International Book Mine or Gold Mine?

When driving down West Gaines Street you may have noticed a new addition to your road side viewing: Bookstore, carefully painted on a white sign in large blue lettering. Leaning beside what may be a WWII Quonset hut, this bookstore has more than just one sign of genuine character.

Inside, the floors are a quilt of beige, teal and oriental carpets. A busy mural in dark pinks, blacks, yellows and greens captivate customers. Little artifacts are strewn throughout the labyrinthine bookshelves. For example a small bust of Abraham Lincoln, a brass statue of Shiva, a detailed sketch portrait of a middle aged man with wide eyes and an African mask mounted on one of two thick wooden pillars that stand on both sides of the main reference desk.

Behind that desk was Allan Amalou, artist, employee and step-son of the bookstore's founder, Jayson Hays. I asked Allan how he came up with his images. " I go with it, it's how I feel... A way to relieve stress."

Allan could just as easily be titled a carpenter. Since the age of 10 he was inspired by his stepfather to have a bookstore. In shaping that reality, Allan built all 53 of the three-column book shelves from salvaged and re-used wood. Wood that was left to be unused; trashed or left on the sides of roads. The counter itself is a mismatched array of puzzle pieces in different shades of brown, russet and auburn ."It took about nine months," he says. Additionally he expressed that sometimes a hammer wasn't around when a baseball bat was. That sort of creativity and improvisation of resources is the epitome of DIY.

Still renovation persists daily, surpassing more than the apparent electric work. Tables are planned to be built, possibly with excess materials, Bistro chairs soon to go under them. A gallery to compliment First Friday's will go up. A stage in-the-making, which is backed by the energetic mural, will have curtains to hug the sides. The stage is planned for a poetry area but not just exclusively. Live music, maybe?

Right now their main attraction is their selection. The shelves are organized from Greek history all the way down to a small Manga comic book collection. Allan explains, "We don't just sell anything. We try to look for quality... Our focus is on history and fiction." And also expansion. Even though you can order text books now, in the spring they will be available in the shelves, likely undercutting the mainstream market. IBM has a back area and an upstairs, tripling its size. Luckily, Allan isn't alone to run the shop.

Van Fox, an employee and previous bookstore owner, said he was procured for the position at a stop light in the middle of traffic. He and Jayson Hays had not been in touch for some time. Van reasoned that when he was in sight it was instinctual for Jayson to get his attention. "He liked how I ran my store," Van said, smiling lightly. Van not only enlightened me that the structure could be a Quonset hut after all but also breaks down his take on Jayson's philosophical drive behind the bookstore: Sharing knowledge and ideas through the written word is a powerful thing.

Jayson, a former FSU professor, often visits the store an hour or two at a time. Although he's a cancer survivor, he is still recovering from chemotherapy. He said that as a long time teacher he had been thinking of running a bookstore for over twenty years. He affirms that the medium of books are still vital in our ever-growing high tech world. "The last bastion of high culture is a well-stocked private library," Jayson voiced.

IBM was intended to open every First Friday but then re-opened soon after its premier on August 7th (2009). International Book Mine is opened seven days a week, 9 am to 9 pm. You can buy used books for around 40% off the cover price, depending on its condition and demand. IBM is a fresh business, so remember to bring cash or checks.

Netroots Nation: Muckraking and More

Muckraking 101 was one among many scintillating sessions (also session videos) this year at Netroots Nation, held at the David L. Lawrence convention center in Pittsburgh. Sponsored by The Investigative Fund, it was the first investigative training workshop for bloggers. The session featured speakers Bill Bastone, the founder of The Smoking Gun (known for this article) ; Brant Houston, the former executive director of Investigative Reporters & Editors; investigative blogger Lindsay Beyerstein; Mediator and Investigative Fund's own Esther Kaplan.

*Tools, resources and links from the session are available online here, including a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) letter generator.

The speakers led an inspiring and thought provoking crash course on research. Brant Houston advised when inquiring information that it is crucial to do so early and often. Some agencies, such as the FBI, will usually deny the first request off the bat. Parallel to some insurance agencies, you have to show more than initial interest to get feedback. Also, make sure to grab files from courts before they get their litigated seals placed on them.

Another top note was to follow a paper trail from the source. If you are investigating, for example a corporation filing tax reports, a good place to start would be to call the IRS and see what exact forms they are so that you are able to search them directly by number. Brant states that there is a method of triangulation in paper trailing, that there are different documents on the same subject. Much like a crime scene, he says, you don't take just one photo of the scene but revolve around it.

Types of data are crucial, particularly those that already have information organized for you. Search XLS files. XLS' are organized excel data files that, especially if you utilize excel, can retrieve nominal amounts of information. We were reminded in the session that we should also look into news databases and clippings and not to forget the validity they carry.


Bill Bastone introduced PACER, an online administrative office of US courts that retrieves, for extremely cheap pocket change (.08 cents a page), court documents. PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records . One spectator comments that there is a Firefox add-on called RECAP that will find the files you are looking for for free. This could be a useful tool but I agree with Bill when he says to be weary of possible adjustments when getting these documents apart from the source. PACER includes bankruptcy documents, which Bill describes as detailed and "remarkable" files.

Bill advised not to ever suggest you are a reporter, journalist or blogger when tending to investigation hard copies. He insists it will fire off immediate alarms and people will be less willing to help you. Also, there should be more optimism when the clerk has an armful of books for your request. "There are gems in there" he says, "if you are willing to look".

Specification Helps:

Disclosures. Donations. Proposition Records. Ownership. Being Sued. Judgments. IRS. Local, State or Federal. Probate Courts (usually left out!) .

Lindsay Beyerstein suggests when posting or reporting to cut and paste directly information from the documents you investigate or you could be at fault. Never write down an interpretation or what you think it says. Lindsay breaks down an investigation of the groups organizing the town hall mobs that are currently disrupting the community meetings where legislators are discussing health care reform. Lindsay reveals how you can see whether a corporation is legitimately registered. She says that if you can't find the corporation in its origin state, to check Delaware. For corporate registration, she says, "Delaware is like marriage in Vegas".

One of the main resources she uses, beside Google's Who Is searches, is to use Guidestar and Foundation Center's foundation finder. Guidestar houses all information listed with nonprofit organizations and the Foundation Finder offers but not limited to information on private foundations, community foundations, grantmaking public charities, and corporate giving programs.

*Article can also be found cross posted at the Florida Progressive Coalition Blog

Given the circumstances of my absence in Pittsburgh I thought I would let you guys in on some GUBA footage I found about tweeking your wifi signal with a little aluminum foil, a single sheet of printed paper and some glue.

Guba Video: Tweek your Wifi Signal

Netroots Nation

Stay tuned for coverage.

Why markets can't cure healthcare

This article posted on the NY Times put a lot of the privatized healthcare quarreling to rest.

The PDF he links to that sources the information can be found here also. Refresh if it doesn't load up correctly.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal:

Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.

Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.

There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.

This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.

This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities.

The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (“I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”) That’s why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.

You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don’t trust them — they’re profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.

Between those two factors, health care just doesn’t work as a standard market story.

All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.

Courtesy of the New York Times.

CNN's Dobbs Problem

Courtesy of MEDIAMATTERS