This article first appeared on the Buckeye Flame

The staff of The Buckeye Flame arrived at one of Ohio’s largest Pride celebrations in 2024 to find our table sandwiched between a cellphone company and a grocery-store chain. 

To our left, the cellphone company was giving out gift cards and T-shirts. To our right, the grocery store chain was giving out high-quality tote bags and industrial strength carabiners. The enthusiastic staffers, with Chappell Roan blaring behind them, beckoned Pride-goers over to their tables to grab their free stuff.

All throughout the day, people would come to our table straight from one of our corporate neighbors, totes open and at the ready.

“What do you have?” people would demand, truly without salutation or preamble. 

Our retorts of, “The truth!” or “Queer journalism!” never went over well. 

So we would point to the fishbowl of rubber bracelets, people would take one and immediately walk off to the next stop on their gay trick-or-treating experience. 

Wednesday, February 5, noon-8pm
Ohio Statehouse, 1 Capitol square, Columbus
Join a decentralized self-organized community for a peaceful protest. 

Also, there is also a planned meet up at State and Third St. at 11:45 with local activist Meryl Neiman. Meryl is planning to take a group to march down to Bernie Moreno's office in the federal building and have folks go up to talk to staff. Please join her! Showing up at his office is super important.

I recently heard an interview on OnPoint Radio with Jane Clayson. The interview
subject was an internist named Stuart B. Mushlin. He had practiced in the Boston area
for 40 years and had recently written a book describing 20 difficult to diagnose patients
that he had encountered during his career. The book was titled “Playing the Ponies and
Other Medical Mysteries Solved”.

In the interview, Dr Mushlin expressed many of the same concerns that I have had with
the Big Business of medicine, and so I wrote the following letter to him:

Dear Dr Mushlin: Thank you for writing the book and also for taking the time to reveal
some unwelcome truths about the sad status of America’s healthcare system.

With so much attention on President Trump, there has been relatively little attention has been paid to Elon Musk, who welds quite a bit of influence in American politics.

Musk may not be as rich or as successful as he and others claim. His net worth may be artificially inflated to attract investors, huge loans, and billions in government subsidies.

Tesla is not really a success story yet. The auto company has had tens of thousands of customer complaints, returns, recalls, and thousands of cars they can't sell. Maybe if Tesla had some models which more people could afford, they might have stronger sales. But there are only a limited number of upper income drivers buying them.

Maybe if Trump really wants to save money for the government, then they could eliminate tax breaks, subsidies, and huge concessions to major money losing companies like Tesla and Space X. 

The Great White Father in Washington has spoken. Let mere mortals hark and obey.

Gaza is a ‘mess’ said President Trump and must be ‘cleaned up.’ 2.1 million human refuse are befouling this potentially prime beachside property. `We just clean out that whole thing’ quoth the Great Developer.

Trump said the answer to this thorny problem is to move all these Palestinian refugees to neighboring Egypt and Jordan. Voila! Problem solved!

Why didn’t the world think of this earlier? Small problem: Egypt, has 107.5 million people crammed into a fertile area the size of the small US state of Maryland. Overpopulated Egypt is so crowded that its people have taken up camping in cemeteries.

Egypt can’t feed its people without millions in US aid delivered through a network of corrupt suppliers. Trump had nothing to say about the corrupt former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez, who took large bribes for decades from the Egyptian government – and possibly from others such as Ukraine and Israel.