Sign The Petition To Ask St. Albans City Council To Adopt Huntington's Dog Tethering Ordinance

I signed the electronic petition to give St. Albans dogs the same protection from cruel tethering that the City of Huntington gave their dogs 4 years ago. You can sign the petition, too. Click this link: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/318/410/863/stop-tethering-dogs-in-st-albans-wv/#next_action

Cities all over the United States and Canada are enacting city ordinances that protect dogs from being tethered outside without access to food, water, shelter and companionship. Tethered dogs live miserable, lonely lives.

We're asking St. Albans to adopt the Huntington law because it is simple and clear. Unlike the Kanawha County "Linz Law" which is riddled with exceptions and loopholes, the Huntington law makes it easy for law enforcement to see at a glance if the law is being violated. 

The Huntington law reads: "It shall be unlawful for any owner or other person controlling or possessing any dog to tether a dog outdoors without direct supervision of the animal's guardian."

Sign the petition to protect the dogs of St. Albans, WV, from cruelty on the end of a chain. Click here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/318/410/863/stop-tethering-dogs-in-st-albans-wv/#next_action

Put On Your Heisenberg Hats, Your Gas Masks And Your "Breaking Bad" T-Shirts, We're Headed For Ordnance Park

Put on your Heisenberg hats, your gas masks and your "Breaking Bad" t-shirts, we're headed for St. Albans' Ordnance Park tonight. Yep, we're gathering at the St. Peter's United Methodist Church in Ordnance Park at 7PM to take a bite out of crime and it's nursery, citizen apathy.

By the way, I ran into the busiest man in St. Albans, Adam Bryan, today and I have an idea for him: On Free Movie Night at the Alban Arts and Conference Center, show encore presentations of the best show on TV, Breaking Bad". If you haven't seen "Breaking Bad" and its cast of award winning actors, it's about a mild-mannered high school science teacher who finds out he has only a few months to live so he starts cooking the purest, best meth in town and makes a lot of money to leave for his family when he's dead.

Yeah, I like that idea, Bryan. Thursday night showings of "Breaking Bad." Seasons one and two are on DVD now. Season three goes on sale June 7.

Tomorrow I'll report on tonight's meeting.

In the meantime, read  my 20 March post, "Why St. Albans' Crime Problem Is A Leadership Opportunity For Generation X and Generation Y"

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=6550062939430773936&postID=7391787918561017547

Higginbotham At Large Is Not Affiliated In Any Way With Anonymously or Pseudonymously Published Sites

Last night I got an email from a print media publisher who mistakenly thought me to be the publisher of a website that prints unflattering photos and news stories about St. Albans and its elected leaders. This was the first I had heard of the site so I Googled it and found that this anonymously published site prominently features a quote from one of my blog posts and links to my blog in at least two ways. I was never asked for permission to quote from my blog or to link to it nor would I have ever granted permission for any unaccountable, anonymous publisher to link to or quote from my blog.

Let me be clear: I, Joseph Higginbotham, have no connection whatsoever to any pseudonymously or anonymously published site, have not granted permission to quote from my blog and do not know the identity of the person or persons responsible for the aforementioned site that portrays St. Albans as a meth-making "badlands".

This is not to say that I disagree with everything the anonymous site says. The difference is that when I have something unflattering to say about St. Albans or its titular leaders I say it under my own name where I can be held accountable for what I say. Three of my July 2009 posts dealt with bad leadership and one of them seems to have provided some inspiration for the anonymous site.

The difference between me and the anonymous website publisher is that when I have something unflattering to say about St. Albans or its titular leaders I am accountable for what I say.

I hope the anonymous web publisher doesn't fancy himself (or herself) some kind of modern day Thomas Paine or his website a kind of 21st Century Common Sense just because Paine's tract was first published anonymously. Paine was committing treason against England and might very well have been arrested and killed for what he wrote. I doubt that Mayor Callaway would order the St. Albans police to shoot the anonymous website publisher on sight if he were to disclose his identity.

