Editorial

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.

Gov. John Kasich continued to hide from unfriendly questioners June 19 when his "interview" by Channel 4's Colleen Marshall was broadcast.

Marshall, the dean of Columbus news anchors, turned out to be another journalistic "poodle," asking softball questions and failing to hold Kasich accountable for neglecting his duties as governor for a year while he flopped as a presidential candidate and burned through an estimated $1 million-plus of taxpayer money for security and traveling expenses while campaigning out of state.

Sadly, Marshall was more interested in looking good and making Kasich look good than performing as a reporter.

She started the recorded episode of The Spectrum on that Sunday morning by bragging that hers was the first interview in Ohio of Kasich since he dropped out of the race for the GOP nomination. That was false. Two reporters from the Columbus Dispatch and cleveland.com beat her to it.

Marshall opened by telling the audience it would be a "no holds barred interview." Hardly.

I had an odd feeling when I walked into the local Cabela’s.

It’s a big, beautiful store, designed to appeal to campers, hunters and others who enjoy spending time in the great outdoors. I’d been there before and felt comfortable, if a little out of place.

But that was before June 12, when a lone gunman forced his way into a gay bar in Orlando and shot 102 people, killing 49. He was able to pick off so many because he was armed not only with a semiautomatic pistol but with a SIG Sauer MCX assault rifle capable of firing 30 rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger.

Though the shooter didn’t purchase his assault rifle at Cabela’s, he could have. Mixed in with the store’s tents, fishing poles and other outdoor gear are rifles and shotguns designed for shooting game both big and small. And mixed in with those are weapons designed for one purpose only: to kill as many people as possible in as little time as possible.

Those weapons include the MCX, which Cabela’s sells for $1,679.99 when stores can keep it in stock. It’s currently out of stock at Columbus’s Cabela’s, which is hardly surprising.

On June 6th at the weekly City Council meeting they granted yet another multimillion dollar tax abatement to another major corporation with gross profits over a billion dollars. This time it was to UPS. Council member Elizabeth Brown, who chairs the Economic Development Committee, did her best to try and justify this tax abatement. In my comments to City Council, I suggested that UPS is not in danger of bankruptcy and her reply to that was she wants to make sure that companies like UPS do not fall into bankruptcy.

Really?

She then tried to tout her extensive experience in Economic Development since she used to be the Downtown Development Manager for the Department of Development.

Her duties?

You guessed it, to focus on helping companies to expand into sites in Downtown and the surrounding area (Short North) through income tax incentives and other tax giveaways. The perfect go to person for a handout. She also claimed that our surrounding suburbs give away much more in terms of tax incentives and we could have lost UPS.

Bulls#%t!

Ohio Governor John Kasich picked “poodles” – softball interviewers – for his return to public view after dropping out of the Republican presidential primary race in early May, following another shellacking at the polls in Indiana.

Ohio's lame duck governor invited CNN celebrity Anderson Cooper to come to the largely unoccupied Ohio governor's mansion (because Kasich chooses to continue to live in his rural Westerville palatial estate at additional cost to the taxpayer).

Cooper took time off from promoting his latest money-making project -- a book about him and his celebrity mom -- sandwiched in between his stand-up appearance in Columbus with a friend -- to welcome Kasich back to the public spotlight by letting Ohio's blabbermouth Gov say whatever, largely unfiltered and completely unobstructed by follow-up questions.

City Council must have been in a generous mood earlier this week during its Monday meeting at City Hall when it handed out two 10 year 75% tax abatements worth $680,710 to Hubbard Park Place LLC and Brunner Building LLC for two separate building projects in the Short North with a total investment cost of approximately $46 million. Both projects will create eight full-time permanent jobs in the economically depressed area of the Short North.

Then came Ball Metal Food Containers turn. According to the Department of Development, Ball Corp along with its subsidiaries is “the world’s leading supplier of metal packaging to the beverage, food, personal care and household industries, aerospace and other technology industries servicing both the commercial and government sectors.” Council members felt justified in handing out another 75% 10 year tax abatement totaling $1,684,430 for Ball Corp’s $15 million investment into their existing facility on the West side of Columbus and the promise of 50 new jobs.

“Conspiracy theory’ is a term that strikes fear and anxiety in the hearts of most every public figure, particularly journalists and academics. Since the 1960s the label has become a disciplinary device that has been overwhelmingly effective in defining certain events as off limits to inquiry or debate. Especially in the United States, raising legitimate questions about dubious official narratives destined to inform public opinion (and thereby public policy) is a major thought crime that must be cauterized from the public psyche at all costs…CIA Document 1035-960 played a definitive role in making the ‘conspiracy theory’ term a weapon to be wielded against almost any individual or group calling the government’s increasingly clandestine programs and activities into question.” – From CIA Document 1035-960  

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”-- William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s first CIA Director (from Casey’s first staff meeting, 1981)

We are back talking about Columbus police wearing body cameras and placing cameras on patrol cars, so we can catch the rare instance when a cop goes wrong, publicize it and get justice.

No doubt there has been wrong-doing by police elsewhere in the country and one bad cop is one too many, but ...

We need to think long and hard about the additional pressure we would put on Columbus' Finest by forcing them to record every moment on patrol. Will they be forced to stop and think about the ramifications of the camera instead of acting quickly to fight crime?

Does that have negative consequences for the public?

If we are going all in on cameras for cops, why stop there?

Why not require all public employees wear cameras and record their workdays?

It might cut down on wrong-doing and waste of public money.

Better yet add elected public officials to the camera-wearing menagerie.

There would not have been any Redflex skullduggery if Columbus city officials has been wearing them when those red-light camera deals were made.
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This evening, the Franklin County Democratic Party Central Committee is holding its first meeting since the primary election to appoint new leadership. Before the meeting, elected leaders from Yes We Can Columbus, Count Me In, the Unity Ticket, and Franklin County Democrats United came together to promote shared values and goals to unite the local party.

The following quotes can be attributed to Mario Cespedes, a Ward 40 Central Committee member and leader with Yes We Can Columbus:

“I was elected, because people in my neighborhood want a change. They feel like our democracy is broken and their voice isn’t being heard. The folks in my neighborhood want big money out of politics and they want a debate around raising the minimum wage and empowering our local neighborhoods in Columbus.”

The following quote can be attributed to Deb Steele, Clinton Township Central Committee member and leader in the Unity Ticket:

I was asked to write an article about “420.” Apropos, I guess, considering my name. So I began conceptualizing the piece. Perhaps a few interesting innuendos and stoner stories peppered with a traipse through time. As light-hearted as 420 seems to be, there are also uneasy overtones to this holiday of the high. Where to begin.

How about at the beginning. The vaunted Wikipedia confirms that “four-twenty” was coined at San Rafael High School forty-five years ago as clandestine code used by some students to denote a specified time and place for consuming cannabis – 4:20 pm in the shadow of Louis Pasteur. The term morphed to mean a need to find weed. Mushrooming through the local Grateful Dead culture, 420 landed in the hands of High Times’ Steve Bloom in the 1990s, pollinating globally through one of cannabis culture’s most time-honored magazines.

So with the approach of this hempy holiday, a happy 420 to you!