The corporate Democrats who greased Bill Clinton’s path to the White House are now a bit worried. Their influence on the party’s presidential nomination process has slipped. But the Democratic Leadership Council can count on plenty of assistance from mainstream news media.

     For several years leading up to 1992, the DLC curried favor with high-profile political journalists as they repeated the mantra that the Democratic Party needed to be centrist. Co-founded by Clinton in the mid-1980s, the DLC emphasized catering to “middle class” Americans — while the organization filled its coffers with funding from such non-middle-class bastions as the top echelons of corporate outfits like Arco, Prudential-Bache, Dow Chemical, Georgia Pacific and Martin Marietta.

     In a 1992 book, Who Will Tell the People, political analyst William Greider noted that the Democratic Leadership Council’s main objective was “an attack on the Democratic Party’s core constituencies — labor, schoolteachers, women’s rights groups, peace and disarmament activists, the racial minorities and supporters of affirmative action.” During the eight years that followed, President

While the mainstream media debates whether the President was misinforming, exaggerating or misleading the U.S. public, they miss the bigger story – their obvious complicity with the Bush administration’s Nazi-style propaganda prior to the war.

George W. Bush and his administration deliberately undertook a massive campaign to wage illegal and aggressive war against the people of Iraq. The narrow focus on one fraudulent claim in the State of the Union address regarding Iraq buying uranium from Africa ignores the much broader campaign of falsification used to whip the people into a war frenzy.

Columbus Free Press Editor Bob Fitrakis received 8042 votes, more than 6% of the votes cast in a 10-person field for Columbus City Council in the May 6 primary. Fitrakis came within less than 2% of the votes needed to knock off the endorsed Republican candidate John Jones. In modern Columbus history, the Free Press could not find any third-party candidate who has come as close to unseating an endorsed major party candidate. Fitrakis was endorsed by the Central Ohio Green Party and came in 9th, although only the top 8 candidates advanced to the fall election.

The mainstream media did not present the results from the perspective of a third party candidate nearly toppling an endorsed candidate of the Franklin County Republican Party, the Columbus Dispatch did provide straightforward coverage of Fitrakis’ policies as a Green Party candidate. The Alive provided the best in-depth coverage of the campaign. Both This Week and the Messenger publications provided fair and accurate coverage of the Green Party campaign.

In case anyone in central Ohio didn’t know, the movement for marijuana law reform is alive and well. Two major cannabis liberation events happen this spring in Columbus, the Global March for Cannabis liberation and the 16th annual Hempfest. Both events were organized by The Ohio State University chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. The May 4th march saw two hundred people turn out on a rainy afternoon to rally at 15th Ave and High and then proceed down High to Goodale Park for a bonafide smokeout. A month later, on June 7th, over ten thousand festivalgoers flooded the South Oval for a day of political speakers and regional musical acts.

Progress with Economic and Environmental Responsibility, Inc. (PEER) announced that it will lead an Initiative Petition Drive to amend the Columbus City Charter. The Initiative will allow voters to elect an as yet undetermined number of district or ward representatives in addition to the current seven at-large council members. The goal of the Initiative Petition Drive is to ensure comprehensive representation for all of the neighborhoods within the City.

PEER supports a public policy agenda featuring truly representative government and efficient planning for Columbus and Central Ohio. PEER thus supports growth policies which allow for commercial and residential development but which also promote the reuse and redevelopment of the central city while preserving key environmental assets in the area.