River Vices

Three Bankrupt Mayors

2012-01-30T15:47:00.000-05:00

Three Bankrupt Mayors

and Portsmouth’s Financial Crisis

Here’s our three bankrupt mayors for all to see.

The first, our currentfiscally clueless mayor,

Believes the wayto achieve prosperity

Is not throughworking but through prayer.

The second, who’s nextin line to be mayor,

Is a deadbeat dadwho collects vintage cars.

And likes to driveand dress with flair.

He piles up debts tillthey reach the stars.

The third, the lapdog ex-mayor

Who got Portsmouthinto this financial mess,

Is a brainless, bankruptfailure.

He’s like the girlwho’s gotta say yes.

What’s worse than getting the finger from Neil Hatcher?
Appointing a bankrupt mayor with rabies dog catcher.

Haunted House from Hell

2012-01-18T17:50:00.000-05:00

Haunted House from Hell

At about six-thirty P.M., Monday, January 16th, 2012, the Portsmouth Fire Department responded to a fire at 1914 7th Street, a property previously owned by the bankrupt Shane DeSimone. Police Chief Bill Raison told the Portsmouth Daily Times he believes the fire was deliberately set, possibly by a firebug.

This is the house A.D.—

After DeSimone acquired it,

But before his bankruptcy

And before a firebug fired it.

It’s a fiery hell to a parson—

To a firebug it’s fuel.

Anywhere else it’s arson—

In Portsmouth it’s urban renewal.

Still-standing now, after the fire,
It’s a burned-out, asbestos-shingled shell.
But will it, like Dracula, never expire—
This haunted house from hell?

Just Who is Getting Screwed and Who is Doing the Screwing?

2012-01-16T18:49:00.000-05:00

Mayor-unelect Malone, perhaps trying to figure who he can screw next, having

already screwed his creditors by filing for personal bankruptcy

Screwing the Sanitation Workers

Unelected Mayor David Malone is quoted in the Portsmouth Daily Times (7 Jan 2012): “The unions are being protected while their non-union counterparts are, quite honestly, being screwed because of budget cuts.” “Quite honestly!” Malone in incapable of honesty. In my view, it is not the non-union city employees, it is the union employees who are being screwed. They are the ones who pay dues and are denounced by much of the public as trouble makers. They are the ones who struggle to improve wages and working conditions. And then whatever gains they make in negotiations are given to non-union members. Non-union employees may be opposed to unions on principle or simply because they don’t want to pay union dues. It is their right to be non-union, but they have no right to expect to be rewarded for not belonging to a union. In financial crises like the current one in Portsmouth, non-union members are being rewarded by the city employers for not belonging to unions. They are, of course, being paid off. If they find themselves, during a fiscal crisis, losing out on their customary payoff, they have no reason to complain. They can’t have it both ways: they do not deserve to have the rewards of being in a union when they are not in a union. If they want union pay and benefits they should join a union, and if a union doesn’t exist, they should try to organize one. Of course, if they succeed in becoming unionized, Malone will screw them too, like he screws the sanitation workers. But when it comes to the politically powerful police and fire unions, Malone grovels. He contributed $1000 to the Committee in Support of Police and Fire, a political action committee that supported the measure on last November’s ballot that increased the city income tax. Note that the committee was in support of police and fire personnel, not city sanitation workers. The passage of the income tax measure did not improve the lot of the sanitation workers as Malone’s recent attempts to screw them by ignoring the contract they had negotiated with the city made clear.

Bankruptee and Mayor-unelect Malone contributed $1000 to campaign to support the police and fire unions

Screwing the Citizens of Portsmouth

Speaking of being screwed. It is the citizens of Portsmouth who are being screwed by having the mathematically and administratively challenged Malone as mayor. He wasn’t elected. He became mayor by default when Jane Murray was recalled. Malone was next in line in the long line of corrupt officials who became mayor when the elected mayor was recalled or left office for other reasons. The reason Malone was next in line was because he had demonstrated his subservience to the rich unelected individuals who decide who should be next in line. Malone is beholden especially to Neal Hatcher. Malone does what Hatcher and others expect of him—which is serve their interests. Granted he had a lot of competition, but there was no one on council who was more willing to sell out the citizens of Portsmouth than Malone. That’s why he is mayor. That’s why he rehired Weghorst and appointed her to a position for which she is not qualified, which is what he did for another unqualified city employee, Rick Duncan. Both Weghorst and Duncan were cogs in the corrupt administration of Mayor Jim Kalb.

The Marting Building Screwing

Malone will do whatever he can to make the Marting building the place that the city government will move to, in spite of it having been rejected by voters as unworthy of being anything but torn down. The Marting building is another way Malone is trying to screw the tax payers. If the Municipal Building were not sitting on prime real estate, it would not have been neglected, and would have probably been renovated by now, and Malone wouldn’t have created yet another building committee that will attempt to get the city to spend many millions to renovate the worthless Marting building.

To return to the previous point, it is not the non-union members who are being screwed. It is the people of Portsmouth who are being screwed by having as mayor somebody whom the voters have more than once rejected soundly at the polls just as they have soundly rejected the Marting building. Why do you think SOLACE was pressured to leave the Marting building by Malone and the city? It is because Malone is following the wishes of those who have not given up the scheme to have the city government move there once it is renovated, making the site of the Municipal building available for developers, who have long had designs on that property. Getting SOLACE out of the Marting building will make it easier to get city offices in. Solace is just one of the parties being screwed by Malone.

