TOO BUSY LOSING TO VOTE
Remember early this year when Joe Cimperman, running against Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primary for the 10th congressional district House seat, accused Kucinich of being a “part-time congressman”? At the time he had missed 12.1 percent of votes in the current session of Congress, actually the lowest of any congressman or senator who had been running for president. Since he stopped running for president, true to form, Kucinich has been diligently showing up for work and his record has improved to 9.3 percent of votes missed.
If you want to see the true meaning of “part-time,” you’re going to have to look on the Senate side, where one member has missed at whopping 61.8 percent of votes during the 110th Congress. You’re probably thinking it’s South Dakota’s Tim Johnson, who suffered a brain hemorrhage just before this Congress convened, or the venerable Ted Kennedy, who recently had surgery for brain cancer. But you’d be wrong. It’s John McCain, whose interest in actual governing has waned even below the 51 percent absentee record he had when I checked back in February. In the last week alone, McCain was one of only two Senators, along with Kennedy, to miss crucial votes on funding education for veterans and placing limits on potentially illegal spying by government on US citizens. And when a vote on reversing Medicare fee cuts to doctors came up yesterday, Kennedy, not expected to return until September, made his way to DC and the Senate floor to vote. McCain? He was the only senator to miss the vote. If elected to the White House, it’s clear McCain would break at least one Bush record — for the most vacation time ever taken by a president. — Anastasia Pantsios
CAM, DEW
Decked out in Mongoose gear, BMX dirt rider 
stopped by the office today on his way to Progressive Field, where he was to throw out the first pitch for the Tribe game against the Devil Rays.
“I like the city,” White, 24, says of Cleveland, where he’s competed before as part of the AST Dew Tour. “It’s got good architecture and I like the water. It’s not too hot, either.”
A native of Canberra, Austrialia, White started winning events about four years ago and last year finished second in year-end Dew Cup standings. He spends so much time competing that he now splits his time between Canberra (where he says he spent 20K setting up a practice course in his six acre backyard) and Las Vegas, where he also has a home. He’ll be competing as part of the AST Dew Tour, which returns to Cleveland’s North Coast Harbor July 17-20.
“I just started riding for fun,” he admits. “And it’s still fun today, obviously. I work my butt off riding but I eat crap food like cheeseburgers and fries. I hope to ride as long as I can. But that all depends on injuries and how my body holds up.”
As far as throwing out the first pitch, White admits he’s a bit apprehensive.
“Baseball isn’t very big in Australia,” he says. “Maybe I’ll just have to roll it in like a cricket ball.”
If that helps the Tribe break a ten-game losing streak, he might as well give it a shot. — Jeff Niesel
WASHED AWAY
One of the tragic aspects of the subprime lending and foreclosure crisis is its impact on Cleveland’s community development industry, regarded by many as one of the most innovative and successful in the nation.
According to Frank Ford, senior vice president for research and development at Neighborhood Progress, Inc., more than $500 million has been invested in developing 6,000 units of housing in Cleveland neighborhoods over the past 20 years. “This achievement, representing the hard work of so many people, has now been undermined by reckless and irresponsible lending practices,” Ford says. “If, as is estimated by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, foreclosures have caused the city’s property values to decline by as much as 49 percent, then over $200 million of our community’s $500 million investment may now be lost.”
Cleveland’s worst foreclosure hot spots — neighborhoods like Slavic Village, Union Miles, Hough, Glenville, Mount Pleasant and Detroit-Shoreway — are also among the places where community development groups and the city have labored longest and hardest to build new homes and renovate old ones, hoping to leverage even greater private investments and “drive the market” upward. No one anticipated a sudden onslaught by a predatory army of brokers and out-of-town mortgage companies, driving recklessly in the other direction.
In North and South Broadway, for example, the Slavic Village Development Corporation built or rehabbed over 1,100 units of market-rate and low-income housing between 1990 and 2004 — a total investment of more than $60 million, according to CWRU’s NEOCANDO database. But these units, and the healthier housing market they were meant to create, are now adrift in the flood of foreclosed, flipped and vacant properties that made zip code 44105 an international symbol of the subprime catastrophe.
The Slavic Village example is the most dramatic, but similar tragedies are unfolding in other neighborhoods with strong development histories on both the East and West Sides. Since the foreclosure hurricane roared into town in 2003-04, a generation of Cleveland neighborhood development professional and leaders has seen much of its life work washed away in the flood.
Kate Monter of the Cleveland Housing Network said this at Cleveland City Council’s “Foreclosure Forum” for the presidential candidates in February: “I have worked in the community development field in Cleveland’s neighborhoods since 1981, and I have seen enormous progress and so many reasons for hope. Together we have built one of the strongest models of urban redevelopment in the country. However, because aggressive, abusive mortgage lending practices were allowed to flourish unabated, everything we have worked for is decidedly at risk.”
And, she might have added, a lot of it is already gone. — Bill Callahan
“YOU CHOSE WHAT?!”
Half the fun in taking on a project like compiling The Ultimate Cleveland Summer Mixtape is to spark debate. (For Ron Kretsch, it’s more like 94 percent of the fun.) So have at it. — Frank Lewis
A LASTING PEACE
Never thought I’d be linking to something from Scene, but everyone at both Cleveland alt weeklies have had to get used to a lot of strange new realities lately. In the latest issue, Scene managing editor Joe Tone nicely summarizes the reasons behind the impending merger of his paper and mine, without resorting to melodrama or industry-speak.
The idea, of course, is that with no competition to siphon off advertisers or keep ad prices rock-bottom, one alt-weekly might accomplish what the Free Times and Scene couldn’t: make enough money to survive. And it’s hard to bemoan the consolidation. Had they not become one, the two papers would have eventually become none.
