CAC Opening Tomorrow Night

The CAC has a vibrant opening tomorrow night: MARIA LASSNIG and Carlos Amorales: Discarded Spider.

The event starts at 8 pm. Admission is free, there's a cash bar, a DJ, a ballet performance at 10PM, and of course, wonderful contemporary art by two very significant artists.

If you need a midpoint break from Midpoint, get there, then afterwards hit more showcases!

20/20 Vision Kicks Off

CinWeekly has a nice artcle on the start of 20/20. For the full story on the 20/20 arts festival, check out www.20days20nights.com for more.

What Are They Thinking?

[UPDATE: 9/25/2008]: The post to which the following refers has been deleted from the Hamilton County GOP Blog without comment. Since Triantafilou is relatively new to the blogosphere, perhaps people will overlook this serious breach of blogger etiquette (generally, it is understood that one does not delete posts--updating or editing for typos is fine--in this manner). I've no idea whether our post here has anything to do with the deletion.

Via Alex Triantafilou's blog, we learn that the HamCo Republican Party is recommending a "no" vote on Issue 8, which would amend the City Charter to force voting by proportional representation in City Council elections. The official statement from the local GOP:

The Hamilton County Republican Party has historically stood against proportional representation as a method of electing members of city council. The most important factors identified by the Republican Party in opposing this measure is the confusion in how the system operates and the cost associated with implementation. After vigorous debate and discussion, our Party is urging a vote of "NO" on Issue 8.

(Emphasis mine.) Why on earth would the GOP highlight its "historical" position on PR? Whoever drafted this statement for the GOP should either resign his or her post or be asked to step aside. It's one of two things: it's either historically unaware at best, or extraordinarily insensitive at worst.

Before I explain why, let me make sure I'm not misunderstood. In November, people of various political stripes will take various positions on PR. That's why you see rather odd bedfellows like the NAACP, COAST, and the Cincinnati Business Journal supporting the measure. Some people will decide it's a great idea. Others will decide it's not. Neither decision makes a person or group inherently bad or good, inherently racist or not, or inherently democratic or undemocratic. People of good conscience can surely disagree over Issue 8. In fact, while I'm currently leaning towards believing PR is a good idea, I may vote against Issue 8 for an entirely different reason.

Having said that, the history of opposition to PR in this city is not pretty. According to the most complete account I've seen of the 1957 repeal, the motives for the repeal effort were downright racist. Here's how a paper posted on Mt. Holyoke's website describes the situtation:

In Cincinnati, race was the dominant theme in the successful 1957 repeal effort. The single transferable vote had allowed African Americans to be elected for the first time, with two blacks being elected to the city council in the 1950s. The nation was also seeing the first stirrings of the Civil Rights movement and racial tensions were running high. PR opponents shrewdly decided to make race an explicit factor in their repeal campaign. They warned whites that PR was helping to increase black power in the city and asked them whether they wanted a "Negro mayor." Their appeal to white anxieties succeeded, with whites supporting repeal by a two to one margin.

Let me be perfectly clear: I do not believe that today's HamCo GOP is motivated by racism in encouraging a rejection of PR. But why would the GOP embrace a history of which it should not be proud?

Neither of the two major parties in this nation has a terrific record regarding racism. While the Democratic Party now trumpets civil rights, this hasn't always been the case. Take the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Dems typically will be willing to talk about the shameful acts that occurred outside the convention that year. What we don't talk about, however, is the shame visited upon our party inside the convention. Just forty years ago, Democratic delegates from Georgia left the convention in protest because the DNC seated a racially integrated delegation from Mississippi. That happened within the lifespan of the majority of Americans. Have we--as a party and a nation--come a long way since then? Absolutely. But need we always be mindful of this terrible part of our history? Absolutely.

I'm not suggesting that anyone should vote against Republicans or Republican positions on the basis of things that happened 50 years ago. I am concerned, though, when party leaders--be they Republican, Democratic, or of any other stripe--make statements that demonstrate a lack of awareness of our roots, both as parties and as a nation. The historical opposition to PR is not something for anyone in this City of be proud of or to embrace, and I hope the local GOP will amend its position to make its current motives for rejecting PR clear.

MPMF Tomorrow!!!!

I realize there's a big banner at the top of this blog advertising Midpoint Music Festival (but for those of you who, like me, ignore banners) Midpoint is Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Complete schedule can be found here. I hadn't realized it was this week until I saw Griff's post about Javier's joining the fray, and went to check the full schedule.

