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Issue 1 on the November ballot will remove politicians from the business of drawing voting maps. In Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman’s view, Issue I is “gerrymandering at its finest.”
The irony is striking. Huffman and Ohio’s Redistricting Commission disregarded seven orders from the Ohio Supreme Court to observe the constitutional mandate to draw maps that would not “favor or disfavor a political party” and, instead, drew maps that ...
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No one seriously questions that our immigration system is broken, but even with plenty of legitimate reasons to support comprehensive reform, Donald Trump chooses to engage in fiction to gain votes.
Why? Because lying works; voters don’t question what they hear.
And, yes, Democrats also lie. It’s just that Trump has elevated lying to a whole new level.
First, let’s look at what we’re hearing. Trump tell us, “hundreds of thousands of ...
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The Israeli goal of eliminating Hamas raises the question, is the war’s resulting civilian Palestinian death toll proportional, as the International Committee of the Red Cross puts it, “in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated?” More than 35,000 Palestinians have died in the Gaza war, roughly two-thirds of whom are women and children.
I sometimes wonder if our efforts at putting limits on civilian casualties are merely ...
Continue Reading →We vote for our legislative representatives, but the reality is, they select the voters who put them in office. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.
A group called Citizens Not Politicians is poised to bring real change to how state and congressional legislative districts are drawn in Ohio. Before explaining what’s coming, let’s take stock of where we are.
Gerrymandering—drawing statehouse and congressional maps to favor one party over the other—is done ...
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Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno and his primary opponents all oppose raising the minimum wage. Both Moreno and Matt Dolan believe the minimum wage was never intended to be a living wage. Says who?
Here’s what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to say about wages over 90 years ago:
“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living ...
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Bowling Green State University recently published a study concerning a law passed in June 2022 that permits citizens to carry firearms in public without a license. In the year since, we are told, there was “a significant decrease in crime incidents involving a firearm” in Ohio’s eight most populous cities.
Gun zealots will surely herald this study as proof that relaxed gun restrictions pose no risk, and Attorney General ...
Continue Reading →We have come to the point that when 18 people are massacred in Lewiston, Maine—or 49 in Orlando or 60 in Las Vegas—we accept it as a way of life.
Well, you know, we have the Second Amendment, people say, as if words written over 230 years ago condemn us, without recourse, to gun violence.
America has a gun violence problem it is powerless to solve, and the problem exists because ...
Continue Reading →Is there an age when politicians should leave public office? Looking at age, national leaders are out of sync with the people they represent.
The median age in the U.S is 39 years. The median age of members in the U.S. House of Representatives is 58. Sixty-one representatives are 70 to 79 years old, and 11 are 80 years old or older.
The median age in the Senate is 65. Thirty ...
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This post comes from my friend, Rev. Tim Ahrens, a strong advocate for social justice.
In 1912, it was just called “The Initiative.”
The Initiative represented the constitutional right of all Ohioans to shape fair and equitable laws through the ballot box of initiatives and referenda. The Ohio Progressive Republican League helped establish this constitutional right for all Ohioans in 1912. Under ...
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