“… Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.” – Donald Trump at a news conference July 27, 2016

hat’s the money quote that was widely reported as what Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump said that day about Russia and Hillary Clinton’s emails. It is hard to read those sentences as anything but cynical joking, but most of the media, the empty-headed commentariat, and Democratic shills all made a fundamentally bad-faith effort to inflate the joke into something sinister to serve their various agendas.

As we go to press, the devastating numbers are coming in from the special election polls. It appears Issue One has failed.

At the crux of the anti-Issue One campaign was the Big Lie that the idea of a city with representative districts came from "The party of Trump" who were supposedly "associated with the Koch Brothers." Ironically, many voters were worried about an increased cost of $20 million to the city budget, which was part of the anti-Issue One campaign's false advertising. In reality, the movement for more representation was created after the all-Democratic Columbus City Council gave away a quarter of a billion dollars to Nationwide Insurance and four of the richest families to bail them out for a bad investment in the Columbus Blue Jackets hockey team.

With all the struggles this presidential election of getting Gary Johnson eligible to take part in the debates, we can easily become lost in the miasma of the federal elections. It had happened to me, until I noticed a post last week from my previous professor Dr. Robert Fitrakis. Dr. Fitrakis was always one of my favorite teachers to have discussions with, as well as the professor I credit the most for providing the tools I employ to analyze political media, thanks to his “Politics and the Media” course. He and I would have long discussions while smoking our briar tobacco pipes outside of the school building jokingly referring to ourselves as “pipe smoking intellectuals.”

Jonathan Beard is the energy and inspiration behind Issue 1, the vote to end the at-large city council which has been in-place for over a century. Beard is the president and CEO of the Columbus Compact Corporation. He’s co-chair of Represent Columbus, the grass-roots group behind Issue 1. In his own words Issue 1 is the “citizen-initiated proposed Columbus Charter Amendment to change our city council to a form that better represents the interests of the people of all Columbus.” A summer of violence in a long-neglected east side neighborhood, he says, is when and where Issue 1 was born.   

I personally became involved to initiate Issue 1 when Columbus City Council would not act to support 22 neighborhood groups – two area commissions, plus umpteen civic associations, business associations and block watches – during a summer of horrific drug-related gun violence on E. Main Street where all the violence was caught on video and shared with city council.