Burnin’

Rolling Stone is running a feature on the new Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb. The story paints him as an indignant populist in the grand tradition.

Just a few years ago, Webb described America’s elites in terms that might be familiar to the fans of Fox News. Liberals were “cultural Marxists,” and “the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood” were a fifth column waging war on American traditions. But Iraq has refocused his views. Now when he speaks of the elites he more often means “the military-industrial complex,” and “the Cheney factor,” the corporate chieftains he describes as the new robber barons. The war and the crimes of class — sending Americans to Iraq and their jobs to China — are becoming interwoven in his mind.

The story shows Webb’s transformation from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy to an advocate for the rural coal miners of southwest Virginia. “Captain Webb is marching leftward, and he’s taking many of his old views with him,” writes Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet also points out that Webb is an historian and author.

Publishers Weekly describes Webb’s latest offering, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America:

As Webb relates, the Scots-Irish first emigrated to the U.S., 200,000 to 400,000 strong, in four waves during the 18th century, settling primarily in Appalachia before spreading west and south. Webb’s thesis is that the Scots-Irish, with their rugged individualism, warrior culture built on extended familial groups and an instinctive mistrust of authority, created an American culture that mirrors these traits.

Sounds like an interesting read, and it’s good to know at least one Democrat Senator is constitutionally ready for the fight it’s going to take to win our country back.

According to The Beaufort Gazette, St. Helena farmer Sara Reynolds, 56, introduced her newly certified organic produce to the public Wednesday at a new market off U.S. 21 behind Gullah Grub restaurant.

photo by Bob Sofaly

The market is still in its early stages, but organizers hope it will include other local farmers interested in growing produce using fewer chemicals.

From noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays at the market, Reynolds will sell an array of organic seasonal produce including tomatoes, cucumbers, okra, cantaloupe, watermelon, bell peppers and yellow squash for $15 a box.

The mixed produce boxes are roughly enough to add to recipes to feed a family of three for a week and must be reserved in advance.

For more information search Local Harvest, an online directory of organic farms, farmers and farmers’ markets.

The mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations.

Dr William Bird, the health adviser to Natural England, has compiled evidence that people are healthier and better adjusted if they get out into the countryside, parks or gardens.

Stress levels fall within minutes of seeing green spaces, he says. Even filling a home with flowers and plants can improve concentration and lower stress.

“If children haven’t had contact with nature, they never develop a relationship with natural environment and they are unable to use it to cope with stress,” he said.

[via Daily Mail]

Will Blythe writing a review of Jim Harrison’s ninth novel, Returning to Earth, for The New York Times Sunday Book Review section says:

As a rough rule, it seems that writers fall into two camps. There are those who delight in rousting the truth from its concealment amid pieties and convention. If they must strip-mine the world to expose its hypocrisy, they will do so, even if they leave a landscape barren of hope. Then there are those writers who prefer to remythologize life on earth, finding it rich with strange congruences and possibilities. Jim Harrison is a writer of the second type, and Returning to Earth is his extraordinary valediction to mourning. It sharpens one’s appetite for life even at its darkest.

That’s eloquent criticism and Harrison deserves the praise.

In my estimation, readers love Harrison’s novels for two central reasons—his evocative sense of place and his creation of full-blooded characters. Naturally, Returning to Earth shares these traits with Harrison’s other works. The man made a lifelong fan of me with his depictions of my native Nebraska in Dalva and The Road Home. In Returning to Earth, it’s his own pine-scented northern Michigan that he so superbly reveals. Having once camped in a dark and desolate Forest Service campground along Lake Superior, I’m lucky to know this land slightly as a visitor. Harrison’s prose certainly makes the desire to return to the area for more instructive visits palpable.

A couple other notes on this book…It takes the Faulknerian form in both its reliance on stream-of-consciousness and in its consecutive use of first-person naration by four different characters (although I have yet to read it, I’m told The Sound and the Fury uses this same structure). Harrison is also unabahsed about weaving parts of himself into any and all of his characters. In this book, he is very much the David character, right down to his obsession with Mexico and preference for Subaru wagons. Critics say that mature novelists tend to leave their autobiographical writing behind after book one. Not so with Harrison, and I’m glad for this. It seems to me that we’re seeking mental and spiritual intimacy when we read important books. Harrison generously provides this to his readers yet again by looking at himself, this continent’s native people and their various traditions and modern culture’s finer distractions like drink, food and sex.

Lastly, Harrison mentions Rites of Conquest by Charles Cleland several times throughout his 280-page story. This historical inquiry clearly informs Returning to Earth; thus, it piques my interest.

Metropolis Magazine published a feature last September on the rapid acceleration of New Urbanism in Omaha.

The magazine claims much of the groundwork for Omaha’s urban-design plan was put in place by the Omaha Community Foundation, which started working on a vision for the city in 1999. In 2002 the foundation asked Connie Spellman from the chamber of commerce to spearhead Omaha by Design, a nonprofit set up to focus their efforts, and they brought in Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces to help.

Omaha by Design came up with 73 urban-design recommendations as part of the Omaha Master Plan. The plan encompasses everything from the landscaping of street corners, the design of important civic sites, and streetlamp choices available for neighborhoods to regional development, protection of watersheds, and the creation of a citywide trail system.

“Corporations were realizing that Omaha didn’t have the energy that a lot of young workers were looking for,” Steve Jensen, Omaha’s planning director says. “They’re saying, ‘It’s important to have a city that’s interesting and active—and a little edgy.’” That’s something community leaders appreciate about Saddle Creek Records. According to the Omaha World Herald, the city helped finance Saddle Creek’s new entertainment complex in NoDo. The 56,000 square feet complex consists of Saddle Creek Records, live music venue Slowdown, the Film Streams art-house theater and spaces in which artists can work and live.

