If approved at the August 2 special election, Issue 1 will end Columbus’ seven-member city council whose members are all elected citywide (i.e., “at large”). Replacing it will be a council consisting of 10 members elected from districts of the city and 3 elected citywide.

The present system was designed over a hundred years ago for a city less than a fourth of Columbus’ present size. The reform would make council’s structure consistent with what’s used by virtually every other large American city.

Issue 1 opponents are ignoring the present system’s problems and the changes the reform would bring. They’re hoping voters will too. 

A currently divided city

Opponents say districts would divide the city and pit neighborhoods against each other. They ignore, however, that the present system has produced this very result by favoring certain areas and neglecting others.

As the Democratic Convention opens in Philadelphia, there’s just one one clear message that matters from the Republicans: Donald Trump will be within ten points of Hillary Clinton in the fall election. 

Thus, unless the Democrats do something about the issue of election protection, it will be within the power of key GOP swing state governors to give Donald Trump the presidency.

For all its problems, the wildly disorganized and fractious gathering in Cleveland all boiled down to Trump’s final speech. It was rambling and often incoherent. But it delivered the classic strongman message: You need ME to protect you.

Given the chaos, violence, and injustice of imperial America in 2016, that message is almost certain to sell with enough Americans to keep Trump close enough to Hillary Clinton to allow the election to be electronically stripped and flipped.

In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama was able to overcome these barriers with a huge popular margin in more states than the GOP could reasonably steal. 

Whenever I think of Richard Nixon, a wave of pity washes over me. Has there ever been a mainstream politician in America who was so hated, so reviled, so disrespected as Nixon? (I’m sure my esteemed editor would say that Nixon deserved every last brickbat thrown at him.) Like Shaft, Nixon was a complicated man–charming and cold, clever and calculating, craven and crafty. Dead for more than twenty years–he died a month before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of his late rival, John F. Kennedy, in the same hospital in which she was treated–he would have been 102 years old on January 19. The former president is still a fascinating study.

Who knew? Before there was Fox-TV’s Empire, there was John Dolphin (Broadway veteran Stu James),who from 1948-1958 was an African American impresario and entrepreneur who pioneered “Race music” at a critical time when Rock ‘n’ Roll was being born. AsRecorded in Hollywood splendidly dramatizes through music, dance, dialogueand more, this trailblazer presided over his show biz domain from the record shop Dolphin’s of Hollywood. However, as this bioplay quickly reveals in Act I, the emporium from whence Dolphin ruled his mini-empire was not located on then-lily white Hollywood Blvd., where not- so-angelic Angeleno realtors literally refused to rent a space out to him, even when offered rent in advance in hard cold cash.