Back when “tin soldiers and Nixon” were “cutting us down” in 1970, a group of Ohio State University students and campus activists started an underground newspaper in Columbus. Driven mostly by the murder of four students at Kent State – Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer and Bill Schroeder – shot during a demonstration that was opposing President Nixon’s illegal attack on Cambodia and the Vietnam War, the Columbus Free Press was born.

Not surprisingly, the Free Press was the first western newspaper to expose Cambodia’s killing fields thanks to international law professor John Quigley’s reporting from Southeast Asia. In the first issue of the Free Press, the October 11, 1970 issue, a Free Press opinion attacked a special grand jury’s decision not to indict Ohio National Guardsmen for the Kent State killings.

Thanks to State Sen. Joe Schiavoni, the Columbus Dispatch stepped up its coverage of the ECOT scandal on April 24.

"Schiavoni wants criminal probe of ECOT attendance claims" the online headline screamed atop dispatch.com. It did not make the front page of the early print edition, but was relegated to the first page of the second section.

It turns out that a whistleblower contacted both the state auditor and the Ohio Department of

Education nearly a year ago with evidence that ECOT apparently was falsifying attendance figures in order to collect millions of dollars of state subsidies.

Schiavoni, the longest-running Democratic candidate for governor, is locked in a three-way race for the nomination with Richard Cordray and Dennis Kucinich. He is making the case the he is best qualified to clean up the Republican corruption being revealed on an almost daily basis.

By the way, the state auditor who was informed in May 2017 about the whistleblower's complaint is none other than Dave Yost, the erstwhile Republican candidate for attorney general and poster child for Dispatch favoritism. Keep reading.

As we plow towards Ohio’s primaries this month, the two big parties are predictably gearing up to reward their establishment candidates.

On the Republican side, Ohio’s attorney general Mike Dewine is trying to put the final nail in the coffin of lieutenant governor Mary Taylor’s campaign with million dollar ad buys, calling her “two faced” and challenging her “conservative” credentials. This comes after DeWine is already well on his way to the nomination after receiving the party’s endorsement in February, a process that Taylor criticized as the “good ol’ boys” tipping the race. With all of this support and plenty of money in the bank, DeWine’s ad buys are questionable because the nomination is seemingly in the bag, but his campaign must be worried about Taylor’s attacks having an impact past the primary. Either way, he’s certainly got the cash to blow.

By David Swanson

Of all the various groupings of Democrats raising campaign “contributions” under various banners, the only one that says anything useful about foreign policy is the Justice Democrats, whose platform says they want to close foreign bases, cut military spending, and end wars. It’s very short and vague, but it’s something.

The Justice Democrats’ website endorses 54 candidates and links to their websites. One is a candidate for governor, so let’s call it 53 candidates for Congress. They all supposedly support the platform of the Justice Democrats.

This year, Marvel Studios marks the 10th anniversary of the release of its first movie, Iron Man, and it does so with a movie that would have seemed like a crazy dream back then: Avengers: Infinity War, in which too many heroes to list fight a big guy with a giant purple chin and bejeweled golden glove and actually make it seem not totally ridiculous. Filmmaking has come so far that one of the biggest, gaudiest comic events of the early 90s can be adapted for the screen into a massive, critically-acclaimed blockbuster.