Editorial

Police have a term for murdered sex workers. The term is “Less than Dead.” This is the literal station house and locker room phrase and has also been used to describe the level of zeal when a crime is committed against sex workers. It was not suprising hearing those words echo from the bushes in Upper Arlington this morning. Viewing this latest case, and the context and the official reaction makes the echos loud.

Republican conspiracy fetishists love to talk about a deep state family without talking about all the corporate cousins. If someone were to discuss the deep state with any level of rigor they would come away with the impression of an interlocking network that includes a vast seas of corporate power within it's globe. When the military industrial complex is mentioned, the focus of overlap examination is on the revolving door between the floors at the top. What is left out when this is considered are the connections between various entities in the banking intelligence complex.

On Saturday October 5th, the Reporters Committee on the Freedom of the Press (RCFP) reported the findings of one of their many and constant Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The group had noted that the FBI had in actually infiltrated an agent into the news stream of the Associated Press and actually published an article in 2007. This was exposed in 2014 and an internal FBI investigation found that the operation, although legal, was outside of the changing guidelines.

Officer Neel resigned the night of Monday October 1st. His resignation was announced moments before a Village Council meeting where multiple instances of excessive force and false charging were going to be discussed by angry Village residents regardless of the desires of the Village government.

Imagine going to work one day, a day like any other. You see someone you've seen before and you start to do the things you do every time. You take the equipment you use every time out of your car, start to set up and then....Then he shoots you twice. Once in the chest and once in the gut. You barely survive, you spend all night in surgery. While the team of doctors work feverishly to stop the bleeding in your internal organs someone with a stolen passwords illegally downloads your medical history up until that moment and leaves with it.

This summer has been a public relations nightmare for the Columbus Police. It is hard to get the public to believe that you are doing good things when your number one copsplainer is in jail awaiting trial on multiple child pornography charges. Seriously uncomfortable questions might be asked if they promote the 2nd shift Special Victims Unit Sgt Terry McConnell who pays minors for sex, or maybe not.

Senate Democrats, powerless against a 51 to 49 margin in with Mike Pence ready to be a plus one, have been leaking what documents they think help them discredit Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh's views on contraception and abortion are at the forefront of the narrative they feel is most likely to win the uphill partisan fight they are in.

An anonymous tip came early yesterday morning. They concealed their identity. A special quick school board meeting was to be held at 7pm. I checked. It had been legally announced, barely. The law requires that all public bodies must publish the time, place and agenda of any meeting for it to be a legal meeting. The Yellow Springs School Board does not regularly meet on the first Thursday of a month. If it requires a special meeting, those usually happen on the 4th Thursday.

The yearly festival that New Yorker Magazine, for those readers who, like myself, do not attend, is a $40 an hour set of presentations on Art, Literature, Culture, Politics and “everything in between.” Looking at the past lineups and current presentations it seems to be what happens when a Ted Talk and NPR's All Irrelevant Things Considered made babies in a radioactive clone vat. Thanks to this year's gaff one can finally understand why the iconic covers only actually appear as bathroom wallpaper: Looking at all this can help you poop.

The often used adage that police can lie whenever they want and get away with it is in a sense legally true. This stems from the legal concealment of truth, the literal blinding of justice and strident defense of the laws that make this possible. There are politicians on both sides of the shrinking aisle that seek every chance to extend rather than curtail the secrecy. It is not vampiric America that simply does not appear in mirrors, but Medusa America that would certainly petrify if confronted with it's own horrific gaze.