The Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland must do their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and charge Donald Trump with the extremely serious crimes the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has documented and alleges that the ex-president committed in order to subvert democracy. The DOJ, AG Garland and Biden administration must not make the same mistake that Pres. Gerald Ford did when he granted a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, shortly after Tricky Dick resigned the presidency. Not prosecuting Trump for the heinous crimes he purportedly perpetrated will, in effect, be the same as Ford’s Proclamation 4311, which let Nixon get off Scot free for the crimes he committed as part of the Watergate Scandal and set a deplorable precedent of unaccountability.

The rich, powerful and famous must be held to account, the same as the rest of us. They must pay the consequences for their actions, just like ordinary people are expected to. There must not be a double standard for the high and mighty; NOBODY is above the law, not even a president or ex-president.

Sir John Falstaff is arguably William Shakespeare’s greatest comic character. The ribald, oversized skirt chaser appears in three of the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon’s plays, including Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. According to Director’s Notes in the program, Queen Elizabeth enjoyed this roguish character so much that Her Majesty commanded the playwright to write another comedy featuring Falstaff. That third Falstaffian play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is now the summer season opener of Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum at Topanga Canyon.

However, this version is the Bard with (literally) a twist: WGTB Artistic Director Ellen Geer has transported the Elizabethan-era, Windsor, England-set play to small town USA in Connecticut, during the1950s. Not only that, but a score of period music has been interjected into the madcap merriment of this modern dress revival, with songs from musicals such as My Fair Lady, South Pacific and Bye Bye Birdie, plus rock ‘’n’ roll hits such as “Rock Around the Clock.”

Dear Kenny McDonald:

I write to you in your capacity as the new CEO of the self-proclaimed since 2002, Columbus Partnership.

Columbus Dispatch business reporter Mark Williams belatedly announced your ascension in January on June 10 with an interview. (See also, Carrie Ghose, “Alex Fischer to hand over Columbus Partnership reins to Kenny McDonald.”) Compare the Dispatch article with the more guarded and questioning comments by Dave Ghose in Columbus Monthly in January, “The Titans Are Gone. Power Is Shifting. Who Will Lead Columbus into the Future?”

Pretty much anything that complicates the story of a person is a good corrective to the tendency to simplify and caricature. So, one has to welcome Craig McNamara’s book, Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. Craig’s father, Robert McNamara was Secretary of War (“Defense”) for much of the war on Vietnam. He’d been offered the choice of that or Secretary of the Treasury, with no requirement that he know anything about either job, and of course no requirement to have the slightest notion that the study of making and maintaining peace even existed.

From the Coalition on Human Needs: