Thursday, March 22, 7pm
Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley
$8.00
The first 10 people to email the Columbus Free Press - colsfreepress@gmail.com - after seeing this, can get into the movie for free! Put FREE MOVIE in the subject line.

In Friedrich Engels’ 1880 book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific the co-founder of communism wrote about the difference between an idealistic conception of socialism and one rooted in historical, material reality. Raoul Peck’s new movie biopic The Young Karl Marx deals with this disparity and shows how during the 1840s Marx and Engels rooted the emerging notion of socialism in the real world and class struggle. In John Morogiello’s play Engaging Shaw the dramatis personae all belong to the former decidedly fanciful, airy-fairy trend of socialistic thought - and they sure act like it.

Ohio’s decision to buy new voting machines will make the difference between hackable -- or less-hackable elections.

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: All computer voting machines can be hacked!

We remember when Ohioans witnessed their votes jumping from John Kerry to George Bush on voting machines in Youngstown during the 2004 election. Voters saw their Kerry selection disappear during the infamous “Franklin County fade” on electronic voting machines in that election as well. Ohio’s former voting machine company, Diebold admitted its system accidentally knocked 10,000 registered voters off the rolls.

Ohio’s previous Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner conducted the seminal Everest Study of Ohio’s voting machines in 2007 and found that all of them had security problems. The study concluded that: “Unfortunately, the findings in this study indicate that the computer-based voting systems in use in Ohio do not meet computer industry security standards and are susceptible to breaches of security that may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.”

50 years ago today, on March 16,1968, a company of green, battle-untested US Army combat soldiers from the Americal Division, swept into the un-defended Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, rounded up the 500+ unarmed women, children, babies and old men, and efficiently executed almost all of them in cold blood, Nazi-style. No weapons or Viet Cong soldiers were found in the village. The entire killing operation took only 4 hours.

Although there was a prolonged attempt to cover-up the operation (which involved a young up-and-coming US Army Major named Colin Powell), those who participated in the massacre did not deny the details of the slaughter when the case came to trial two years later. Despite the cover-up, the story did eventually filter back to the Western news media, thanks to a some courageous military eye-witnesses whose consciences were still intact. An Army court-marital trial eventually convened against a handful of the soldiers, including Lt. William Calley and Company C commanding officer, Ernest Medina.