Free Press History

Will there be any standards or rules governing the world? Will the U.S. government promote a free-for-all of terrorist attacks by a war machine masquerading as representative government? Or will Congress stand up to Trump?

Email your Senate and House members now!

I’ve been struggling to imagine Elon Musk might do if he gets his trillion-dollar payday. He could spend a million dollars a day for 3,000 years.  Or, more realistically, $100 million a day for 30 years. He could spend the $290 million he invested in Trump’s election and do it 3,400 times, wherever and whenever he pleases. Or buy more media properties, spending up to twenty times the $44 billion it took for him to buy Twitter and make it into a misinformation swamp key to Trump’s reelection.

But the money the Tesla board just handed Musk isn’t guaranteed. He has to meet goals like delivering 20 million Tesla vehicles and dramatically increasing Tesla’s stock price. Ordinary citizens can prevent that, but we need to take our efforts to another level.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and local advocates are defending Ohio’s child care system after comments from the Trump administration accusing another state of child care fraud.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said states would need to provide “justification” proving that federal child care funds are being spent on “legitimate” entities. The comments followed fraud allegations in Minnesota related to the state’s child care programs, stemming from a YouTube video by a right-wing social media influencer. The allegations particularly targeted child care centers run by Somali citizens of the state.

The allegations led the Trump administration to freeze federal funding going to the child care sector in Minnesota, which owners and Democrats in the state said would cause major problems in an already struggling sector.

For the most part, 2025 was a very good year for me. I took a trip to Chicago, and I saw the Cubs. I spent a couple of weeks with good friends in Southern California and got to see pelicans and sea lions. I went to Boston and attended the convention for the National Cartoonists Society for the very first time in my life, where I got to see old friends and make a lot of new ones. I spent a few days in New York City. And at the convention for the Association of American Cartoonists, I won the Rex Bab Memorial Award.

And then I had a stroke. And maybe this is partly why my doctors and nurses thought I had a very positive attitude throughout the process, because I don't think the stroke ruined my year. That's why I wouldn’t call it a setback. If nothing else, I learned from the stroke that a shit ton of people love me.

And the stroke did not stop me from cartooning. If anything, it caused a slight pause. When I asked readers on Facebook to pick their favorites of mine from the year, they collected cartoons before and after the stroke.

This article first appeared on OtherWorlds.org.

If you want to understand how the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority has undermined democracy, you need to understand the “shadow docket.”

The shadow docket — as the court’s emergency docket has come to be known — is one of the more dramatic and corrupt ways that MAGA-aligned justices are enabling President Trump to take away our freedoms.

Normally, the justices don’t hear a case until after lower courts have considered it fully and made a final decision. But a party to a case may describe it as so urgent that quick “relief” is needed from the Supreme Court, claiming that “irreparable harm” may occur while lower courts consider it.

That puts it on the emergency docket.

Since time is supposedly of the essence, the justices don’t hold oral arguments. And if they grant the “relief” and undo the lower court’s order, they often give us little if any explanation why. Lower court judges are left without much guidance on whether or how to use the decision to guide their own decisions.

With so little sunlight, no wonder the term “shadow docket” has stuck.

Karl Marx has been famously quoted as referring to religion as the opiate of the masses. His point being that religion, offering a future, better life in the by and by, narcotized people to endure the difficulty of their lives and work, rather than rising to demand change in the here and now. Religion now lacks the force or mass participation of the past, but it’s also pretty clear to me that it has been replaced as the critical agent for peoples’ pacification by the ubiquity of smartphones.

It’s impossible to ignore, so don’t tell me that you haven’t noticed this phenomenon as well. Some might argue that this is a teen issue. There’s heavy breathing around the United States about blocking cellphones from schools and classrooms and the reported benefits of these restrictions in attention and participation. Others might claim this is a relief from boredom. Waiting for airplanes or in lobbies almost anywhere these days, I sometimes find myself counting the number of people, old and young, who are buried deep in their phones. It’s always a majority, and frequently it’s nearly unanimous, as I find myself an outlier.

Saturday, January 3, 3PM
MAS Columbus, 4615 Northtowne Blvd

Join the Car Caravan this Saturday to demand ICE OUT OF COLUMBUS, an end to the racist deportation machine, and to stop the ultra-right billionaire agenda!

Bring your car and ensure you’re licensed to drive!

Not able to drive? Show up and let’s figure out a carpool!

This article first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal

Last March during the hearings on Ohio House Bill 15, I was the only representative of an environmental organization in Ohio to testify against it.

The reason? It gave the Ohio Power Siting Board just 45 days to consider a major utility facility – defined as 50 MW or more – to serve a large energy user – often a data center – on property owned by the applicant. Usually this process takes one to three years.

Data centers use prodigious amounts of energy – often as much as an entire city. If they are to be directly served by an energy generation facility, it needs to be well over 50 MW.

It was clear from the language of H.B. 15 that any such major utility facility would be run by gas.

Wind turbines have too large of a setback requirement to go on most land next to a large energy user, and the footprint of utility scale solar projects is too large.

Wednesday, Dec 31 at 7 PM 
MAS Columbus (4615 Northtowne Blvd, 43229)

ICE attacks in Columbus are rampant, and our community needs to show up for one another! Join us on Wednesday, Dec 31 at 7 PM at MAS Columbus to take action by building whistle kits and learning how to use them. Whistle kits are a simple, low-tech tool neighbors use to alert one another when ICE or federal agents are nearby. Can’t make it? You can still help by donating to help buy more supplies