People who closely follow the budget troubles plaguing City Hall for the past couple of years know that Cincinnati City Council had to make numerous cuts to services last winter to avoid a $54.7 million deficit. Those cuts originally included eliminating residential yard waste collection, ending funding for nurses in public schools and keeping most of the city-owned swimming pools closed this summer.  

If Ohio’s execrable new governor thought he was going to stop Cincinnati’s long-planned streetcar project by blocking $51.8 million in state funding for the project, he’d better think again. Led by Mayor Mark Mallory and City Manager Milton Dohoney Jr., city officials last week unveiled a new, shorter Phase One for the proposed system. The revised project now will be comprised of a four-mile initial segment from downtown’s Fountain Square to Findlay Market in Over-the-Rhine, at a cost of $95 million.  

My favorite reading includes corrections. Everyone errs. Some admit it and correct their errors. Graphs, maps and percentages figure prominently in corrections, but names of people and places most often seem to trip us up. Get a name wrong, and it becomes journalism history if not local legend. Unless it's corrected, others reporters may rely on that spelling and get into all kinds of trouble.   

After a seven-month internal investigation, the Cincinnati Police Department finally released its findings last week from a probe into whether Lt. Col. Michael Cureton, an assistant police chief, improperly offered a free police escort for R&B singer Jamie Foxx in exchange for 40 concert tickets.   

CityBeat recently obtained a copy of an e-mail written by Brad Beckett — chief of staff to Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Monzel and a right-wing activist involved in anti-tax and anti-abortion causes — outlining the agenda of a secret conservative group called the Vanguard. We were fascinated by the wording the e-mail used about prominent public figures and what it might reveal about the members' outlook for the 2010 elections.  

We at WWE! realize that in 17 years things will be a lot different — technology will be increasingly difficult to use and people who are 10 right now will be able to kick our asses. Another thing that’s going to suck is that the $1.9 billion Cincinnati Retirement System is going to be broke unless fundamental changes are made soon.  

President Obama and his supremely obnoxious chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, should be more honest. The $871 billion health care reform bill passed by the U.S. Senate Dec. 21 after eight long and tedious months of debate is, by all indications, almost the exact bill that both men had in mind when they began this process. It's clear that so far this isn't the president most of us signed up for.  

As Mayor Mark Mallory and the new City Council are sworn in this week, the city says goodbye to two of its trusted progressive allies, David Crowley and Greg Harris. With the return of hard right-winger Charlie Winburn, council's conservative coalition now owns a 5-4 vote margin. It's now time for them to step up and offer a more inspiring plan than their current "No."  

When he was on trial in Nuremberg after World War II, Nazi leader Hermann Goering told a panel of judges how clever officials could manipulate the public to do their bidding. He was referring to persuading a reluctant population to go to war, but the same scare tactics apply to most matters of public safety. Above all, people want security and, if it seems threatened, they will panic and do almost anything.  

In an unfortunately all too rare case of political courage and discipline, Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory and a City Council majority ignored negative headlines and stuck to their guns last week in a budget showdown with the police union. The two unions that had balked at any furloughs to save jobs (the Fraternal Order of Police and Cincinnati Organized and Dedicated Employees, representing middle managers) finally agreed to deals to save the city from having to eliminate employees, including 138 in the police department.