On Wednesday, the managers of the new paper were announced. From Scene: Sean Misutka, advertising sales manager; Joe Strailey, classifieds sales manager. From Free Times: Steve Antol, circulation manager; Tim Divis, business manager; Steve Miluch, production manager; and me, as editor.
Beyond that, there’s not much to tell at the moment. Several thousand details await attention, including choosing the teams to round out the departments. Both papers will publish final issues on July 16, and issue 1, volume 1, of the new Cleveland Scene will debut on July 23. Wish us luck. — Frank Lewis
THEIR MENDACITY GOES TO 11
Other than dead-ender neocons, those most likely to mourn the Bush 43 era drawing to a close are those in the humor business. Greeting-card designers, late-night show show hosts and standup comics will soon be deprived of a motherlode of comedic gold. Getting his licks in just under the wire is actor/comedian Harry Shearer, who was part of the team of comedic geniuses who took down the pompousness of heavy-metal bands in This Is Spinal Tap and the earnest self-importance of ’60s folksingers in A Mighty Wind.
As a valedictory for the current administration, now in its waning days, he has turned his satirical attention to its cast of ridicule-worthy characters and the laughs they provide before they become history. On his just-released album, Songs of the Bushman, he memorializes in song the hopefully soon-to-be-forgotten Colin Powell, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Scooter Libby and Karen Hughes.
One of my co-workers (Thanks, Chris!) tipped me off to the release. He told me about an entertaining track he’d heard as a lead-in to an NPR program, which he described as sounding sort of Springsteenish and having a refrain about a number he couldn’t recall of Bush lies — it’s so easy to lose count. Through a little Google magic, I found it. The track is “935 Lies,”, a tribute to the number of lies the Bush administration allegedly told in the run-up to the war in Iraq, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
Clear Channel’s outdoor advertising division, appalled by a cover that features a picture of George Bush with a bone through his nose, has refused to accept billboards advertising the disk, so help spread the word. — Anastasia Pantsios
AMERICA THE NEVERFULL
CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH
Living in the northeasternmost region of the Midwest, where Obama and Clinton lawn signs bloomed like weeds, we can be forgiven for forgetting occassionally that in other parts of Ohio — parts not even very far away — people see things … differently. Take Jim Peterman of Findlay, who’s deeply conflicted about the Democratic nominee:
Does he choose to trust a TV commercial in which Obama talks about his “love of country”? Or his neighbor of 40 years, Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran who heard from a friend in Toledo that Obama refuses to wear an American-flag pin?
Does he trust a local newspaper article that details Obama’s Christian faith? Or his friend Leroy Pollard, a devoted family man so convinced Obama is a radical Muslim that he threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him?
“I’ll admit that I probably don’t follow all of the election news like maybe I should,” Peterman said. “I haven’t read his books or studied up more than a little bit. But it’s hard to ignore what you hear when everybody you know is saying it. These are good people, smart people, so can they really all be wrong?”
The entire article is worth a read. Peterman and his neighbors aren’t bad people, and as the article goes on to explain, most don’t trust John McCain either, due to his strong support of the war. But they seem distressingly impervious to information in exactly the same way that conservative voters have for decades, believing everything they hear, no matter how outrageous, that comports with their chronic distrust of everyone and everything they perceive to be liberal, the most baggage-laden word in politics. People like this put George Bush in office. Are there enough of them left to do the same for John McCain? Most of the time I don’t think so, but reports like this make me wonder, and worry. — Frank Lewis
GET SLIM
Late Thursday. Grog Shop. And there’s Langhorne Slim easing through the door after some mellowing
libations and taking the tiny stage with the kind of fluid swagger Mick Jagger perfected but lost sometime after the onset of arthritis. And then his little three-piece college of music, the War Eagles, rumble forth with a jazzy stand-up bassist (Paul Defiglia) and some well-oiled stickwork on a rickety throwback drum set (Malachi DeLorenzo) and, of course, the overly perfect posture of Slim picking away at his guitar and crooning like Cat Stevens lost at a Delta blues crossroad.
“I hope soon,” DeLorenzo said after the show, in answer to when the anti-folk outfit was going to make it big already. “Any minute now,” I told him, holding a spit-slicked finger up to an imaginary breeze. But it’s true.
If you haven’t heard this troubadour’s tunes, his latest a self-titled collection of 13 folk and Southern rock jams twisted and turned by a punk cowpoke at the helm, then borrow it from somebody and acknowledge that they are, indeed, your better. If you’re already aboard, then your next step is to witness this charming spectacle face-to-face. With his thrift store old-gentleman duds topped off with the straw fedora of a blues champion, Slim swayed and bounced through every one of his high-energy and intricately crafted songs. Though lacking the ornate instrumentation from the keys and added strings that made his latest album sparkle as brightly in parts as Josh Ritter’s Historical Conquests of… masterpiece, Langhorne’s show brimmed with melodious music that’s hard to cull for favorites. Maybe the sweet testimonials “Diamonds and Gold” or “Colette” or the playful exuberance of “Rebel Side of Heaven” or “Hello Sunshine” or the frenetic “The Tipping Point,” but then there were the early gems off his Electric EP and elsewhere that blended so well with the new that it started me to wondering: Do I want to live in a world that’s kept this guy in obscurity for so long? — Dan Harkins; photo by Jeremy Hills
GOD AND MONSTERS
The History Channel show Monster Quest recently featured Grassman (heh), a Bigfoot-like critter that wanders and makes elaborate tree branch nests in the Akron area. But that is nowhere near as creepy as the Mount Vernon teacher who taught Christianity instead of science and BURNED CROSSES INTO STUDENTS’ ARMS! FOR 11 YEARS! — Frank Lewis
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