Global

Joe Motil submitted this letter to The Columbus Dispatch recently in response to former Columbus Mayor Greg Lashutka's letter in opposition to the District-at-large City Council Issue. The Dispatch did not print it. Turning down a letter from one of Central Ohio’s most active and intelligent progressives is damn-near unconscionable considering how many passionate progressives are active in this community’s affairs. We’re proudly running it here:

There’s a void in Kyle Harrison’s trophy case. The Ohio Machine midfielder has won championships at every level.

Every level but one.

In high school, Harrison led Friends of Baltimore to two Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association championships. In college, he helped Johns Hopkins University win its eighth national title with a 9-8 win over Duke in the 2005 championship.

However, there’s a dust ring reserved for the Steinfield Cup, the trophy awarded for the Major Lacrosse League championship. Harrison has come close, guiding the Denver Outlaws to the 2009 championship game before losing to Toronto Nationals 9-8 in the finals. The past two seasons, the Machine has fallen in the semifinals, losing to Rochester Rattlers 12-8 last year and 15-11 in 2014.

“You can’t look at it that way or you will drive yourself insane,” said Harrison, whose team is 6-4 overall after losing to the Rattlers 16-13 on June. 25. “(But at the same time) the ultimate team goal is to win a championship.

Note: This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones season six. If you’re not caught up yet, set it aside and come back when you are.

Among Game of Thrones fans, there’s long been an important divide between those who’ve read the books the show is based on (the series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin) and those who haven’t. With a show defined by its willingness to kill off important characters with little warning, those who kept up with the books were able to lord their foreknowledge over lesser-read fans. “Oh yes, Robb Stark’s wedding,” they’d grin wickedly, cackling internally in anticipation of the pain you would soon enough know. “That’s going to go great.”

But George R.R. Martin is not a fast writer. The first in the series, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996. When the show started adapting his books, one per season, he had finished four out of a planned seven. In 2011 he published the fifth. And while he assures his fans that he’s hard at work on the sixth, it’s yet to appear.

>>>>italics: This is urgent if you care about limiting efforts to not
limit GMO labeling, a vital consumer protection issue. Write your 2
Senators as soon as you have read this....


I'm writing to ask you to oppose the Roberts-Stabenow compromise language
on the GMO labeling bill. This legislation would overrule Vermont's GMO
labeling law, and prevent states from passing similar laws.

This legislation would create a confusing, misleading and unenforceable
national standard for labeling GMOs. Instead of a uniform labeling
standard like Vermont's law, the language allows text, symbols, or an
electronic code to be used. This is intentionally confusing to consumers,
and the information may be entirely inaccessible if the consumer does not
have access to the internet.

Perhaps most shockingly, this bill imposes no penalties whatsoever for
violating the labeling requirement, making the law essentially
meaningless. Thus, this is a weak bill, full of loopholes, without any
requirement to comply.

Brexit — the stunning British vote to leave the European Union — is a clear and dramatic rebuke of the country’s political and economic elites. A majority voted to leave even though the heads of the United Kingdom’s two major parties, more than a thousand corporate and bank CEOs, legions of economists, the leaders of Europe and the United States, and the heads of the international financial organizations all warned of dire consequences if they did not vote to remain.

For Americans, one question is whether this result has implications for the 2016 presidential campaign. Political sea changes tend to cross national boundaries. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 tracked the rise of Margaret Thatcher to power in Great Britain. Bill Clinton’s New Democrats were mirrored by Tony Blair’s New Labour Party. So does Brexit presage the rise of Donald Trump in the United States?

Mark Rudd, who chaired Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter and co-led the celebrated 1968 student revolt there and co-founded the ultra-left Weatherman, recently took part in a talkback following Home/Sick, a drama about the Weather Underground which is being presented at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre through July 3. The “Your Brain is a Bomb: A Revolutionary Conversation Series” that followed four Home/Sick performances (see: www.assemblytheater.org/talkback) also featured ex-SDS member and historian Jon Wiener, host of a KPFK radio program and The Nation’s weekly podcast.

Mark Rudd, who chaired Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter and co-led the celebrated 1968 student revolt there and co-founded the ultra-left Weatherman, recently took part in a talkback following Home/Sick, a drama about the Weather Undergroundwhich is being presented at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre through July 3. The “Your Brain is a Bomb: A Revolutionary Conversation Series” that followed four Home/Sick performances (see: www.assemblytheater.org/talkback) also featured ex-SDS member and historian Jon Wiener, host of a KPFK radio program and The Nation’s weekly podcast.

This decision overturned former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell's
conviction, making it more difficult for the US government, even when it
wants to, to prosecute officials for public corruption.

The Supreme court on the surface creates a higher standard for prosecuting
corruption, bribes, malfeasance, etc., positing that when an official
assists an affluent contributor in giving them access to other state
officials, in this case, and among others, researches at a University in
Virginia, although the public may find this reprehensible, that this is
not necessary illegal.

Monday's decision "leaves intact the ability of federal prosecutors to go
after official misconduct at the state and local level," said Columbia Law
Professor Richard Briffault, and frequent writer and commentator on
enforcing standards of ethics. Prosecutors, he said, "have to link up the
quid and quo more tightly and show that the gifts influenced real official
actions."

The Chief Justice, John Roberts Jr., said that the former governor's

This Fourth of July, U.S. war makers will be drinking fermented grain, grilling dead flesh, traumatizing veterans with colorful explosions, and thanking their lucky stars and campaign contributors that they don't live in rotten old England. And I don't mean because of King George III. I'm talking about the Chilcot Inquiry.

he Sanders campaign has more than enough principled reasons to resist conventional political wisdom and carry on its campaign at least into convention floor fights and street demonstrations, not least because Democrats are acting as if they want only to co-opt Sanders supporters and send the Sanders political revolution down the memory hole.