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Both African Americans and progressives in Ohio are wondering if throwing a football at a TV screen is the Tim Ryan blunder which makes Ohio even more MAGA?

Tim Ryan’s most widely-recognized TV commercial to date – smashing a football into a television screen depicting “Defund the Police” – may sway some moderate Republicans to vote Democrat over JD Vance, but this same commercial could also backfire.

“It’s going to cost him votes,” says Charles Traylor, an African American from Columbus who hosts the radio show ‘Front Street.’“The voters’ psyche can be very fickle. When you say you’re against ‘Defunding the Police,’ what you are saying to victims of police abuse is, ‘I care more about protecting police officers than I do protecting people from bad police officers.’”

Traylor gets what Ryan is trying to do, and many other pundits get it as well. Ryan is unapologetically seeking to reverse Trump’s gains with white people in Ohio. But African Americans also remember what helped fuel Trump to power – white people’s (bigoted) anger.

Monday, October 24, 2022, 7:00 – 8:30 PM
We know we can win key races in Ohio if we can get people to vote down ballot. We also know that voters like to be confident and knowledgeable about all of the candidates.
Come to this virtual event to become more familiar with the positions of all the statewide candidates so you can help others feel more confident about voting all the way down the ballot.  
Ohio Progressive Action Leaders.  
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Above all, one golden attribute renders our species worth saving: a capacity for compassion, to see the world through another’s eyes, and to feel it with a shared heart.

It’s the rare empathetic genius whose music can evoke, exalt and immortalize that capacity.

High atop that list would be Bonnie Raitt, whose transcendent Just Like That has soared to the top of the charts… and into the timeless repertoire.

Daughter of a concert pianist and a Broadway legend, Bonnie has climbed unique artistic, political and spiritual peaks.

Her lifetime in music slides from blues to folk, r&b, rock, reggae, pop, classical standards and more. A partial of list of artists with whom she’s performed tracks our musical heart-print, through the likes of John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, CSN, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow, John Prine, Nora Jones, Pete Seeger, Allen Toussant, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Ruth, Charles & James Brown, Peter Tosh Taj Mahal, Mavis Staples, and more. Her duet with her father, John Raitt, moves mountains:

During my decades-long teaching career, I have found that one of the reasons students shy away from history classes is they are afraid they will be forced to “memorize all those dates.” One pair of dates that they had tp grapple with sought to determine the beginning and end of the civil rights movement. Generally speaking, and for efficiency’s sake, the movement is usually placed in the time frame of 1954, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, through 1968, the year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been proclaimed by the media as the leader of the freedom movement, was assassinated. While I suppose this is close enough for government work, it is at best misleading. Any number of incidents are claimed to be the beginning of the civil rights movement. So while I reflexively bristled at the subtitle of Alabama v King, I am always up for reading another book on the freedom movement.

Early Voting Hours

OCTOBER

October 24-28: 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

October 29: 8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.

October 31: 8:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.

November 1-4: 8:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.

November 5: 8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.

November 6: 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

November 7: 8:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

NOVEMBER

November 5: Deadline to Request an Absentee Ballot (Noon)

November 7: Mailed absentee ballots must be postmarked by this date

November 8: General Election: Polls are open from 6:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m.

November 8: Absentee Ballots May Be Returned by Mail or Personally Delivered to Your County Board of Elections. If Not Returned by Mail, Absentee Ballots Must Be Received by Your Board of Elections by 7:30 p.m.

November 18: Last day for boards to receive mail-in ballots that have been postmarked on or before November 7

https://www.ohiosos.gov/elections/voters/current-voting-schedule/2022-schedule/

This essay grows from an informal conversation over coffee with a friend. As I criticized the former mayor, but far more influential chair of the self-appointed and uncontrolled Downtown Development Commission’s unembarrassed promotion of an imaginary non-plan for a fictional downtown in 2040, they looked at me and asked: why can’t this city accept itself and build on what it is?

Columbus, Ohio, is more than 200 years old. But it won’t grow up. Immaturity characterizes every dimension including its illogical obsession with size. Today, this overflows in the pseudo-celebration of a convention center hotel new tower—too tall for the area—making it “the largest hotel in Ohio.”

Despite its age, the city functions like an awkward, sometimes self-destructive child. For clues, watch the mayor sputter and inarticulately blurt out meaningless slogans never associated with proposals, let alone policies. Councilors and department heads chime in. What has happened to speech classes?

Look for these brands to support union workers!

As spooky season rolls around again, that means Ohio’s even-spookier midterm elections will be right behind it. Naturally, a fun way to celebrate Halloween every year is to go visit a scary haunted house, but did you know that you can combine both the spooky season and election season into one visit to our state’s scariest haunted house? Yes, if you want to see some of the spookiest sights that autumn has to offer, just load up the family van and head down to what is arguably the most frightening haunted house in Ohio –– our Statehouse, right here in Columbus. After all, who needs ghosts, ghouls and creatures that go bump in the night when you have legislators, lobbyists and lawyers gathering in gaggles to make our state a truly darker place?

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Make New Habits ~ Choose your Actions -- Spend only a little time or go crazy!
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Let's rewind the clocks back to 1978. John Carpenter's "Halloween" kicks off the slasher genre into high gear with inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho. That creates the end of 70s early 80s big slasher hits. Inevitably creating a string of "Halloween" sequels and reboots that even had Rob Zombie directing a trilogy. Fast forward to 2018, and David Gordon Green reinvents the "Halloween" franchise with a focus on PTSD. Jamie Lee Curtis is at the helm of it and centrally involved in the production.

"Halloween Ends" opening sequence felt like a well-put-together short film. Introducing a new key character, Corey Coleman (Rohan Campbell), a babysitter looking after an annoying kid who won't go to bed and wants to watch John Carpenter’s "The Thing" on TV. Not wasting any time attempting to grab your attention, the child tragically dies, setting up Corey as the town's pariah.