I, for one, would have greater respect for him (or her) if he/she boldly published his name.

Nor do I disagree with the anonymous website's determination to provide an online forum where St. Albans residents can interact with one another and become better engaged with their elected leaders and their neighbors. In fact, I've met with Mayor Callaway and with members of Council and asked them why the mayor's office has not provided this leadership and this online forum.

But I strongly disapprove of any online forum that allows anonymous posts.

If you want to tell the police about the meth lab next door, you can already do so anonymously but if you wish to get St. Albans talking about its crime problems and its rising median age and its declining population and its lack of citizen engagement, you need to do that publicly. That's why my LinkedSt.Albans group is on Linkedin, a site that is all about accountability and real IDs.

In fact, let me put in a plug for the only St. Albans discussion forum with which I am affiliated, LinkedSt.ALbans. I started LinkedSt.Albans in hope that it would kickstart some citizen engagement in a town where 4 votes will get you a seat on city council because nobody else bothers to run.

If you would like to join LinkedSt.Albans just go to :: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=2053370.

Higginbotham At Large does not publish reader comments but if you identify yourself I'll read your email and even reply if necessary. Send all comments, questions or hate me to me at JosephHigginbotham@gmail.com.

St. Albans Barber Shop And Public Policy Think Tank Finds Brooks McCabe and Obama In Biblical Prophecy

is Senator Brooks McCabe a tool of the Anti-Christ? Would merged city-county government help usher in One World Government and the reign of The Anti-Christ as prophesied in The Book of Revelation? Yes and yes according to the patrons of the St. Albans barber shop where I got a haircut this past Friday.

I live in a town where The Mark of The Beast, The Anti-Christ and One World Government are never far from the minds and the lips of many of its residents and can pop up in day-to-day conversation at almost any time if certain precipitating conditions are present. For example, when the cashier at the St. Albans Kroger asks a shopper for his or her Kroger Plus card it's not unusual for this innocent request to get employees and customers talking about a "cashless society" and how we're all being softened up for a mark on our foreheads or our hands without which we can neither buy nor sell. A software engineer routinely sends me updates about how close we are to being surgically fitted with government mandated  RFID devices.

The mere sight or mention of President Obama is another precipitating condition that gets people talking and speculating about "End Times". To many of the people in St. Albans, figuring out if Obama is The Anti-Christ or what part he plays in the fulfillment of prophetic Scripture is better than Sudoku.

On the day when the barber shop in which I was waiting for a haircut erupted in speculation that Brooks McCabe might be in league with Satan and that merged city-county government might have an ignominious and nefarious place  in biblical prophecy, there were at least three precipitating conditions present: (1) The guy in the barber chair was complaining about government abuse. (2) Much of the brown-skinned, Muslim world was in revolt against their governments. (3) President Obama was on TV making a speech about the fall of Egypt's Mubarak.

The mere sight of President Obama was making the guy who came in after me visibly twitchy. Every once in a while he groaned or muttered curse words in a stage whisper.

"Merged government just moves us one step closer to One World Government" said the guy in the barber chair.

The guy who came in behind me nodded his head in agreement.

"So by your reasoning" I said, "we also moved one step closer to One World Government when the 13 colonies merged to become the United States."

The guy who came in behind me grunted but never looked at me. Had he been Egyptian he would have removed a shoe and held it in the air like the Egyptian revolutionaries did to show their contempt for Mubarak.

The guy in the barber chair got a familiar far away look in his eye that told me he was experiencing cognitive dissonance - he was trying to reconcile two contradictory, mutually exclusive thoughts. On one hand, the guy in the barber chair believed Peter Marshall, David Manuel, Glenn Beck and David Barton, that God Almighty guided Christopher Columbus, The Pilgrims and the Puritans to the New World where He also led them to form the nation that would become the beacon of light to the world. Never mind that the US was formed 150 years later, not by Puritans and Pilgrims but by Deists and skeptics.

