It’s election season, and already we’ve had two instances of those amusing quadrennial scuffles between Republican politicians and leftist musicians. Donald Trump repeatedly played Neil Young’s “Rocking’ in the Free World” at a campaign event, prompting a statement from Young’s camp that he was “not authorized” to use the song. Previously, the band Survivor sued Mike Huckabee over the use of “Eye of the Tiger” at a rally celebrating Rowan County, PA county clerk Kim Davis’ release from jail following a stint for contempt of court for refusing to marry same-sex couples. 

It’s a strange phenomenon, made more so by its reliability. Bumbling Republican candidate blasts song from campaign bus or whatever.  Artist sends irate cease and desist letter and copies the media. Politician quietly drops the song with vague apologies. Liberals pass it around as the latest evidence of the candidate’s brain damage, and get a good chuckle out of the whole thing. It’s extra fun if patriotic themes in the stolen songs turn out to be rather sarcastic, such as Young’s “Free World,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” or John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.” 

Marvel and Fox Studios’ R-rated superhero action/comedy Deadpool, a gamble of a movie that required some “leaked” test footage and a fan campaign just to get made, is now breaking box office records. In addition to a stellar opening weekend that surpassed any of Fox Studios’ other X-Men-related movies, as of this writing it’s on its way to becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever.

This flies in the face of “common wisdom” in Hollywood that superhero movies just can’t make money without that under-17 audience. And while an R-rated superhero movie may never make as much as a kid-friendly, PG-13 Avengers, Deadpool proves that a good one can still outperform an average PG-13 one.

The problem is that some in Hollywood are learning all the wrong lessons from Deadpool’s success.

Two wildly imaginative worlds open up on area movie screens this week. Both mix gorgeous animated photography with important life lessons for kids old enough to appreciate them.

The more mainstream offering is Disney’sZootopia, the story of a plucky rabbit who’s determined to become the first member of her species to pin on a badge.

Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) grows up in an anthropomorphic world where all animals—predators and prey alike—have learned to live in peace with each other. Even so, not all of the old differences have been forgotten. When Judy prepares to leave her hometown to join the Zootopia Police Academy, her parents warn her to watch out for big-city foxes.

Wouldn’t you know it, her first day on the job brings her into contact with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a sly fox who makes his living with schemes that fall just short of illegality.

Frustrated that her chief (Idris Elba) has assigned her to the parking patrol, Judy is determined to prove she’s capable of real police work. But her efforts backfire when she gets involved in a chase that nearly demolishes a neighborhood inhabited by tiny rodents.

Since my last article, a mere four months ago, I was lamenting Responsible Ohio’s crash and burn 66-34% defeat on Election Night 2015. Good grief! After a year of twists and turns and ups and downs and ins and outs, it was hard to believe that this $25 million-dollar campaign to legalize marijuana in Ohio could fail so miserably. Some said RO’s loss was the end of marijuana in Ohio, some said just wait for something better in 2016, some said the election results smelled funny.

If 2015 was a rollercoaster in Ohio cannabis reform, 2016 portends to be even more bizarre. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at just the four months since RO’s defeat in CannaTime:

November 3, 2015:Election Day. Responsible Ohio badly loses its bid to legalize marijuana in Ohio. Stunned, RO’s raucous Executive Director Ian James declares in his election night speech, we’ll be back! Definitely on the 2016 ballot.

November 4, 2015:No, it can’t be true! Well, maybe it isn’t. Implausible irregularities in RO’s 66-34% loss are detected.

And so it begins. A 10-year pollworker named Diane contacted the Free Press. She had just gone through three hours of training and gave the Free Press her manuals. She said she had been ordered to re-take the training because she had asked too many questions about counting paper ballots during training.

“They came in with a stack of 800 ballots from the last election that had never been counted. One they weren’t going to count because the city and zip code had been left off even though there was an address on it,” she explained. “I asked them why if the voter has already shown ID with his address on it and you’ve given him a ballot based on the candidates running in that precinct where he lives, why would you not count his vote when you have his name, street address, and date of birth?”

Diane noted that she was told not to tell voters to fill in the required information before they left. “Why do you have to sit there and watch them walk out and know their vote won’t be counted when you could tell them to fill it all in?”