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Tues, May 2, 6:30am-7:30pm, many locations in Franklin County and elsewhere
It's a primary so it is a nonpartisan race and you can vote for any candidate you want. 
Franklin County Board of Elections, 614-525-3100
vote.franklincountyohio.gov/

A fist with the words Community Festival
ComFest is just a few weeks away (June 23-25), and volunteers are needed! The festival is and has always been operated tip to toe by volunteers from the community rather than by paid staff. Organizers volunteer their time throughout the year to plan the event; musicians and artists volunteer their talent; community leaders and activists volunteer their expertise to lead workshops; and citizens volunteer a few hours of time during the event to make it all run smoothly. 
  This is a simplified but accurate overview of how ComFest works. Volunteers are needed to set up and tear down tents and structures, pour beer, sell merchandise, assist stage managers in moving bands on and off stage, work on clean up/recycling teams, and maintain the mellow to keep everyone safe throughout the weekend. ComFest provides volunteers with a tee shirt displaying the current 2017 logo and slogan, and a token for each hour of service good for vendor food and beverages.   
Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year American Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul by Clara Bingham is a valuable contribution to further understanding and popularizing the radical upsurge of the 1960s. The book is an oral history and we hear from well-known figures of the time such as Ericka Huggins, Tom Hayden and Robin Morgan as well as others like Vivian Rothstein, Wesley Brown and Jan Barry who did significant work mostly behind the scenes in one or more of the movements that together made up The Movement. Though the focus of the book is the one-year period from the summer of 1969 to the summer of 1970, the interviews cover ground going back much earlier and thus provide many important insights about context and individual development.

A new book about Hillary Clinton’s last campaign for president -- “Shattered,” by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes -- has gotten a lot of publicity since it appeared two weeks ago. But major media have ignored a revealing passage near the end of the book.

Soon after Clinton’s defeat, top strategists decided where to place the blame. “Within 24 hours of her concession speech,” the authors report, campaign manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John Podesta “assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Six months later, that centerpiece of the argument is rampant -- with claims often lurching from unsubstantiated overreach to outright demagoguery.

Donald Trump frowning with hand on Bible at swearing in ceremony

I imagine I’m not the only political and media observer sickened by the dominant (“mainstream”) corporate media’s habitual reference to xenophobic, right-wing, white-nationalist, and neo-fascist politicians like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen as “populists.”  Populism properly understood is about popular and democratic opposition to the rule of the money power – to the reign of concentrated wealth. It emerged from radical farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and democracy against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists during the late 19th century.  It was a movement of the left.  As the left author and journalist Harvey Wasserman notes:

 “The Morgans, Rockefellers and their ilk had captured the industrial revolution that dominated the U.S. after the Civil War. The farmers of the South and West fought back with a grass-roots social movement…They formed the People’s Party. Its socialistic platforms demanded public ownership of the major financial institutions, including banks, railways, power utilities and other private monopolies that were crushing the public well-being.”

Head shot of young black woman with short curly hair smiling
The city’s leaders are failing the Black community in Columbus. There is an unacceptable lack of economic investment in predominantly Black neighborhoods throughout the city. Meanwhile, tax breaks are lavished on wealthy developers in the Short North and Easton, creating levels of segregation based on race and income and wealth that are virtually unparalleled across the country. At the same time, City Council continues to support the violent and overly aggressive tactics of the Columbus Police Department in these same communities.

Badge with Santa Maria in center and red/white/blue background saying Columbus Ohio Police


The Columbus Police Department has undergone “a significant loss” in dash-camera videos stored from Columbus Police Division traffic stops and call responses, Police Chief Kim Jacobs announced Tuesday. An estimated 100,000 videos recorded in 2017, the entirety of videos recorded in 2015, and an estimated 500 video files from last year were deleted. This incident was the result of an officer’s blundering attempt to reclassify thousands of video files. The deletion occurred on March 8 and officers became aware of the missing files March 13.

The 12th annual South East European Film Festival kicked off with a gala screening at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills of writer/ director Rajko Grlić’s The Constitution, a stellar must-see movie full of humor and humanity that set the tone for this filmfest. I say that because sometimes cinefiles “suffer” through specialty cinema (especially those bearing English subtitles), but The Constitution reminded me of the joy of discovering those “foreign” films by Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, et al, at an arthouse that transported us beyond Hollywood glitz and glamour to a more “sophisticated” cinematic view of the world beyond our shores.

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