Last week’s ruling by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission that a Greater Cincinnati landlady violated a girl’s civil rights by posting a “whites only” sign at an apartment complex’s swimming pool is a decision that most rational people would say is just.   

Regular readers of this column and CityBeat already know plenty about Gov. John Kasich’s obnoxious, grating personality and autocratic, regressive style of governing from his dismal 12 months in office so far.   

President Obama’s actions on New Year’s Eve finally dispenses any shred of doubt about him being a fraud and a huckster. In a reversal of his previous position, Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act.
  

Now that Christmas has come and gone, we enter that strange time of year where many people get reflective and try to make some type of sense and discern meaning from the previous 12-months’ worth of random occurrences. 
  

A new report released this month found that 30 large U.S. corporations paid more to lobby Congress than they paid in federal income taxes for the three years between 2008 and 2010, despite all of them being profitable. Merry Christmas!  

It’s amazing how quickly some politicians will change their tune when it suits them. For years, local developer Chris Bortz would complain whenever I referred to him in columns and news articles as a “registered Republican” while he was a member of Cincinnati City Council.  

If you’re like most people, you would jump at the chance to buy something that you wanted if it was offered at just one-third of its normal price. That’s exactly what happened last week when two of the three Hamilton County commissioners offered to sell the county-owned Drake Center to the University of Cincinnati at a rock-bottom price.   

There is a relatively simple way to ascertain how neither Republicans nor Democrats no longer represent the will of average voters and show how out of touch the political class is with most people. The litmus test comes down to three major issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case and raising taxes on the wealthy.  

This isn’t something I say or write often, so please pay attention: Hamilton County Commissioner Greg Hartmann is right. Hartmann, a Republican who currently is president of the county commission, wants to temporarily keep the existing reduction in the amount of a property tax rollback to avoid deficits in the county’s stadium account.  

Fueled by the wave of Democratic, pro-union voters energized by state Issue 2, a whopping four City Council incumbents were defeated in their bids to keep their seats. The biggest surprise losers were Leslie Ghiz and Chris Bortz, and it’s not just because the pool of voters widened with more Democrats showing up this year. It’s clear that past supporters of Ghiz and Bortz made a conscious decision to rebuff them this time.  

While the broadcast TV networks were busy covering Andy Rooney’s death, Kim Kardashian’s divorce and the Royal Couple’s visit to America, they barely mentioned a disturbing study that found 30 of the most profitable U.S. corporations had a “negative tax rate” during the recent three-year period it covered. Those same firms had combined pre-tax profits of $160 billion during that time.  

There is a certain appropriateness that it is representatives of Big Business and corporate America who are trying to have the Occupy Cincinnati protestors removed from their encampment at downtown’s Piatt Park, which is a public space. In trying to capitalize on their oversized influence with politicians at City Hall, those corporate bigwigs are proving the main point behind the various “Occupy” protests taking place across the nation — that people with money have far more clout in our political system than those who don’t.  

It probably should’ve begun about three years ago, but finally many Americans are starting to wake up to the true culprits behind the Great Recession and our broken political system, and demanding change. In what’s fast becoming the progressive alternative to the Tea Party movement, the political left in the United States is trying to redirect populist anger about the nation’s long economic downturn on multiple fronts and convert it into action.  

It’s been a rocky couple of weeks for U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Miami Township), whose ethics are once again being questioned. First, Schmidt was selected by a nonpartisan ethics watchdog group as one of the most corrupt members of Congress. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) bestowed the dubious honor on Schmidt for improperly accepting free legal services.  

Throughout its 45-year history, the Center for Constitutional Rights hasn’t been timid about tackling legal cases that are daunting or perhaps seem even hopeless. Founded in 1966 by a group of attorneys that included William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy, the Center initially was designed to offer support to civil rights activists who were trying to end racial segregation in the Deep South. Unlike other legal firms doing similar work such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center would even take on cases that it thought were not winnable as part of its “success without victory” strategy.