Editorial

I have to confess I feel a bit like a middle-aged groupie, but I just can’t stop telling people about William Davis’ new book, “Undoctored.” Dr. Davis is a Milwaukee cardiologist known for his New York Times bestselling “Wheat Belly” books.

And in case I’ve already lost you or am at risk of doing so, let me just quickly share this:

“Excess fat melts away effortlessly, joint pain and skin rashes recede, acid reflux and irritable bowel syndrome symptoms reverse within days, fibromyalgia and ulcerative colitis begin a powerful retreat.”

This is what he witnessed, as more or less unexpected side effects, after he’d convinced his patients to give up wheat for 30 days for their heart health. Imagine if these were the side effects you or someone close to you experienced from something the doctor or, more likely the physician’s assistant, had prescribed.

The health benefits were so dramatic, and his book so successful, it launched a new career for him: from cog-in-the (broken)-system cardiologist to personal health empowerment crusader.

While Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is getting most of the attention as the Co-Chair of Donald Trump’s “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity,” the appointment to that Commission of notorious election rigger Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s former Secretary of State, is the real threat to democracy.

Blackwell played a role in Ohio’s 2004 election parallel to that played by Florida’s Secretary of State Kathleen Harris in the 2000 election. He co-chaired George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio. Blackwell is a far-right Republican who administered Ohio’s 2004 election using an “all the above” barrage of tactics pioneered throughout the Third World by the CIA and other covert operatives since the beginning of the Cold War.

Prior to the election, Blackwell established a wide range of measures aimed at systematically disenfranchising potential Democratic voters, and for electronically shifting the vote count to guarantee a Bush-Cheney victory.

As an African American woman, I started elementary school during the Jim Crow Law era. I went to middle school and high school after the Civil Rights movement helped end the law. As an adult, I have watched the country still practice the philosophy that we, Americans and all people that live here, are “separate but equal.” 

I have watched the people of this country that I love, go about the business of “play acting” that the laws of Jim Crow no longer exist. That minorities, specifically, Black minorities, have the same rights as the white person that they live next to, that they work with, worship with and sit next to in school. We as a people, have been able to “try to get along” with each other, especially in public, regardless of our real thoughts in private. 

Also by Lila Garrett, Bob Fitrakis, Suzanne Patzer, David Swanson, Ilene Proctor, Jan Goodman, Jerry Manpearl, Myla Reson, Alan Minsky, Linda Seeley, and many more

The unthinkable is upon us.

A president of the United States poses a clear and present danger to our global survival. He is mentally unstable, dangerously incompetent, throughly dishonest and can’t be trusted with the safety of our children or our planet.

It’s become our duty to remove him soon, beyond the electoral system, and strictly without violence. 

At primary issue are Trump’s imminent threat of nuclear war; his assault on the global ecosystems and green infrastructure on which our ecological and economic future depends; the outrageous culture of theft permeating his regime; its on-going attacks on women, and more.

Trump embodies a classic corporatist reaction against a powerful social democratic uprising. The volcanic energy generated by the Sanders, Green, Libertarian. Occupy and other campaigns for social justice and ecological sanity are at the core of American life.

In a perfect world, $50 million would be spent showing Ohioans the following political ad on TV:

Announcer: "This is the Ohio Newscast featuring Lenny Smith and Lara Lewandowski." (Ken and Barbie lookalikes)

Lenny: "Ohio's runaway governor is running the Buckeye State into an even bigger ditch."

(Picture of a disgruntled-looking Gov. John Kasich superimposed in background.)

Lara: "That's right, Lenny. A few months ago Kasich said Ohio was running a $400 million deficit. Now it's ballooned to $800 million. Kasich is driving Ohio into a $1 billion debt hole."

Lenny: "In other words, Kasich's so-called Ohio Miracle has become a Buckeye Catastrophe."

Lara: "Isn't Kasich the guy who cut taxes for rich Ohio business owners and cut the hell out of Ohio public schools, cities and counties."

Lenny: "This guy's bad plans are bankrupting the state and hurting its people. What is Kasich doing running around the country campaigning for president and promoting his new book while our home state goes to hell in a hand basket?"

Thousands, possibly millions, of Americans have been calling for President Trump’s impeachment. They want to save the world by making him lose his job. Sadly, it is just a knee-jerk reaction that will do nothing to protect immigrants, end war, or rescue funding for essential programs. The country’s violent swing to the right does not live and die with Trump. Removing him from office will only result in a different scumbag becoming the official spokesperson for evil.

Hard to imagine a more insensitive gesture than Mayor Andy Ginther’s choice of the Police Academy for his second State of the City address. Shockingly, Ginther chose the occasion to announce that the notorious, overly white police unit known as the “jump-out boys” would be unleashed year-round to torment black, minority and poor youth. Everybody knows that if Henry Green was a young white man in Upper Arlington, legally open-carrying, and was shot by two plainclothes black officers, those officers would be in jail right now.

Also, the State Highway Patrol confirmed that Trump supporters hired private security who guarded the perimeters at their latest Ohio Statehouse rally dressed in military fatigues and carrying AR-15 assault rifles. The police allowed them open-carry on state property. Andy, where were the jump-out boys then?

Last week I saw a little African-American girl who looked to be about five years old walking with, I assume her mother. I then saw other young African-American girls entering an elementary school. They appeared to be between five and eight years old.

They were normal little girls. Running, laughing and looking happy to be going to school. They were of different hues of color, some short and some tall for their ages. They wore normal clothing for children their age. Most of them had something else in common. They were wearing fake hair. Hair that was long and almost for some, touching their backside. Hair that they had to brush out of their eyes as they ran to enter the school doors. Hair in styles that made them look like little women. Hair that clearly wasn’t their own.

The last time I wrote, I said that I was on my way home from the DAPL protest at the Sacred Stone Camp in the Standing Rock reservation. Well, I got as far as Jamestown, ND, rented a motel room, and found I simply could not sleep. I was worrying too much about the few protesters I had left behind, and was afraid that I was wrong in my opinion that the camp would not be raided. So, I emptied my car of all my gear so that I might be able to carry people back with me, then went back to the camp.

There were very few people left. It was an incredibly surreal landscape. There were literally tons of perfectly good gear laying abandoned. Lumber, sleeping bags, dozens of ti pis, semi-permanent dwellings people had built, tarps, wooden platforms, wood burning stoves--literally every kind of camping gear you can imagine, and some I'd never seen before (like a propane powered instant hot water tank).