Opinion

The Palestine National Football Team has, once more, done the seemingly impossible by qualifying for the 2023 AFC Asian Cup. By any standards, this is a great achievement, especially as the Palestinians have done it with style and convincing victories over Mongolia, Yemen and the Philippines, without conceding a single goal. However, for Palestinians, this is hardly about sports. 

This accomplishment can only be appreciated within the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. 

Joe Motil, former Columbus City Council candidate and longtime community advocate who has begun circulating petitions to run for Mayor in the 2023 May primary election stated that, “I attended the city’s promise to bulldoze the homeless camp at Heer Park this morning at around 8:00am. When I turned west onto Williams Road you would have thought there was another homicide or violent crime committed due to the heavy police presence. There was a combined nine police cruisers and paddy wagons on Williams Road alone. As I approached the parking lot to the south, I saw eight more cruisers nearby and two more parked on a service road just south of the camp. We are talking about 20 police vehicles and probably 25-30 police officers. Seriously? I haven’t seen this much police presence since the protesting in downtown Columbus in 2020.”

Part One (of Four)

Unlike those of any other U.S. city of its size, and certainly its slogan-dominated, boosterish aspirations, residents of Columbus have few legal rights and fewer ethical democratic rights. I write as a privileged member of the community, a homeowner, retired professional, taxpayer, and voter. Many others lack my privileges. They have even fewer rights. The City of Columbus has no inclusive urban vision, no focus on the public, especially those in need, other than private interests and developers.

The contradictions of Columbus past and present require a long book. I can only highlight some of the major ones here. Refer to my continuing series of Columbus Free Press columns (listed at end of this essay and available on the website) as well as Kevin Cox’s Boomtown Columbus (2021), the only documented, book-length study of the 220-year-old city. I ask rhetorically: Does the 14th largest city in the nation deserve to have a thoroughly researched, fact-based history—not the fictitious and trivial version expressed always without context in Columbus Dispatch and on WOSU?

A long view

For all her decades of experience in politics and the ways of Washington, D.C., nothing had prepared Lady Bird Johnson for the role of First Lady. She and her husband were elevated to their offices under the worst circumstances imaginable. On the airplane ride back from Dallas, she visited Jackie Kennedy who was in the hold of the plane with the casket. Lady Bird told her, "Oh, Mrs Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be vice president and now, dear God, it's come to this." We. Mrs. Johnson seemingly sublimated her husband’s wishes to hers. But as Julia Sweig shows us, LBJ’s political career was her career too. Indeed, she sometimes referred to his office as “our presidency.” If Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, was the second most powerful person in Washington during his brother’s presidency, Lady Bird Johnson played that same role in her husband’s administration.

While it is true that Zionism is a modern political ideology that has exploited religion to achieve specific colonial objectives in Palestine, prophecies continue to be a critical component of Israel’s perception of itself, and of the state’s relationship to other groups, especially Christian messianic groups in the United States and worldwide. 

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.

“Just imagine for once if we led the world in funding peace and not wars.”

Just imagine! The words are those of Robert Weissman, president of the organization Public Citizen, in response to the legislative efforts of Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, who are the co-chairs of — glory hallelujah! — the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. They recently introduced legislation that would cut Pentagon spending by $100 billion and divert the money to programs that actually helped the country . . . e.g., universal health care, ending child poverty, saving the environment.

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.”

Joe Motil, former Columbus City Council candidate and longtime community advocate who has begun circulating petitions to run for Mayor in the 2023 Mayoral primary election calls for an immediate public hearing and investigation into AEP’s claim that their decision to shut off power was to protect the power grid and prevent longer power outages.  

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?”