Global

A scholarly study has found that the U.S. public believes that whenever the U.S. government proposes a war, it has already exhausted all other possibilities. When a sample group was asked if they supported a particular war, and a second group was asked if they supported that particular war after being told that all alternatives were no good, and a third group was asked if they supported that war even though there were good alternatives, the first two groups registered the same level of support, while support for war dropped off significantly in the third group. This led the researchers to the conclusion that if alternatives are not mentioned, people don’t assume they exist — rather, people assume they’ve already been tried.

JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir by Matt Berman

It is somewhat difficult to believe that John F. Kennedy, Jr. has been dead for fifteen years. Known as John-John, America’s son, the Sexiest Man Alive, the Prince of Camelot–he had almost as many nicknames as the late soul singer, James Brown–he was killed, along with his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister, Lauren Bessette, in a plane crash on his way to his cousin Rory’s wedding In Hyannisport, the summer stomping ground of generations of Kennedys. The plan was to drop his sister-in-law off on Martha’s Vineyard, but something went horribly wrong. The crash occurred fewer than ten miles from the Gay Head beaches where his late mother had owned a summer estate. Kennedy was only thirty-eight years old.

Condoleezza Rice made headlines when she testified Thursday at the leak trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling — underscoring that powerful people in the Bush administration went to great lengths a dozen years ago to prevent disclosure of a classified operation. But as The Associated Press noted, “While Rice’s testimony helped establish the importance of the classified program in question, her testimony did not implicate Sterling in any way as the leaker.”

Few pixels and little ink went to the witness just before Rice — former CIA spokesman William Harlow — whose testimony stumbled into indicating why he thought of Sterling early on in connection with the leak, which ultimately resulted in a ten-count indictment.

Harlow, who ran the CIA press office, testified that Sterling came to mind soon after New York Times reporter James Risen first called him, on April 3, 2003, about the highly secret Operation Merlin, a CIA program that provided faulty nuclear weapon design information to Iran.

Since Tuesday and continuing for the coming three weeks, an amazing trial is happening in U.S. District Court at 401 Courthouse Square in Alexandria, Va. The trial is open to the public, and among the upcoming witnesses is Condoleezza Rice, but -- unlike the Chelsea Manning trial -- most of the seats at this somewhat similar event are empty.

The media is mostly MIA, and during lunch break the two tables at the cafe across the street are occupied, one by the defendant and his lawyers, the other by a small group of activists, including former CIA officer Ray McGovern, blogger Marcy Wheeler (follow her report of every detail at ExposeFacts.org), and Norman Solomon who has organized a petition at DropTheCharges.org -- the name of which speaks for itself.

“Je suis Charlie. Tout est pardonné.”

Muhammad in tears adorns the new cover of Charlie Hebdo: “I am Charlie. All is forgiven.” This is bigger than satire.

I take a deep breath, uncertain how to write about last week’s insane shooting spree in Paris. My daughter and her husband live there. “Things are normal,” she told me a few days afterward, “but there’s a presence — this thing that has happened. It’s in the air.”

A few days later I came upon this headline at the McClatchy Washington bureau website: “U.S. airstrike in Syria may have killed 50 civilians.”

The story reports: “The civilians were being held in a makeshift jail in the town of Al Bab, close to the Turkish border, when the aircraft struck on the evening of Dec. 28, the witnesses said. The building, called the Al Saraya, a government center, was leveled in the airstrike. It was days before civil defense workers could dig out the victims’ bodies.”

‘Tis Midwinter, and that means network television is either showing reruns or airing new miniseries to fill time until the regular shows return from their mid-season breaks. In the case of Agents of SHIELD, the television arm of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the angst of waiting to find out just what the heck is going on with Skye and Raina is lessened by a new spin-off prequel series all about one of the founding members of the organization, Agent Peggy Carter.

The MCU excels at giving characters the kinds of stories they need to be in, and so far Marvel’s Agent Carter is much more of a postwar spy story than a superhero one, a period piece set in the aftermath of World War II. Unlike Agents of SHIELD, this is a firmly pre-Avengers world, and the only superhero it has known is the now-MIA Captain America. There are no Asgardians or Inhumans here. But there is a Stark: Howard, Iron Man Tony Stark’s father, who is every bit as brilliant and badly behaved as his son. The “super” element here isn’t aliens or magic but good old super-science.

In the wake of the Ohio Republican legislature (with a few Democrats) passing Senate Bill 310 in June of 2014 – a bill that put Ohio’s renewable and energy efficiency programs on hold – American Electric Power and Duke Energy have followed up by petitioning the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) for ratepayer bailouts for their oldest and dirtiest coal plants. FirstEnergy, with its base in Northern Ohio, is petitioning for a bailout for its Davis-Besse atomic reactor on Lake Erie as well as its polluting coal plants. These bailouts, called power purchase agreements, would be a line item on electric bills that no costumer could avoid, even if they’re buying power from a different company than the one that is delivering power to the customer’s home.

AEP and Duke kicked the process off and both have separate cases before the PUCO seeking to secure riders for power purchase agreements for two almost 60-year-old coal plants – Kyger Creek in Ohio and Clifty Creek in Indiana. See the Sierra Club Coal Campaign’s fact sheet on Kyger Creek as an example of how dirty and inefficient these coal plants are.

I’m a private practice psychiatrist in southern Ohio for over 22 years. As a physician, it’s become intolerable to see the abuse of power our state pushes on its population because supposedly “mainstream medicine” has an opinion that marijuana is deadly. It’s a shame our legislature doesn’t listen to their constituents, nor to the specialists that they quote. Marijuana is not a dangerous compound. Even so, our state is keeping increasingly more people incarcerated and disabled due to possessing marijuana, which is simply despicable and dangerous.

Our legal system, reliant on busting far too many level blacks and Latinos for marijuana offenses, is unjustifiable. Not only can race alone raise economic barriers, an arrest translates into a criminal record that squelches economic opportunity and places required licenses and certifications off limits. Even with probation, it’s exquisitely difficult to escape the web of an un-recalcitrant legal system.

The Columbus Free Press welcomes hockey fans to the 2015 NHL All Star game at Nationwide Arena, here in Columbus. Now that you are in town, we need you to put down your bags, head to our local casino and start gambling. Oh – and we need you to lose … and lose big.

Our Beautiful (Now) Taxpayer Funded Arena

You will soon see Nationwide Arena in the newly-developed Arena District, which fifteen years ago was the blighted and deteriorating site of the former Ohio State Penitentiary. The state of Ohio sold the site to the City of Columbus in 1995, and the City of Columbus remediated environmental issues and added infrastructure before leasing the 22 acres to Nationwide Insurance to redevelop.