Phil Donahue

Phil Donahue, whom we lost last week, put honest, antiwar, anticorporate, antiracist, pro-feminist voices on millions of U.S. television screens for decades. Then he was banished by a corporate cartel that had monopolized the airwaves.

Social media provides an illusion of diversity, while establishing new monopolistic gatekeepers. Google was ruled an illegal monopoly in federal court earlier this month.

Media is only one area where corporate monopolization has taken over. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan is the strongest U.S. government official against this trend that we've seen in a very long time.

But Big Tech billionaire and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman has donated tens of millions of dollars to Democrats in recent years, and he wants Khan fired.

Can politics be equal to the deepest of who we are? Can humanity evolve beyond war?

Such questions — I know, I know — are never officially asked during a presidential campaign. That’s not the point of the election: to plunge philosophically and spiritually into who we are. And thus, as the Trump-Harris race proceeds, not too many people (besides me) will be bringing up Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — Jesuit priest, theologian, scientist, best known as the author of The Phenomenon of Man — who died seventy years ago.

But I can’t tolerate the clichés of state! So let me sneak a dozen or so of Teilhard’s words into the present moment: “Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.”

Departing Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan clearly had an unpleasant experience at the world’s largest international institution. 

 In an interview published in the Israeli newspaper Maariv on August 20, the disgruntled envoy said that “the UN building should be closed and wiped off from the face of the earth.”

 Whether Erdan has made this realization or not, his aggressive statement indicates that his four-year career as Israel’s top UN diplomat was a failure. 

Wings of Desire mural and Joe Motil

Using words such as “stolen” or “hijacked,” members of the Tuttle Park Community Recreation Council (CRC) say the City of Columbus took over their Ohio State game day parking fundraiser which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Tuttle Park just north of the off-campus area.

“I was unofficially informed by an upper management Columbus Recreation and Parks Department [CRPD] employee that the CRPD and Columbus Parks and Recreation Foundation [CPRF] decided that due to the profitability of our fundraiser that they were taking it away from us after 29 years,” stated former mayoral candidate Joe Motil in a recent Facebook post.

Motil of Clintonville has been president of the Tuttle Park Community Recreation Council since 1992.

“Those making this decision did not even have the common decency to personally inform us of this takeover. We were informed that the CRPF had hired a private vendor to take over the football parking fundraiser,” stated Motil in his post.

Beat the heat

With high temperatures forecasted to be above 90 degrees this week, Columbus Recreation and Parks will open cooling centers at five regional community centers to give residents a place to cool off during this week’s extreme heat. The following centers will be open daily from 8 a.m.-9 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 28 through Friday, Aug. 30:

Kamala Harris

Like most Americans, Vice President Kamala Harris has evolved on marijuana.

In 2010, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris urged voters to reject a proposed ballot initiative to legalize the adult-use marijuana market. At the time, Harris’ position aligned with that of most California voters, 54 percent of whom ultimately decided against the measure.

But not long after, Harris — and most Americans — changed their stance. 

In 2016, Californians reversed course and passed Proposition 64 legalizing marijuana statewide.  And in 2019, Harris — then California’s junior U.S. senator — sponsored legislation to end the federal prohibition of cannabis. That same year, Gallup pollsters reported that some two-thirds of Americans believed that “the use of marijuana should be legal” — up from 46 percent in 2010. 

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