Joe Gudenrath, spokesman for Mayor Mike Fahey, said the mayor’s office was “active in encouraging them to locate in north downtown.”

“We didn’t want to take the chance of losing Saddle Creek Records to another city,” Gudenrath said.

Independent documentary film, One Bright Shining Moment, offers a compelling look at the 1972 Democrat Party nomination, which went to the rogue Senator from South Dakota George McGovern.

It’s uncomfortable and sad to realize the issues the nation faced in 1972 are exactly the same issues we face today—total and utter corruption of the executive branch, an unpopular and illegal war and the inept response from the opposition party. Yet, no matter how dark it gets in America, real men and women of conscience continue to fight for change. Activist, author and actor Dick Gregory is one such man. He appears in the film several times and each time he has nothing but truth to share.

The immigration debate in the country is one of the more complex issues we face as a nation today. It’s about border security in a post-9/11 world, law and order, race, human rights and the economy. In an odd and rare juxtapositon, Senator Kennedy sponsored the Senate bill that was backed by the pro-business White House but not by socially conservative Republicans. It seems like everyone has their own angle. Kennedy wants to “take care” of immigrant communities and end the vigilante actions of citizen border patrols. The Bushies want a steady stream of cheap labor.

According to BusinessWeek:

Top U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyist R. Bruce Josten said this week that the immigration issue is “divisive in the Republican base, it’s divisive in the Democratic base, it’s divisive in the business community. It splits organized labor, it splits the immigration community.”

Republican senators who backed the immigration bill felt particularly exposed to fierce attacks from conservative activists in their home states, including talk show hosts and local GOP officials.

It was this groundswell of public reaction that stymied the legislative process and left Reid, Kennedy and Bush holding their jocks this week. With all this confusion, let’s turn to Vermont’s Independent Senator, Bernie Sanders, for his view of the issue.

What most concerns me about this legislation are the provisions that would bring low-wage workers into this country in order to depress the wages of American workers, which are already in decline. With poverty increasing and the middle-class shrinking, we must not force American workers into even more economic distress.

The CEOs who want this bill aren’t even embarrassed by their hypocrisy. One day they shut down plants with high-skilled, well-paid American workers, and move to China where they pay desperate people 50 cents an hour. The next day, they have the nerve to come before the U.S Congress and tell us that they can’t find skilled workers to do the jobs that they need. Give me a break.

Sanders said on C-SPAN that the same business forces that supported NAFTA are supporting the Bush/Kennedy agenda on immigration. That’s a bad sign.

BBC News reports on Amnesty International’s efforts to keep censorship from the interwebs.

“The Chinese model of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers,” said Tim Hancock, Amnesty’s campaign director.

“Unless we act on this issue, the internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come.

More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts,” he said.

According to the latest Open Net Initiative report on internet filtering, at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

See Amnesty’s Irrepressible.info for more.

Award-winning journalist Nancy Cleeland ended her employment at the Los Angeles Times last month, along with 56 newsroom colleagues who also accepted the latest round of boyout offers from the Tribune company which owns the the paper.

Cleeland is troubled by the move. She explains why on Huffington Post.

The Los Angeles region is defined by gaping income disparities and an enormous pool of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom are pulled north by lousy, unstable jobs. It’s also home to one of the most active and creative labor federations in the country. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading a typical issue of the L.A. Times, in print or online. Increasingly anti-union in its editorial policy, and celebrity — and crime-focused in its news coverage, it ignores the economic discontent that is clearly reflected in ethnic publications such as La Opinion.

Of course, I realize that revenues are plummeting and newsroom staffs are being cut across the country. But even in these tough financial times, it’s possible to shift priorities to make Southern California’s largest newspaper more relevant to the bulk of people who live here. Here’s one idea: Instead of hiring a “celebrity justice reporter,” now being sought for the Times website, why not develop a beat on economic justice? It might interest some of the millions of workers who draw hourly wages and are being squeezed by soaring rents, health care costs and debt loads.

With the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable, Cleeland is exploring the development of a nonprofit online site to chronicle the regional economy from a full range of perspectives.

[via Counter Spin]

CNN is reporting that U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin—Karl Rove’s handpicked choice for U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas—has resigned under the weight of scandal.

Of course, CNN gives up very little information on this character and no information on why he’s stepping aside. For that, we must turn to investigative reporter Greg Palast, who recently mentioned Griffin in a Buzzflash interview.

Of course, the reason my book was subpoenaed is that it has to do with the US prosecutor firings. The prosecutor firings were 100% about influencing elections — not about loyalty to Bush, which is what The New York Times wrote. The administration team couldn’t tolerate appointees who wouldn’t go along with crime. In the book I present the evidence that Karl Rove directed a guy named Tim Griffin to target suppressing the votes of African American students, homeless men, and soldiers. Nice guy. They actually challenged the votes and successfully removed tens of thousands of legal voters from the voter rolls, same as they did in 2000. But instead of calling them felons, they said that they had suspect addresses.

Bobby Kennedy, who is a voting rights attorney, said, “This is not just an icky, horrible thing that people do wearing white sheets. This is a felony crime.” And the guy they put in charge of this criminal ring to knock out voters is a guy named Tim Griffin. Today, Tim Griffin is — badda-bing — U.S. Attorney for Arkansas. When they fired the honest guys, they put in the Rove-bots to fix the 2008 election. That’s what I’m saying — it’s already being stolen, as we speak. Tim Griffin is the perpetrator who’s become the prosecutor, and that’s what’s going down right now.