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Wednesday, April 20  

11 am - 1 pm
Ohio Statehouse 

You/We CAN make a difference! 

 Simply Living is one of many sponsors of the Climate Action Coalition that  

is organizing a Rally and Lobby Day at the Statehouse. 

Women United for Change logo
WHAT   Educational and advocacy event to learn more about legislative solutions to issues impacting women.  

WHEN Wednesday, April 20, 2016 from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM

WHERE Trinity Episcopal Church - 125 East Broad Street, Columbus, OH 43215 - View Map

Women United For Change, a coalition of a group of nineteen organizations, has joined together to create an educational and advocacy event opportunity to learn more about legislative solutions to issues impacting women. This event will also be an opportunity to learn tips on how to effectively advocate for legislation that positively impacts women at the Ohio Statehouse.

Book cover

The last time there was a serious discussion about poverty in America was during the presidential campaign of 2008 when former United States Senator John Edwards (D-NC) announced his intention to run for the office from the back yard of a home in New Orleans. The city was still reeling from the impact of Hurricane Katrina in 2005–the natural disaster that made poverty in America visible again.  Edwards had been identified as a champion for the poor throughout his legal career during which we successfully represented plaintiffs in seemingly unwinnable cases as they fought large corporations, physicians and others, winning multimillion dollar settlements for his clients.  He was also the director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Law.  During his political career Edwards had proposed that the government should place poor people in middle class neighborhoods through the use of one million housing vouchers.  The idea went nowhere, and once again, poverty fell off America’s agenda.

Marijuana leaf

I was asked to write an article about “420.” Apropos, I guess, considering my name. So I began conceptualizing the piece. Perhaps a few interesting innuendos and stoner stories peppered with a traipse through time. As light-hearted as 420 seems to be, there are also uneasy overtones to this holiday of the high. Where to begin.

How about at the beginning. The vaunted Wikipedia confirms that “four-twenty” was coined at San Rafael High School forty-five years ago as clandestine code used by some students to denote a specified time and place for consuming cannabis – 4:20 pm in the shadow of Louis Pasteur. The term morphed to mean a need to find weed. Mushrooming through the local Grateful Dead culture, 420 landed in the hands of High Times’ Steve Bloom in the 1990s, pollinating globally through one of cannabis culture’s most time-honored magazines.

So with the approach of this hempy holiday, a happy 420 to you!


BANGKOK, Thailand -- Millions of people staged the world's biggest
water fight celebrating a week-long holiday which ended on April 17,
during which traffic accidents killed 442 people and the military
regime warned females wearing wet shirts not to expose themselves in
Thailand's sweltering streets.
   Bangkok "turned into City of Aquatic Mayhem," U.S. Ambassador to
Thailand, Glyn T. Davies, posted on his official Twitter account
@GlynTDavies during the April 11-17 Songkran New Year holiday.
   "Happy Songkran all -- long life, happiness, blessings & fun," the
envoy wrote, celebrating Thailand's traditional new year and several
days of public water splashing during the hottest weather of the year.
   Ambassador Davies also posted a photograph of himself and his wife,
both grinning and wearing sunglasses while gently squirting each other
with plastic sprayers alongside revelers in a busy Bangkok street.
   At least 442 people died in nationwide traffic accidents during
April 11-17 -- annually dubbed the "Seven Days of Death" -- and 3,656

 

 

There are two things we all need to know about the upcoming 2016 election:


 

  1. Millions of likely Democratic voters have already been stripped from the voter rolls in critical states like Ohio.  The key reporting on this has been done by the great Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com), who has shown a computer program coordinated by the Republican Secretary of State of Kansas is being used in some two dozen states to steal from a substantial percentage of the citizenry their right to vote.  The raw numbers are high enough they could have a significant impact on the presidential, US Senate, House and many other elections this fall.  

 

An H 2 O image

The final year for using medical marijuana illegally on 420 could be 2016 as two groups are seeking to put a medical marijuana amendment on this November’s ballot. Parallel to these 420 activists are Ohio lawmakers who introduced a medical marijuana bill a week before April 20th.

State lawmakers plan on fast-tracking the bill (House Bill 523) to Gov. John Kasich before any November ballot, and they said if it passes this summer, Ohioans could be using medical marijuana by 2018.

The two groups seeking a citizen vote on medical marijuana – Ohioans for Medical Marijuana and Grassroots Ohio – will most likely stay the course, as they have said they don’t have confidence in the Republican-dominated Ohio Legislature passing an effective law. Thus Ohio could have competing medical marijuana measures on this fall’s ballot.

Mowgli (Neel Sethi) and panther friend Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) in The Jungle Book (Disney Enterprises Inc.)

Orphan struggles to survive in mesmerizing ‘Jungle Book’

The best movie I’ve seen so far this year is about a boy who was raised by wolves. It may also be the most harrowing movie of the year to date.

Disney’s The Jungle Book tells the story of Mowgli (Neel Sethi), who lives with the wolf pack that took him in as an infant. Though he clearly doesn’t fit in with the other “cubs,” he’s loved and protected by adopted mother Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o) and the rest of the clan. He’s also watched over by Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), the stern panther who brought the orphaned child to the wolves in the first place.

Mowgli’s odd but comfortable existence is upset during a dry spell that brings the human-hating tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) to the local watering hole. Honoring the truce that’s enforced when the water level is low, Shere Khan spares the boy’s life but claims the right to kill him at a later date—or to take revenge on the rest of the wolf pack if he’s denied this privilege.

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