The US Supreme Court (by the usual 5-4) has certified Ohio’s Jim Crow stripping of more than a million mostly black and Hispanic citizens from the 2018 voter registration rolls. Unless the Democrats effectively respond, a GOP victory in the 2018 mid-term election may be a done deal.

The decision approves Ohio’s race-based assault on the right to vote. Secretary of State Jon Husted has been stripping citizens who don’t vote in consecutive federal elections. His office mailed some 1.5 million queries to registered voters. He got back fewer than 300,000 responses – and then stripped some 1.2 million voters from the computer files.

Husted (now running for lieutenant governor) says he’s sent voters a notice after they skip a single federal election. If they don’t vote or respond in the next four years, they lose their ballot.

Court documents confirm that those eliminated are mostly urban blacks and Hispanics in mostly Democratic districts. Voters in rural Republican districts are often not queried, and their registration rolls are not stripped.

By David Swanson
Seymour Hersh’s new memoir, Reporter: A Memoir, occasionally notes the failure of the exposure of wrong-doing to result in accountability or policy reforms. That’s the closest the book generally comes to touching on any motivation behind Hersh’s work related to ending war or torture or any other evil. The exception is the bit about Hersh’s time working for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. In 1960, in Chapter 3, Hersh joins the U.S. Army without one word as to why. In Chapter 14 he self-censors the story of President Richard Nixon seriously assaulting the First Lady because Hersh thought it was a story unrelated to public policy. Wasn’t allowing Nixon to remain in office and unindicted related to public policy?

While crossing High Street at Graceland Boulevard in Clintonville the other day, I noticed a bumper sticker stuck to one of the light poles. It read “Fluoride: There is poison in the tap water” with a link to the ultra-conservative, white supremacist site InfoWars.

Though I know it’s nearly impossible to have political ubiquity in a neighborhood as large as Clintonville, one doesn’t expect to see InfoWars stickers peppering a neighborhood that probably went overwhelmingly to Hillary in the last presidential election. It’s much more common to see yard signs with slogans like “hate has no home here” and “no matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor” in six different languages. While the anti-fluoride sticker is among the more benign of InfoWars’ stances, it’s still jarring to see.

I thought about what a thing like that said about my neighborhood and how someone who’s perhaps not versed in media literacy might see it and decide to check out the website. And how the internet is full of rabbit holes for one to fall down.

By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War

Nathan Ramos’ As We Babble On is a mildly entertaining dramedy about five characters who aren’t anywhere near as edgy as they and their playwright fancy them and their one-acter to be. The lead character is - as his name Benji (a popular movie moniker for mutts) suggests - wishy-washy, one of those often ineffectual individuals who frequently shoot themselves in the foot. Compensating for his inadequacies, Benji (Will Choi) inks superheroes for a comic book company. But this doesn’t make up for his being self-sabotaging when it comes to work or re-encountering a former boyfriend, Vish (Sachin Bhatt, who is quite touching as a hunk who’s not as sure of himself as good looks might seem to guarantee one to be in our superficial society). Having a weak protagonist does not bode well for a play.