City Hall Mess

What will City Government reform entail? Korte gives a summary of the proposals which are now coming forward to council for a vote to add the plans to the November ballot. I see currently no consensus on a plan and too many plans to really give people something to focus on. I hope council can weed down which proposals make it to the ballot to one plan that a majority of council can support.

City Beat' Stephanie Dunlap asked last week: "Council districts: real reform or clever backlash?" Is it all a sham? Are various groups just manipulating the form of government in order to gain power for their group? Is this the plan of the GOP (Brinkman) or Dems (Laketa Cole)? Who stands to gain or who stands to lose in the various forms of "reform?"

5/3 Bank Moves into 21st Century?

XRay Magazine is reporting that 5/3 Bank has agreed to change it's discrimination policy and include sexual orientation. The change comes on the heals of a campaign from local gay-rights organizations to move money out of 5/3 Bank next month. According to the XRay report the "Move Your Money" Campaign has been "Curbed." 5/3 Bank claims no connection between their revised policy and the activist actions.

The Enquirer has more.

Bronson: Blame the Evil Liberals!!!

Well, he is far more subtle, but he just might as well can come out blamed the Clenis® in column today:

Here's another reason STDs are out of control: Teens have been taught by our culture that oral sex is not sex - although it transmits STDs. They are seduced with a relentless background music of sex in media and entertainment. And when they think of STDs at all, they think of the disease that gets all the attention, AIDS.

Maybe sex education in schools that was not based on being what a fundamentalists Christian finds acceptable and more like what a reasonable human being find acceptable would help reduce the number of STDs. I also find Peter's, "kids believe oral sex is not sex" theme to be one not based on anything beyond recycled conservative dogma, not solid scientific data from reputable sources.

In fact, what is odd, is that this sounds like something Bronson would have written about 6 years ago. It could be a slightly modified retread.

Bush Coverage

Kudos to Korte for including opposition comments in his article on the Bush appearance. We got two retorts added in, so I am sure that will be seen as bias by the GOP, even though it was buried at the very bottom of the article, opposed to the top half for Rob Portman. We also got the full text of Bush's speech.

Korte and Weiser also had a briefs section and the stray plane story was played up like no one's business. It is almost like Bush is releasing the stories on stray planes to show how much he is "in danger" to the public or how much hyper protection he has to make the terrorist forget about attacking him. I wonder who pushed the news story on the plane incident? The DDN says there were two planes escorted down by military jets. The DDN also had a story on the fundraiser.

RNC Talking Points on Iraq

Atrios found this and is not sure how old they are, but here are the talking points from one well known RNC pollster on what Republicans should say about Iraq and terrorism. I wanted to post this just to make sure that Peter Bronson has a back-up copy. There is even a section about writing editorials, so I can Peter's sources more clearly.

Dayton Racial Problems

I never thought race relations were great anywhere, but Dayton did not seem worse than Cincinnati. This incident seems to suggest otherwise. This is something that I have not heard of recently happening in Cincinnati. I don't see a big fight happening because of race at a Main Street or Mt. Adams bar. Now, why is that? Unfortunately I think the reason is because here in Cincinnati people self segregate far more than in Dayton.

More here.

P&G: New Ivory Soap

P&G will be announcing a new line of Ivory Bar Soap. The question I have: will it float?