Blogweek Ohio

An improvement over the previous title for the weekly meta-post.

Needless to say, Katarina is still a favorite discussion topic, though with little new that you can't find in national blogs. One exception is at Callahan who was the man this week. In addition to providing links for tech-specific help for the displaced, he personally has been at work setting up connectivity for the on-again-off-again Ohio arrivals. Follow his work here.

Susan at An Age Like this has continued her Grover Norquist watch through the disaster aftermath. Here she notes the deafening silence from the Norquistas as the need for something more than TINY GOVERNMENT became increasingly apparent. Here she recounts his eventual partisan blast which incidently does nothing overcome the mounting evidence that having a competent, fully funded disaster recovery agency would come in handy about now. Personally I think the avatars of TINY GOVERNMENT are laying low but quietly rejoicing. Since the long-term strategy of the Kill-the-Beasters is to bankrupt the government, the opportunity to run up additional tabs without the means to pay for them suit Grover et al. just fine.


Locally, big doin's at Brewed Fresh Daily. George acquired an apparently secret document detailing a multi-pillar plan to make Cleveland attractive as a tech mecca. This prompted an intense discussion during which the author of the plan dropped in and got grilled by Democracy Guy for her troubles. The effort, titled Red Room Revolution for reasons that escape me, is spearheaded by the law firm of Thompson Hine and Panzicka Investments. You can follow the later discussions here and here

The attention the discussion drew prompted Democracy Guy to hypothesize "The BFD Effect," the short form of which is that posts on BFD prompt sufficient discussion to draw in the principles.

My take on the whole thing is 1) I am skeptical about any attempt to create a tech mecca, they seem to be happy accidents, 2) the one determinant that humans can actually effect, high quality higher education is nowhere in the plan and 3) it't not clear to me that trying to create a tech boom based on 1990's era business models makes sense in a flat world.

Still and all, it's a better development plan than al fresco dining.

Speaking of She Who Got 80G's to Read Back Issues of Wired and Stuff, Mary Beth Matthews, an inner-city Cleveland teacher, writes a great post about taking three of her star students to see a Rebecca Ryan speak at the Cleveland Excellence Rountable. One of her students spoke up about the folly of trying to make Cleveland more attractive to outsiders but ignoring the problems in the schools. The response of the participants was something like "sgrgp gaeeb aierbaf ytpurhbh. ereu?"

HypoSpeak has been his anonymously indespensible self this week, mostly about RON, but also hitting on Petro's woes, the press coverage of the upcoming antiwar rally and windfalls car dealers are getting in the upcoming tax reform. I won't bother to link to specific posts, this is the one blog you have to take in in toto.

I've spent more time than usual on the Chief Source this week. You get what you get on national blogs -- reliably liberal takes on nation issues followed by lively discussions. But the pool is somewhat smaller so one doesn't feel so lost, plus there are a couple of fairly reasonable conservatives who make things interesting. I do feel they need to adopt a corrolary to Godwin's Law; whenever Jeff is Angry calls people he differs with "socialists" he should be deemed to have lost the argument.