Under the state constitution and the Columbus City Charter, everyday citizens have the right to propose legislation using the citizen initiatives process. In short, if citizens can collect 10 percent of valid signatures from registered Columbus voters, the Columbus City Council is required to put the question on the ballot for a vote. Two groups have recently sought to use those provisions. In a tough year for citizen initiatives, both have failed for lack of sufficient signatures – but those failures exposed apparent manipulations of city government seemingly designed to make the process even more arduous – if not impossible for citizens to exercise their constitutional rights.
   City Council President and Mayoral Candidate Andrew Ginther is leading the chorus of citizen suppression, with City Attorney Rick Pfeiffer serving as hype man for the new band, launching “yeah boyyyeeee” whenever Ginther clamps down more on local democracy. Pfeiffer has provided legal ammunition to keep citizen initiatives off the ballot and has tried to strengthen Ginther’s claims that he was not bribed as a Redflex executive said in her federal guilty plea.

The U.S. Army and Air Force public relations offices have responded to a Freedom of Information Act request by releasing huge lists of movies and television shows that they have assessed and, at least in many cases, sought to influence. Here's the Army's PDF. Here's the Air Force's PDF.

The shows and films, foreign and U.S. made, aimed at foreign and U.S. audiences, including documentaries and dramas and talk shows and "reality" TV, cross every genre from those obviously related to war to those with little discernable connection to it.

One-and-a-half year old Ali Saad Dawabsha became the latest victim of Israeli violence on July 31. He was burnt to death. Other members of his family were also severely burnt in a Jewish settlers’ attack on their home in the village of Duma, near Nablus, in the West Bank.

A spokesman for Rabbis for Human Rights told Aljazeera Arabic that this is the tenth attack on Nablus by settlers in July. A statement issued by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) provided an even  more alarming statistic, putting the number of Jewish settlers’ attacks, some of them lethal, at an estimated 11,000 since the end of 2014.

Nukes get all the attention, but the fact is that intense inspections of Iranian facilities will also prevent Iran from developing a ray gun that causes your clothes to vanish and your brain to convert to Islam.

No, there is not the slightest scrap of evidence that Iran is trying to create such a thing, but then there's also not the slightest scrap of evidence that Iran is trying to create a nuclear bomb.

And yet, here are a bunch of celebrities in a video that certainly cost many more dollars than the number of people who've watched it, urging support for the Iran deal after hyping the bogus Iranian nuclear threat, pretending that the United States gets "forced into" wars, making a bunch of sick jokes about how nuclear death can be better than other war deaths, suggesting that spies are cool, cursing, and mocking the very idea that war is a serious matter.