On Monday morning the protesters outside the the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio were fewer in number than in June, but no less determined to prevent a consumer bailout of FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear plant and Sammis coal-fired plant. After three postponements, the PUCO was holding the first evidentiary hearing on FirstEnergy's request for a rate hike to support the aging power plants.

"We are on the brink of a major breakthrough," said Harvey Wasserman, editor of nukefree.org and history instructor at Capital University. "We have a nuclear plant and a coal-fired plant that this utility is begging, tin cup in hand, to keep operating. About a decade ago, we heard FirstEnergy and others say that they wanted competition in the electric power business. Now they are begging for more money to keep these reactors open, because they can't compete in the market.

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is proud to announce in their 2014 Annual Report that their already record-low recidivism rate has dropped again and is now 27.1 percent and continues to be well below the national average of 49.7 percent. Recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after he/she has either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior.

  The report attributes Ohio’s reduction in recidivism to the use of evidence-based programs such as reintegration units within the prisons, programs to connect offenders with families and resources while incarcerated, community corrections programs and their continued work with local communities and reentry coalitions.

  As of January 11, 2014, Ohio’s prison population was 50,604 and these prisoners are “housed” in the state's 28 prisons which were built to house a total of 38,579 inmates. That’s 12,025 inmates too many. Some have served their “reasonable” time and now await the decision of the Ohio Parole Board to release them. One of these inmates is Norman Whiteside.

The Columbus Free Press has been no great fan of city council president Andrew Ginther’s undistinguished career in the public sector; his face graced our 2013 Halloween cover, and we invited readers to use it as their Halloween mask as Ginther seems to be something that he was not – that he was a Republican masquerading as a Democrat, in our article “Gintherstein – A Democrat with Republican Chops,” http://columbusfreepress.com/article/gintherstein-democrat-republican-chops)”. And now it looks like the wheels are coming off his planned coronation as the city’s Mayor, and we feel a little nostalgic about that. I mean – if we don’t have Andy Ginther around, who in the hell will we have to expose or lampoon anymore? His tenure has provided such rich material for alternative press as he has turned Columbus into a crony-supporting corrupt political backwater of a town, while he stumbles from one abuse of public trust to the next.

The latest politician to leap toward the GOP nomination is widely known as America’s most anti-green governor. But he has a critical decision coming up that could help change that. Ohio Gov. John Kasich has established a national reputation as a leading enemy of renewable energy and enhanced energy efficiency.
   When he took office in 2011, he opened fire by killing a $400 million federal grant to restore passenger rail service between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati. Columbus is the largest capital city in the western world that people cannot get to by train. It also has no internal commuter rail, making it what some have called “the mid-sized town technology forgot.” The rail grant had been painstakingly crafted over the better part of a decade by a broad bi-partisan coalition. It was poised to create hundreds of jobs and provide new opportunity for a number of small towns languishing along the restoration route.

Black Lives Matter activists are under surveillance and attack here in Columbus.
   A Columbus Police report obtained by the Columbus Free Press indicates that the police would have been justified in shooting Torri Sablan, a prominent local civil rights activist, as she rode along with friend Ashley Henderson when they transported Alexander Paraskos to the hospital on August 1st this year.
    The police report included the chilling abbreviation Just. Hom. Circ. This means “justifiable homicide circumstance” – indicating the police would have been justified in killing Sablan.
   Police records describe LEOKA circumstances, indicating a “Law Enforcement Officer Killed or Assaulted.”
   How a going-away party thrown by activists and an innocent asthma attack turned into a potential police homicide situation is hotly disputed. Sablan and Henderson are black females and Paraskos is a transgender male -- all well-known political activists.