On the other hand, the guy in the barber chair also believed that government - especially Big Government - is of the Devil. So Big Government is bad - except when it's the US government which was a work of God but is now led by a man who may be a candidate for Anti-Christ.

Anyway, that's how a barber shop think tank decided that Brooks McCabe may be a tool of Satan and merged government may help usher in One World, Anti-Christ led government.

Are You The Leader St. Albans WV Is Waiting For?

I plan to transfer ownership of my St. Albans WV Linkedin group to any group member who convinces me that he or she has a vision for St. Albans WV – both the city and the Linkedin group.

So far I’ve had no takers.

Let me tell you a little about why I started this group that I’m now trying to give it away.

When, after a 20-year absence, I returned to St. Albans I noticed that the average St. Albans resident is pretty disengaged. The average St. Albans resident doesn’t know what’s going on at City Hall, doesn’t know what The St. Albans Partnership is, doesn’t know The Partnership’s constituent members, doesn’t know what any of those member orgs do and doesn’t care.

I also noticed that the handful of engaged citizens who might like to actually know what’s going on in town don’t have a single, central place they can go to get information. The “official” city of St. Albans website isn’t managed very well and isn’t updated often enough.

The St. Albans Partnership which, ostensibly, sees itself as the org that will become that central source of information and citizen engagement but, frankly, I’ve been very disappointed in their efforts. They haven’t tweeted since January and they have only 12 followers.

One of St. Albans’ council members agrees with me that St. Albans needs a single source of info – a website – where citizens can go to stay informed but disagrees with me on why we don’t already have it. The city council member blames it on citizen apathy.

I blame it on poor leadership. I blame St. Albans’ citizens’ apathy on decades of learned disengagement. Our quasi- and para-government orgs don’t do what they said they were going to do. Our city council members and mayors haven’t replaced the do-nothing volunteers with new volunteers who might actually do things, might actually have vision and new ideas.

Our titular leaders haven’t reached out to the one demographic that actually has a stake in the future of the town: our young people.

If our titular – “legitimate” - leaders were serious about making St. Albans a city that attracts and retains young minds there would be some young minds on the do-nothing committees that have been preventing real progress and real change for decades.

I always intended to transfer ownership of the St. Albans WV Linkedin group to someone with a better chance of uniting and informing the town than me. I was hoping that the mayor and city council members and other would-be movers and shakers would join the St. Albans WV Linkedin group and use it to inform, challenge and inspire the town to see itself as something besides an aging, declining bedroom community of Charleston whose best days are behind it and whose primary industry these days seems to be the illegal and dangerous manufacture of methamphetamine.

By the way, why is it that all the neighbors of the meth houses seem to know where the meth house are but the police don’t seem to know? I’ve been asked that question a hundred times since returning to St. Albans.

In other words, I was hoping that some elected officials – people with what management theory books call “legitimate power” – would join the group and start St. Albans talking about its future in a new way.

That hasn’t happened.

I was also hoping that internet-savvy young people would join the group and use it to tell their elected leaders what St. Albans has to do to attract and retain the creative class – and a different class of entrepreneurs than the meth cookers. 

That hasn’t happened, either.

Right now, the only thing St. Albans is positioned to attract is more meth dealers and, perhaps, a mention on the hit AMC network TV show, Breaking Bad, a show about a high school science teacher who becomes a huge meth cooker.

So I’m going to transfer ownership of the St. Albans WV Linkedin group to someone who has a convincing plan to inform St. Albans.

I’m also going to take this opportunity to ask would-be leaders to read some things. I want them to read the Spaces For People blog.

I want them to read the books of Richard Florida and other books about the creative class and why some towns attract them and why others repel them. I want would-be leaders to read Seth Godin’s wonderful little book on leadership, Tribes.

I was just telling my conservative correspondent that I might print up some bumper stickers and buttons that say, “Are you the leader St. Albans is waiting for?”

