Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Equal rights amendment. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Jo Ingles reports, “Ohio group backing equal rights, same sex marriage amendments won’t try for fall ballot.”

Backers of two amendments that would have allowed Ohioans to vote on repealing the ban on same-sex marriage and extending legal protections to women, LGBTQ+ and disabled people won’t be submitting petition signatures to get on the ballot this November.

Ohio Equal Rights co-chair Lis Regula wouldn’t say how many petition signatures the group has gathered, but he said that’s not why the group decided to put off its ballot measures. “This was a strategy decision, not a numbers decision,” Regula said.

• Shameless open public corruption. ProPublica reports, “The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.”

When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism.

The president’s eldest son said through a spokesperson that he wasn’t involved. The Pentagon said Trump Jr. played no role in the record-setting deal. And the startup’s founder told reporters that his company, Vulcan Elements, received no political favoritism.

But interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

• Defeat. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire writes, “Trump in Defeat: The president went to war triumphant and will likely leave greatly weakened.”

President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker—diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.

The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations.