Blue Ohioan at Bloggapalooza.

I made an appearance at Bloggapalooza way back when. Getting away from the kids for a roady even just to C-town is always a challenge, so I wasn't there long. Because of the deluge outside, we crowded into the Town Fryer to feast on deep-fried oreos (the whole cookie liquifies) and listen to great bands.

And I worked in as many conversations as possible during the band breaks. If you aren't hip to it by now, understand that the network of bloggers loosely associated with Meet the Bloggers is a real network. We see each other at MTB interviews, but also at meetups, the odd comped ODP event, what have you. We email, we comment on each others' blogs, we occasionally call. Personally, I don't get enough time with these folks. This is a fascinating group of people I never tire of talking to.

Among the conversations was a video recorded interview with Anthony Fossaceca from Blue Ohioan. Anthony is a longtime political operative, most recently running Eric Fingerhut's gubernatorial campaign. He's assembled a blogging staff of one grassroots organizer (Susan Meara from North Olmstead), one policy wonk (Veronica Johnson) and Anthony himself blogging on party stuff. Blue Ohioan set up a makeshift video studio at the Town Fryer and interviewed pretty much everyone there who was even marginally anyone (they interviewed me, after all). Fossaceca is pictured here talking to Anastasia Pantsios from the Free Times.

I'm not entirely clear on the history of Blue Ohioan. The blog is one that existed at the time I started all this last summer and is no more. Ohio Watch, Seven Cent Nickel, An Age Like This -- all gone. Ditto Blue Ohioan.

Until now. I first learned of the "return" of the blog when he bought time on the MTB Ad NetworkFossaceca appears to be trying to bridge the worlds of the Dem insider and the guy with a gripe and a Blogger account.

Until Bloggapalooza, Blue Ohioan was annoyingly insular with no blogroll and few links to other blogs. Seeing (and participating in) the Ohio blogger interviews allayed some of my personal concerns that this was one of those Blogosphere-neutralizing gambits that touches off wearing and distracting blogstorms.

The Blue O crew has apparently done their videoblog mojo and is posting the interviews this week. I'm not up yet, but should be by week's end. And Blue Ohioan has earned a spot on my blogroll.

Speaking of the blogroll, some folks contacted me about blogrolling and it's done. Bob Higgens runs an Ohio-based, world/national-focused blog called Worldwide Sawdust. Looking at it, I wonder how I've missed it so long. Bob is now a Phriend.

JD Amer emailed about his business and supporting blog. J.D. is an internet entrepreneur behind Lopico -- a "Social Business Directory." Basically, it's like a Wiki for business reviews. For you Akronites, J.D. is one of the West Hill Marathon Amers. At some point I may blog more heavily about Lopico. For now, J.D.'s blog is on the Akron roll.

Monday Morning

For those of you who have never heard of the place, a little rundown on Chincoteague Island. Chincoteage lies between the Eastern Shore of Virginia and the southern end of Assateague Island. Assateague is a barrier island, given over almost entirely to preservation. Most of it is either Assateague National Seashore or Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge with a bit of the northern end a Maryland State Park.

Chincoteague historically has been a working village -- mostly watermen, plus a bit of farming. In the Eighties when I was living in DC, it was gaining currency as a place to go among those looking for something a little less commercial and decadent than Rehobbeth, DE or Ocean City, MD. In the intervening time, it has obviously gotten more popular resulting in more development.

We stay at the Hampton Inn on Chincoteage which looks to be less than ten years old, part of this new wave of development. While most chain hotels are in commercial areas surrounded by malls or restaurant clusters or other hotels, this Hampton Inn is right next door to some guy's house. Some guy whose waterfront on the bay (the channel between Chincoteage and the mainland) serves a berth to a rotating array of commercial fishing boats.

So this is what we see out our balcony each morning. If we are really good and get up early enough, we can see the crew outfitting the boats for the day's work, then get underway and sail out the channel past the turnstyle drawbridge in the background here.





These contrasts highlight the tensions one might expect -- watermen vs. commercial developers. Environment vs. growth. Old-timers vs. newbies vs. summer regulars. It's an old story we've seen played out over our past three summers here.

Pho's Vacation Pages

Sunset on Chincoteage Bay.