Higginbotham At Large publishes dissenting opinions but

Higginbotham At Large will publish no comments from “anonymous”, from company names, from organization names or from aliases (like screen names and CB handles). If you want to comment here you must be accountable for what you write as I am accountable for what I write.

22 Jan. 2010 -STARDA ,Economic Development, Alban Arts and Conference Center, Creative Class, Tri-State Talk With Bobby Nelson, The Corporation

Higginbotham At Large Friday 22 January 2010:

In This Issue:

- Misused Expression of the Week: "Economic Development"

- “The Corporation”

- Q&A On My Wednesday Appearance On “Tri-State Talk” hosted by former WV legislator and former Huntington mayor, Bobby Nelson.

Misused Expression Of The Week: “Economic Development”

There are only two ways for a city, county or state to accomplish “economic development”. One way is by transfer of wealth from one region to another. Too often in human history the transfer of wealth was accomplished by war or by good old fashioned sacking and pillaging but these days it’s more often accomplished by figuring out how to get people who live in, say, Kanawha County, to spend their money in Putnam County or vice versa or figuring out a way to get Kentuckians to spend their money in West Virginia or vice versa. Let’s say I build a huge shopping mall in, say, Putnam County and drain off shopping dollars from Charleston’s Town Center Mall and from Barboursville’s Huntington Mall. I have created jobs, increased the tax base and performed economic development in Putnam County but I’ve done so at the expense of other parts of the state so it’s a zero-sum game. A shopping mall in Putnam County doesn’t create new wealth it simply transfers wealth from one area to another. Even if it could be proven that shoppers in the Cabell-Putnam-Kanawha corridor go to more movies, eat more meals at restaurants, and buy more stuff, the shopping mall pie didn’t get larger it simply got sliced up into three pieces instead of two. Nothing was done to give the spenders more discretionary dollars to spend. The shoppers who made $X before the new mall was built are still making the same salary. Were new jobs created? Yes, in Putnam County but chances are that jobs were lost in Charleston and Huntington so, overall, the economic pie was not made larger, the pie is simply being sliced more ways and smaller pieces are being redistributed.

The second and better way to accomplish economic development is to discover or invent and then monetize something that was previously not discovered, invented or monetized. When The Beverly Hillbillies discovered oil on their land, this oil was previously undiscovered, previously unmonetized new wealth. When Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, built the computer that was small enough and cheap enough to, in effect, prove his concept that one day small, inexpensive personal computers would be in most people’s homes and change the world, he invented and monetized something that was previously nonexistent and unmonetized. He not only created new wealth for Apple but he made it possible for individuals and businesses everywhere to work more efficiently and create new wealth.

Someone asked me the other day if I approved of St. Albans Mayor, Dick Callaway and STARDA’s (St. Albans Regional Development Authority) purchase of the old Alban Theater and turning it into the Alban Arts and Convention Center. I said that the Alban has the potential to be an important first step in attracting the creative class a known engine of economic development and growth.

If you haven’t had a chance to read any of Dr. Richard Florida’s books or see the speech he made at George Mason University (occasionally shown on PBS) then you may not know that the old economic development model (workers go where the employers are) has been replaced by a new model – employers go where the creative class is.

A creative class worker is any worker with the skills and technology to live and work pretty much anywhere that there’s internet access and cell phone coverage. A creative class worker isn’t tethered to a certain employer, plant or office building. Because of cell phone technology, the internet and his skills, the creative class worker can create music or computer apps almost anywhere on the planet. These high autonomy professionals get to choose where they live and spend so cities must become places where the creative class wants to live.

Yes, of course I’m aware that Richard Florida has his detractors who say “creative class” is just another way of saying that America’s middle class manufacturing based economy is being replaced by a knowledge based economy, something we’ve known for decades. But even if “creative class” is interchangeable with “knowledge workers” – which it isn’t, exactly – this observation doesn’t negate the mounting evidence that cities and regions which become places where the creative class wants to live and work are the cities and regions that experience the kind of economic development that actually makes the economic pie bigger.

