Editorial
I’m speaking out for the children who are bombarded everyday with visions and sounds and negative images that can change who they think they are, before they know who they are, in this world.
I’m speaking out for the children who have been told that they can’t be what they want to be by the media and thus by their parents, caregivers and guardians who allow them to be exposed to the media without supervision and proper guidance to ensure they understand the messages they are receiving.
As adults we sometimes feel we can do what we want, listen to what we want and take our children to see what we want without any negative consequences. We play all kinds of sounds and images that can do serious damage to our children’s emotional growth, damage that we may not see until they are teenagers and adults and find it hard to “cope” with society and the people who make up our society.
I’m speaking out for the children no matter what color, race, creed or age, they are who are forced to see movies, videos, DVDs and listen to music that degrades women and men.
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Convicted felon Tom Noe, former Lucas County (Toledo) Republican Party chairman, stole $13.7 million in the so-called “Coingate” scandal during the Voinovich and Taft administrations. Major daily newspapers in Ohio such as the Toledo Blade and the Columbus Dispatch are finally getting around to pondering: Why has there been no investigation and final report from the Ohio Inspector General’s office on this important scandal?
A Blade editorial asks the key question: “What is the state trying to cover up?”
Let us explain it to them.
Why there’s no report on the Coingate scandal is because it intersects with money –laundering into a presidential campaign and Voinovich’s ties to organized crime.
Tom Noe was northwest Ohio's “Mr. Republican” and a close Bush/Rove crony. He served two years for illegal money laundering into the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign. He is now serving an 18-year term in state prison for stealing from the state’s Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (BWC).
As owner of Vintage Coins and Cards in Maumee, Ohio, Noe raised more than $100,000 to become a Bush Pioneer/Ranger. But Noe was more than a mere fundraiser.
It is said that politics is a full contact sport and that Ohio is a battleground state. With Ohio politicians seemingly incapable of legitimizing medicinal cannabis while their power to do so is being usurped by “we the people,” it seems logical that this topic would ignite a heated debate. Such was the case at the ABC 6 Town Hall Meeting on Medicinal Marijuana held at the Columbus Museum of Art in the evening of Wednesday, February 19th. Perverbial fists and fingers flew.
Sparring partners included those representing the prohibitionist status quo who sat on the left side of a long table – Dr. Steve Matson, President of the Ohio Society of Addiction Medicine, and Marcie Seidel, the Executive Director of the Drug Free Action Alliance. And on right side, the voices for reason and reform belonged to Michael Revercomb, Vice President of Ohio NORML and John Pardee, President of the Ohio Rights Group. The ORG sponsors the Ohio Cannabis Rights Amendment, one subject of the debate.
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A stunning new report indicates the US Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago.
The revelations cast new light on the $1 billion lawsuit filed by the sailors against Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). Many of the sailors are already suffering devastating health impacts, but are being stonewalled by Tepco and the Navy.
The Reagan had joined several other US ships in Operation Tomadachi (“friendship”) to aid victims of the March 11, 2011 quake and tsunami. Photographic evidence and first-person testimony confirms that on 3/12/11 the ship was within two miles of Fukushima Dai’ichi as the reactors there began to melt and explode.
In the midst of a snow storm, deck hands were enveloped in a warm cloud that came with a metallic taste. The Reagan’s 5500-member crew was told over the ship’s intercom to avoid drinking or bathing in desalinized water drawn from a radioactive sea.
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When I started to pay attention to the movies on the black and white television in our family room, I loved to watch the “silly” negro actors who occasionally showed up in the old black and white movies from the 1930s and 40s. At the time, as a young child, I liked them just as much as the “silly” white actors in the movies. The only difference that I saw in the acting of the comedians was that most of them were white, with the exception of the few black actors.
It wasn’t until I was older and my father began to teach me my Black and Cherokee history on his family side and my mother taught me my Black and “possibly” white history on her side that I realized that the negro actors that I had been watching, and laughing at, when I was a youth were wearing “blackface.”
That’s right! The black people who already had “brown skin” were forced to wear “blackface” in order to get a “part” in a movie or in the theatre. Let’s look at a few of the Black actors who had to play the “role” to get a part in the 1930s and 40s:
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Why is Attorney General DeWine making unfair and untruthful statements to Ohio voters? DeWine recently rejected the petition language for the citizen’s initiative entitled the “Voters Bill of Rights.” The proposed amendment would have granted Ohioans the same rights recognized in the European Union – making voting a Constitutional right.