Things to Do While I'm Gone

The House of Pho is on the road, blogging from whatever hotel will give me free wi-fi. Right now it is the Hampton Inn in Frederick, MD (plugs for free access are a tradition here on the Pages.)

A few event notices are coming my way via email and elsewhere. You might want to check things out to help fill the void left by my lengthy silences.

Both the Dem Party and MoveOn are encouraging nationwide DIY events marking the last 100 days until Election 06. The Dems are putting on Democratic Reunions. You can plug in your zip here to find one near you. An event showed up for Summit last week, but now is gone. Here’s the search result for 100 miles around my zip code. Unfortunately, nothing shows for where we will be vacationing, confirming my impression that the place is fairly red.

MoveOn does better in Summit Co. with an event in Copley Monday night. RSVP here.

Back to Sunday, my friend Debbie Phillips is having a fundraiser in Columbus with guest Francis Strickland. Contact the campaign for details. (And full disclosure, I contract with the agency she runs though she is now on leave, blah blah.) I hear tell a Cleveland FR is also in the works and will plug that one insufferably.

SCPD will be meeting as usual the second Tuesday of the week. I’ll try to get that up on Upcoming (memo to the Upcoming folks – I’d plug a lot more stuff in there if I didn’t have to go through all the rigmarole of inputting details of every new venue.)

Finally, Sherrod Brown will Meet the Bloggers -- no really!-- on Saturday, August 12. I will be back in town by then, but alas will be in Columbus for a work meeting.

The Time of the Mommydaddy

What has passed so far for productive Summer time is at an end. The kids are mine full-time until waning days of August. In addition, we are getting ready for vacation in a couple of days, meaning I have to get stuff ready and load up on work hours.

For the blog this means that the spare moments I scrape together to post here are even rarer. I'm aiming at five posts a week, but that's probably wildly optimistic. We can expect posting to be even more erratic and less tied to any semblance of a news cycle than usual. Thanks in advance for putting up with it.

Am I The Beast or The Whore?

UPDATED: Fixed the link for the main story.

Honestly, you shouldn’t be reading my blog. You should be reading the Columbus Dispatch. Yesterday’s CD runs a multi-story spread on the Governor’s race. They have a nice story juxtaposing Ted and J. Ken on how their faith guides their respective candidacies, a side-by-side Q&A on a number of issues, a recap of the latest poll showing Ted in the lead.

But the story you must read is an extensively reported multimedia piece focusing on the fundamentalist Christian allies of J. Ken Blackwell. It starts with this vignette:

The Rev. Tommy Bates, a Pentecostal preacher from Kentucky, described the beast rising out of the sea: a horned, multi-headed creature with the body of a leopard, paws of a bear and mouth of a lion -- just like in the Book of Revelation.
This, Bates said, was the political system of Babylon, the evil kingdom in the Bible that was opposed to God and his people.

But there to stop the beast was the Rev. Rod Parsley -- the overseer of a worldwide ministry headquartered at World Harvest in southeastern Columbus, an outspoken critic of popular culture and a nationally known Republican ally.

"The Lord spoke to me and said, 'I chose Rod Parsley to push this beast back for a season,' " Bates said. "He said it was Pastor Rod Parsley who I chose to alter the election, the presidential election. Not a Democrat, not a Republican situation, but the spirit of the Antichrist ... that came walking in America."

Now, Bates said, that creature was returning, with "a great whore riding on the beast's back. ... She is identified with a city, a political city called Babylon which is going to usher in the Antichrist."

As you move through the story and meet the cast of characters, at times they appear to try to moderate their views for public consumption. But this opening reveals the true heart of those who would be in charge of Ohio’s Restoration, its Reformation and whatever else they seek to do to it. Parsley famously prayed that America would have the wisdom to make the right choice on Election Day 2004. Plug that into Bates’ story – apparently a vote for Kerry was a vote for the AntiChrist.

Elsewhere a Rabbi involved with one of the groups in the network opines that “irreconcilable differences between the right and the left [constitute] a conflict between two ‘religio-moral worldviews’ – essentially, those who believe in God and those who don't.”

