The guy who owns the Columbus ABC television station is a pretty odd duck (I don’t know his name, but I know he is an independent owner). He exercises much more control over programming than most station owners. Example: To my knowledge, NYPD Blue has never been shown on his station.

He got into trouble when he wanted to show a television special essentially toeing the swift boat veterans line. It kind of made national news, sparking discussions over the value of political contributions and free speech. The local station ended up playing a watered down version of the program, spending equal time criticizing W’s time in the National Guard.

Well, interestingly, I couldn’t find the GOP debate on ABC this morning.

Oh well, I only have 8 future GOP debates from which to choose. Goodness gracious!

Mr Voinovich,

Why on earth are you denying even a modicum of law and order for illegal immigrants in this country. If we shrug our shoulders and say, “we can’t deport 12 million people, so we may as well give them amnesty immediately”, what will we do when we have 24 million illegal immigrants in this country? There are more important issues here, Mr. Voinovich, than cheap labor. This is about citizenship, and what kind of citizens make up this country. Immigration policy currently restricts the influx of the best and brightest from around the world, but thanks to your efforts, the uneducated and poor, who have little desire to learn English or American civics, get a free pass. This schizophrenic policy is a joke as there is no incentive to follow whatever rules you set up. Illegal immigrants know that these rules will not have any teeth, that there will be no enforcement, and in 10 or 20 years another amnesty will be enforced against the will of the US citizenry to favor 24 million or more people who are citizens of other countries.

Could you please represent Americans for a change, instead of La Raza and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal?

A shout out to my neighbors with the big press release.

“We found that estrogen has totally opposite effects on behavior in these mice depending only on how much light they got each day,” said Brian Trainor, co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow in psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University. “It is quite a surprising finding.”

Since the Supreme Court delegated this to the states, citizens need to take action and talk to their reps about preserving their ownership, because local government can be easily enticed into selling out lower and middle class districts to developers.

A few months later [following Kelo vs. New London], the Ohio Supreme Court was the first state high court to decide an eminent-domain case in this altered legal environment, in City of Norwood vs. Horney. In Norwood, an island within Cincinnati, a few homeowners declined to sell to make way for the development of condos and retail space. The workingclass neighborhood was far from what any reasonable person would consider blighted.

So the city made up a category, deteriorating, for a neighborhood that one day might fall into disrepair. Among the reasons for seizing the property were that the roads were too heavily traveled and poorly designed and that the neighborhood had too much “diversity of ownership,” meaning too many people owned their own homes and businesses.

Ohio’s justices decided that rationale didn’t fly.

Thankfully, the justices were right, this time. All this talk about small business driving the economy, you’d figure “diversity of ownership” would be a good thing. Thanks a lot to the local government Norwood, your sad sack obvious attempt to undermine individual property rights has spurred a movement to write new state laws.

Read this story if you want to laugh (or cry) at Ohio Judges. Two kids set up deer decoys in the middle of the road to watch cars swerve. That’s pretty kewl. But get this, the judge is suspending the sentencing until football season is over. I mean, who’s going to be quarterback if this kid is in jail? Somebody should call up Jim Tressel so he can offer these boys a scholarship to join the rest of the criminals and thugs on his team.

Posted at 10:07 pm by Johnny B

I read the whole debate before I say anything on the previous post. I don’t want to enrage anybody, but a story just came out today which discusses the conflict between business and religion, and law each supports. Wal-mart and co. are pushing for more and more alcohol in it’s stores, including political campaigning in dry counties throughout the south. It is increasingly difficult to talk about any religious beliefs in any sphere without bumping into government regulation and control. Here in Ohio there has been a long sustained push for gambling, you know, to help the children. The only groups organized enough to fight gambling (i.e. a calculated extraction of cash from typically the poor that goes straight to big business with a cut to the state) are the churches. If Christians, etc. are model citizens but sit on their hands politically, they may find family members in debt and broke, and that affects them personally too.

Posted at 10:29 pm by Johnny B

	Posted by BP @ 08/13/2006 10:49 PM PDT
	there you go…a couple of issues that are much better suited for the debate of religion and politics: drinking and gambling. Thank you. Agree on both points.

The episcopalian church continues to “not curb” the ordination of openly gay bishops. The worldwide episcopal meeting was held in Columbus, OH. Why Columbus? Well, the Columbus convention center is smack dab in the middle of the Short North district, the gay village of Columbus. We bumped into some Episcopalians around town. In general I don’t like to comment on other people’s religion, so I’ll just throw this out there for now.

Posted at 10:12 pm by Johnny B

After a couple of weeks of seeing angry white Duke girls pouting and publicly displaying the white members of the lacrosse team all over the Duke campus, and all the race mongering about Duke University, it turns out there is no physical evidence that they held her against her will or raped her. The boys probably shouldn’t have hired an “exotic dancer”, but does that warrant suspension of the lacrosse season? Hey, maybe it does, but Ohio State has students who were on football scholarships get convicted of armed robbery and other felonies, and no games were canceled.

Posted at 10:52 pm by Johnny B

In general I am skeptical of any self-proclaimed architects of the last fifty or so years. Many of them tend to be irascible socialists, and it shows in their work. For example, a new architecture building was built for the University opposite of the Football stadium. Everyone I know has the same impression, it is garish, and the million dollar tiles on the exterior look like they will drop from the sky at any moment. The inside is bare concrete straight out of Cold War Romania. Here is a picture of an astutely designed set of benches outside our tuition, state, and federal tax supported University. I know I am proud, because I sure couldn’t have designed benches any better than that.

Posted at 08:40 pm by Johnny B

Every year, as part of my Christmas trip, I collect Louisiana coffee to bring back up to Ohio. The Cafe especial community coffee was good, but last year it started seeming too bitter to me. I switched to Mellow Joy and have been happy with that ever since. Lately I asked the Coach about the East Texas/West Louisiana coffee with the boat on it. Seaport. Strong stuff. I heard how people double brew it. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all those cool regional sodas and products. Today I looked up Ale-8-one, which you either know or you don’t. (Wikipedia). I just kept thinking about how cool and refreshing that stuff really is, and how little Coke or Pepsi people drank in central Kentucky.

Posted at 08:41 pm by Johnny B

	Posted by BP @ 01/11/2006 11:52 AM PST
	Anyone ever had an actual can of “Whoop Ass”? I believe that was in West Virginia. And don’t forget Cheerwine in North Carolina.