The Prosperity Screwing

Malone’ s Prayermobile, with City of

of Prosperity bumper sticker

Malone also screwed the public by preaching that prayer could lead to prosperity. Look at how successful prayers were, both for himself and the city of Portsmouth! If he had prayed less and paid his bills more, maybe he wouldn’t have had to file for bankruptcy. Prayer doesn’t produce prosperity— hard working people do, and Malone has apparently never been one of those. Wasn’t that the reason he got into politics in the first place? He is the handy tool of the unelected clique that controls the city and it is the clique and Malone who are doing the screwing. With Malone as their unelected mayor, the poor people of Portsmouth don’t have a prayer.

Rev. Malone, future unelected mayor of Portsmouth, bible in hand,

preaching on the steps of the Municipal Building (2007)

The BCS Dumb Ox Trophy

2012-01-10T11:42:00.000-05:00

The BCS Dumb Ox Trophy

After its victory last night, Alabamais now ranked number one in football. It is also number one among the fiftystates in one other category: alphabetically. It always comes first there. Thoseare about the only things in which the state is number one. In almost every otherrespect it ranks low to bottom. On a scale from 1 to 50, with 1 being the highest (good) and50 the lowest (bad), Alabama ranks as follows:

· Homelessness 50^th

· Strokes 50^th

· Economic Opportunity 47^th

· Obesity 46^th

· Diabetes 46^th

· Education 45^th

· Smoking 45^th

· Health Care 45^th

· Taxes on cigarettes 42^nd

· Personal income 40^th

· Crime 39^th

· Teen pregnancy 39^th

· Violent crimes 23^rd

Is it just coincidental that Alabama is ranked so high in football and so low in these other categories? I don’t think so. In what I will call the Dumb Ox Law, a state is ranked in the other categories in inverse ratio to its ranking—or at least the ranking of its state university—in football. But the Dumb Ox Law is not infallible. Guess which state is ranked lower than Alabama in categories related to health, education, etc? You’re right if you guessed the neighboring state of Louisiana. If the Dumb Ox Law was infallible, Louisiana State University should have defeated Alabama last night in New Orleans, especially since it also had the home field advantage. I could speculate on why LSU lost the game last night—because I have a theory—but the game was boring enough without my making this analysis more complicated and as boring as the battle of college football titans was. Just let me say this. It is the most economically and culturally disadvantaged states that try hardest through football to compensate for their disadvantages, states that will go to extraordinary, even unethical and criminal lengths to achieve number one status.

Ohio State and Penn State are reminders that it is not just in the historically disadvantaged southern states that football is almost a religious (or at least a bread and circus) diversion from the unpleasant facts and harsh realities of life. The pieties, the religiosity, that both Ohio State and Penn State used to cover up their immorality and criminality have now been exposed for the hypocrisies that they were, though it probably won’t be long before the worshippers, the fans, are once more as fanatical about their teams as they were in the past. That will happen once the ghosts of the once holy Tressel and Parterno are exorcised. Two-time Heisman winner Tim Tebow, who is still playing and praying like a college quarterback at the professional level, may be the avatar of the religious revival underway in football.

Ohio is not just a northernstate, it is also a border state, sharing important characteristics with the South. The Midwest, just like the South, is out toprove something to the Northeast, the home of the pointy headed Ivy League “elites.” Callit the F. Scott Fitzgerald or Great Gatsby Complex. Among the hundred-and-thirty-pound Fitzgerald’s fantasies were being a war hero or a football star.That may be one reason he was such a poor student. It surprised me when Ilearned how low Ohio is ranked educationally. But I shouldn’t have beensurprised, considering how insanely determined Ohio State is to be number onein football. The Dumb Ox Law may not be fool proof, but it proves there are stilla lot of fools when it comes to college football.

Let me close with a question. What do you make of the fact that Mike Mearan is one of the most die-hard Buckeye fans in the state?

The Illustrated Ballad of Dr. Lundeen

2011-12-30T20:16:00.001-05:00

The Illustrated Balladof Dr. Lundeen

The office of Dr. James E. Lundeen in Portsmouth

This is the door of the controversial doctor

Who was accused of dispensing pain pills like candy

To “patients” who came from near and far

To a location that was handy—

The fourth floor of the Masonic Building

On Chillicothe Street in P’town.

Masonic Building, c. 1900

Was he practicing medicine or a swindle;

Was he high-minded or low-down;

Was he Hippocratic or hypocritical;

Was he hard working or just lazy;

Was he the sufferer’s best friend,

An angel of mercy—or just crazy?

He operated in God’s country, the Buckeye state,

Thirteen crowded so-called clinics

Where milling “patients” faced a long wait

That drove some of them to hysterics.

On entering, what his patients would see

Was a smoothshaven, bow-tied gent

Who was not only a bona fide M.D.

But had also been candidate for president.

For more on candidate Lundeen, click here

He proposed a foreign policy called SMITE—

A biblical assault on evil—

A reminder to enemies of God’s might,

Which could eradicate them like boll weevil.

In addition to providing a fix to those in pain,

The doctor also would ask for a donation

For his presidential campaign

To help relieve the pain of the nation.

He literally threw his hat in the ring,

A hat made by Cynthia, his millinery wife.

She was his one, his only, his everything—

His faithful companion for life,

His support hose, his holy staff.

She was the first to ask, “Jim, what’s the matter?”

The only one who could make him laugh—

She was both his dream of genie and mad hatter.

The Lundeens at Kentucky Derby in hats designed by Cynthia

The Lundeens in campaign hats designed by Cynthia

Having gone bankrupt in 2007,
Did Lundeen, when he came to P’town
Feel like he’d arrived in loser’s heaven?
Mayor Malone, President Haas, Kalb the clown,

Desimone, of Fork and Finger—

And a very close call for Kevin—

All had given creditors the finger,

All were deadbeats, all Chapter 7.

