WEDNESDAY JULY 3
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell is a complicated man, as evidenced by his ability to parlay years of respectable military and public service into becoming the guy who uses whack-a-mole metaphors and auto-tune to condemn political opponents. The latest iteration of the senior senator’s growingly unsophisticated political maneuvering (to his credit, he didn’t think the public would find out about the whack-a-mole commentary) was the recent release of an auto-tuned YouTube video of his senatorial race opponent, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, which is mostly just Lundergran looking like a nice lady and saying her name over and over with phrases like “sticks to party line” and “left-wing mime” popping onto the screen. McConnell’s campaign pointed out that the senator has gone the video route before and offered as evidence a VHS tape containing a Dukes of Hazzard parody that helped him defeat Walter Huddleston in 1984 by portraying McConnell as Boss Hogg and Huddleston as one of the Duke boys, except in this episode the boys wore the Daisy Dukes and Boss Hogg didn’t accidentally let them out of jail because he was busy eating chicken.
THURSDAY JULY 4
Enquirer reporter Jessica Brown was probably surprised to find her perfectly accurate story about former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ presence in the Northside Fourth of July Parade being dramatized on Cincinnati.com as the story of an anti-gun crusader coming to town to take away everyone’s freedom (“Giffords crusades for anti-gun cause in Northside”). Brown had pretty clearly explained Giffords’ not-anti-gun cause in the story’s third sentence: “Giffords and Kelly made a stop in Northside to spread their message of responsible gun ownership,” also noting: “Giffords and her husband support the right to bear arms, but they would like greater responsibility in gun ownership including expanded background checks.” Brown also explained a little bit about how Giffords was shot in the head in public by a crazy person and is becoming the face of the responsible gun legislation cause even though she doesn’t speak well and one of her arms is paralyzed from the bullet going into her brain, a story apparently not respectable enough for a headline writer to take a temporary break from seeing how quickly the publication can make readers mad at liberals.
FRIDAY JULY 5
It’s often difficult to understand what Gov. John Kasich is talking about — sometimes he calls people “whackadoodles” or mimics people with Parkinson’s disease (unlike most of this article, these are not made up). Nevertheless, the Dayton Business Journal today published a guest editorial by Kasich declaring that Ohio’s new budget “celebrates the freedom to succeed.” (Does he mean that the government is not going to help poor people or women but that they should feel free to try to succeed on their own without all the resources that aren’t in the budget anymore?) The editorial was likely offered to but not accepted by even the most conservative daily newspapers in the state, as even The Enquirer was busy this week working on a budget analysis that found Kasich’s tax breaks to be pretty useless to the middle class and his upcoming tour supporting it to be a waste of taxpayer money that could have gone to job creators.
SATURDAY JULY 6
The first thing that Cincinnatians learn after moving away to a big city is that stuff in other places is really expensive (did you know that it’s cheaper to get your car towed away near a Yankees game and buy a new one than to pay for parking?). The second thing they learn is that people from their hometown drink a lot of beer (they realize this in various ways; some are bad). Research released last week put Ohio at No. 23 nationally in alcohol consumption, with the average Ohioan drinking 321 beers per year. But reactions from locals near Akron, whose Beacon Journal first reported the findings, suggests that Ohio’s northerners aren’t really pulling their weight — one guy buying a sixer in an Akron gas station suggested that drinking almost a beer per day was way too much. Told that four beers a day would meet the average Ohioan’s intake in 81 days, a majority of CityBeat’s editorial staff admitted to topping this figure most years before filing their taxes.
SUNDAY JULY 7
It must be difficult to be a business owner during today’s changing times — 50 years ago no one had to pay women an equal wage or even hire black people, and now there’s all this social media and Obamacare making everything confusing. The Enquirer today detailed the plight of local business owner David Tramontana, whose Home Care by Black Stone company has employed 850 home health aides for years but never had to supply insurance to many of them which has helped the company expand several times, according to the Business Courier in 2010. The potential $2,000 Obama-fine per qualified employee, Tramontana says, is putting him in a bad spot because he can’t just raise the price of his product the way the guy from Papa John’s did. Tramontana is thankful for the recently announced one-year reprieve from fines but also noted that he actually wouldn’t have this problem if Ohio would take up the federal Medicaid expansion blocked by state Republicans (y’all might want to pop this part up a little higher in the story since it’s KIND OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PART). Tramontana pays many of his employees $10 an hour or less, which makes them so poor they could qualify for the government-provided health care everyone would get if the GOP didn’t use small-business owners like Tramontana to stop Obama’s socialist agenda a few years ago.
MONDAY JULY 8
With the Major League Baseball All-Star break fast approaching, many Reds fans are real mad that the team is in THIRD PLACE instead of FIRST PLACE even though their record is FOURTH-BEST in the league (“Only 11 games above .500? Damn you, Dusty Baker, stop bunting!). The New York Times today pointed out that Reds fans have many things for which to be thankful, starting with the team no longer being owned by a cheap, racist lady who let her dog poop on the field or a mean billionaire who hosted mass GOP rallies in the stadium. The Times says current Reds owner Bob Castellini has revitalized Reds fans by investing in the stadium and rebuilding the farm system, concluding that fans whose favorite teams have bad owners need only to keep waiting for a new one unless the plan is to hand the team down to someone in the same family, in which case nothing good is ever going to happen in your life again.
CONTACT DANNY CROSS: [email protected]
