Joe Motil, former Columbus City Council candidate and longtime community advocate who is strongly considering running for mayor in 2023, states that, “Mayor Ginther’s state of the city address painted a rosy picture of Columbus but rather than 'opportunity rising' for Columbus residents, too many continue to see their opportunities for success declining.”  

Columbus has an overall poverty rate of 19.54 percent, with black residents at 29.69 percent, our Hispanic neighbors at 28.67 percent, while white residents are at 12.67 percent. “Good paying jobs continue to be unreachable for too many individuals and families who cannot afford the never-ending escalating housing costs, food on the table and other rising cost of living expenses.”            

For decades, the U.S. public seemed largely indifferent to most of the horrible suffering of war. The corporate media outlets mostly avoided it, made war look like a video game, occasionally mentioned suffering U.S. troops, and once in a blue moon touched on the deaths of a handful of local civilians as if their killing were some sort of aberration. The U.S. public funded and either cheered for or tolerated years and years of bloody wars, and came out managing to believe falsely that a large percentage of war deaths are of troops, that a large percentage of war deaths in U.S. wars are U.S. troops, that wars happen in a mysterious place called a “battlefield,” and that with rare exceptions the people killed by U.S. troops are people who need killing exactly like those given death sentences in U.S. courts (except for the ones later exonerated).

Ohio is on the verge of making marijuana fully legal, but no surprise is the unlucky timing for proponents. Stuck in purgatory in the Ohio Statehouse is a proposed citizen-initiated statute which will make marijuana legal for adults 21 and over.

The Coalition to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol (CTRMLA) and its canvassers gathered signatures at shopping plazas late last year gaining 136,729 valid signatures. Their goal is to force the Ohio legislature to consider their legislation for November’s ballot. An answer from the Statehouse is due in May.

CTRMLA’s law would give 36 percent of earned taxes to support social equity and jobs, and it also legalizes home grow with a limit of six plants per person and 12 plants per household. Ohio’s current Medical Marijuana Control Program forbidshome-based cultivation, a point of contention with many of the state’s patients.