I write this column with a heavy heart.

Two fields of endeavor that I care deeply about are disintegrating before my eyes.

In politics, the two candidates for president are deeply flawed and profoundly unpopular.

In journalism, once-evenhanded media institutions and individual reporters have lost their way and become propagandists.

Sadly, I fear that after the election, things will become worse and the warring political camps will start posturing for the next election.

The public has been badly served by all this and now holds both politicians and journalists in disrepute with little possibility of regaining the public trust. The chances of either of them changing their ways and beginning to serve the public without fear or favor -- once the hallmark of a good politician and a good journalist -- are slim.

How did we get to this sad state of affairs?

On the Republican side, Donald Trump, a venom-spewing bully used his superior knowledge of manipulating the media to intimidate his primary opponents and swat them down like flies.

What happens when you want to turn a popular work of literature into cinema but it’s not long enough to serve your purposes?

In the case of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, director Peter Jackson simply padded the story out so much that he was able to stretch the novel into not one, not two, but three super-sized films.

Director Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda) has taken a different approach with Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic children’s book, The Little Prince. The beloved tale is so simple and concise that there wasn’t enough content to stretch into even one feature-length film. Osborne’s solution: Embed the original story into another story set in contemporary times.

First appearing in French in 1943, The Little Prince is the illustrated tale of an aviator who crash-lands in the desert with only eight days’ worth of water. He’s feverishly working to fix his plane when he meets a young boy who claims to be a visitor from another planet—or, actually, an asteroid. The boy has left his tiny home after a tiff with his true love: a beautiful, but vain, rose.

I emailed Upski last month because I wanted guidance about the current political climate. Upski’s books Bomb the Suburbs, No More Prisons, and Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs have hugely impacted and influenced Hip Hop culture, and grassroots activism.

Opposition to City Council format and city schools levy growing from the grassroots

Feds called to investigate Columbus Police and legality of at-large City Council

Three groups now opposing school levy hike

On Oct. 12, 2016, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) approved a massive subsidy for FirstEnergy to keep their dirty, dangerous and, now they say, uneconomical Davis-Besse nuclear power plant on Lake Erie in operation.

This bailout will force FirstEnergy’s electric customers to pay about $200 million extra per year for the next three to five years. Though the PUCO made statements about FirstEnergy improving the electric grid, there is nothing in the fine print that would force the company to do anything other than hand this money over to their shareholders. The subsidy could ultimately cost customers $1 billion.

FirstEnergy complained bitterly about the PUCO decision, because they had asked for billions more.
An earlier bailout request by FirstEnergy was approved by the PUCO but ultimately rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC.) FirstEnergy’s new request to the PUCO, written slightly differently, is an end-run around the original FERC decision.