Local

Thursday, March 7, 7:30pm, Big Room Bar, 1036 S. Front St.

Join in to vote for your favorite ComFest 2024 logo design!

Want to enter your design? Entries must be emailed to <logo@comfest.com> by March 5 in order to be considered! Please see |post| for specific details and requirements.

Hosted by Community Festival.

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Have you applied to be a member of our 2024 Digital Organizing Council yet

Single Payer Action Network (SPAN) Ohio and Health Care for All Ohioans are collecting compelling stories to highlight the many struggles that people face when dealing with the American healthcare system.

We will be videotaping people's stories at the Health Care for All Ohioans/SPAN Ohio Annual Conference on April 27th, in Columbus, at the Quest Conference Center on Pulsar Road. If you cannot make that date, and your video is selected for this initial effort, we can make arrangements for a video production in Worthington, Ohio, if possible, prior to mid-May. 

Please submit your story by clicking the link to our website here.

City of Columbus officials are now doing what they should have done in early 2023 to prevent their repeated blunders and resulting harms concerning the Greyhound/Barons bus depot on North Wilson Road.

A March 1, 2024 email from city attorney Section Chief Steve Dunbar states: “Next week’s Greyhound hearing is being continued. City, Barons and Greyhound are doing a search for alternative sites. I’ll let you know as soon as we get a new date. It will be about sixty days out.”

If a new trial date is not set for another two months, it will be nearly a year that this bus terminal disaster began to play out.  

Barons officials had reached out to city officials requesting assistance in early 2023 to find a new location for their bus terminal after they could not come to terms with COTA on renewing their lease at the West Spring Street COTA location. The city refused to help Barons find a suitable location.

Small mammals called fishers have reappeared in Ohio after being chased from the state by 19th-century hunters. The return of the fishers clears up an old mystery in Ohio archaeology.

One of the most spectacular ancient earthworks in Ohio is the animal effigy in Granville, west of Newark, which was ignominiously named “Alligator Mound” for reasons that remain mysterious and hilarious. Obviously, there were no alligators in ancient Ohio. My theory is that some young white child told her or his daddy that the mound looked like an alligator, the name stuck, and this became alligator baggage that the archaeological authorities still carry.

Tuesday, March 5, 7-10pm, Club Diversity, 863 S. High St.

Join us for our DSA happy hour! We will be meeting on the first Tuesday of each month at Club Diversity at 863 S. High St. This will be an informal get together to meet, hang out, talk shop, and enjoy the camaraderie! Non-members are welcome to join and learn more about the chapter.

Hosted by Columbus DSA [Democratic Socialists of America].

Facebook Event

There’s a guide at wordsaboutwar.org to some of the standard war language used for big bucks by professional propagandists and for free by almost everyone else who has normalized it and not given it another thought. Manufacturing tools for mass murder is called “the defense industry,” those murdered are called “collateral damage,” the purpose is labeled “the national interest,” etc.

The trouble with talking like the Pentagon or CNN is not just that it helps to — in the words of George W. Bush — catapult the propaganda, but also that it makes war in general seem more acceptable and less horrific than it is.

I want to add a friendly amendment to efforts to reduce the use of Pentagon language. I think CIA language is a problem as well. I think it’s at least as present as war language in Hollywood productions, and in massive child-focused cultural efforts like the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Columbus Call to Action:  Pack City Hall for Palestine!  Ceasefire now! 
Monday, March 4, 2024, 4:00 PM
For more than 4 months, we have been asking Columbus City council to pass a ceasefire resolution.  Join us at this city council meeting to support a ceasefire resolution.  

Location:  90 W. Broad St., Columbus. Bring your Ohio photo ID.  

All day long - call city council members and ask for their support for a ceasefire resolution.  
General number:  614-645-7380 and Stanley Gates, Director of Community Engagement:  614-645-3566 segates@columbus.gov.  Ask for the office of these council members:  Shannon Hardin (President), Rob Dorans (Pres. Pro Temp.), Nicholas Bankston, Lourdes Barroso Padilla, Nancy Day-Achauer, Shayla Favor, Melissa Green, Emmanual Remy, and Christopher Wyche. 

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A Problem Even in Death

When Jimmy came home last night he went straight to his bedroom. He was bone-tired, mentally, and physically, and fell asleep, waking up this morning still in the clothes he wore yesterday.

Jimmy sipped his coffee as he watched Shelia washing the dishes. The girls acted strangely towards him this morning, and this concerned him, because although he expected this behavior from Jean, he was surprised that Sara ignored him and wouldn’t give him any eye contact. Instead, she mumbled hello and kept her eyes on her bowl of cereal when he sat down at the kitchen table. 

Shelia seemed nervous. He watched her washing the same bowl for over a minute before rinsing the soap off. Shelia didn’t look at the dishes she washed, instead she looked out of the kitchen window. Jimmy cleared his throat a couple of times. 

“Everything alright with you Shelia?”

“It’s all good. Why you ask?” Shelia put the last dish into the dishrack and turned to face Jimmy as she dried off her hands with the dishtowel.

“Just asking, you seem to be distracted. That’s all. And Sara was quiet this morning too.” 

Poor and low-wage people will join Ohio Poor People’s Campaign Tri-Chairs Clair Hochstetler and David Guran, and Rev. Dr. Jack Sullivan, Bishop Tony Minor, Imam Horsed Noah, and Yvonka Hall, among many others, for a mass assembly at the Ohio statehouse to launch a 40-week effort to mobilize poor and low-wage voters in Ohio, and demand legislators take immediate action to end the crisis of death by poverty in the United States.

During Saturday’s mass assembly, a powerful fusion coalition, including impacted people, poor and low-wage voters, faith leaders, and social justice advocates, gathered to declare their votes are demands for living wages, voting rights and other policies to combat poverty and save lives. As part of the assembly, poor and low-wage voters shared testimony of how poverty has impacted their lives and why politicians need to champion the issues that matter most to poor and low-wealth individuals.