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Sherrod Brown

I’m a 75-year-old steelworker, with real mobility problems from decades of hard work, especially as a steelworker. I’m living on a good, United Steel Workers (USW) negotiated pension, like thousands of my fellow steelworkers, thanks to Sherrod Brown. 

I worked at Lorain Works, USX, in Lorain, Ohio and, like thousands of my fellow steelworkers, looked forward to the day that I finally could retire, take it easy, and enjoy a decent life supported by a good Union (USW) Steelworker pension. 

Hiring, then retirements, go in large waves in steel mills as the company puts on or takes off whole “turns” of workers.” So, when I prepared to retire when I hit my 30-year anniversary in 2002, I was part of a big wave of retirements. 

Protester with sign saying You Shall Not Kill

From the American Friends Service Committee
For decades, AFSC has worked to end the use of the death penalty as well as life and long-term sentences.

Please join us in urging Congress and state governors to end the death penalty once and for all. The death penalty flies in the face of moral values, common sense, and history. Death sentences do not deter crime, are disproportionately handed to people of color, and have been given to numerous individuals who were later exonerated.

Earlier this year, the state of Alabama put a man to death using the untested execution method of nitrogen hypoxia. The execution was carried out despite U.N. experts warning that the method could lead to excessive pain and constitute torture.  

Killing anyone—by any method—is immoral and should be outlawed.  In recent years, the use of the death penalty has declined sharply across the U.S. Since 2019, three states—Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire—have abolished the practice completely.

Now it's time for the federal government and all states to follow suit. 

Last Friday, President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 individuals at a White House ceremony. Among the recipients were Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Al Gore, Elizabeth Dole who served as the head of the American Red Cross, media personality Phil Donahue, and former Secretary of State John Kerry to name few.
 
The Presidential Medal of honor should be reserved for those whose risk their lives and whose work and contributions help positively impact the quality of life for others and enhance the image of their country. Giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Nancy Pelosi, the Lady who ripped up a SOTU speech in full view on national TV, is a disgrace.
 
Let's face it, Katie Ledecky being an Olympic swimmer with multiple golds for the U.S. was the only person I saw deserving of the honor. But Nancy Pelosi, give me a freaking break!

Mine! Mine! Mine! Praise God . . .

This is perhaps the worst thing human beings do: They take their deepest values — connection, love, empathy — simplify them down to a religion, a name (Christianity, let us say, or Judaism, or whatever) and suddenly they have a flag to wave and a “cause” to go to war for. And the blood flows. Kill the savages! Kill the non-believers! Kill the enemy! (Take their land.)

Here’s the question of the day, as Israel continues to inflict hell and starvation on Gaza, as brutal conflict and murder rage across the planet: How do we reclaim — and maintain — the integrity of our deepest values? Acting in love and connection with an “Other” is, or can be, remarkably complex; declaring the Other to be an evil being who doesn’t deserve to live not only simplifies things enormously, but allows part of humanity to connect with itself, in fear of that enemy.

VINNIE DESTEFANO’S information on Julian Assange includes a way YOU can help by calling your Senators & Representatives to get him FREE!

MYLA RESON, DAVID GURAN and WENDI LEDERMAN chime into the amazing battle to save the right to practice journalism anywhere on Earth.

RUTH STRAUSS talks to us about “Outside Agitators” and Joe Biden.

From Georgia's RAY MCCLENDON we hear the latest on the Trump prosecutions and also on the arrival of the Vogtle nuclear plant already devastating the Peach State economy.

Republican Arizona state Senator KEN BENNETT explains the 4-point program for guaranteeing safe, fair, digitally scanned paper ballots that produce accurate outcomes in public elections.

With legendary election protection pioneer JOHN BRAKEY we conduct an astonishing excursion into the workings of the AZ legislature’s progress into the world of actual democracy.

Will this publicly verifiable method of conducting the vote counting and auditing process become a national model? Let’s hope so.

For too long, policymakers have neglected Ohio’s childcare system, and the littlest Ohioans suffer the consequences.

Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Pacific Islands’ Indigenous peoples are being highlighted from May 1-10 at various L.A. venues and via an online platform during the 40th annual VC Film Fest (formerly the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival). Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented this festival, dedicated to its mission “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” Although the majority of the productions screened are by Asian and Asian-American filmmakers, VCFF is arguably America’s top portal for films of Oceania, as L.A. is cinema’s global capital.

What is taking place in occupied Palestine is not a conflict, but a straightforward case of illegal military occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and outright genocide.

 Those who insist on using ‘neutral’ language in depicting the crisis in Palestine are harming the Palestinian people beyond their seemingly innocuous words. 

 This morally non-committal, middle-ground language is now at work in Gaza. Here, the harm of this ‘impartiality’ is greatest. 

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