Not that anyone really gives a [expletive] what Hank Williams, Jr., thinks about politics, but the country singer has gotten himself canned from Monday Night Football for saying insensitive things about subjects he doesn't know that much about. Williams yesterday told Fox & Friends that John Boehner's golf game with President Obama was "one of the biggest political mistakes ever," comparing it to “Hitler playing golf with (Israeli leader) Benjamin Netanyahu,” and then explaining that Obama and Joe Biden are “the enemy.”

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The Enquirer’s top two sports editors are resigning from the newspaper.

Assistant Managing Editor/Sports Barry Forbis and Deputy Sports Editor Rory Glynn announced their resignations last week in separate emails to fellow staffers.

Forbis, whose resignation becomes effective April 4, is leaving to join Fox Sports as a deputy managing editor in Los Angeles.

In his email, Forbis wrote, “I’ll be working with Jason Whitlock, Jen Engel, Bill Reiter, Greg Couch, Reid Forgrave, Mark Kriegel and A.J. Perez, not to mention a bunch of old friends. It’s a talented group, the job pays pretty well, and, uh, it’s L.A., so I’d have to consider it even if everything were perfect here. It’s not, of course, but you know as well as I do the challenges we have faced and the challenges you will continue to face.”

Forbis also thanked his co-workers, adding, “I want you to know how privileged I feel to have worked with you. I’ve worked with a lot of great sports departments. I don’t know of any who did more with less. You guys are better at just plain getting it done than any group I’ve worked with.”

Glynn announced his departure in an email to the sports staff, which was then forwarded by another person to the entire news staff. The resignation apparently becomes effective Friday.

In his email, Glynn wrote, “Last week, I told Barry … that I’ve decided to resign at the end of the month. Barry knows this is something I’ve been wrestling with for months now; bless his persuasiveness, he’s talked me out of it on a couple of occasions. But it’s time.”

Glynn added, “You all don’t need me to go on about the challenges we all face. I’ll just say the ever-growing demands of this job and the demands of raising four kids are difficult to balance, and if sometimes I’ve focused too much on the first, now I choose to focus on the second."

Online Sports Content Manager Nick Hurm will replace the editors on a temporary basis.

As part of reductions mandated by its owner, The Gannett Co., The Enquirer has laid off about 150 workers during the past two years. Also, employees have had to take five unpaid furloughs during the past three years.

Activists continue to protest Western & Southern’s treatment of the Anna Louise Inn, which has been helping women in the Lytle Park neighborhood for more than a century. CityBeat last week reported the details of Western & Southern’s failure to purchase the property when it had the chance and the company’s subsequent attempts to force the Inn to leave the neighborhood anyway. 

The Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition, released a statement on Saturday describing the protest banner as proof for local and national leaders that Western & Southern’s actions won’t be tolerated. The statement read: “We will continue to up the ante until you stop attacking the hard-working women of the Anna Louise Inn.”

Josh Spring, executive director of the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition, said in an email to CityBeat that the plane flew for two 30-minute stints on Sunday. Spring said protesters distributed 2,000 flyers outside the tournament’s gates and that the people who learned what Western & Southern was doing generally expressed frustration. The banner was made possible by contributions from several local organizations, including Occupy Work and Wages, Amos Project, the Homeless Coalition, SEIU Local 1, Mount Auburn Presbyterian church and other concerned citizens and groups. 

The banner asks people to go to stpws.com to learn more. The website redirects to www.southernwestern.net, which is the site where activists finally were able to publish a satirical video parodying a Western & Southern spokesperson proud of his company’s attacks on the Anna Louise Inn. The video was originally posted in June to YouTube and Vimeo, but was removed for copyright infringement shortly after Western & Southern found out about it. Western & Southern didn’t return CityBeat’s calls back then asking whether or not W&S was involved in forcing the removal of the video. The website includes a change.org petition asking Western & Southern to stop suing the Anna Louise Inn.

Cincinnati’s Historic Conservation Board is scheduled to hear arguments on Aug. 27 that could lead to a conditional use permit and allow the Anna Louise Inn to move forward with a renovation Western & Southern stalled by suing the Inn. It will take place 3 p.m. on the seventh floor of 805 Central Ave.

Read this week's CityBeat cover story on the issue here.

Occupy D.C. protesters built some type of structure in a park Saturday night, and police on Sunday notified them that they didn't have a permit and took it down, arresting dozens in the process. It was a pretty nice structure, though.

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A new study has found high levels of arsenic in fruit juices that millions of kids are drinking because there's pictures of actual food on the label. Too bad government regulation is just a big waste of money that hurts the economy.

