I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I'm the same age as him, but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-fifties, Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.

Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.

The Broadway in Columbus Series's "Thoroughly Modern Millie" opened Tuesday night at the Palace Theater with a tight, light and thoroughly enjoyable musical cream puff to adorn the Palace stage.

This is, of course, no major work of angst or passion.  Miss Saigon has come and gone. 

But as advertised, Millie is a perfectly lovely milk chocolate trifle, served light and frothy.  The performances are clean, competent and engaging.  The staging is unpretentious and credible.  The lines are delivered right, the music sung nicely, the pacing reasonable and the plot line so thoroughly predictable as to be downright relaxing. 

Lead Darcie Roberts (Millie) and her cohorts Stephanie Pope (Muzzie), Robyn Payne (Miss Flannery) and Pamela Hamill (Mrs. Meers) balance each other nicely, while the men---mainly Bryan McElroy (Jimmy) and John Ganun (Trevor Graydon), along with Emir Yonzon (Bun Foo) and Richard Feng Zhu (Chin Ho)---more than deliver on their end of the bargain. 

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable evening, easy on the eyes, ears and psyche. 

The following documents are supporting documents in the Blackwell presidential election sanctions case in Ohio. For more information about the sanctions, read the following articles.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1138, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1102, and see other articles in the Election 2004 department.

Briefs

MEMORANDUM OF UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS, JR. AS AMICUS CURIAE IN OPPOSITION TO MOTION OF SECRETARY OF STATE BLACKWELL FOR SANCTIONS PURSUANT TO CIV. R. 11 AND S. CT. PRAC. R. XIV, §5

MEMORANDUM OF UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS, JR. AS AMICUS CURIAE IN OPPOSITION TO MOTION OF SECRETARY OF STATE BLACKWELL AND OHIO’S TWENTY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS FOR SANCTIONS PURSUANT TO CIV. R 11 AND S. CT. PRAC. R. XIV, §5

J. Kenneth Blackwell is at it again. Ohio’s infamous Secretary of State and master of media distortion and hype, earning him the name “Inkwell” among the statehouse press corps, has announced his partisan agenda for governor of the Buckeye State.

Blackwell, Ohio’s first statewide African American office holder, has rapidly moved to stake out the far right of the Ohio Republican Party as his political base. The Secretary of State has found himself consistently at odds with mainstream conservatives in the state’s GOP.

Last week, the Franklin County Board of Elections, under the control of Republican Executive Director Matt Damschroder, obtained a temporary restraining order against Blackwell. In another of his notorious imperial decrees, the Secretary of State ordered all 88 county boards to buy optical-scan voting systems from two well-known Republican-linked companies, Diebold and ES&S.

When I think of newspaper journalists who became authors and had enormous impacts on media criticism in the United States, two names come to mind.

One is George Seldes. As a young man, he covered the First World War and then reported on historic events in Europe for the Chicago Tribune from 1919 until 1928. Seldes quit the paper and went on to blaze a trail as an independent journalist -- ready, able and eager to challenge media business-as-usual. Naturally, he earned hostility from the kind of media magnates he skewered in “Lords of the Press.” The renowned historian Charles A. Beard called that 1938 book “a grand job.”

Forty-five years later, another emigre from newsrooms wrote a book that turned out to have profound effects on critical thinking about media. When “The Media Monopoly” first appeared in 1983, the media establishment and many of its employees shrugged; if they paid any attention, it was usually just long enough to dismiss Ben Bagdikian’s warning about consolidation of media ownership as alarmist.

While the media landscape shifted, Bagdikian saw corporate behemoths on