Lundeen’s office was just down the hall

From the studios of WNXT,

Where Stephanie Haze, the SOGP’s moll,
Was always denouncing the CCG—

The fourth floor hall of Masonic Building where as many as forty patients sometimes waited to see Lundeen

The Concerned Citizens Group—

For criticizing the SOGP’s dirty tricks,

While, milling in the hall, dozens of cooped

Up addicts waited impatiently for their fix,

Waited like cars to get gassed on dope.

The shorn losing candidate in one of his cramped thirteen offices

Notice the box marked “Free Trial,” a sample,

As if it contained some evil dope

From the satanic Procter and Gamble,

Which was into much more than soap.

The former P&G “satanic” logo

The Southern Ohio Growth Partnership

Controls P’town like Tammany did Manhattan

And the military now does Egypt.

While the poor of Portsmouth repine, the SOGP fatten.

Only after the homeboy was not reelected

Did the state revoke Lundeen’s license;

Only after one in eight babies were born addicted

Did authorities finally stop the pretense.

Lundeen had been dispensing for five long years,

While Stephanie Haze ranted on the station

Against C.A.V.E. People and the CCG’ers

For besmirching P’town’s reputation!

The doctor has fled to Indiana or Pennsylvania.

On the fourth floor, WNXT has found the solution:

Thirty second plugs for Mohr’s Automania—

Instead of pain pills, it’s noise pollution.

Mohr noise

Look Deeper

2011-12-27T08:51:00.001-05:00

Look Deeper

He tried creating a blog of his own

But no one but himself would read the thing.

It was so damn boring and monotone,

Always scolding, always lecturing—

The blogger no one would ever mention.

Like a desperate nerd who always jogs

In heavy traffic for the attention—

He became a parasite on trafficked blogs,

Anonymously depositing comments,

Like lice in kids’ hair, fleas in dogs’ fur—

The bench warmer who constantly torments

The loser coach to make him a starter.

Vaulter without a pole, player without a goal—

See him look deeper up his own asshole.

Robert Forrey, 2011

For more on Look Deeper, click here.

'Twas the Night Before Christmas

2011-12-24T18:14:00.000-05:00

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas: 2011

‘Twas the nightbefore Christmas, when all through house,

Not a creature wasstirring, not even a louse.

The stockings werehung by the chimney with care

In hopes a citymanager soon would be there.

Mike Mearan wasnestled all snug in his bed,

While visions of hookersdanced in his head,

And Kalb on thetoilet, in his dunce’s cap,

Had just settleddown for a long winter’s crap,

When out on thelawn there arose such a clatter,

Kalb sprang fromthe toilet to see what was the matter.

Away to the windowhe flew like a flash,

Tore open theshutters and smoked some hash.

The moon on thebreast of a hooker below

Made him want todo wheelies in the snow,

When what to hiswandering eye should appear,

But the recycled auditorswigging some beer.

A Kiwanian, lookingdishonest and spent,

It could be nobodyelse but Trent.

Pixilated fromplaying financial games,

He whistled andcalled out some names:

“Here Horner! HereRaison! Here Tricky Nixon,

As sure as shootin’I’m puttin’ the fix in.

You’ll all get raises,public employees all,

Cause your CPFA’s on the ball.”

“To CapitalImprovements say bye-bye,

Cause they’re nothing but a lot of pie in the sky.”

Then up to thehouse-top he flew

Like an elephant jumping out of a zoo.

Meanwhile,tinkling, Kalb heard on the roof

A drunken footstep that he thought was a hoof.

Failing to flushthe toilet, as Allison told him, he turned around

Just as Trent came down the chimney like a chow hound.

Like a black sheep from head to foot,

Covered all over withinches of soot,

He resembled asweep who’d just come back

From supplying Mary Poppins crack.

His eyes so twinkling, his smile so Kiwanis,

His bulk was just shortof dinosaurus.

A Certified PublicFinancial Administrator,

He was deficit financing’s favorite perpetrator.

He was chubby andplump, a gigantic old elf,

And Kalb laughed whenhe saw him in spite of himself.

A wink of Trent’seye, which showed he would fudge it,

Made Kalb understand he would “balance” the budget.

Trent spoke not aword as he cooked the books,

Transferring fundsto the usual crooks.

Then putting afinger up his nose,

He chuckled and up the chimney he rose.

He sprang to hiscycle and gave a whistle,

And away he flewlike an unguided missile.

But Kalb heard himexclaim, as he drove out of sight,

“Be sure to writeForrey an email tonight.”

Robert Forrey, 12/24/11

Hornergate

2011-12-22T14:15:00.000-05:00

Matt Dillon AWOL

2011-12-18T10:27:00.001-05:00

Matt Dillon and friend outside of the bankrupt

Shane DeSimone’s Fork and Finger Restaurant

(*For the Portsmouth Daily Times story, click here.)

Wanted for Pilfering from the C.I.P. Fund

2011-12-16T14:51:00.000-05:00

WANTED

The Portsmouth CityCouncil for Pilfering from the Capital Improvement Fund

Jim “Dopey” Kalb

Bankrupt head of the Capital Improvement Pilferers.

Chief parasite on the body politic ofPortsmouth.

Trent “The Enabler” Williams

The Auditor who cooks the books

Mike “Donut Hole” Jones

The heavily mortgaged clueless city lawyer

John “Deadbeat” Haas.

