WEDNESDAY NOV. 30
Today was a good day for Hamilton County taxpayers, if by “Hamilton County taxpayers” you mean rich people who don’t want to pay their share of the stadium tax. County Commissioners Chris Monzel and Todd Portune today pulled off a back-room deal to save the property tax rollback for one year by selling Drake Hospital to UC Health for $15 million. Monzel and Portune actually had their aides negotiate the deal in order to avoid the sunshine law, and by the time the third member of the commission, Greg Hartmann, heard about the deal (on Facebook when one of Monzel’s aides tagged him in a photo trying to look in the window to see what was going on), it had already been finalized.
THURSDAY DEC. 1
There was a different vibe over at City Hall today than what many familiar with the scary building are used to: smiles (Yvette Simpson), hugs (Chris Seelbach), eye contact (P.G. Sittenfeld), temporary reprieve from all evictions of demons (Charlie Winburn). That’s because Council’s new class includes three young members who promise to be more civil and enthusiastic than the grumpy East Siders they replaced. Local Chamber of Commerce representatives say the election of Seelbach and Simpson, both 32, and Sittenfeld, 27, is a sign to newcomers that Cincinnati is a market with new opportunities to get involved because current leaders care so little about the community that they move away after losing elections.
FRIDAY DEC. 2
Sometimes you have to hand it to The Enquirer — one day its leaders are making old people sign up for Facebook to comment on stories, the next day it’s absolutely nailing a story about suburban teenagers and the subsets of Punk Rock music that cause brawls in makeshift West Chester concert spaces. In a report that obviously disregarded the opportunity to use Wikipedia to learn something about the topics at hand (sometimes Wiki is accurate, y’all), The Enquirer described a group of “Straight Edgers” fighting a group of Punk rockers called “Swing On Site” for a reason that was never quite clear (is Punk Rock dead and Straight Edge alive or is it the other way around?). West Chester Township Police are asking anyone with information about a third group of people, described as “wearing suspenders, dancing in circles and chanting about hating someone named Rudy,” to contact them at 513-777-2231.
SATURDAY DEC. 3
There are only two things you can do as a politician who’s made such an ass out of himself that Newt Gingrich gets up out of his Barcalounger and overtakes you in the polls: run quickly away. That’s exactly what former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain did today, suspending his campaign after numerous allegations of sexual harassment and extramarital affairs. Cain told a group of supporters at what was supposed to be the opening of his national campaign headquarters that he was quitting to avoid news coverage hurtful to his family, though he left open the possibility of running for any House seats in towns where no one cares how badly you treat women.
SUNDAY DEC. 4
Occupy protesters across the country have run into some pretty significant obstacles in their attempts to articulate their dissatisfaction with corporate influence over politics: trespassing tickets, nonchalant pepper spraying, people misunderstanding what they’re upset about even though it’s fairly simple, etc. Members of Occupy D.C. today decided to do something about it — build a sweet fort overnight while the police were asleep. Police arrived at the park early Sunday and notified the protesters that they needed a permit for whatever it was they had built, arrested several who wouldn’t get off the roof, posted a notice on the structure that it was “a real piece of shit” and then smashed it to pieces.
MONDAY DEC. 5
Last September, a group of European planet-hunters found some broke-ass planet called HD85512b circling an orange star smaller and cooler than our sun that might or might not have some ice on it. Today, NASA’s Kepler scientists were able to send the Euros an email with the subject line reading “Kepler-22b VIP!” as their latest discovery is of a planet even more like Earth, with a very similar sun star and a year-long rotation of 290 days. Scientists believe the temperature on Kepler-22b is about 72 degrees, making it the best candidate yet for life beyond our solar system. NASA still needs to confirm that the planet has an atmosphere, in which case the next step would be to send some robots there to eradicate anything found living in case it could hurt us.
TUESDAY DEC. 6
It’s about time a local politician got serious about prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, race and other purposes — those things are mean. Unfortunately for those of us who every day feel the pain of inequality (J/K, white male here ... ), the politician at-hand is Rep. Steve Chabot and his proposed legislation is aimed at preventing discrimination against unborn babies. Chabot’s Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act is based on the logic that higher rates of African-American abortions are due to discrimination and not a lack of access to preventative care, birth control and cancer screenings. Chabot also wants to ban the unethical practice of sex-selection abortions and said he doesn’t need evidence of such a thing actually occurring in the U.S. to do so because it sounds really bad.
CONTACT DANNY CROSS : [email protected]
