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Now that the National Entertainer-In-Chief election is over, what to do?

Here's what not to do: Overanalyze.

Donald Trump won in the Electoral College. How did he do it and still lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes? If only 80,000 votes were changed in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Blah, blah, blah.

The simple explanation is that America is tired of the Clintons, and Hillary was not an inspirational figure. Late-deciding voters did not want to face four years of  boring television and social media from the White House, so folks shifted over to TV celebrity Trump because they were choosing a National Entertainer-In-Chief, not a Commander-In-Chief.

Boredom is the mortal enemy of many of our fellow citizens, not Putin. In fact, a lot of people find Vladimir a charismatic figure like Trump.

In a another case of over studying, Washington Post and New York Times columnists recently have praised Sen. Rob Portman for a magnificent campaign. What a political genius that Portman, they wrote, citing all sorts of reasons for his rout of Ted Strickland.

A brick building with words Neighborhood House on it

For the past six months, I have had the pleasure and displeasure of working at The Neighborhood House (NHI). The pleasure has been in working at a settlement house that was established in 1902 to serve the homeless, jobless, hungry, adults, children, pregnant mothers, families and people of all races who need community services to become and remain self-sufficient. The pleasure was in providing hope and encouragement as well as resources to meet the settlement goals in Franklin County. 

The displeasure was in watching the NHI become extinct as programs were cut and ended at a pace that showed no compassion for the people that it served or the employees that worked at the NHI, some for several years.

 Let’s start with the first deception which clearly rests with the NHI Board Members. Now I’m going to assume that the NHI board has a job description in place, which is a standard practice with non-profit organizations. However, if it does have a job description, then the question that arises is: what are they doing or what have they done to “save” the NHI from failing after 114 years of service. 

Two gold hands one in a fist one like a gun pointing at each other

Run The Jewels (El-P and Killer Mike) just sold-out the Express Live 3 weeks before the Hip Hop duo’s January 16th show in our fair city.

  Run the Jewels are resonating because the music is futuristic and they speak their minds. El-P and Killer Mike were in Ferguson the night of the Michael Brown verdict. They campaigned for Bernie Sanders.

So their latest album, RTJ3 is hitting an important stride at the beginning of 2017.

RTJ3 opens up with “Down” where Killer Mike states, “One time for the Freedom of Speech/ Two Times for the right to hold heat.” There is a refrain that says, “I could’ve died y’all.” Then El-P arrives demanding attention with bold statements, as one “who dodged his own lobotomy.”

Obviously there are multiple factors that lead to a musical act connecting with how a mass of people feel.

Jill Stein with her arm above her head and in a white tank top and yellow scarf outside at rally

Free Press Heroes: Local activists at Standing Rock

The Free Press recognizes the Central Ohioans who stood in solidarity with Native Americans and others protesting the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016: Heidi Detty, Bob Studzinski, Bruce Kiracofe, Michael Ulrey, Elizabeth Castro, Michael Vinson and Rudy Gerdeman, who was hit by water cannons and tear gas. These brave water protectors are appreciated by Tunkashila. The Free Press is proud to support these local activists who put their bodies on the line against those who poison water in the name of profit. Mitakuye oyasin.
 

Free Press Salutes: Jill Stein

Black and white drawing of scary medieval skeletons

Indeed, it is the new legislative dark age in Ohio as Donald Trump awaits his coronation. The barbarian hordes that are sacking our state were unleashed by other forces prior to the new emperor. It was Obama’s feds that decided to pull the deepest, darkest oil and gas from underneath our state and allow the motherfrackers to vandalize the Wayne National Forest, Ohio’s only national forest.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) opened its online auction on December 13 to lease the first 1600 acres of the pristine forest. The toxic plundering and pillaging begins with a minimum bid of $2 per acre. If it goes poorly and we get the minimum, at least we’ll be up a whopping $3200 for drinking radioactive sludge. Setting the lowest possible bar for government policy, BLM District Manager Dean Gettinger said “The project does not violate any federal, state, local or tribal law or requirement imposed for the protection of the environment.” So, bring your more than 900 toxic and secretive chemical compounds and suck radioactive wastewater from the bowels of the earth.

I recently saw this complaint – that the market is oversaturated with JFK assassination books – and from a certain point of view that is true. However, if we only pick out the worthwhile JFK books, that list shrinks considerably. The problem is, how do you know what is worthwhile and what isn’t?
 
Everybody has their own point of view. One person’s meat is another’s poison and all that. And it’s also true that some books that can have an utterly wrongheaded thesis and still have some worthwhile research in it. My friend Joe McBride has pointed out that even Dale Meyers’s book With Malice is not entirely useless, although one has to account for the ideological curve at all times. For his part, Meyers has attacked McBride’s book.
 

Confirmation hearings for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, named by Donald Trump to be attorney general of the United States, will begin on Jan. 10, before Trump is even inaugurated. The rush and insistence on only two days of hearings reflect Republican efforts to cram the nomination through before Americans understand what is at stake.

Sessions will, no doubt, present himself as a humble, genial and reasonable public servant. In reality, Sessions is an outlier, an unimaginable nominee as attorney general, an implacable opponent of the very rights and liberties that the attorney general is supposed to defend. As more than 200 civil rights, human rights and women’s groups noted in a unified statement: “Sen. Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”


 

To many Democrats for whom killing a million people in Iraq just didn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense, and who considered Obama's bombing of eight nations and the creation of the drone murder program to be praiseworthy, Trump will be impeachable on Day 1.

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