At the very least I'll go to Javier's Friday or Saturday, and hopefully will do much more than that. This should be a great weekend downtown and across the river, so please support the bands involved and come on down.

Right Here in OTR

Jason at Somewhere Over-the-Rhine knocks it out of the park with his take on the ill perceptions of OTR perpetuated by the media and the ignorant suburbanites who haven't been near OTR or Downtown ever in their lives, outside of a Red's or Bengal's game. Jason hits on a topic that I've been seeing for a while and have had in the back of my mind for a long time as a topic to blog about. It deasl with where the perception problem of Cincinnati comes from. It comes from the Native Cincinnatians that never left Cincinnati and are now living outside of the urban core. They don't travel a lot, they spend time in their closed off social networks, socializing only with high school or maybe college friends. They are ignorant and allow themselves to be sucked in by what ever the media says. Hell, if we trusted the media, we would think no crime ever happens in West Chester. When crime does happen there, or in Milford, or in Morrow, we don't hear those areas labeled at all. I wonder why.

[Hat Tip to Just Past Central]

Rocking for Obama on Fountain Square

A huge event will hit the square next on Octber 16th, when The National and The Breeders will do a free show from 5 to 9 PM. This is a rally in support of Barak Obama, so look for other political speakers to appear. Also, since this is going to likely be open to the public, look out for the brownshirts trying to disrupt it or try to make it look like the Dems are being disruptive.

Driehaus--Chabot, Neck and Neck

The Blogging Pros at Talking Points Memo have the link to polling for the 1st and 2nd Districts in Ohio:

"A new set of SurveyUSA polls in Ohio show Dems poised to pick up two out of four contested GOP-held district. In the First District, incumbent Rep. Steve Chabot (R) is holding a small lead over challenger Steve Driehaus (D) 46%-44%. In the Second District, Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) is holding an 8-point lead over challenger Victoria Wulsin (D) 48%-40%."

It has been months since a poll came out and this is great news for Driehaus. Look for money to be dropped into this race right now and for a big blitz to unseat Chabot by the Dems.

It looks like a much tougher hill for Wulsin to climb. The poll there doesn't mention the impact of the Independent conservative (Krikorian) in the race, however, which should be an impact to Schmidt, who has a very high negative with some conservatives.

Local TV Thread

Kate of KRM blogs on her favorite television shows. I have to admit, I kind of had a blog crush on her (there's a good definition of "blog crush" here) until I learned of her passion for Dancing with the Stars and Desperate Housewives. She may have won me back with her fondness for Amazing Race. And like her, I enjoy watching Christina Applegate in Samantha Who?, though I suspect for entirely different reasons (hey....I'm a 34 year-old American male....I grew up watching Married With Children! And having grown up in Buffalo, I have to love a woman who agreed to star in a sitcom set in that ill-fated city.).

All that is my long-winded way of introducing a discussion topic: what's your favorite local show or TV personality? And who's your least favorite? There is, of course, precious little local programming any more, but there's some. For that matter, who are your favorite all-time Cincinnati television personalities, including folks who aren't on TV anymore?

My own favorites? I like Newsmakers. I think Dan Hurley does a pretty good job. And even though I disagreed with him (and many of you) about the Bodies exhibit (he thought it was excellent), I thought he provided a great forum for both sides to be heard. Frankly, I wish WKRC would give him a full hour. Sometimes he jumps the shark on me (for instance, when he did a couple of shows on naturalism and showed pictures of birds the whole time...yawn). But overall, he's an asset to local television journalism. I also dig Bob Herzog, but that may just be my bias in favor of lawyers.

Least favorites? One name immediately springs to mind: Dave Lapham. Maybe I'd like him more if I'd grown up in Cincinnati and was a Bengals fan when he played. But seeing him on TV and listening to him on the radio fuels one reaction: change the channel!

Finally: I guess I shouldn't make fun of others' TV viewing habits too much. The other night, I found myself switching back and forth between two television shows: Live from Lincoln Center (the NY Philharmonic with James Galway) and The Ultimate Fighter, watching each with equal rapture. Yes, something's seriously wrong with me.

So please, weigh in with your local TV favorites, as well as you diagnoses of my psychological profile based on my confessed viewing patterns.

