A hundred or more Columbus people stood in a single file line in front of the Omar Ibn El-Khattab Mosque to protect it from a few dozen protestors -- presumably the "God Hates Fags" folks that arrive in the city every year to preach during the Columbus Pride Parade. It was reported that at the time, Muslims celebrated Eid al-Fitr to mark the end of Ramadan a holy day. The protest group spouted anti-Muslim hatred and at one point a truck ran down the street between the two groups of people with ugle photos on the side promoting anti-abortion sentiments. 

Yesterday, June 14, 2018, Vice President Mike Pence came to Columbus, ironically during Gay Pride week. LGBTQ groups protested his visit, hosting DJs and drag queens in a dance party to make the notorious homophobic uncomfortable.

The event, as reported on CNN, went this way: "Crowds converged on a small stretch of Gay Street -- you read that right -- outside the hotel where Pence was speaking to a separate group about tax reform. Videos posted to social media showed crowd members raising rainbow flags and dancing to loud music. They were celebrating the kickoff of Columbus' Pride Festival, but organizers also wanted to send a message to the vice president."

Pence could barely get a word out in his speech to a couple of hundred supporters at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Columbus when protestors converged on the event shouting loudly about ICE raids and family separation. Pence was repeatedly heckled while he touted tax reform, attacked Ohio Democratic Senator Shsrrod Brown, and announced his support for candidate Troy Balderson, running for Republican Congressman Pat Tiberi's seat in the 12th district.

Families in Columbus Ohio, along with their children, came together and took to the streets on Thursday, June 14th from 5-7pm EST. They came together at Goodale Park, to talk about and protest for the end of family separation. The protest and rally was in response to the “Military-Style” ICE raid that took place June 5th in Sandusky Ohio, on workers at Corso’s Garden Center.

Before the protest began, people listened to a very diverse group of speakers, from many different walks of life, as they shared their perspectives on the issue. These were people who were working day and night to support this cause and what had happened to the families of Sandusky Ohio.  

By David Swanson

We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support, and yet they overwhelmingly believe that the United States is “fundamentally better than other countries.” Why?

Duina didn’t try to puzzle this one out for himself. He went out and surveyed patriotic poor people in Alabama and Montana. He found variations between those two places, such as people loving the government for helping them a little bit and people loving the government for not helping them at all. He found variations between men and women and racial groups, but mostly he found intense patriotism built around identical myths and phrases.

In his Los Angeles theatrical debut in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Tom Hanks proves he is as talented a stage actor as he is on the screen in Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, The Post, etc. Wearing (I hope for Rita Wilson’s sake) a fat suit, bearded and with long flowing grayish/ whitish hair, Hanks - almost unrecognizable as the portly, comic character Sir John Falstaff - not only opened the epic about England’s power struggles but rescued the play during a “medical emergency.”

When the action during the first act of this Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles production was interrupted due to an ailing theatergoer, Hanks took to the boards, good-naturedly waving his sword at viewers, “ordering” them back into their seats and so on. Hanks’ improvisational panache saved the moment and in that hallowed show biz tradition, eventually the show went on, performed under the stars at the West L.A. V.A. Campus’ Japanese Garden. (Although the delay added time to the play’s already three hour-plus length, putting me in mind of the title of Orson Welles’ 1966 Falstaff film Chimes at Midnight).