"And here we have two parts of America," Lapin said, "that votes differently, that raises its children differently, that views family entirely differently, and has created two completely incompatible political visions for America.[sic]"

I hate – absolutely from the depths of my soul, hate – the way I sound like Chicken Little about this stuff, but it frankly unnerves me. History proves fairly definitively that when those in power convince the people that an Other is responsible for the trouble in the world, things rapidly go badly for the Other.

As a Liberal non-Christian I am apparently an Other.

If you are not a Fundamentalist Christian and you doubt what is at stake in this election, read the article, click through the media links. If you are still sanguine about a Blackwell victory, come back and tell me why I should be able to sleep at night. If it bothers you as well, decide what you are going to do about it and get to work.

And if you are a Fundamentalist Christian, you might start thinking about the point at which you would say “Hold, enough!” The Day of Reckoning may take a different form than you expect.

Market Forces Sully White Hat

Time to check in with Akron’s best-connected concerned citizen, David Brennan, and his government-funded empire. Yes, this is that White Hat post I mentioned earlier this week.

Last summer a storefront cropped up in the new Wallhaven strip mall. It was called Brilliant and, according to a blurb in Akron Family Magazine, was a White Hat venture. I suspected that the business plan centered providing school-funded tutoring help mandated under No Child Left Behind. Under NCLB if a school fails to meet Adequate Yearly Progress for three straight years, the “remedies” include tutoring help for any kids in failing schools on the district’s dime.

NCLB tutoring has some serious potential for scammage. I’ve reported before that some firms in other states are setting up shop here rather than their home states, raising the suspicion that Ohio’s standards for tutoring firms are unusually low.

Anyway, I thought that’s what Brilliant was up to and twice started writing posts on it (working title: "Just Fucking Brilliant"), both times junking them because I didn’t have the goods. Part of Brilliant's operation was “NCLB Tutoring,” but also has a number of programs that actual people pay for with their own money. So it looked like maybe this was an actual business venture as opposed to another of Brennan’s belly-to-the-trough deals. I only recently found this article which attempted to lay out the business plan.

Recently I went to the Caribou in that same plaza and noticed that the Brilliant store looked oddly dark. With a sign on the window.

I immediately went into irony shock: The man who professes that all of life should follow the dictates of the market unable to compete. Not terribly surprising; Brilliant’s tutoring arm tried to flex in an awfully crowded market. In the Akron area we have at least three different storefront tutoring operations – Kumon on Smith Road, Knowledge-something by White Pond and the grandfather of the market segment, Sylvan Learning Centers. I saw one TV ad for Brilliant marketing it as a low-cost alternative. Funny that people didn’t flock to the cheapest place to educate their kids.

In a story about Life Skills expanding into Florida, a White Hat flak bravefaces the Brilliant failure, saying that it was all about NCLB tutoring and the demand wasn’t there and White Hat is stronger without it. In fact the demand wasn’t there because APS has been successful of late. The district is poised to meet AYP for the second straight year, meaning it will go back to Year 0. That would mean at least another three years before the district would have to pay for tutoring district-wide.

So I don’t know which is worse: That Brennan has failed at the one business in the White Hat education empire that was subjected to market forces, then tried to spin it as a positive. Or that Brennan, who seems determined to have every landmark in Akron named after him, was short-selling the city’s school district. I don’t know what school system he actually has in mind for Pottersville – er – Akron, but it doesn’t sound like one I want my kids to go to.

Meanwhile, White Hat is losing Life Skills Centers in Columbus – they have severed ties and are looking for new management. And White Hat is expanding Life Skills into Florida. “Expanding” for White Hat means lobbying the state legislature to change the rules Life Skills fits under them. This is just me, but if you need to lobby to make your business legal, it probably isn’t a very good business to be in.

White Hat touts its 20% success rate as 20% that wouldn’t have any diploma without them. But anecdotally I know that some students are leaving traditional schools because White Hat exists. One has to ask how many of that 20% would have a diploma from a traditional school or would have a GED if there was no White Hat? And how many are attracted to White Hat because it is a cake ride compared to real school?

And finally, how many of the 80% who wash out are just biding time and keeping a parent and/or probation officer off their backs until they can split? Biding time and, by the way, wasting money that should be educating my kids.