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Congress took the first steps to make Klansmen and neo-Nazis a special protected class of citizen with special protection when on July 8, Congressman Daniel Donovan (R-NY) introduced the “Unmasking Antifa Act of 2018.” It is currently in the House Judiciary Committee where it will languish while the Democratic Party is done pretending to fight Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee. With the business of the House cleared of performances, the bill will then move forward.

The bill makes assault or intimidation of anyone exercising their rights under the Constitution while wearing a mask punishable by 15 years in federal prison. Despite the fact that the Klan has done that since the beginning of the lukewarm period of American history books call by the misnomer “reconstruction,” the bill names only one kind of person.

The design is to make it a crime to fight back against racists in any public way. Under this new law, all a Nazi snowflake would have to do is claim they were triggered by counter protestors, and everyone present would face 15 years in prison for wearing a mask or 10 years in prison for “conspiracy” if they were not.

The third time was a charm for the Columbus Community Bill of Rights initiative which is confirmed to be on the Columbus ballot this November. The following is what one of their tireless activists said before Columbus City Council on Monday, July 9 after their signatures were validated.

Columbus City Council Speech
By William Lyons 
7/9/18

Good evening members of Columbus City Council, my name is Bill Lyons and I am a member of a group of concerned citizens called Columbus Community Bill of Rights. We appreciate it that most of you have met with us several times over the past couple of years.

What’s a black female police officer to do when her fellow white male police officer talks about blowing up Black Lives Matter protestors? Any words of caution may be interpreted as anti-police rhetoric. This is the case of Police Lieutenant Melissa McFadden.

Racial discrimination

Police Lieutenant Melissa McFadden filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Columbus June 4. McFadden charges, among other things, that she was “retaliated and discriminated against” for “assisting a fellow officer in drafting and filing a claim of race based discrimination….” McFadden and one other female lieutenant are the highest-ranking minority women on the Columbus police force.

The charges in McFadden’s complaint are explosive. She alleges that after accompanying an “African-American female officer” to the city’s Human Resources department to file a complaint she was targeted by the white officers at the highest level of the department.

Institutionalized racism

The joke around town about personal injury attorney Scott Schiff is, if you need to find him, just wait around any car accident. Poof, he’s going to appear out of nowhere, and if you need a chiropractor, he’s probably one of those, too.

Columbus born and raised, Schiff has made a killing off traffic accidents and slip-and-falls. He’s even become a TV personality of sorts and went into real estate 30 years ago when he started Schiff Properties, now a family-run business and one of the largest owners of commercial property around Ohio State.

He’s omnipotence continues to fester and this is no surprise. We live in an age when personal injury lawyers, real estate developers, tech gurus, CEO billionaires and healthcare executives, have too much the power and our city government, so desperate for tax revenue and campaign contributions, caves to their every whim. 

I am honored to be here this week, every day I am here in the Lakota Nation North Dakota, I feel my inner strength and my spirit set loose and free. Everyone is nice and respectful here despite all the genocide the white man and woman have thrown down at the Lakota. To hear these Lakota people tell me the horror stories of genocide and government lies stowed upon them for generations. I fight my tears from coming out. I get angry.

The Lakota set the blueprint for this country and everyone had a home and food to eat. People traded and respected each other back then. Then the pilgrims showed up and got greedy with all they were taught from tribes. This USA we live in is a crooked evil machine that neglects and takes advantage of the Lakota. When will this end? That’s the real question. When will the USA government realize the Hate crimes being done daily to the indigenous? Never, because our crooked government had been stealing and killing them for hundreds of years and covering it up.

After a gas well owned by XTO, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, exploded on February 15, it continued leaking pollution into the air for three weeks. The word “leak” is deceiving–what came out of the Schnegg well was a 100-foot vertical geyser of smoke, brine, and gases. Powhatan Point, Ohio residents 1.5 miles away could see the initial explosion, and continued hearing the ongoing eruption until XTO capped the well on March 6.

The Buckeye Environmental Network (BEN) has filed a lawsuit against the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) for withholding critical public information, violating Ohio law. Under public records law ORC 149.43, Ohio Department of Natural Recourses should have granted, but instead denied, a file review request by the group's Executive Director of ODNR files on AquaSalina, a product of oil and gas waste. The group requested to review all records held by ODNR as follows. "1. Records held by your agency regarding Nature's Own Sources/AquaSalina. 2. Communication between your agency and Dave Mansbery, owner of Duck Creek Energy, Inc." 

Cleveland.com is reporting that Senator Sherrod Brown has strongly denounced yesterday’s aggressive, military-style raids on the Corso’s Flower and Garden Center in Sandusky and Castalia, calling them “immoral” and an “insane policy.”  Sabrina Eaton reports:

"Tearing families apart will not fix our broken immigration system," said Brown. "It will mean more problems for all of us. There is no good reason, ever, to separate children from their parents." "I don't want to be the kind of country where federal agents split families up and send kids who knows where without being able to account for them," said Brown, who is running for re-election this year against GOP Rep. Jim Renacci of Wadsworth.

To our knowledge, Sen. Brown is the first member of the Ohio congressional delegation to speak out publicly against the raid.  Taking one look at these photos of children whose parents were arrested yesterday, posted by Veronica Dahlberg of HOLA, will make it clear why. 

Even though The Ohio State University has researched cannabis to discover new therapeutic benefits, the university is refusing to test cannabis for The Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program.

State law says medical marijuana, like other agricultural products, has to be tested for quality and levels of pesticide, for example, before being sold to the public. And when Ohio legalized medical marijuana in 2016, state lawmakers mandated they would only allow public universities during the program’s first year to test the medicine.

OSU is not alone when it comes to researching cannabis but at the same time refusing to set up a testing lab. The University of Cincinnati and Ohio University are researching cannabis for medicinal uses, to help epileptic children, for example, but have also turned a cold shoulder to the state program.

What’s more, could this double standard by state universities delay the program?

Bob Bridges, the patient advocate on the state’s medical marijuana advisory board, recently told the Columbus Dispatch he doesn’t have confidence the program will be up-and-running for its designated “fully functional” date of September 8th.

Five years ago, five activists and I set up a protest action at the Wendy’s restaurant located on South High Street in Columbus, Ohio. We lined up on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant with a 30-foot-long banner that stated, “Wendy’s Stop the Exploitation, Join the Fair Food Program.”

Customers did not turn away or stop driving into the parking lot, but when they sat at the outdoor dining area, they would shout out, “What’s wrong with Wendy’s?”

That’s the problem: not many people know what’s wrong with Wendy’s. It is necessary to reiterate the reason that larger and larger groups of farm workers and consumers demand that Wendy’s join the Fair Food Program.

Collaborating as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) the farm workers’ demands are simple: to be compensated just one penny more per pound for tomatoes picked, and for the companies to purchase from participating farms that adhere to the Fair Food Standards (FFS).