Local
If approved at the August 2 special election, Issue 1 will end Columbus’ seven-member city council whose members are all elected citywide (i.e., “at large”). Replacing it will be a council consisting of 10 members elected from districts of the city and 3 elected citywide.
The present system was designed over a hundred years ago for a city less than a fourth of Columbus’ present size. The reform would make council’s structure consistent with what’s used by virtually every other large American city.
Issue 1 opponents are ignoring the present system’s problems and the changes the reform would bring. They’re hoping voters will too.
A currently divided city
Opponents say districts would divide the city and pit neighborhoods against each other. They ignore, however, that the present system has produced this very result by favoring certain areas and neglecting others.
Despite an attempt to sabotage it via social media, a Black Lives Matter march went on as planned Thursday evening. Over 100 protesters marched around the Ohio Statehouse and continued to the Columbus Division of Police headquarters.
That morning, organizers became aware that the Facebook event page for the march had been taken down, and the account associated with it was locked. Someone had reported the event to Facebook, flagging it as involving either “violence or harmful behavior” or “hate speech.”
Facebook made no attempt to contact the organizers of the march to verify whether it would involve anything inappropriate. They just took down the page. Undeterred, organizers quickly got the word out to supporters that the event was still on.
The attempt to derail the march underscores the racial tensions in Columbus that go unspoken. Instead of engaging in an open, honest dialogue with the Black Lives Matter movement, someone decided to stay in the shadows and employ a dirty trick to try to stop the march.
As the Democratic Convention opens in Philadelphia, there’s just one one clear message that matters from the Republicans: Donald Trump will be within ten points of Hillary Clinton in the fall election.
Thus, unless the Democrats do something about the issue of election protection, it will be within the power of key GOP swing state governors to give Donald Trump the presidency.
For all its problems, the wildly disorganized and fractious gathering in Cleveland all boiled down to Trump’s final speech. It was rambling and often incoherent. But it delivered the classic strongman message: You need ME to protect you.
Given the chaos, violence, and injustice of imperial America in 2016, that message is almost certain to sell with enough Americans to keep Trump close enough to Hillary Clinton to allow the election to be electronically stripped and flipped.
In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama was able to overcome these barriers with a huge popular margin in more states than the GOP could reasonably steal.
Whenever I think of Richard Nixon, a wave of pity washes over me. Has there ever been a mainstream politician in America who was so hated, so reviled, so disrespected as Nixon? (I’m sure my esteemed editor would say that Nixon deserved every last brickbat thrown at him.) Like Shaft, Nixon was a complicated man–charming and cold, clever and calculating, craven and crafty. Dead for more than twenty years–he died a month before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of his late rival, John F. Kennedy, in the same hospital in which she was treated–he would have been 102 years old on January 19. The former president is still a fascinating study.
Who knew? Before there was Fox-TV’s Empire, there was John Dolphin (Broadway veteran Stu James),who from 1948-1958 was an African American impresario and entrepreneur who pioneered “Race music” at a critical time when Rock ‘n’ Roll was being born. AsRecorded in Hollywood splendidly dramatizes through music, dance, dialogueand more, this trailblazer presided over his show biz domain from the record shop Dolphin’s of Hollywood. However, as this bioplay quickly reveals in Act I, the emporium from whence Dolphin ruled his mini-empire was not located on then-lily white Hollywood Blvd., where not- so-angelic Angeleno realtors literally refused to rent a space out to him, even when offered rent in advance in hard cold cash.
Absolutely fabulous. That’s the only way to describe Bexley’s renovated Drexel Theatre
New décor. New seats. Best of all, new restrooms that are finally worthy of the well-heeled suburb where the landmark cinema sits. Their rundown predecessors were scarier than the average horror flick, but the new ones are so gorgeous that patrons will be tempted to gulp down a super-sized soda just so they’ll have an excuse to visit them.
Overall, the recently reopened Drexel is so posh that Edina Monsoon and Patsy Stone would feel right at home there.
Wait. Who?
For those who don’t recognize those names, Edina “Eddy” Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) are the anti-heroines of both a film that opens at the Drexel this weekend and the classic British sitcom that spawned it. Both the series and the film are called Absolutely Fabulous.
On July 21, the last day of the Republican National Convention, activists across the nation rallied at the offices of Republican politicians and corporations sponsoring the RNC to denounce the racism, xenophobia, and misogyny expressed by Donald Trump. In Columbus the focus was primarily on Trump’s disdain for green energy.
“No more coal. No more oil. Keep your carbon in the soil!” shouted a dozen young protesters outside the Columbus office of Senator Rob Portman. “Don’t give in to racist fear. Immigrants are welcome here!”
“We’re trying to make people aware of the dangerous rhetoric that Donald Trump, Senator Portman, and the rest of the Republican Party have put into their platform: attacking the environment and not moving in the direction of clean energy,” said David Miller, organizer for NextGen Climate. “Donald Trump complains about the EPA and has talked disparagingly about the movement for clean energy. Gutting the EPA is a very dangerous position to take.”
PG&E has also earmarked some $350 million to “retain and retrain” Diablo’s workforce, whose union has signed on to the deal, which was crafted in large part by major environmental groups.
The all-female title characters of 2016’s Ghostbusters can bust ghosts just as well as their 1984 forebears. Just don’t expect them to bust a lot of guts in the process.
Despite its overall quirky charm, the original film was primarily a Bill Murray comedy. It was fun to watch the other Ghostbusters spout pseudo-scientific jargon as they tried to save New York from a spectral invasion, but what made it funny was Murray’s wry attitude to the whole thing. He was too busy trying to romance Sigourney Weaver to take his job seriously.
The main problem with the new Ghostbusters is that despite its comedically adept cast, no one is given the chance to fill Murray’s laconic shoes. Nor, unfortunately, are they allowed to take Ghostbusters in a revolutionarily new, female-centered direction. Certainly nothing on a par with director Paul Feig and star Kristen Wiig’s 2011 buddy picture/romcom, Bridesmaids.
In the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in St Paul, and Henry Green in Columbus, a Black Lives Matter rally was scheduled for Friday, July 8 at the Franklin Park Amphitheater. But it almost didn’t happen.
As news came in Thursday night about the shootings of Dallas police officers, the original organizers of the action postponed it, citing safety concerns. This didn’t sit well with many who planned to be there. By early Friday afternoon new plans were in place for a speak-out in the evening at the same location. About 450 people showed up.