Bankrupt President of City Council

who cares more for cars than kids.

Rich “One for the Road” Saddler.

The “Portsmouth Boy” voted for the motionto pilfer.

Kevin Johnson.

Thefailed businessman who was for Kalb as mayor,

for gambling, for the city manager form of government,
and for the pilfering of the CapitalImprovement fund.

Nick “Thundering Turd” Basham.

Ex-teacher, ex-bar owner, who served half price Pilfer Beer
to disgruntled city employees conspiring to recall Mayor Murray.

*See the anti-pilfering briefs filed with the court by Frank Gerlach and Jane Murray by clicking here.

Trent Williams's Double Talk

2011-12-12T05:45:00.000-05:00

In view of the double talk thatCity Auditor Trent Williams resorted to in order to evade answering the questionsof Frank Gerlach and Jane Murray about city finances at the recent hearing atthe Court of Common Pleas, the underlined excerpt from the minutes of the Portsmouth City Council for 12 January2004, shown above,* is revealing.Williams announced in January, 2004, that there were no deficits for the year just passed, 2003. First Ward councilwomanAnne Sydnor asked how this balancing of the budget had been achieved. Where hadthe revenues come from to erase ananticipated deficit? The question could not have been clearer, but Williams repliedhe “was not sure to what figures she was referring.” Williams gave the same evasiveanswer more than once when Gerlach asked the same question earlier this month. Williamssaid he was not sure what figuresGerlach was asking about. Gerlach, like Sydnor in 2004, was asking for anaccounting of the revenues that had help erase the deficit. Williams said hewas not sure which revenues Gerlach was referring to. Williams was beingevasive because it was not “revenues” thathad erased the budget but rather funds that had been transferred from theCapital Improvement fund. In October, 2003, with the approval of Judge Harcha, the city had made up the deficit in theGeneral Fund by transferring money from the Capital Improvement fund. By law,the Capital Improvement funds are supposed to be used only for capitalimprovements, for the city’s infrastructure, and for such structures as theMunicipal Building. But a loophole in the law allows the city to petition the Common Pleas Court to allow the transferof CIP funds, which is what was done in 2003 and which is what the city isasking to do again, in 2011. The Capital Improvement funds are the piggy bankthat the city periodically empties to pay off city employees.

The sorry condition of theMunicipal Building today is a consequence of the funneling of Capital Improvementfunds into the General Fund, which is used to pay general operating expenses,such as salaries and benefits for city employees, including fire and policepersonnel. The city has been generous tothe fire and police personnel in particular because they are a potent politicalforce in Portsmouth, and politicians cannot expect to stay in office if theydon’t cater to that powerful political constituency. Now Judge Marshall, presiding in theCommon Pleas Court, is being asked again to make an exception, even though, asGerlach pointed out, the city is not currently in a deficit and has revenuescoming in that will assure that it won’t fall into a deficit. Why does the citywant the CIP funds to be transferred again? What is the emergency? Theemergency is that the politicians, including City Solicitor Jones (who, last timewe checked, appeared to be mortgaged tothe hilt and beholden to those who control the city financially**) wants to makesure there is enough money in the city treasury to provide a reported 12% payincrease in wages for the fire department. Can that be right, 12% for firepersonnel in these belt-tightening times? Surely the court is not going to rewardthe city’s budget busting-infrastructurewrecking behavior by allowing the transfer again. Will the citizens again haveto take it to a higher court to see that justice is done, as it did when itappealed to the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn the Common Pleas Court’s rulingthat City Clerk Jo Ann Aeh had not mutilated recall petitions?

The city is now rehiring thesame employees, the same people, who negotiated the contracts while Kalb wasmayor that put the city in the financial bind that caused the state to putPortsmouth on a fiscal watch list. Kalb will once again be in a position to help take Portsmouth down the road to bankruptcy, a road he knows somethingabout, having traveled it himself personally, as did the unelected, out-to-lunch mayor David Malone andthe deadbeat president of city council, John Haas. The court should not allowthe city to continue to follow the same pathof misusing capital improvement funds, which led the state to declare Scioto County thefirst county ever to be in a fiscal emergency. The city will end up like thecounty if Williams is allowed to get away with his double talk. The city and the auditor have made no effort to change the way the city mishandles its finances since the Common Pleas Court approved the transfer in 2003. By approving another transfer, the court will be condoning the way the city auditor cooks the books.

*For more on the 2003 transfer of funds, go to Teresa Mollette’s invaluable website Portsmouthcitizens.info by clicking here.

** For my earlier post on Solicitor Jones's personal finances, click here.

Bankrupt DeSimone's Crappy Properties

2011-12-06T17:20:00.001-05:00

DeSimone and Friends

In July, 2004, Shane DeSimone bought sixteen pieces of heavily mortgaged Portsmouth houses from Home Federal Savings and Loan, a Kentucky bank, for about $440,000 dollars. Three of the properties, 1701, 1703, and 1709 Jackson Street (not shown here), were renovated into the Fork and Finger Restaurant, which he is the owner of. But most of the houses, including those shown below, were ramshackle and in the seven years since then have only gotten worse. The first house below, at 318 2nd Street, now boarded up, was a crack house for several years. The last house below, at 1525 Jackson, may still have tenants, with children, judging by a light inside and the battered playthings surrounding it. On September 27,2011, four months after Home Federal Savings and Loan took DeSimone to court,he sold it to Hatcher for $10,000, well below what the county auditor had it valued at. Hatcher may be doingwhat homeowners in the John St. area suspected him doing there—letting housesgo to hell as a way of depressing property values so he can buy them for a song. DeSimone sued then mayor Murray for saying she thought he bought these properties to launder drug money. He claimed she defamed him, making it harder to achieve one of his ambitions: to be mayor of Portsmouth! Why did he buy these properties? Whatever the reason, he is now bankrupt and owes Home Federal about a half million dollars. His properties will be auctioned off at the County Courthouse, beginning at 1 PM, Wednesday, December 21.

