The Columbus Free Press

Editor's Notes

by Bob Fitrakis, Sep 4, 1996

More Bizarro Planet News
Headlines: "Clinton signs Newt's welfare bill"; "Kilroy attacks Watts from the Right." No doubt progressive activists and Kilroy coddlers will ignore Mary Jo's severe swerve to the Right, just as they explain away her vote for the Republican Rev. Troy to join the School Board. "Politics is the art of compromise," they're fond of quoting. Indeed, what's principles and integrity got to do with it?

Last Thursday, Kilroy attacked her campaign rival Senator Eugene Watts for voting for the so-called "Robin Hood" plan -- that takes from the wealthy school districts and gives to the poor. Here's the problem. The vote was without a doubt the best one in Watts' career. And Kilroy has publicly argued that the plan wasn't socialistic enough: that it takes more money to educate the less fortunate and poor children. She was right. But that was the old Mary Jo.

The new one shows up with someone dressed as Robin Hood at Barrington Elementary in Upper Arlington and assails Watts. Columbus School Board member Kilroy would gradually shift money into the education budget and take from the state's rainy day fund and, without a tax hike, save the ravaged youth of suburbia from the yoke of Watts' egalitarianism. Sounds like "voodoo edu-nomics," from the Gipper's playbook. I guess that's why they call it politics. Maybe she can explain to her colleagues on the Columbus School Board that, hey, "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

Clinton Says NO to Mass Transit
Speaking about winners, that President Clinton, what a great guy. Loves trains. Sorta like that Tom Cruise character in Risky Business, I suppose. Real mass transit-type guy, you know. After all, his administration supports mass transit the least of all 22 industrial democracies. Clinton loves trains so much he wants Amtrak to be totally self-sufficient by the year 2002. That half-a-cent tax on gas is such a burden. Scott Leonard of the National Association of Railroad Passengers argues that Clinton's policies will destroy Amtrak -- already the worst rail system in the western world -- within the next five years. Yeah, loves trains, and loves even more, Republican mass transit policy.

His whistle-stop train tour as symbolism was probably suggested by his top advisor, Dick Morris. Morris engineered the transformation of the once-progressive Democratic Party into a Republican-lite beer commercial. Morris resigned recently after his predilection for sucking hooker's toes was revealed first in the Star and then in theNew York Times. Morris, a sensitive fellow, reportedly cried in the arms of Sherry Rowlands because he wasn't sure he was giving President Clinton "the right answers to important questions." It's hard to speak and think clearly when you're suffering from Hooker's Foot in Mouth Disease. As for Bill, reportedly, he didn't want to cut Medicaid because he worried ". . . [he'd] wake up and see a bunch of cripples in wheelchairs chained to my front gate."

Illegal To Sit in Worthington Schools
Another winner: Worthington-Kilborne High School was rated "#1" in September's Columbus Monthly. While I'm actually a fan and participant in the school's American Radical Politics series, I'm a little worried about the thinking process employed by their highly-touted principal Dr. Diana Lindsay. Last spring, she had a paddy wagon sent to the school to remove a student. Lindsay believes the student, Max Seeman, had the right to stand or not to stand at a school assembly. But, "the genesis" of Max being removed "was the fact that he did not stand initially." Even though, she says, it was his right not to stand. When Max refused to be punished for exercising his right not to stand, Lindsay "didn't know what he might do."

"I personally was not in fear, but I did not know what -- what he might do," Lindsay explained. After all, there he was, sitting in a lawful manner. So Lindsay had him frisked, arrested, and removed in a paddy wagon. It's that type of thinking that no doubt impressed the staff at Columbus Monthly, at the "best" high school in Central Ohio.

Dispatch Reprints CIA-Cocaine Stories
The Columbus Dispatch did the community a great service by reprinting Gary Webb's San Jose Mercury News article on the link between the CIA, contras, cocaine and L.A. gangs. If you care at all about American democracy, you'll read the article in Sunday's Insight section and you'll get outraged and active. Now, if the Dispatch has enough faith in Webb's well-researched article that links the U.S. government to the crack cocaine trade in America's urban ghettos -- including Cincinnati and Dayton -- why are they pushing for a second "former" CIA proprietary airline, Evergreen, to set up at Rickenbacker? We already have admitted former CIA proprietary Southern Air Transport headquartered at Rickenbacker. Why another? Not enough illegal guns and drugs in Central Ohio, I suppose. Or maybe it's just a ploy to create more crime so that the Voinovich Company can build more overpriced jails and prisons.


More Editor's Notes
Back to Front Page