What's Ahead

Over the next few weeks, I hope to post on each of the ballot initiatives we'll see when we vote this year. There are five or six state-wide issues, as well as two proposals to amend Cincinnati's charter.

The most talked about of these are the casino plan, the payday lender reform proposal, and the local referenda on red light cameras and proportional representation. But there are a few others that haven't made many headlines.

To the extent anyone cares what I think, I'll be including with each post my view of whether the issue should pass. While I think I've made up my mind about most of these issues, I'm still very much up in the air on proportional representation. I'm emailing PR's backers for some additional information on the mechanism by which PR works (I understand it in its basic form, but I'm confused by how the redistribution of "over-votes" works.)

I'll also be staying away from national politics from now on, besides the extent to which the presidential race specifically impacts Ohio and/or Cincinnati. I don't think blogging the presidential race here is winning Griff many readers, and it seems to just trigger lots of comments from spammers.

Keeping Ohio's Water Safe

Earlier today, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill that would protect water from the Great Lakes from being diverted to other states.

Here in Ohio's southwestern-most extremity, we sometimes forget that we live in a Great Lakes state. And there are those in dry regions of the country who want to require that Great Lakes water be shipped cross-country to slake their thirst. Under the Great Lakes Compact, which President Bush is expected to sign, that can't happen.

For what it's worth: both Senators McCain and Obama support the compact. (I had inititally thought that McCain, from the great, dusty state of Arizona, favored Great Lakes water diversion. I'm glad to see I was wrong.)

Will a Hotel Replace Condos in Phase 1 of the Banks?

The Enquirer is reporting the Banks condos may not be in the first phase and could be replaced with a Hotel next door to Great American Ball Park.

So, is this the first step in changes that will alter the purpose of the Banks? Is this going to be nothing but a tourist area? That is what the suburbanites and John Cranley are clamoring for when they spout off asking when they will get to drink a beer at the ESPN Zone.

Obama 273, McCain 265

Today's round-up of polls shows Obama leading in enough states to win the electoral college.

I don't put much stock in this, as this site's poll tallies have fluctuated daily. Instead, I've posted the map to make a broader point: Ohioans, we may not be as important as we think we are.

Obama's campaign has said all along that they can win the White House without Ohio. And if the election were to follow the results below, that's exactly what would happen. McCain needs to win here, but Obama can live without us. The real "battleground states" this year are more likely to be Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.

Just some food for thought on a Monday.

UC Riots After Victory Over Miami

I know they won pretty big over Miami, but did they need to riot after the win?

Midpoint Venue Change

Javier's Restaurant and Bar has replaced Ink Tank as a venue for Midpoint. Please adjust your schedules as needed.

Crime in Over-the-Rhine

The Business Courier has an excellent story this week about crime in OTR and the impact of the horrible mistake of keeping a centralized homing beacon for criminals to prey on victims has done to this neighborhood.

Who's Bumblin' Now?

HamCo Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou has decided to blog about Joe Biden's purported tendency towards gaffes. The former judge is upset that Biden told a Delaware crowd that the Delaware Blue Hens (a div I-AA team) would beat the Buckeyes. Of course, the two don't even play against each other.

I had a lot of respect for Triantafilou when he was a judge. He's a really intelligent man, and he was a really good judge, in my opinion. But you'd think the local GOP chairman wouldn't be too interested in calling attention to a candidate's less-than-perfect oratory this week.

You see, John McCain announced earlier this week that he wouldn't meet with the president of long-time NATO ally Spain if he's elected. The most reasonable explanation for this is that McCain was confused about the nation to which that president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, belongs: the question came after a discussion of a series of Latin American leaders who an American president probably wouldn't be willing to meet. But rather than admit this, McCain's campaign is insisting the septuagenerian senator meant what he said, even though this past April, McCain said he'd welcome such a meeting.

So who would I rather have leading the country: someone who pandered (admittedly) to his home state by asserting that its university's second-rate football team could take on one of the best in the nation, or a senator who's "bumblin'" may hurt American foreign policy and alienate our Western allies? You be the judge.

Finally, since Triantafilou raises it, let's deal with the Biden plagiarism myths. In 1987, when Biden was running for president, during a debate he borrowed extensively from a speech initially given by British politician Neil Kinnock. Sounds damning, right? On its own, sure. But not so much when you consider that Biden had repeatedly paraphrased Kinnock as he did during that debate, and on each previous occasion, he attributed it. During the more abbreviated format, he forgot to. There was no intent to mislead anyone into thinking the idea was his own: he'd told people on numerous occasions that it had originated elsewhere. And as for the allegations about what occurred during law school: he was fully investigated by his law school at the time, and a determination was made that he was guilty only of sloppy citation (lawyers are a stickler for citation), not intentional plagiarism. He'd pointed out the work (a law journal article) his ideas had come from, but had not sufficiently footnoted his assignment.