You can see the County Court docket on his bankruptcy by clicking here.

Fiscalholicism

2011-12-01T21:41:00.001-05:00

City Auditor in advanced stages of fiscalholicism

After sitting in on the hearing at the Common Pleas Court on the morning of December 1, 2011, I reached the following conclusions:

1. One of the reasons the city is in a fiscal crisis is because historically city officials and the mayor in particular get in bed with municipal employees unions, particularly the police and fire unions.

2. Elected officials do not negotiate with the municipal employee unions, they collude with them because the bottom line for elected officials is getting elected and getting elected or reelected without the support of municipal employees is hard as hell.

3. One of the ways elected officials have paid off municipal employees for their political support is transferring money out of the Capital Improvement account into the General Account.

4. Elected officials are reluctant to spend the Capital Improvement monies on capital improvements—roads, sewers, municipal buildings—because capital improvements do not vote.

5. People vote and municipal employees are people; increasing their wages and benefits makes political sense because they not only vote for the colluding public officials, they campaign for them.

6. The police and fire personnel are very good at campaigning. They do not hesitate to use scare tactics to get voters, especially elderly voters, to vote for measures, such as the increase in the city income tax, that are favorable to police and fire personnel.

7. Now that the city income tax has passed by a narrow margin, police and especially fire personnel are campaigning to get the transfer of unused money in the Capital Improvement account, where it can be used only for capital improvements, into the General Fund, where it can be used to further increase salaries and benefits for police and fire personnel.

8. Municipal unions, and particularly the fire and police unions, give unionism a bad name. Unions that must engage in real negotiations, such as teachers, who are not invited to get into bed with elected officials, are blamed for the higher taxes that result from the increased cost of salaries and benefits of public employees, particularly the police and fire personnel.

9. City solicitor Mike Jones represents the interests not of the taxpayers of Portsmouth but of the municipal unions, particularly the police and fire department unions.

Fiscalholic City Solicitor Mike Jones, who represents the Police and Fire Unions in city government

10. Both Auditor Williams and Solicitor Jones vowed to Judge Marshall that if he transfers the funds, they will do everything they can to see that the city puts its fiscal house in order. Williams is not an alcoholic but he is a fiscalholic. Some of his answers to questions were so non-responsive and strange as to suggest he is in an extreme stage of fiscalholicsm.

11. If Judge Marshall agrees to the transfer he will be enabling fiscalholics in city government to continue what is by now a long standing practice of robbing the Capital Improvement Fund to pay for salaries and benefits for municipal employees.

12. The Municipal Building is the most glaring example of what happens when Capital Improvement monies are not used for capital improvements. People are very important, including rank and file municipal employees, but so is Portsmouth’s infrastructure, and that is what Capital Improvement monies should be spent on.

Capital Improvement funds have not been properly used to maintain the Municipal Building

The participation of Frank Gerlach and Jane Murray in the hearing, speaking against the transfer, was outstanding; they are probably the most capable mayors Portsmouth has had in the last half century. We should not give up on Portsmouth when we have people like them speaking up for taxpayers.

A Sewer Runs Through It

2011-11-27T08:08:00.004-05:00

After the Ohio River recedes

A Sewer Runs Through It

When the river rises and then recedes,

It’s obvious we’re in deep trouble

Because it’s like what proceeds

From war-torn cities where the rubble

Remains in the streets months later.

Here, it’s an unbiodegradable “crick”

Coagulating at the Mountain Dude equator,

A jungle of exhausted tires and plastic.

No, this mess isn’t the result of war

But of the arrogant assumption

Of an Olympian right to litter

By the gold medalists of consumption.

Since the town can’t prevent or undo it,
The river runs like a sewer through it.

Robert Forrey, 2011

Black Friday

2011-11-25T07:26:00.001-05:00

Black Friday

Whom the gods would destroy, they first addict to shopping.

Life’s one endless whirl of bargain hunting.

It’s worse than free basing, worse than pill popping—

Steer madness, with hoofing and grunting—

Anything to be the first turkey in line

After the stuffing of Thanksgiving.

Getting and shopping—isn’t this a sign,

Isn’t this the purpose, of living?

Isn’t it worth getting trampled to death?
Isn’t it more satisfying than sex?

Isn’t it what we’ll do with our last breath,

What we’ve been doing since Tyrannosaurus Rex?

After 9/11, with the market sharply dropping,
Didn’t Bush tell Americans to go shopping?

Robert Forrey, 2011

Kalb's Record

2011-11-19T12:13:00.062-05:00

Jim Kalb is now OK with City Manager

Nothing would give me more pleasure than never having to write or even think about James D. Kalb again, but that is not going to be the case because in the game of musical chairs that is played in city government, “Dopey” Kalb ran unopposed for city council to fill the Fourth Ward seat that was being vacated by “Sleepy” Albrecht. Running unopposed, Kalb of course won. If anyone had run against him, I’m sure he would have lost, but it is the rare qualified decent person who wants to descend into the sewer of Portsmouth politics, and more particularly into the political armpit that is Ward Four. If he had to run against an opponent on his record, how could Kalb have beaten anybody? His record includes not just his political record—not just Marting’s, Ameresco, Indian Head Rock, and his infamous middle of the night redneck email to me which went viral and global, bringing shame to a city which, as the epicenter of drug addiction, had more than enough to be ashamed about already. No, in addition to Kalb’s political record, there is also his police record. As a pot smoking kid, Kalb was as much of a physical danger behind the steering wheel of a hotrod as he later would be financially at the helm of city government.

