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Joe Motil, former candidate for Columbus City Council and Ohio state legislature testified at this morning’s Franklin County Board of Commissioners public hearing on a proposal and other suggestions on how to best spend the county’s $255 million share of the federal governments American Rescue Plan (ARP) money.

Mr. Motil, who has been advocating and fighting for fairness, opportunity, and justice on nearly all fronts on issues that impact our communities economic and social quality of life for 35 years now states that, “The ARP funding for both the county and City of Columbus can lend immediate assistance especially to our underserved and low-income residents who have been impacted by COVID far more than others.”          

Friends! Angelenos! Theatergoers! Send me your rears – to fill the seats at that Roman-style amphitheater known as Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum. After an interregnum due to the you-know-what, WGTB is back, launching its new season with a do-not-dare-miss Julius Caesar. William Shakespeare’s immortal drama about intrigue and political liquidation opened with impeccable timing, coming hard on the heels of the assassination of Haiti’s president and premiering on the precise anniversary of French DGSE saboteurs blowing up the Rainbow Warrior on July 10, 1985 at Auckland Harbor, in order to prevent Greenpeace’s ship from protesting nuclear testing near Tahiti.

When the Israeli Knesset (parliament) failed to renew what is commonly referred to as the Family Reunification Law, news reports and analyses misrepresented the story altogether. The even split of 59 MKs voting in favor of the law and 59 against it gave the erroneous impression that Israeli lawmakers are equally divided over the right of Palestinians to obtain permanent residency status or citizenship in Israel through marriage. Nothing could be further away from the truth. 

 

Let’s dance at the border!

One of these days, something will give — the rich, the powerful will suddenly look around cluelessly. What’s happening? Awareness will sweep across the planet: We are one, and life is sacred. This consciousness will even invade political life and what I call moral intelligence will find political traction.

This won’t mean that life suddenly becomes simple — anything but! The politics of today, nationally and internationally, is simple: somebody wins, somebody loses; war is inevitable, there are always several on the horizon, and the primary consequence of every war that is waged is that it spurs more wars, a fact that remains officially unnoticed; only some lives matter, those that don’t are collateral damage, illegal aliens or simply the enemy; nuclear weapons  (ours, only ours) are justified, necessary and must be continually upgraded; national borders, however arbitrary, are sacred (the only thing that’s sacred); if these norms are challenged, the best response is mockery and cynicism.  

Cows

For the first time, the 25 million animals confined in factory “farms,” together with the U.S. Great Lake contaminated by their waste, will speak directly to Ohioans in a provocative, hard-hitting billboard and social media ad campaign centered in Toledo and including Cleveland and Columbus.

Through early October, five rotating ads (attached) will appear a total of over 100,000 times on high-visibility electronic boards and social media platforms, sponsored by Lake Erie Advocates. The duration of the campaign includes when the Solheim Cup, an international women’s golf championship, is played in Toledo.

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Alabama and Argentina. Cleveland, Columbus, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia. Guinea, Haiti, and Kent. Mauritania and Mexico. New Jersey, New York, and Romania. Sierra Leone and South Sudan. Youngstown and Vietnam. 

What do these places have in common?

Find out as you read Far From Their Eyes, Ohio Migration Anthology (Volume I). Each story, essay, painting, and poem in this anthology is rooted in at least two worlds – the physical place where its creator lives, today, and the place from which they and their ancestors came.

Sign up here to get first notice and please share and support this work: https://bit.ly/OMAVolumeOne.

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From AILA (American Immigration Lawyers Association):  Please call your Senators to urge passage of the American Dream and Promise Act (H.R. 6) and the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, FWMA, (H.R. 1603) passed the U.S. House of Representatives with bipartisan support on March 18, 2021. These bills, which would provide a path to citizenship to Dreamers, DED and TPS holders, as well as farm workers and their immediate family members, have stalled in the Senate. The best path forward is to include a pathway to citizenship in the budget reconciliation process.https://www.aila.org/takeaction#/105

If one were only limited to viewing or reading the US mainstream media the story of how President Joe Biden went down on his knees to honor two visiting Israelis would never have surfaced. Fortunately, the story did make considerable waves in both the Israeli and the alternative media, though not enough to convince the faceless editors at CBS news and elsewhere to run with it. The kneeling incident reportedly took place while Biden was meeting in the White House with soon-to-be retired Israeli president Reuven Rivlin. Rivlin was doing something like his victory lap, having presumably completed his term of office without being charged with corruption, which is what the Jewish state’s leaders have traditionally been noted for.

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