Joe Biden certainly is not a perfect candidate for national office. If I were a GOP leader trying to throw red meat to the base, I'd be talking about Biden's ties to the banking industry, given that this week all hell has broken loose on Wall Street (of course, then the Dems might start talking about McCain's role in the Keating Five . . .). The petty attack on the Blue Hens remark is, quite frankly, beneath our local GOP chair, and not what the voters of this or any other county will be focusing on in November.

1929 Redux --- Free Market Capitalism's Last Gasp

Since I have been without power since the freak wind storm on Sunday, it has felt a lot like what 1929 must have felt like on a lot of fronts. Let's see, where once there stood five major historic finance houses, now there are two. The government has nationalized the giant home mortgage loan companies and now has a majority equity stake in the largest insurance company in the world. Individual shareholders and employees at these companies who have seen their savings and their retirements and their lives wiped out in an instant have been told by the "inventor" of that great Canadian device, the blackberry, that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." (The inventor of the blackberry realized after conferring with his staff that no stupider statement could possibly have been made and tried again a few hours later.) The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen almost 1000 points taking with it thousands of dollars that you and I have put away for retirement --- although likely the market will rally today with news of this societal bailout. Credit card companies overnight began slashing all of our credit lines, after decades of encouraging our profligacy --- they don't seem to understand that it is my right as an American to have stuff I can't afford, because it is not fair for people with money to live better than me.

No, the fundamentals of this economy are not strong. It is hard to know even where to begin the discussion of the events that have occurred over the last week that have led to the remarkable interference in the markets announced by Treasury Secretary Paulson and the SEC this morning.

First, the SEC and its UK equivalent announce that they will prohibit, at least temporarily, the short selling of financial company stocks, which means that no longer will these free marketers allow you to bet that the price of the stock will fall. Now you can only bet that it will go up --- hardly an unfettered market.

Treasury also will create a $50 billion fund to protect investments in some segments of the mutual fund market --- the market where most of us have our retirement money after the government's idiotic decision to drive retirement dollars to the speculative markets as a way of giving us all freedom --- freedom to be poor in old age (How much is in your 401K and how many years salary does it represent? Enough if you live to 80? Or are you counting on that "conservative" 8% annual growth?)

Next, the Congress and Treasury will work together to essentially create a "bank" to buy up and hold over a trillion dollars in bad toxic mortgage debts that financial institutions have created by putting individuals in houses and loan instruments that they could not possibly afford and then selling those loans off --- all the while knowing they were crap and that the whole system was built upon the false assumption that housing values would never fall.

So to all you free marketers out there benefiting from your government subsidized education with your money held in government protected accounts and living in your house mortgaged by a government protected entity, here's a toast to the week that the myth of free market capitalism crashed and burned. Unfortunately no one will be held responsible and we will be paying for this devastation for years.

So maybe this election will be about more than lipstick and pigs and whether McCain knows where Spain is and whether he invented the blackberry and whether Obama is a celebrity who chose hoops over troops, and whether Palin is a celebrity who had her brother in law fired because he was a cad or whether she can actually see Russia from Alaska and thus is a foreign policy expert on the Bush Doctrine --- maybe this election is about us and our children and our country and our future and what kind of country we will be and whether we will continue to be a country that tortures and one that honors its values.

Hope springs eternal, but today feels like 1929.

Map Out Oktoberfest

If you don't know where to go during Oktoberfest Zinzinnati, you'd best check out the map. Please be warned that during the peak hours, 4PM to 11PM Saturday and 3PM to 7PM Sunday (After the Bengals Game) you are going to have to fight the dreaded slow walking crowds. With that in mind, use the map to enter the 5th Street area near where you want to be. Get a beer and a brat, then just start the stroll.

Update to Ike Damage

A reader has an update on the damage from the falling street light Donald wrote about Monday. Here's the photo update:

BuyCincy Drinks Deep into Oktoberfest Zinzinnati

The Gents at BuyCincy have a nice article on Oktoberfest Zinzinnati.