A bipartisan Ohio election panel released its recommendations for "voting reforms." An early indicator of how bad these "so-called" reforms came when Ohio's controversial Secretary of State Jon Husted immediately endorsed the panel's proposals.

"A lot of the reforms that are in there are things that I have long advocated for," Husted said.

The Ohio Association of Election Officials responsible for the recommendations is comprised of equal totals of Democrats and Republicans, but they are 100% party regulars, causing some activists to refer to them as the Ohio Association of Political Hacks. Under Ohio law, the two major parties get to appoint the top election officials in the state's 88 counties.

These party regulars agreed to eliminate Ohio's "Golden Week" of voting. During that week, voters were both allowed to register to vote at the Board of Elections and also cast an early ballot on the same day. Apparently the efficiency of such a system that made it incredibly convenient for voters to participate in the democratic process had to go.

Now, voter registration will close the day before early voting begins.

Thyroid abnormalities have now been confirmed among tens of thousands of children downwind from Fukushima.  They are the first clear sign of an unfolding radioactive tragedy that demands this industry be buried forever. 

Two years after Fukushima exploded, three still-smoldering reactors remind us that the nuclear power industry repeatedly told the world this could never happen.    

And 72 years after the nuclear weapons industry began creating them,  untold quantities of deadly wastes still leak at Hanford and at commercial reactor sites around the world, with no solution in sight.  

Radiation can be slow to cause cancer, taking decades to kill.

But children can suffer quickly.  Their cells grow faster than adults'.  Their smaller bodies are more vulnerable.  With the embryo and fetus, there can never be a "safe" dose of radiation.  NO dose of radiation is too small to have a human impact.  

Last month the Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey acknowledged a horrifying plague of thyroid abnormalities, thus far afflicting more than forty percent of the children studied. 

Stringent “background checks” are central to many proposals for curbing gun violence. The following is a background check on the nation’s largest buyer of firearms:

The applicant, U.S. Pentagon, seeks to purchase a wide variety of firearms in vast quantities. This background check has determined that the applicant has a long history of assisting individuals, organizations and governments prone to gun violence.

Pentagon has often served as an active accomplice or direct perpetrator of killings on a mass scale. During the last 50 years, the applicant has directly inflicted large-scale death and injuries in numerous countries, among them the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan (partial list). Resulting fatalities are estimated to have been more than 5 million people.

At midnight on Friday, the 2013 Budget Sequestration cuts went into effect, making CMHA’s “neighborhood-transformation-by-demolition” strategy even more risky and speculative than before.

According to the OMB Report issued on September 12, 2012 pursuant to the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, the HUD Choice Neighborhoods “Transformation Initiative” is “sequestrable” (page 68). And according to a brief issued by the United Neighborhoods Centers of America (“A selection of programs that would be impacted by a March 1, 2013 sequester and their estimated cuts”), the HUD Choice Neighborhoods program that CMHA expects to finance the “transformation” of the Near East Side would be cut from $120M to $21.6M through sequestration, effective at midnight, tonight. Thus, a substantial source of money being counted upon for the neighborhood’s PACT redevelopment may not really be there.

"Turn off the lights!" My dad would remind us. For the 1000th time. Yes, we took it for granted. But that was our way of life. Saving energy, saving electricity, saving the world — one light at a time.

Tofu or fish every night for dinner with a huge, huge bowl of salad and brown rice. Same dinner, every night.

Drive? Why not walk, or bike? It wasn't even a question. If we could walk there, we would. If it was only an hour bike ride away, we were biking it. The longer one could go without being in a car, the better. The more we saved, preserved, reserved, the better we were doing our jobs as daughters of Mother Earth.

As an actual hippy child, not just one of the 60s, I got to attend social action camps, political rallies, political conventions and speeches, and best of all – political concerts.

A hippy child did not have a television. If they did, it was placed sneakily in front of the treadmill for exercise or in the basement for movies, only.

If I ever ate meat it was not in the sight of my father. I didn't even learn how to cook it until I was 25.