In defending his selection of an anti-gay rights activist to become the Cincinnati NAACP’s legal advisor, Christopher Smitherman scolded critics for daring to invoke the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

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People who died during the past year and didn’t have a home will be remembered today during a ceremony at Washington Park in Over-the-Rhine.

Homeless Memorial Day is an annual event usually held on the day of the year with the longest amount of nighttime hours. A national day of mourning, the local ceremony is sponsored by the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless.

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That will be the headline on March 3 after the state kills Jeff Hill even though the victim’s family is begging the parole board and governor to spare Hill’s life.

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Despite the economic troubles affecting the state, Ohioans are smoking more than ever, according to a study that found the highest percentage point increase of any state. An official with the Ohio Department of Health attributes the increase to the stress people are under, though the Ohio General Assembly also cut funding to the state's smoking cessation help line, so there's that. Ohio ranked as the 36th healthiest state in 2011, down from 33 rd in 2010, while Indiana came in at 38th and Kentucky 43rd.

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Spectators at the Western & Southern Open’s finals on Sunday also saw a plane flying overhead pulling a banner protesting the tournament’s corporate sponsor. The banner read: “W&S Stop Bullying Anna Lou Inn STPWS.COM.” 

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.

Ohio voter advocates say there was a big elephant in the room during the creation of Ohio's controversial redistricting map, and it was super tan and cried a lot. The Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting says John Boehner was central in the process, working with map-making consultants and the National Republican Congressional Committee. Here's a link to the Ohio Redistricting Transparency Report. From The Enquirer:

"The report found: decisions were not made in public; public input was ignored; there was limited opportunity for the public to review proposed maps; the public was not provided with relevant data for proposed districts; nonpartisan redistricting criteria were not used; and the criteria used to evaluate plans were never publicly identified."

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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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Released Monday, the FBI’s annual crime report for last year further underscores the fact that imposing capital punishment on criminals doesn’t act as a deterrent to homicides.

The report, Crime in the United States 2008, reveals that in 13 of the 14 states that didn’t have the death penalty last year, the murder rate was below the national rate of 5.4 homicides per 100,000 people.

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This week’s issue of CityBeat, which hits the streets today, features an article about the selection of arch-conservative activist Chris Finney to serve as a legal adviser to the NAACP’s Cincinnati chapter.

The article details how Finney’s past work on anti-gay rights causes might be at odds with the national NAACP’s stance on repealing Proposition 8 in California, and the late Coretta Scott King’s impassioned defense of gay rights.

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If President Obama hopes to rely on all the socialists who in 2008 elected him with hopes of seeing all of America’s wealth get spread around, he better come up with something even more radical this year.

Something called the Freedom Socialist Party announced in December that it is running two candidates in a national write-in campaign — New Yorker Stephen Durham for president and Christina López, of Seattle, for vice president. And today the duo sent out a press release demonstrating that America’s real socialists are none too pleased with Obama’s first three years in office.

In a memo titled, “Recognize healthcare as a human right — make it universal and free,” Durham and López refer to Obama’s healthcare reform as one of the biggest disappointments of his presidency.

“Instead of stepping up to the plate and acknowledging that public healthcare is a need as great as public education,” the release states, “Obama made one concession after another to the pharmaceutical and insurance mega-corporations. As he restated in his February State of the Union address, his Affordable Care Act does not give the government the role of guaranteeing universal care; instead, it relies on a reformed private market.”

López goes even further, calling the healthcare program just another one of Obama’s “sellouts of the human rights of women and immigrants under corporate and right-wing pressure.”

Ouch!

Durham, according to the FSP website, says Obama and the other jokers in Washington have furthered the struggle of America’s working class and poor during their bipartisan attempts at correcting the recession.

“The Democratic and Republican parties have done nothing but cooperate in forcing workers and the poor to pay the costs of the Great Recession caused by the banks and Wall Street,” the site says. “President Obama may play to the crowd by criticizing ‘bad apple’ corporations, as he did in his State of the Union address. But the facts show that the program of corporate coddling, which creates austerity for the masses, is completely bipartisan.”

Durham and López are also offended by Obama’s recent compromise with religious institutions over providing birth control coverage.

Durham says the only way to provide quality health care is to get private insurers out of the picture altogether. For-profit insurance companies, according to a Baltimore-area neurologist Dr. Steven Strauss, are a fundamental problem.

“No one should be making a profit from providing — or, more to the point, denying — the medical care that should be treated as a basic human right,” Strauss says, according to the release. “But insurance and drug companies are among the biggest money-makers in the nation, amassing billions each year from people's suffering.”

The Freedom Socialist Party believes that a single-payer option such as Medicare, if it were to be offered to everyone, would be a reasonable first step but that all for-profit entities must be removed from the pharmaceutical, medical supply and hospitals industries.

It also suggests taxing corporations and the very wealthy — something that’s not going to take away any of Obama’s votes because he’s trying to do that, too. And the duo’s ideas for redirecting military spending to the nation’s human needs probably won’t cost the president too many reelection votes, either.

For more information go to www.socialism.com or email the stuff you hate about unrelenting capitalism to votesocialism@gmail.com.

President Obama could not be reached for comment before the publishing of this blog.