There are two James D. Kalbs in police records, the father and the son, and the police records do not always make clear which is which. Though in later records the son is clearly listed as James D. Kalb II, he is occasionally in the earlier records listed simply, like his father, as James D. Kalb. The police record of James D. Kalb, the father, began when he was a senior at the Scioto County Joint Vocational School. (Where Kalb is concerned, it is apt that the word “Joint” was in the name of the school.) Unfortunately, too often the first place that a person’s substance abuse problem shows itself is, dangerously, behind the wheel of an automobile, which was the case with Kalb. The senior Kalb’s traffic violations began in 1973, when he went through a stop sign (case #484) in a vehicle that was unsafe (#485) and that had no tail lights (#486). The kid was just getting started. Later in that same year, 1973, he was cited for speeding (#6027) and also cited for driving an unregistered vehicle (#9267), which happened to lack the required safety equipment (#9268). Was he operating under the influence of a controlled substance in any of his driving violations? Quite possibly, because in that same year, 1973, he was arrested for possession of marijuana (#10410). In 1975 he was again cited for speeding, (#5788) and in 1976 he was cited twice for that same offense (#5078 and #6691). In 1977 he was arrested for disorderly conduct (#2109) and had his license suspended. In that same year, 1977, he got another speeding ticket (#2924). In 1980, he was ticketed for speeding (#7588) and, for the second time, was cited for driving an unregistered vehicle (#9155). In 1980 he was cited by state police for parking in a prohibited area (#9005028). In 1981, he was cited for speeding three times (#6821, #7204, and #8256).

Bankruptcy

Kalb’s record also includes the bankruptcy that he and his second wife Allison filed for on January 8, 1991, in United States Bankruptcy Court, in Cincinnati, for the Southern District of Ohio, case #1:91-bk-10132. What kind of a racket is this bankruptcy anyway? Mayor David Malone, in 2005, and City Council president John R. Haas, in 1996, also filed for bankruptcy. Who was Haas’s shyster lawyer? None other than the unindicted ex-city councilman Mike Mearan! Is it any wonder that Portsmouth is chronically on the verge of bankruptcy with crooks like this running the city? At the October League of Women Voters forum at the Welcome Center, according to the Portsmouth Daily Times (10-19-11) the candidates were asked their views on the city’s financial crisis. Auditor candidate Doyle said the question was “a no-brainer.” City Auditor Williams said, “The city is absolutely in a financial crisis.” Kalb answered, in effect, there is no crisis: “I don’t know that I would consider it a financial crisis.” Yes, Kalb the bankrupt is not worried about the city going bankrupt. Reassuring isn’t it?

Things did not go well in Kalb’s personal life either. His first marriage ended in divorce and his son from that marriage, James D. Kalb II, became a drug addict and a felon. In 1998 his second wife filed for divorce, and for custody and child support, and in October of that year she got the court to issue a restraining order against him. His police record continued even after he became a politician. In 1999 he was charged with three instances of mutilating petitions that had sought his recall from city council (#9902637, #9902644, #9902651). Ohio law defines “mutilation” as the defacement, damage, alteration, or modification of a petition. At a council meeting, City Clerk JoAn Aeh indignantly denied “mutilating” any petition. (You can hear her indignant denial on Teresa Mollette’s invaluable website, under the “Recall” heading.) Who did she think she was fooling with her bluster. Under oath she had admitted to altering the petitions, including the ones to recall Kalb that had been filed with her, and altering by the state’s definition was an act of mutilation. Kalb was also accused of “mutilating” the petitions, which in his case consisted of taking photocopies of the original petitions that Aeh had given him and going door to door to urge signers to request Aeh to have their names removed from the original petitions. The charges against Kalb were subsequently dismissed in the Scioto County Court of Pleas (big surprise!), but the whole “mutilation” case went to the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled in effect that JoAn Aeh had indeed mutilated the petitions by illegally invalidating signatures on them. The Supreme Court ordered that those signatures be restored. (For more on this, go to Teresa Mollette’s website through the link above.) To bring Kalb’s record up to date, in 2009 he was taken to court by Southern Ohio Radiologists for an unpaid bill (#090237). So, in addition to the traffic violations, the pot bust, the bankruptcy, the restraining order, and the mutilation of petitions, he was also a deadbeat.

For all his misdemeanors, Kalb has never been convicted of a felony, which qualifies him to be the front man for Lee Scott, the owner of the Columbia Music Hall. Because Scott is an ex-felon, the liquor license for the Columbia can’t be in his name. Always the eager tool for somebody, provided there’s something in it for him, like being manager of the Columbia, Kalb has allowed his name to be on the liquor license. It may be only a question of time before his record includes violations of Ohio’s liquor laws.