A full 10 percent of the juices tested by the magazine had arsenic levels higher than what is allowed in water by the Food and Drug Administration.

“What we’re talking about here is not acute affects,” Urvashi Rangan, director of safety and sustainability at Consumer Reports, told TODAY. “We’re talking about chronic effects. We’re talking about cancer risk. And so, the fact that 10 percent of our samples exceeded the drinking water standard underscores the need for a standard to be set in juices.”

Consumer Reports tested 88 samples of apple and grape juices sold around the country. Included among those tested were popular juices like Minute Maid, Welch’s and Tropicana.

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Local subscribers to Time Warner and Insight cable woke up today without access to WLWT-TV (Channel 5) after the station and companies failed to reach a new retransmission agreement. Instead, the cable companies offered Channel 2 from NBC affiliate Terre Haute, Ind. The Enquirer is all over the story, reporting that Todd Dykes and Lisa Cooney in the morning were replaced by someone named Dada Winklepleck in Wabash Valley, Ind. Don’t worry: 30 Rock will still be on your new local Indiana station. Visit mywabashvalley.com for further details about additional programming. Or you can just hook up an antennae and get WLWT in hi-def for free. 

Anyone in the market for a school building? Cincinnati Public Schools is adding four closed buildings to a for-sale list in an attempt to raise the capital necessary to complete an overhaul of its in-use buildings as part of its Facilities Master Plan. The new buildings on the list are Central Fairmount, Kirby Road, North Fairmount and Old Shroder schools. 

Ohio brought in $23.5 million during the first seven weeks of legalized gambling in the state. 

Mitt Romney says he’s not hiding anything in his offshore accounts. The proof: He doesn’t even know where they are, so they’re technically hidden from him, too.

Barack Obama is in Iowa apparently setting up an issue on which to debate Romney later this fall. Obama is pitching an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for households earning less than $250,000, while Romney wants to extend them for rich people, too. 

The FDA went against the advice of an expert panel, deciding not to require mandatory training for doctors prescribing long-acting narcotic painkillers that can lead to addiction. 

Three-hundred-square-foot apartments in New York City? Mayor Michael Bloomberg asked developers yesterday to try to make them work.

City planners envision a future in which the young, the cash-poor and empty nesters flock to such small dwellings — each not much bigger than a dorm room. In a pricey real estate market where about one-third of renter households spend more than half their income on rent, it could make housing more affordable.

Droughts in 18 states have made the price of corn go up, and the soybeans are hurting a little bit, too.

Sitting less adds two years to U.S. life expectancy. 

A new study found that babies are healthier when there are dogs in their homes.

The Major League Baseball All-Star Game will take place tonight in Kansas City. The Reds’ Joey Votto is a starter, while Jay Bruce and Aroldis Chapman are also likely to play. 

So much for glory days on the gridiron. Playing pro football makes it far more likely than normal a brain can turn into mush. And there’s elevated likelihood these once powerful bodies will shut themselves down with Lou Gehrig’s disease.   

Disturbing new data from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health lab in Cincinnati says retired NFL players are dying from Alzheimer disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at rates four times higher than the U.S. population. Other neurodegenerative diseases kill retired NFL players at about twice the norm. The study appears in this month’s issue of Neurology, a medical journal affiliated with the American Academy of Neurology.

Overall, retired football players live longer and are healthier than most Americans, especially the linemen. But some of the players who passed, caught and defended are clearly beset by excessive amounts of neurodegenerative disorders later in the lives.  

Former quarterbacks, running backs, fullbacks, receivers, defensive backs, linebackers and safeties comprise the biggest group of former players who suffer. All were in the so-called “speed” positions, players who took hits that included high-acceleration head impacts.   

For the pro football study, the Cincinnati-based research team looked at health records of 3,439 retired NFL players who had five seasons in the league between 1959 and 1988. The researchers tracked down 334 death certificates across the nation. Of those, 17 had a neurodegenerative disorder listed as the cause of death; 14 had been in speed positions.  

(Cardiovascular disease claimed 126 of the ex-NFL players; cancer took 85).  

The NIOSH team said their findings add to a growing collection of evidence that shows football players face an increased risk of neurodegenerative disease. Most previous studies have focused on long-term health effects of repeated concussions. Besides finding increased death rates from Alzheimer’s, ALS (which often is called Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and Parkinson disease (about three times the national rate), the Cincinnati scientists raised an entirely new concern. They said football players have elevated death rates from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is a pathologically distinct neurodegenerative condition. It sets in years after head-knocking and is linked to a progressive decline in neuron functioning. It can change the ability to think and makes it difficult to move about because the brain doesn’t work as it should.   

