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While Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is getting most of the attention as the Co-Chair of Donald Trump’s “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity,” the appointment to that Commission of notorious election rigger Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s former Secretary of State, is the real threat to democracy.

Blackwell played a role in Ohio’s 2004 election parallel to that played by Florida’s Secretary of State Kathleen Harris in the 2000 election. He co-chaired George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio. Blackwell is a far-right Republican who administered Ohio’s 2004 election using an “all the above” barrage of tactics pioneered throughout the Third World by the CIA and other covert operatives since the beginning of the Cold War.

Prior to the election, Blackwell established a wide range of measures aimed at systematically disenfranchising potential Democratic voters, and for electronically shifting the vote count to guarantee a Bush-Cheney victory.

Election Integrity.2
Urgent Election Reforms for the 2018 Midterms
(that Circumvent Media Silence): Reports from the Field

The wound burst open in November. History, suddenly, could no longer be avoided. Reality could no longer be avoided. American democracy is flawed, polluted, gamed by the oligarchs. It always has been.

But not until the election process whelped Donald Trump did it become so unbearably obvious.

Tuesday's announcement that the Three Mile Island Unit One nuclear plant will close unless it gets massive subsidies has vastly strengthened the case for a totally renewable energy future.

That future is rising in Buffalo, and comes in the form of Tesla's massive job-producing solar shingle factory which will create hundreds of jobs and operate for decades to come.

Three Mile Island, by contrast, joins a wave of commercially dead reactors whose owners are begging state legislatures for huge bailouts. Exelon, the nation's largest nuke owner, recently got nearly $2.5 billion from the Illinois legislature to keep three uncompetitive nukes there on line.

Filmmaker Andrzej Wajda was to Poland what Sergei Eisenstein was to the USSR - and, arguably, what Carl Yastrzemski was to the Boston Red Sox. Along with Roman Polanski’s early work, Wajda’s famed 1950s World War II-era trilogy about Polish partisans battling the Nazis - A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds - put Poland on the world cinema map. He won an Honorary Oscar in 2000 and died last October at age 90 after making movies for more than 60 years.

Like “Yaz,” Afterimage hits a homerun. Poland’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film to the 89th Academy Awards is a biopic about that Eastern European nation’s greatest 20th century painter Władysław Strzemiński (Boguslaw Linda), a constructivist contemporary of Malevich, Kandinsky and Chagall. With this talent, Wajda found a subject through which he could express his credo as an artiste - and criticism of Stalinism.

Washington, D.C., and much of the rest of the United States, is full of war monuments, with many more under construction and being planned. Most of them glorify wars. Many of them were erected during later wars and sought to improve the images of past wars for present purposes. Almost none of them teach any lessons from mistakes made. The very best of them mourn the loss of a tiny fraction — the U.S. fraction — of the wars’ victims.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When the U.S.-Vietnam War ended on April 30,
1975, a Central Intelligence Agency officer's two best military
sources committed suicide and an American diplomat endangered the
lives of escaping staff and CIA personnel, according to James Parker
the last CIA officer to evacuate Vietnam.
   Earlier, off the coast of Danang, South Vietnamese who evacuated
onto a U.S. ship shot, stabbed, raped, trampled and executed each
other during onboard revenge attacks and panic, Mr. Parker, 73, said.
   "As for my experiences back in Vietnam at the end, the absolute
chickenshit character of the men in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, how
they were so petty and self-indulgent, so pedantic and so distant from
the fighting," contributed to the U.S. war's failure and chaotic end,
Mr. Parker said in an interview.
   "Their pusillanimity disrespected the men, American and Asian, I
had known who died fighting the good fight.
   "I'm speaking about all the Americans at the U.S. Embassy in
Saigon, though this does not include the Americans from the CIA that

So far, the Trump administration has been every bit the worst case scenario we feared. And while some of the agendas of his underlings have been thwarted by just how outlandishly villainous they are, others are more likely to slip under the radar of the average American. One of the latter is the very idea of an open internet.

Under President Barack Obama’s FCC, the internet was ruled to be a public utility, in recognition of the importance it plays in the lives of everyone from Netflix bingers to homeless people using smartphones to look for work. This let the FCC regulate internet service providers, and they used that to put in place privacy protections and maintain net neutrality – the principle that all internet traffic, no matter if you’re visiting Facebook or your friend’s obscure blog, must be given the same access.

Trump’s FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has already dismantled our privacy protections, letting our ISPs spy on us so they can sell our data for even more profit. Now he’s looking to kill net neutrality. Get ready for your favorite sites to be held ransom, throttled unless you (or they) pay a premium.

A gay football player. Even today it seems to be something very rare in the game.

Growing up, football was always my outlet to get out whatever I had built up inside me. When those pads came on, I felt at home. I started playing football in third grade, and I still fall more in love with the game every year I play.

I grew up in a very small town called Richwood, Ohio, and graduated with a class size of barely 100 students. In high school I never had a problem with standing out. I made friends with everyone and tried to stay positive and nice to every kid in the school.

My coming-out story is a little different from many others you see today. Freshmen and sophomore year of high school I knew I was gay, but the thought of anyone knowing that part of me was single-handedly the most terrifying thought in my head, especially growing up with a family full of farmers who weren’t really exposed to that kind of thing yet.

I was always terrified with the locker room talk that went on about gays and how gross they are and how wrong being gay is. Yes, that talk was there. It just pushed me further into the back of the closet.

As 'mental health' issues gain more attention, sympathetic and
otherwise, in a wide variety of contexts and countries around the world,
the opportunity for inaccurate perceptions of what causes these issues,
and how to treat them, are likewise expanded.

So if you or someone you know is supposed to have a 'mental illness'
such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive
disorder (OCD), bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa or post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD), I would like to give you the opportunity to
consider an explanation and a way forward that you are unlikely to have
come across.

My first suggestion is that you ignore any label that you have been
given. These labels are an inaccurate and unhelpful way of labeling the
appropriate, diverse and complex emotional responses that a normal human
being will have to emotionally disturbing events. It is inaccurate
because words such as these imply a 'disorder' that a normal individual
should not have in response to emotionally challenging events in their