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Many people here the word Ku Klux Klan and think of the deep South and unreconstructed neo-confederates riding at night with support from the city fathers and some obese caricature of a sheriff. That image is a convenient alibi of denial for those living in the deep North as Ohio, Indiana and Michigan have always been hotbeds of Klan activity and Dayton has always been a center of white supremacist activity. This is why the so-called Honorable and self-described Sacred Knights of the KKK have chosen to come to Dayton to recruit at a rally at the old courthouse on May 25th 2019.

On Tuesday February 5th Mayor Ginther, backed by the Uncle Fester meets Lee Ermey like polished head and dark sunken eyes of Deputy Police Chief Bash, announced the roll out of the ShotSpotter voice surveillance system in the Hilltop, which is targeted pilot neighborhood for a program that is budgeted to cover the entire City.

On Wednesday February 6th the Vice media machine, through their Motherboard tech news website, released a bombshell report after months of leaks, interviews and documents. The basics were that over 200 different bounty hunters were accessing supposedly 911-only real-time location data on phones of people they were hunting for about $1000 a pop.

The world did not know Nick Sandmann until recently, when he has suddenly be pushed into a position as a young spokes person for the Republican far right like David Hoag is for gun control. The young bigots of Covington Catholic High School seemed to land in the perfect space for a confrontation, with brand MAGA hats and several well placed cameras when they began heckling and taunting first a group of Black Israelite and then a group of Native Protestors. His parents have retained a PR firm called RunSwitch, and he has been making the center-right media rounds.

As a warning to the reader, some of the subject matter contained here is not going to easy on the sensibilities because it deals with technical details torture and how it relates to the reality of campus community life at OSU and other public universities in Ohio. It is now a well known fact that the military and the CIA have openly used torture in the so-called war on terror. The national dialogue centers on if this or that particular technique used to gain compliance is torture based on the “severe bodily harm” loophole in definitions written decades and centuries ago.

Two months ago, on August 23rd, Columbus Police Vice Squad Detective Andrew Mitchell murdered 23 year-old mother of two Donna Dalton-Castlebury in his car with 8 bullets. Three days ago, October 23rd, her family were still demanding answers. They did so in front of Police Headquarters on Marconi along with three dozen protestors at a demonstration called by Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).

On October 17th the Justice Department announced that Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a Senior Advisor at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), had been arrested and charged with one count of unauthorized disclosures of suspicious activity reports and one count of conspiracy to make unauthorized disclosures of suspicious activity reports. Each so-called crime carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

After disallowing registrations 53,000 from voters in mostly Democratic counties, 33,000 of them black, Georgia made more moves to suppress the vote in tarted and calculated ways. An additional 107,000 “inactive” voters were removed from the rolls on October 18th. At the same time, at least one bus load of African American senior citizens was stopped on the way to a polling place by police and election officials and turned back.

Two deals in two months were supposed to lead to 30 Trump appointed federal judges. Senate Democrats got way less than they surrendered for on the second deal, which is a logical result of reaching across the aisle to pet the bipartisan snake. A caucus, led by Dianne Feinstein is pretending they did not know the nature of the deal they agreed to last week.