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which goes by the initials CTE, isn’t reported on many death certificates because the diagnosis has only been recently recognized.      

Everett J. Lehman was lead author of the study; others who worked on it were Misty Hein, Sherry L. Baron and Christine M. Gersic.  The researchers said their findings cannot be applied to other professional sports. And the team says more information is needed about the impact of football injuries:

“Because our cohort was limited to longer-term professional players, our findings may not be applicable to other professional and nonprofessional football players. However, recent autopsy studies have reported pathologic findings of CTE in college-age and professional football players with relatively short playing careers. We did not have data on player injuries and conductions.  If chronic mild to moderate concussion is an actual risk factor for neurodegenerative mortality, the magnitude of the risk may depend on the intensity and frequency of brain injuries incurred over a number of years. … Finally, we did not have information on environmental, genetic or other risk factors for neurologic disorders.”

NIOSH did not say it found a cause and effect for the higher than normal number of Alzheimer and ALS deaths. But the scientists said they had no doubt “that professional football players are at an increased risk of death from neurodegenerative causes.”

The Kentucky Speedway and state of Kentucky will find out soon whether the $10 million they spent on highway infrastructure improvements in response to last year’s traffic mess at a NASCAR race was worth it. The Speedway and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet will hold a news conference today to outline plans to actually get all of the race attendees into the venue to watch the race rather than sit in traffic all day and get super mad.

A Cincinnati police officer with a long record of wrecking police vehicles was arrested on Monday and charged with assaulting a woman who he’s already been charged with assaulting once before. The Enquirer detailed the disciplinary history of officer Kevin Jones, who was also charged with two counts of assault from an incident that occurred May 19. 

Politico says President Obama’s recent announcement of a new immigration policy that allows many young immigrants who have never been in trouble with the law to stay in the country, and even travel across its borders, was a really smart move. The policy is not permanent, which leaves Mitt Romney to answer the question of whether or not he would repeal it if elected. The idea is reportedly similar to legislation that Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a potential Romney running mate, has been considering introducing. 

“This is a stroke of political genius,” Bruce Morrison told me. A former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, Morrison was chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee, a member of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform and House author of the Immigration Act of 1990. He’s now an immigration attorney and lobbies on a wide variety of immigration issues.

“Obama has taken Rubio’s idea and put it into action,” Morrison said. “He has given these people a work permit, the ability to remain in this country, but no permanent status.” Their legal status can be terminated at any time. “But it won’t be terminated by Obama,” Morrison said.

A breast cancer survivor who has undergone a double mastectomy has been allowed to swim topless by the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation after stating that wearing a bathing suit over her chest causes pain. 

(Jodi) Jaecks opted against reconstructive surgery. "I don't see a need to fake having breasts," she said.

"My ultimate goal is to change policy at beaches and pools, to increase people's awareness of cancer and the realities of the human condition," Jaecks told Reuters.

LeBron James and the Miami Heat won the NBA title last night, completing a 4 games to 1 series victory over the Oklahoma Thunder. It is the first title for James, who has been widely mocked for stating that he’d like to win more titles than Michael Jordan’s six. James, who is 27, won his first a year younger than Jordan did, thought Jordan then won the title in six of eight years. 

Two alien plants planets around the same star apparently rise in the night sky of each other, looking like a giant full moon. The planets, Kepler-36b and Kepler-36c, are 1,200 light-years from Earth and 1.2 million miles apart, the closes two planets known. 

Manrique, a 27-year-old adult club dancer from Silver Spring, Md., pleaded guilty to the crime Wednesday in Allegheny County District Court, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Originally, she was charged with making a false report to police. Chapman was with the team when guests of the William Penn Hotel found Manrique tied up with cloth napkins and crying in his room. She told police she’d been held up by a man impersonating a hotel maintenance worker there to fix a running toilet. That story didn’t hold up under lengthy interrogation, though. So she shifted to Story B, that a male stranger who had stolen her wallet outside a nearby CVS store forced her to let him in the hotel room — lest he hurt her girlfriend back in Maryland — and ransacked it. She failed a lie detector test. Chapman didn’t believe her either. He told police he thought she was in on the crime.

Because of the plea, the public will never know what really happened. Manrique was ordered to pay a $164 fine and was released. The case paperwork doesn’t say if the jewelry was actually stolen. Nor does it explain what Chapman was doing with $200,000 worth of jewelry on a road trip to Pittsburgh in the first place.