Updated List Of Who Is Running For Cincinnati City Council

Not everyone running has turned in their required signatures, but here's the latest listing of who is running for Cincinnati City Council:

Incumbents:
Chris Bortz
Leslie Ghiz
Wayne Lippert Jr.
Amy Murray
Roxanne Qualls
Laure Quinlivan
Cecil Thomas
Charlie Winburn
Wendell Young

Previous Candidates:
Kevin Flynn
Nicholas Hollan
Christopher Smitherman

New Candidates:
Jason Riveiro
Chris Seelbach
P.G. Sittenfeld
Catherine Smith Mills
Yvette Simpson

Likely Running:
Mike Allen

At most there appear to only be 18 candidates. Anyone else not listed above who turns in signatures will not be a significant candidate, unless they have more gold than Midas. Later this month the 'official' list will come out. If it looks different than above, I'll be astonished for all of about 43 seconds.

Is Smitherman Running For Council? Maybe An Answer Today

Is Chris Smitherman running for Cincinnati City Council or does he just like pretending he is the President of the United States and is trying to invoke the 25th Amendment?  He's been saying he has been running for months, but this latest stunt is the biggest sign he is actually going to do it. His website is not up, but someone has the domain registered.

Is he trying to ride to the wave of anti-City voters with the reported news that his anti-rail charter amendment will be on the ballot?

I've been pondering why there has been a lack of crazy 'independent' candidates running for council this year. I guess later on today, we shall get another crazy one in the mix.

Heartmann and Monzel Officially Screw the Poor

Hamilton County Commissioners voted 2 to 1 to lower the Indigent Care levy. Greg Heartmann and Chris Monzel showed the county that they care more about giving a few dollars more to property owners than they care about watching poor people die.

They could have just left it at the same level and felt and let the property value decrease be felt, which on one level is 'reasonable,' but no, they went ahead and lowered the millage rate, cutting funding even more. There is no reason to cut funding. University Hospital needs the money. Instead they will just increase the costs that go to all paying customers, so, the middle class public still pays for this, just the landowners get to buy a couple more Bud Lights at Walmart before they head home and watch TV in their basements all next year.

What a mindless world conservative Republicans live in.

The only thing worse that could happen is that monsters like COAST will spend money to defeat the levy and then succeed, thus achieving what they might hope would be a purge of the poor.

Barry Horstman's Anti-Streetcar Cheerleading Continues

In case you still had any doubt of the bias of the reporting on the Streetcar issue from the Enquirer's Barry Horstman, then read this article, which is more cheerleading than reporting. Horstman has not properly reported on what the ballot initiative says and provides a tacit explanation of it's  language with selective quotes that provide more of an argument for Smitherman to use, than a balanced summary. Any objective analysis of it, like Judge Mark Painter provided in the Enquirer, would conclude that this ballot initiative would ban the city from spending any money on any rail project, not just the streetcar. This type of bias is what I have come to expect from Horstman, which is very disappointing, but there is hope that he will soon end his involvement in reporting on this issue.  It is very pathetic that the impetus for a story on the Streetcar is going to be an email or phone call from Smitherman to Hortsman providing an update on his signature boondoggle.  The number of press releases and blog pots put out there last week on the ballot language was not something Horstman would have missed, especially if he reads the guest columnists in the newspaper that pays his salary. Hortsman failed to report on many substantive details of this situation. Here is an outline of some of what he failed to do.

1. Question Smitherman on the language used in the ballot initiative. 
2. Question COAST on the language used in the ballot initiative. (Didn't they write it?)
3. Provide evidence on the validity of the claim that August 10th is a soft deadline. This contradicts a prior article he wrote.  What changed?
4. Ask Smitherman how he's going to get over 1,200 signatures in 3 days, when it took around 5 days to get nearly 800.
5. Ask Smitherman how he knows the signatures he has gotten in the last 5 days are valid, is that his guess or have they been validated by the Board of Elections?
6. Ask Smitherman a question about a member of his campaign trashing at least one box full of CityBeat issues last Friday night. (This may happen yet. Hortsman and the Enquirer do like reporting on dirty tricks.)

That's not everything he could have done and included in the article, but the list summarizes some of the key details that would provide the most factual and fair presentation of the current situation.  We really are suffering with the lack of news gathering in this town.  TV and Radio don't have the resources to provide in depth reporting, so we are stuck with what every the Enquirer puts out.  That's a shameful way to live in a democracy.

Grammer's Robbed At Gunpoint Last Night

According to Grammer's Facebook page they were robbed at gunpoint last night (Friday) and will be closed tonight, tomorrow, and Monday. They will be reopening on Wednesday. Luckily no one was injured. I've not seen or heard of any news reports on this, yet, so unless the owners report more, I doubt we'll get any other credible details on what happened. I hope they catch the thief or thieves as soon as possible.

Smitherman Campaign Worker Trashes CityBeat

SpaethC at CincyVoices has a great post about witnessing a Chris Smitherman Campaign worker trashing all of the newspaper copies in a CityBeat box downtown Friday night.  My wonder is: how many other boxes did this or other Smitherman workers trash?

The evidence is all in blog post, debating it is pointless. Chris Smitherman must immediately investigate who did  it, fire them, apologize to CityBeat, and pay damages.

He won't do that, but that will allow everyone to see how Smitherman is NOT running a normal rational political campaign.  Instead he'll either ignore the incident or claim it was a CIA conspiracy.

OK, to be fair, he may claim it was an FBI or NSA  or CPD conspiracy, not just the CIA.

Republican Commissioners Seek to Cut Health Services for the Poor

If you are Hamilton County commissioners Greg Hartmann or Chris Monzel, both Republicans, then you would be in favor of letting some of the Hamilton County poor residents die.  I'm sure they wouldn't phrase it that way, but what else would you expect to happen when you cut funding for indigent health care services by eight million dollars.  That would be around a 17% cut (46 to 38 million).

Not to only be after the health of the poor, the Duo of Death also are looking to cut children's by 2 million dollars.  So if you are a poor child, I guess you are just doubly screwed.

Just when you think that's enough, Hartmann also is putting out the idea of sales tax increase as away to fix the stadium fund deficit, as long as there is a property tax rollback to help offset it.  So, the poor get taxed even more disproportionately and the property owners get another tax break.  There's no class warfare to see here, move along, move along.

Republicans at work to save the property owners from the peasants.  Long live Feudalism!