Kalb’s Record on the Issue of City Manager

One of the reasons I am calling attention now to Kalb’s police and political records is that he is again on city council where, once the city government shifts to city manager, he will be able to do greater mischief since there will be no real mayor, only a ceremonial one, to keep him in check. In the meeting sponsored by the League of Women Voters (LWV), in October, 2011, Kalb implied he was in favor of the shift to the city manager form of government, offering himself as an example of what is wrong with the mayoral form of government. He was able to get elected mayor, he pointed out, in spite of the fact that his experience had been limited to being a grocery clerk his whole career. He was admitting, in other words, that he was unqualified to be mayor. Now he tells us! But why is he confessing at this point? Because he and the other scofflaw, deadbeat dad and bozo boozer councilmen will have the city manager under their thumb. There won’t be a real mayor to stand up to them. The balance of power, so important in all levels of American government, will be lacking. But back in 1995, when running for city council, Kalb in answer to a question from the League of Women Voters took exactly the opposite position, saying that “dealing with the public on a daily basis for twenty-five years qualifies me for this position” [as city councilman]. Dealing with the public? Yes, stocking shelves and punching the cash register did put him in contact with the public, but did that kind of contact qualify him, or would it really qualify anyone, to be a council member or mayor? In 1995 he said yes it would, but in 2011 he admitted it wouldn’t. In neither case was he speaking truthfully. He was speaking rather only for the sake of political expediency. Kalb is lacking not only in brains but principles. He is so stupidly unscrupulous that I think the city charter should have a provision in it that the public can take out a restraining order against politicians like him.

Back in 1995, the League of Women Voters had asked him a question directly related to the issue of the city manager form of government. He replied, in 1995, and it is a matter of public record: “I do favor the present provisions of the Charter concerning administrative service, as opposed to the previous ‘City Manager’ provisions. The chief administrator of the city (the Mayor) should be elected by the entire voting public, not appointed by council members” [emphasis added].

He was against city manager when as a councilman he was conniving to replace Greg Bauer as mayor. But now that he is a councilman again and doesn't have a prayer of ever being mayor, he is for city manager. Why? Because he will be one of the city manager’s bosses, that’s why.

Stifling Debate

Kalb and the other council members will have the power to hire and fire city managers. How long would a city manager with any kind of qualifications, prospects, and self-respect stand working for and being subordinate to someone with the low moral and intellectual caliber of a Kalb? We can expect to have the same high turnover among city managers we did in the past. At the League of Women Voters forum that I earlier alluded to, there were only twenty-three or so people total in the meeting hall and only six of those—six!—represented the public. Everyone else present was with the League of Women Voters, city government, or the media. The current format for the LWV forums is obviously not to the public’s liking. If the LWV had sponsored a debate on the issue of city manager, I’m sure there would have been more than six people in attendance. I know I would have been there, possibly as one of the debaters. Since the president of the LWV publicly endorsed the change to city manager in a letter to the Portsmouth Daily Times, it is disappointing that she did not think to have a public debate on the issue.

When the chief supporter of the city manager form of government, Kevin Johnson, came to Portsmouth, within the last ten years, he thought electing Jim Kalb mayor and bringing in gambling would be good for the city. Now he thinks the city manager will be good also, even though Portsmouth tried and for very good reason rejected it in the past. Sometimes Johnson has some good ideas for the city, but gambling, Jim Kalb as mayor, and the city manager form of government are not among them. Johnson has officiously succeeded in sending Portsmouth off on a wild city manager goose chase for good government. How long will the wild goose chase be this time—ten, twenty, thirty years? If he wanted to do something useful, Johnson should have campaigned to reduce the term of city council members to two years. What a blessing it would be if the likes of Kalb and the rest of them were in office for only two years! Think of the recalls that would not be necessary. The maxim that Portsmouth residents should think about as the city returns unwisely to the city manager form of government is this: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.”

The Morning After (the election)

2011-11-09T07:52:00.014-05:00

Most residents may be surprised that in yesterday’s election the county measure to increase the tax for the Alcohol, Drug, and Mental Health Services (ADMHS) was defeated and by a sizeable margin. It is surprising after all the national and local media focus on addiction in southern Ohio that ADMHS went down to defeat. If any measure on the ballot should have benefited from the anti-drug sentiment in Scioto County, it would have been ADMHS. But that turned out to be not the case. What happened?

About a year ago, I warned the most important figure behind the ADMHS measure that it might be defeated. I warned him specifically that police chief Charles Horner might horn in and hi-jack the anti-drug movement, and that’s just what he did. Horner may have been a failure as a crime fighter and especially as a drug buster (his own son was guilty of dealing drugs), but he is skilled at saving his own skin. Even though he has been a miserable failure professionally, he has succeeded politically. Mayors who have wanted to fire him have come and gone, partly because he sabotaged them politically.

Horner’s goal was the passage not of ADMHS but of the city income tax increase, which, if it survives a recount, will help prevent the loss of jobs in the police department. But the passage of the city income tax increase by the narrowest of margins will not begin to solve the city’s budget ills. On the contrary, it will make those ills worse. Postponing surgery isn’t the answer to the city’s financial ills. Increasing the city income tax will save jobs in the police and fire departments without doing anything to balance the budget. It buys time, time that the city cannot afford. The financial ills will likely metastasize.

SOLACE HANGOVER

The group that could have insured the passage of the ADMHS measure is SOLACE. But unfortunately Horner hi-jacked that group, which is now functioning as his political action committee. The political support of SOLACE has emboldened him to run for Scioto County sheriff. If Horner ever had to run for any office, including dog catcher, he wouldn’t have been elected. If he depended upon the votes of his own department to save his job, he would have been toast a long time ago. He applied for the Shawnee State head of security job, and he didn’t get that, yet he thinks he can be elected the head lawman for the whole county. I don’t think so. He is the most hated figure in Portsmouth, if not the county. I don’t think he deserves to be. There are others, involved directly and indirectly in politics, who are more deserving of that dubious distinction. But he is bad enough. And as much as anybody, he deserves blame for the failure of the ADMHS measure to pass—the measure on the ballot that would have most helped in the fight against addiction in Scioto County. If the defeat of ADMHS doesn't help members of SOLACE realize how far they got off the track when they hooked up with Horner, nothing will. If anybody woke up with a hangover this morning, it should be SOLACE.

