J. Kenneth Blackwell is at it again. Ohio’s infamous Secretary of State and master of media distortion and hype, earning him the name “Inkwell” among the statehouse press corps, has announced his partisan agenda for governor of the Buckeye State.

Blackwell, Ohio’s first statewide African American office holder, has rapidly moved to stake out the far right of the Ohio Republican Party as his political base. The Secretary of State has found himself consistently at odds with mainstream conservatives in the state’s GOP.

Last week, the Franklin County Board of Elections, under the control of Republican Executive Director Matt Damschroder, obtained a temporary restraining order against Blackwell. In another of his notorious imperial decrees, the Secretary of State ordered all 88 county boards to buy optical-scan voting systems from two well-known Republican-linked companies, Diebold and ES&S.

When I think of newspaper journalists who became authors and had enormous impacts on media criticism in the United States, two names come to mind.

One is George Seldes. As a young man, he covered the First World War and then reported on historic events in Europe for the Chicago Tribune from 1919 until 1928. Seldes quit the paper and went on to blaze a trail as an independent journalist -- ready, able and eager to challenge media business-as-usual. Naturally, he earned hostility from the kind of media magnates he skewered in “Lords of the Press.” The renowned historian Charles A. Beard called that 1938 book “a grand job.”

Forty-five years later, another emigre from newsrooms wrote a book that turned out to have profound effects on critical thinking about media. When “The Media Monopoly” first appeared in 1983, the media establishment and many of its employees shrugged; if they paid any attention, it was usually just long enough to dismiss Ben Bagdikian’s warning about consolidation of media ownership as alarmist.

While the media landscape shifted, Bagdikian saw corporate behemoths on

Dear Free Press:  

In modern political parlance, the word "liberal", like Jesus who exemplified it, has been crucified. Only we must not expect its resurrection in our lifetimes.  

My fellow Democarts, we should turn the tables. There is nothing "conservative" about launching wars of choice. There is nothing "conservative" about running record federal deficits and burdening our children with what amounts to a birth tax. There is nothing "conservative" about a largely Republican corporate culture that is polluting our earth and the minds of our children while paying little taxes and sending our jobs overseas. There is nothing "conservative" about selling out our future in hopes that God will someday sort things out.

The true "conservatives", honest and civil and fiscally responsible, have been marginalized by Regressive Republicans who want our nation to regress to the days when we did not look after our elderly, when abortions were performed in the back alley, and when social justice was the dream of a black reverend.

In recent times, automotive companies have been incorporating a device that has been tracking your driving; this device can be used against you if you are in an accident. The device I mention of is an Event Data Recorder or an E.D.R. The E.D.R. is called the automotive black box because it monitors certain aspects of driving and can record information up to five seconds before an accident, or event.

Nearly every car produced since the late 1980ís has some form of an E.D.R. The purpose for modern E.D.R.s is for there to be a means to control the features of newer cars, such as Anti-Lock Braking Systems, Traction Control and Air Bags. The more advanced our cars become, the more advanced E.D.R.s become. Some features in current cars are Electronic Brake Force Distribution, which distributes braking forces to different wheels to help improve braking performance. Active Body Control, which helps reduce body roll by actuating pneumatic devices to keep the body of the car as stable as possible when cornering or going over bumps. All of these devices are being controlled by the E.D.R which monitors yaw, pitch, acceleration, braking,