During the months of August & September, our church community is collecting school supplies to put together kits which will go to children around the world who don't have access to these items.
They will be distributed by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and are given primarily to refugee and displaced children, helping students and teachers add some normalcy to disrupted lives.

They are also given to children living in areas that experienced natural disasters. MCC has sent school kits to children in places such as Bosnia, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Liberia, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine and to poorly funded schools in Canada and the United States.

In 2008 MCC shipped over 120,000 school kits. For more information, go to School supplies

Location: 35 Oakland Park Ave.
Phone: 614-784-9002
Website: Columbus Mennonite

Recently, we've been hearing about 'the death of environmentalism' because - allegedly - the world's corporations now understand ecology and will solve our problems with investment, innovation, and gung-ho optimism.

Of course, what the investors want to create with all that optimism and ingenuity are profits, not real sustainability.

Critics regularly accuse environmentalists of being 'doom and gloom' prognosticators who complain of endless problems, but offer 'no solutions'. However, if we check the record, we'll discover that serious ecologists have been offering solutions for centuries.

Real economic solutions

Economist John Stuart Mill realised the limits of nature 160 years ago, as he witnessed British factories multiplying across the landscape, spoiling woodlands, mowing down hedgerows and turning rivers into sewers.

Give me a ticket for an aeroplane, ain’t got time to take a fast train – since the Republicans destroyed mass transit in the U.S. and there aren’t any fast trains – Ken Blackwell just wrote me a letter. That’s same Blackwell we all now known as the Katherine Harris of Ohio for his role in helping steal the 2004 election. Blackwell, billing himself as “Former Ohio Secretary of State” and “Conservative Republican,” wrote a letter regarding: “The One Way to Stop the Obama Machine.”

My first thought to stop the Obama “Machine” was – take cell phones away from 18-24-year-olds. After all, the Obama political machine was actually a decentralized cyber-force of youngsters. All of this brilliantly captured in Danny Schechter’s recent documentary: Barack Obama: People’s President.

Screw the autoworkers.

They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders - led by Morgan and Citibank - expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.

The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.

I smell a rat.

Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's 'Car Czar' - the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

As the axiom states: “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” Strange and interesting things are happening in the legendary swing state.
First, it was Fox commentator, former Congressman, and originally freshly-scrubbed Nixon youth John Kasich emerging as the likely Republican nominee for governor of the Buckeye State.
Then, former U.S. Senator Mike Dewine announced his candidacy for Ohio Attorney General on July 22. In 2006, the then-incumbent Dewine lost to Democrat U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown by 12 percentage points, although final polls throughout the state showed him losing by twice that amount.

Why would a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives – granted he was most well-known for falling asleep during the Iran-Contra hearings – and U.S. Senator, be seeking the seemingly lesser office of Ohio’s chief law enforcement officer?