One thing is clear about the Smart City grant. Columbus and its sprawl is about to become a petri dish to “creatively reengineer our urban transportation networks” so to avoid global warming and connect the underserved to good jobs. This is the altruistic vision some national pundits have consecrated Columbus with.

The grant is heady stuff for “Test City USA.” A $150 million public and private work-in-progress to test sci-fi transportation technology such as driver-less cars. A plan to build neighborhood hubs with electronic vehicle charging stations that will also have bikeshare and carshare services.

The US Department of Transportation and host of corporate partners – including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., which chipped in $10 million – chose Columbus over 78 other cities, such as Austin, San Francisco, Portland and Denver.

And while our traffic congestion and its pollution doesn’t compare to Denver’s problems, Central Ohio needs to reengineer its transportation and do it in a hurry. For the last several years anyone who commutes into Columbus has painfully dealt with ongoing major road construction to end the outerbelt’s bottlenecks.

While Bernie Sanders was doing a brilliant job of ripping into the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the livestreamed launch of the Our Revolution organization on Wednesday night, CNN was airing a phone interview with Hillary Clinton and MSNBC was interviewing Donald Trump’s campaign manager.

That sums up the contrast between the enduring value of the Bernie campaign and the corporate media’s fixation on the political establishment. Fortunately, Our Revolution won’t depend on mainline media. That said, the group’s debut foreshadowed not only great potential but also real pitfalls.

Even the best election campaigns aren’t really “movements.” Ideally, campaigns strengthen movements and vice versa. As Bernie has often pointed out, essential changes don’t come from Congress simply because of who has been elected; those changes depend on strong grassroots pressure for the long haul.

They called her the luckiest dog in the world, or so read the ad for an adorable puppy who had just been rescued from a kill shelter in Athens County and was now residing at a shelter in Columbus. We visited her on New Year’s Day 2010. My husband knew if he put her in my arms, I’d be hooked, and I was. We took her home and named her Rosie for the Buckeye’s glorious Rose Bowl victory that same day.

Rosie grew into a spotted black and white mutt about the size of a border collie. She was an athletic Frisbee dog: no toss too long, too crooked or too high. Like all dogs, she chased squirrels and barked at mailmen. She ran through the woods scaring up birds and sniffed deeply in the grass for scents only a dog could know. She led the proverbial dog’s life.