Ask Pittsburgh about the high cost of not becoming the kind of place where the creative class wants to live and work. As Richard Florida said in his televised speech at George Mason University, Pittsburgh lost a company it birthed – Lycos – and the thousands of jobs that went with it when Lycos relocated to Boston because Boston already had the creative class workers they couldn’t recruit to Pittsburgh. For those of you who don’t know, Lycos was a search engine before Google reinvented search engines.

I was one of the original incorporators of STARDA back in 1990 and I think STARDA’s and Mayor Callaway’s purchase of the old Alban theater could be a small first step in making St. Albans the kind of place that can compete for creative class brains. It turns out that the creative class wants to live in places where there is a vibrant arts and entertainment community and a “night life”. Remember, creative class workers are highly autonomous, don’t have an 8-5 job and just might want to see a movie at midnight or go to supper or a play or hear some live music at 2AM.

In addition, it turns out that cities that attract and retain the creative class are cities with great racial, ethnic, religious and generational diversity.

I could elaborate but I’m hoping some of my readers will go get some of Richard Florida’s books and read for themselves why some cities grow and others shrink under the new economic development model. Find out why West Virginia’s PROMISE scholarship program is a step in the right direction. Find out why The Republic of Ireland has long been a tax haven for certain creatives. Find out why Lycos left Pittsburgh and went to Boston.

Find out why bringing arts and entertainment to Main Street in St. Albans may do much more than just transfer a few convention and entertainment dollars from surrounding towns.

Imagine a St. Albans where the next Apple or the next Google or the next Microsoft is founded. A little town like St. Albans might be only one Steve Wozniak or one Steve Jobs or one Bill Gates from becoming the engine of West Virginia’s economy.

“The Corporation”

The Supreme Court’s decision to let corporations spend as much as they want to buy elections led to some interesting discussion about what a corporation is and how we got them at last night’s Drinking Liberally meeting. While we waited for the Kennedy-Blankenship debate to come on TV, we talked about a film I’ve long encouraged everyone to see called “The Corporation.” It’s based on the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan. I mentioned that I own a copy of The Corporation on DVD and that if we can find a venue at which to show the film, perhaps we should show it at a future DL meeting.

When I lived in Lexington my friend, Richard Mitchell, was showing The Corporation at The Lexington Public Library to crowds that were surprisingly large considering that Richard didn’t have an advertising budget and most of the attendees heard about these public showings through word of mouth. The film runs 2 and a half hours, by the way, so if we were to show it we might have to do so over two or more nights as Richard Mitchell did in Lexington.

But Charleston DLers who wish to see the film may not have to wait for a public showing. You can now download The Corporation at http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=23.

Q&A On My Wednesday Appearance On “Tri-State Talk” hosted by former WV legislator and former Huntington mayor, Bobby Nelson.

A few of my regular readers have asked me some questions about my Wednesday appearance on what I believe to be the only live, local, liberal talk show in West Virginia, “Tri-State Talk” with former Huntington mayor and former WV legislator, Bobby Nelson.

Q. “Is there a podcast of the show?”

A. No. The show’s producer barked in our headphones that there was some kind of technical problem that prevented him from recording the show so there won’t be a podcast. Sorry.

Q. Did you get any conservative callers?

A. No. This was my second appearance on Mayor Nelson’s show and we didn’t get conservative callers either time I’ve been on. We did, however, get calls from liberals who want me to help them start a Drinking Liberally group in Huntington. I am in touch with these folks and have assured them that if they will get a group of people together for an “organizational meeting” I’ll be happy to come back to Huntington, answer their questions, tell them more about DL and put on a little “workshop” about how to get started. On a personal note, I think Huntington might be a better place to start a DL than Charleston was because the liberals are lonelier. And, of course, they can probably depend on Mayor Nelson to give them some PR during his 3:05 to 4PM radio show on WRVC 930AM and 94.1 FM.