DeWine was quoted in the Columbus Dispatch as saying he rejected the petition’s language because it failed to provide “fair and truthful statements” about matters concerning voter identification practices and voters being purged from the voting rolls due to failure to vote.
Here are the facts now denied by Mike DeWine. In 2012, the Free Press obtained public records from all 88 of Ohio’s county Boards of Elections (BOE) documenting that 1,092,392 voters were removed from the voting rolls since the 2008 presidential election. Cuyahoga County, which includes Democratic-rich Cleveland, led the Buckeye State with 267,071 purges. Franklin County which includes the capital of Columbus, removed 93,578 voters. Franklin County went 58% for Obama in the 2008 election.
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In December, 2013, USEC, Inc., the company building the American Centrifuge Plant (ACP) to enrich uranium at Piketon, OH, announced it would file for bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2014. USEC said they are restructuring to write off $530 million in debts. Unbelievably, bankruptcy did not end government subsidy for the ACP.
* Just hours after USEC announced bankruptcy, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced it would subsidize $24 million to keep the nonfunctional ACP afloat for 3 more months.
* On the same day as the bankruptcy, USEC announced they are seeking new investor money because of a “National Security Train Program” (sic) utilizing ACP technology to be subsidized by the government for not less than $750 million. No official DOE or other government documents could be found mentioning a National Security Train Program, and neither the DOE nor USEC would comment on the program.
* In January, 2014, the U.S. House passed a federal spending bill that included $118 million in subsidies for the ACP.
Wean Ohio politicians off pork!
WHAT SOLYNDRA? Many Republicans such as U.S.
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There are times when the evil you are facing is so vast, so powerful, and so determined that you begin to question your own sanity. I had put off learning about the Trans-Pacific Partnership for a while now, because though I knew it was horrible, it seemed complicated. Of course, that is part of the point. The multivariate machinations of global capitalism are able to hide in plain sight precisely by passing themselves off as dry boring stuff you don't really need to concern yourself with. Free trade agreements, though, are anything but, witness: Ukraine having a revolution over one right now.
And yes, while the phrase “investor-state dispute settlement” sounds esoteric, the concept of corporations suing governments in an international tribunal over environmental regulations that infringe on potential profits ten years in the future is not that complicated. That is but one example of the litany of cartoonishly wicked ideas contained in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and these are only the ones we know about through leaks and free trade agreements of the past.
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Citing a wide range of ailments from leukemia to blindness to birth defects, 79 American veterans of 2011’s earthquake/tsunami relief Operation Tomadachi (“Friendship”) have filed a new $1 billion class action lawsuit against Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco).
The suit includes an infant born with a genetic condition to a sailor who served on the USS Ronald Reagan as radiation poured over it during the Fukushima melt-downs, and an American teenager living near the stricken site. It has also been left open for “up to 70,000 U.S. citizens [who were] potentially affected by the radiation and will be able to join the class action suit.”
Now docked in San Diego, the USS Reagan’s on-going safety has become a political hot potato. The $4.3 billion carrier is at the core of the U.S. Naval presence in the Pacific. Critics say it’s too radioactive to operate or to scrap, and that it should be sunk, as were a number of U.S. ships contaminated by atmospheric Bomb tests in the South Pacific.
The re-filing comes as Tepco admits that it has underestimated certain radiation readings by a factor of five.
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When we think of Martin Luther King, Jr., most of us think of King the dreamer, who spoke to the more than 200,000 people amassed in front of the Lincoln Memorial on that sultry August day in 1963. We think of the man whose soaring rhetoric–some of it extemporaneous–let us in on his dream of living in an America where his four children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. The King of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom has been defined as the man who was looking to build a color blind America in which all men and women were bound together by their very humanity, and neither their race or ethnicity mattered. King is frozen in the American psyche: a deeply religious man who merely wanted to see peace on earth and good will among the races.
Ever since that famous speech, he has been co-opted by politicians and consumerism. Every year he becomes more cardboard cut out and less radical. It is as though we have a vested interest in remembering only the King who constantly turned the other cheek, exhorted blacks to love their enemies, and eschewed violence.