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Free Press Heroes

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

Ohio’s Dark Age: Republican legislative warlords run amok

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.

ARE THERE TOO MANY JFK BOOKS TO READ?

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.
 

One More Disappointment

Civil rights at risk under Sessions

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.”

Fantasies About Russia Could Doom Opposition to Trump


 

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.

Standing Rock Benefit Concerts

Fire in stove behind words Woodlands Tavern

Standing Rock Benefit Shows
Jan 6 - 7pm-2am, Woodlands Tavern, 1200 W. Third and Jan 7 – Bossy Grrls Pin Up Joint, 2598 N. High St.
Six musical acts come together at Woodlands to raise money for the Standing Rock Water protectors in North Dakota.

7 pm - Canadian Waves
https://canadianwaves.bandcamp.com/
8 pm - The Cadence
http://www.thecadencebluesband.com/

ACLU & CAIR Use Gold Star Father to Claim War on Iraq Was for Bill of Rights

Are you old enough to remember when liberal groups openly admitted that the war on Iraq was illegal and fraudulent, based on oil and profit and sadism?

Well, can you recall when the proponents of the war claimed it was a defense against nonexistent ties to terrorists and nonexistent weapons?

Even if you've wiped those memories, let me assure you, NOBODY ever claimed that attacking and destroying Iraq was necessary to protect civil liberties in the United States (which have been seriously eroded during the course of the war).

Yet, in recent months the generic defense of murdering large numbers of people far away has taken over as the explanation for the war on Iraq.

The ACLU on Friday used the voice of my fellow Charlottesvillian Khizr Khan to claim that attacking Iraq was done "in defense of our country's ideals."

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