By the way, if conservatives don’t call Mayor Nelson’s show it isn’t because he would mistreat them the way conservative talk show hosts mistreat liberals who call their shows. Mayor Nelson believes in civil, informed discussion, which is why his talk show would succeed in markets where bombastic liberal talk shows have failed. You see, liberals don’t want talk shows that mirror the bombast and incivility of the big name conservative talkers like Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage. Liberals wouldn’t support a liberal talk show host who calls conservatives names, yells at conservatives and then hangs up on conservatives. And liberals don’t need constant validation of their views. Liberals want to listen to talk shows where issues and current events are civilly discussed from all angles. Huntingtonians of all political stripes will feel welcome on Mayor Nelson’s show as long as they keep it friendly and polite.

Charleston Chapter of Drinking Liberally Looking For A Permanent Venue

The Charleston chapter of Drinking Liberally needs to settle on a permanent meeting place so we can get our chapter listed on the Drinking Liberally website where we can be found by fellow liberals who may be passing through or relocating to Charleston.

We'll be meeting every 2 weeks on Thursday evenings at 5:30-ish. Once selected, the permanent meeting place will be mentioned as part of the chapter listing so we're hoping that somewhere in the Charleston area there's a liberal restaurant or bar owner who would be proud for his establishment's brand to be associated with the liberal-progressive politics of our members.

And, of course, we'd like to settle on a place that stays open until at least 7:30 or 8PM on Thursdays, has ample parking and comfortable seating.

Oh, and perhaps just as important as the seating and parking and the hours, we need a place that doesn't blast music so loud that we can't hear each other talk. Drinking Liberally is about liberals getting together to talk about the issues that matter to us so if we can't have a conversation, we may as well all go home and watch Hardball, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman on TV.

By the way, I'd love to find a bar or tavern whose TVs are spot-welded to MSNBC.

I think it goes without saying that we aren't looking for the kind of place that caters to a "regular" crowd of Fox watchers.

Last night's meeting was briefly disrupted by a Corona-fired, self-described, Republican coal miner who proudly "blows up mountains for a living". I wonder if our mountain top removing coal apologist would have been drinking Coronas at our meeting place if he knew the owner is liberal. It would suit me fine if we could find a meeting place where there are no Corona-swilling, meeting disrupting, Republican coal miners.

Last year, before I moved back to West Virginia, my Lexington, KY, DL group met on a presidential debate night with assurances from the owner of the establishment that we could watch the debate, but when we arrived we found that several other groups were also meeting there and didn't want to hear the debate so many of us retired to our homes and watched the debate alone instead of in the company of our liberal friends.

I know that a restaurant or a bar is a business and needs to be run like a business but it's hard for me to believe that, somewhere in the Charleston area, there's not a bar, tavern or restaurant that would proud to be the home of MSNBC-watching, liberal-talking, patrons.

Oh, and there's a small group of liberals in St. Albans who can't meet in Charleston on Thursday evenings so, if there's enough interest and a friendly place to meet, I'm hoping to organize a St. Albans Drinking Liberally, too.

Incidentally, there are also opportunities for movie theaters to host Screening Liberally chapters, for restaurants to host Eating Liberally chapters, for bookstores to host Reading Liberally chapters and for comedy clubs to host Laughing Liberally chapters.

Living Liberally is about "progressive action through social interaction". Good things happen when people meet, tell each other their ideas, exchange business cards and then find a way to collaborate.

For more information, go to www.livingliberally.org.

Follow St. Albans Partnership On Twitter

Thanks to John "Cotton" Casto, you can now follow

on Twitter.

If you already have a Twitter account:

Go to http://www.stalbanspartnership.com/ and click where it says "follow me on Twitter".

If you don't have a Twitter account:

Go to www.Twitter.com and open an account. It's easy and free. If you don't know what Twitter is or have other questions, click on the "What?", "Why?" and "How?" buttons or click the red button that says "Watch a video". Below is what you'll see when you go to www.Twitter.com: