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.

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.

Driving north on Route 23 from Columbus one will see strip malls and big box stores spreading like a cancer toward Delaware. Just a short distance from the intersection of US Route 23 and State Route 315 in Delaware County is a place worlds away from the retail jungle to the south. The Stratford Ecological Center is a 236 acre oasis of woods, wildflowers and sustainability that is dedicated to reconnecting people with nature, educating children and reminding adults of where our food and fiber come from.

I visited there recently for a half-day class on edible wild plants. Included in the class was an educational walk in the woods and a lunch made from the wild plants found in the fields and woods of the center. The hickory nut pie, sweetened with honey harvested from the center's own hives, may have been the culinary highlight of my life.

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.

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.