closest friends and loved ones in the next 5 minutes, and you may see us delivered from the ignorant tyranny of the MSM within your lifetime.

Verizon patent litigation extorts Vonage for 5.5% royalty

Vonage Wins Permanent Stay in Verizon Patent Litigation --Bruce Perrens, whom we met recently in an MTB session, gave us the catchphrase, "If you can't innovate, litigate," and that's what Verizon's been doing with Vonage lately. Today, Vonage obtained a permanent stay, so it can go about it's business almost as usual, with the modification of paying a 5.5% royalty to Verizon and posting a $66 million bond. This is similar to the AT&T situation with the Ohio SB117, where an uncompetitive and hidebound older company tries to gain market share of a market in which they aren't in the least competitive, using their pawns in the state legislature to extort the companies that created the market. There's honest and forthright competition, and then there's the cheater's game played by AT&T, which might be rephrased as, "If you can't innovate, legislate," especially if you have cooperative "operatives" like Bob Spada and Lance Mason. Am I being too harsh, too unfair?

Bill Callahan's been giving this SB177 thorough and balanced coverage for the past month, and I guess Matt Zone testified today down in Columbus.

SB117 and Matt Zone, now on BFD

Brewed Fresh Daily » Cleveland City Councilman Matt Zone’s testimony to the Ohio Senate on SB117 -- Last Friday morning, I once again took time to participate in a MeetTheBloggers session about Ohio Senate Bill 117 at Gypsy Beans. From what we learned, our recently elected representation, in this case co-sponsors Bob Spada and Lance Mason, have lost no time in linking arms across the aisle and proceeding to sell out the public interest to their goombahs at AT&T. They think they're players. Listen to the whole thing. It's sickening.

We must take our government back from these careerists. Our imposition of term limits has made it so these guys early on form unholy alliances that either get them campaign funds to get on to the next government level or else line up good private-sector jobs after elected office ends. Harbor no illusions; we are compromised by those whom we just placed in office.

This bill is fast-tracked to slide by under our noses, and we'll find ourselves sold down the river, paying exhorbitant prices for a newly installed but already obsolete utility infrastructure. The television commercials, I am told, talk about choice and competition. Turn off the TV. It's lying to you. Keep it off. Your life will improve.

We can easily bypass this AT&T attempt at staying alive, staying in the game. Bring on the beefed-up broadband wireless. Disrupt the utility franchise.

And don't let AT&T put one more of those old-fashioned refrigerator-looking things on one more tree lawn. They lower property values.

And don't forget to read Matt Zone's testimony over on BFD.

priorities for in-town living

90.3 WCPN News: The Downtown Comeback: "Alan Ehrenhalt: This is one of the last pieces to fall in place before this comeback. First you need the streets to be safe. Then you [sic] commerce: stores, restaurants, coffee houses, theaters. Then you need public transit to get them to work. Then some adventurous families will move in if all goes well enough of them to improve the schools. That's how it'll work, not the other way around."

I agree that safety is the primary concern for people who live in cities. That's one reason that Cleveland elected and appointed officials have compromised us: they have cut our safety budget to the bone, laid off police, and embarrassed us with sellouts like the "Ladder 42" debacle. Since the days of Ben Franklin, we have known that safety is the first priority for city dwellers, yet we here in Cleveland allow our representatives to circumvent the wisdom of fully staffed and functional safety forces and spend the money instead on consultants, studies, abatements, demolitions, and street projects. Our largest budget expenditure should be for safety; safety costs for adequate staffing should be fully satisfied, and then we should pay for all other expenses after that. We need to take care of ourselves first at the most basic level. We need to be able to walk the streets, all of them, and ride the buses, at all hours, with relative impunity.

Second, we should improve the transit system. I differ with Alan Ehrenhalt on this piece of the revitalization equation. If the transit system doesn't run frequently and way beyond normal business hours, there's no point in building commerce in town. If you build commerce first, the businesses can starve to death waiting on safety services and transit services. The basic structure must be there before business can survive, and then prosper. Also, if you build public transit first, it makes it possible to demolish less for automobile parking, as you build our your "commerce."

Also, to improve transit is relatively simple and doesn't take a massive civic upset like the Euclid Corridor to make things more viable immediately--the main purpose of the corridor is to put $300 million in motion, not to improve our mobility. We already had a lot of buses running up and down Euclid Avenue before the corridor "improvement" began. All you have to do is increase the frequency of the runs, so that people can transfer from one route to another with very little down time. This would cost way less than $300 million, to get us functional. One of the reasons middle-class and upper-class people don't use public transit is because they can't afford to wait an hour--or more--for the next bus to appear. We have to have the expectation that a bus will come along in 10-15 minutes, so we can be on our way timely, and safely. There's no point in wasting time or putting yourself at undue risk of harm or robbery. Anybody who has spent an hour or more waiting at night on the 79 to come through public square knows that there are no police maintaining order, either in patrol cars or on foot, and that you are at the mercy of the crazies and the drug dealers, and these latter ply their trade freely at the bus stops.

Adventurous families have already moved in, some as many as 35 years ago; we have the people here right now, and these planners from the ivory towers of academia are looking around for new people to lure in, new progams to start, new grants to receive, and new palaver to get them an audience. They ought to be playing to their base of core urban dwellers, yet we've had to fight with our government, our nonprofits, the department of transportation, and our planning departments to protect our interests since the early 1980s. The younger "wealthy" can see what our lives have been like, how we've had to protect our neighborhoods against the depradations of the people who should supposedly work for the public good, and these younger "wealthy" have no problem with not joining the fray, when you can't trust the planners who want to entice you to move into an abusive situation, where you can spend half your time protecting a teetering status quo. Our kids know how much time we've spent trying to keep our community stable; they know it's time the other kids' parents spent working for themselves and their families solely, building their own wealth, living in a safer suburban setting.

We need to start telling our stories about the sellout in this town these past 35 years. We need to start telling the truth.

prancing lightweights

RE: Jennifer Brunner's Son Right Angle Blog - Ohio's Online Conservative Community -- Here's the note from me that Matt Naugle mentioned as being "negative." I intended it to be instructive and defining. These jejune political-specialty bloggers are twisting and perverting our political dialogues still further, to a point where we have prancing lightweight posers and gossip-mongers purportedly speaking for all of us. These Blackwell boy-acolytes are not my Republican party. My note follows:

Matt, it seems you've created a little stir in the blogosphere this morning with that cheap shot using the Brunner kid. This is the kind of cheesy, low-level, inconsequential baiting that keeps us all from moving forward as a community--you're trying to divide people who should be working together.

The worst thing about it all is that you say you're doing this in the name of conservatism and the Republican Party. Please, don't pretend to be speaking for the rest of us.

We may be in the same party, but we're not on the same team.

My team builds community and works for the good of all the people, not just for a particular shrill, fringe faction of a party now in decline in this state because it got too
self-righteous.

New York Times wheels in its big financial gun

Crisis Looms in Market for Mortgages - New York Times -- here, the NYT has wheeled in its big gun, financial-press hit-woman Gretchen Morgenson, to level the mortgage market, perhaps to drive a panic, certainly to bang a gong and sell the news. The excerpt below is the tip of the three-page iceberg:

The analyst’s untimely call, coupled with a failure among other Wall Street institutions to identify problems in the home mortgage market, isn’t the only familiar ring to investors who watched the technology stock bubble burst precisely seven years ago.

Now, as then, Wall Street firms and entrepreneurs made fortunes issuing questionable securities, in this case pools of home loans taken out by risky borrowers. Now, as then, bullish stock and credit analysts for some of those same Wall Street firms, which profited in the underwriting and rating of those investments, lulled investors with upbeat pronouncements even as loan defaults ballooned. Now, as then, regulators stood by as the mania churned, fed by lax standards and anything-goes lending.

Investment manias are nothing new, of course. But the demise of this one has been broadly viewed as troubling, as it involves the nation’s $6.5 trillion mortgage securities market, which is larger even than the United States treasury market.

Hanging in the balance is the nation’s housing market, which has been a big driver of the economy. Fewer lenders means many potential homebuyers will find it more difficult to get credit, while hundreds of thousands of homes will go up for sale as borrowers default, further swamping a stalled market.

"the fish rots from the head down"

I was just thinking, given the messes we have in governments, in corporations, their boardrooms, and hierarchical systems in general, might it be possible to name a blog "the fish rots from the head down" and keep it full of content effortlessly?

government racketeers

Illinois Is Putting Lottery on Block for Quick Payoff - New York Times--This is the second time the government has sold out the citizens--the first time is when they installed the legalized numbers racket in the first place. Now, they want to sell the racket they've supposedly legitimized, and they want to sell it to private investors.

First, they claim they can't get by without running a racket, then, they claim they need to sell it just to get by.

We need to cut them all loose. Notice in the article how they use the politically correct term "gaming," trying to put lipstick on the pig.

The state of Illinois yesterday took the first steps in selling its state lottery system, hoping to attract as much as $10 billion from investors who, in return, would own a monopoly that could turn out to be the biggest jackpot yet.
The sale, which may occur as early as the spring, would not be the first privatization of public property — both Chicago and Indiana have recently earned billions of dollars by signing long-term leases with private companies to run toll roads. But the proposed lottery sale is almost certain be one of the largest privatizations of a state-run program, and it raises concerns that states, some of them critically short of cash, are selling valuable assets that could otherwise provide consistent streams of revenue.

Under the proposed sale, Illinois would receive a multibillion-dollar one-time payment, and the lottery’s new owners would receive all revenue and profit for 75 years.

Indiana is also considering selling its lottery, and bids are due later this month. That sale is expected to raise more than $1 billion upfront and annual payments of $200 million. Midway Airport in Chicago, toll roads in Pennsylvania and the New Jersey Turnpike are all potentially on the block.

vets smoking over ban, thought they were a private club

Veterans upset over inclusion of VFW halls in smoking ban--From the Dayton DAILY NEWS--Once again, they've been sold out by the REMFs. Check out the whiner who collects a paycheck yet whines "We have no control...we're hamstrung..."

COLUMBUS — Military veterans who voted for Ohio's smoking ban feel betrayed now that the state Health Department says the law applies to private clubs that have employees, including VFW halls, a veterans group said Tuesday.

Members-only VFW halls, which veterans believed fell under an exemption clause that appeared on the November ballot, shouldn't have to comply, said William Seagraves, state commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of Ohio. He urged the state to change its draft rules for enforcing the ban.

Seagraves spoke out at a third meeting of bar owners, public health advocates and other business groups who are seeking to clarify how the law will be carried out. The smoking ban, which aims to protect nonsmokers and employees from secondhand smoke, took effect Dec. 7, but the state won't issue penalties until dozens of rules are finalized.

"How can the state tell veterans that they have no right to smoke in their private clubs?" asked Seagraves, whose group represents 424 VFW halls in Ohio. Socrates Tuch, legal counsel to the state Health Department, said that while the law has a provision exempting private clubs, it also says that all employers — businesses, associations or private entities — that have employees must comply. That includes private clubs, such as VFW halls, that have bartenders and wait staff, paid or unpaid, he said.

"We have no control over how the law is written," Tuch said. "We're not trying to dismiss these concerns, but we're hamstrung as to what we can do."