VOTE AGAINST TAX INCREASE AND CITY MANAGER

2011-11-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

Lady Liberty Says Exercise Your Right to Vote on November 8

VOTE AGAINST THE INCREASE IN THE CITY INCOME TAX

Increasing the City Income Tax will make it possible for the free-spending Portsmouth City Government to continue to pay salaries and generous benefits to members of the police and fire departments that the taxpayers cannot afford. It's as simple as that.

Here is what the ballot will look like. Vote for fiscal responsibility by filling in the bubble next to "Against the Charter Amendment."

VOTE AGAINST THE SWITCH TO THE CITY MANAGER FORM OF CITY GOVERNMENT

The city manager would be a puppet in the hands of the City Council, which could fire him or her whenever and for whatever reason. The city has already tried the city manager form of government, and it didn't work. Frank Gerlach has been both mayor and city manager of Portsmouth, and he says the city is better off with the mayoral form of city government.

Here is what the ballot will look like, including all the fine print. Vote against city manager government by filling in the bubble next to "Against the Charter Amendment."

The Billboard from Hell

2011-11-03T16:08:00.000-04:00

The Billboard from Hell

First they prescribed Oxycontin,

To help “patients” get well.

Then, just to rub it in,

They erected the billboard from hell.

Robert Forrey

Halloween, 2011

2011-11-01T11:59:00.000-04:00

Halloween

Boon of the candy manufacturer,

Benefactor of every dentist,

Halloween’s the number one malefactor,

Topps in America’s Ten Worst Holiday List.

Little girls dressed as angels or tarts

And tots in the arms of mothers are taught

To trick or treat and break men’s hearts.

Each Snicker with some pain is fraught.

Fresh from blue-collar neighborhoods,

Grabbing what they can of Good and Plenty,

Little boys dressed as bums or hoods

Foreshadow what they might be at twenty.

Kids addicted to fat, salt, and sugar,

Graduate to sex, drugs, and meshugga.

Robert Forrey 2011

Rick Rattled

2011-10-28T09:51:00.002-04:00

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Duncan. I enjoyed your illustrated lecture about Portsmouth politics very much, but me and the other rodents in our ward feel that maybe, when it comes to one particular person, that maybe, just maybe, you sort of go off the deep end and neglect waste water, which is a subject we care about a lot.”

Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . .

2011-10-24T17:46:00.008-04:00

. . . who’s the dopiest councilman of all?

Nothing would give me more pleasure than never having to write, or even think about a dope like Jim Kalb again, but that is not going to be the case because he will be the front man for the renovated Columbia Theater, which insures there will be problems there, and he is running again, unopposed, for city council to fill the Fourth Ward seat that is being vacated by Jerrold Albrecht.That’s Portsmouth’s version of musical chairs, which two-year terms for city council would help put an end to.

Our recent crop of Portsmouth politicians closely resembles the Seven Dwarfs, with Albrecht as Sleepy (always dozing), Kalb as Dopey (because of all the dope), Basham as boorish Brashful, councilman Greg Bauer as Sneezy (from too much snorting), Chief Horner as Grumpy, and former mayor Frank “Sneakers and Sash” Gerlach as Happy. When Sneezy Bauer defeated Happy Gerlach for mayor, Dopey Kalb became president of council. Then Sneezy Bauer was recalled as mayor after Dopey Kalb conspired with Grumpy Horner to accuse Sneezy of purchasing the Marting Building illegally. When Sneezy was recalled by a two to one margin, Dopey Kalb became mayor, and Sleepy Albrecht was appointed by The Wizard of Ooze to take Dopey’s place on the city council. Are you following me? Then Snow White trounced Dopey Kalb in the last mayoral election forcing him into the shadows. But then Dopey and all the city employees and the bikers ganged up on Snow White, who was recalled, and now Sleepy Albrecht is retiring and Dopey Kalb, probably on the advice of the Wicked Witch, is running unopposed for the Fourth Ward council seat.

Dopey’s being manager of the Columbia spells trouble for that historic landmark, just as Dopey’s being back on city council spells serious trouble for Portsmouth. Far more than any other dwarf, Dopey is responsible for the financial mess the city’s in. When it comes to handling finances, he’s a real dope.

In the tradition of the failed businessmen who end up on city council, the seventh dwarf, Kevin “Doc” Johnson, knows just what the cure for the city is: a more businesslike form of government in the person of a city manager. But we’ve already been through that fiasco, with Prince Harming, Barry Feldman, the infamous city manager of thirty years ago. Feldman’s come and gone, and Portsmouth, having had enough of city managers coming and going like migratory birds, went back to the mayoral form of government. If we go back to the city manager form of government, the dwarfs on the city council will be running the city again.

Citizens for Bitter Government and the All-America City

2011-10-14T00:09:00.184-04:00

The faded, peeling reminder on the Wall of Fame of the selection of Portsmouth as an All-America City, in 1979

There are times when I feel sorry for an opponent. This is one of those times. I am not opposed to the city manager form of government per se, as I pointed out in a previous blog, but I am opposed to Portsmouth switching back to the manager form of city government because our corrupt government and vice-ridden river city is wholly unsuitable for it. A city has to be at a level of ethical and professional maturity before the city manager form of government will work, but Portsmouth is no where near that standard, not when petty criminals, failed businessmen, scofflaws and people with degrees in music education often wind up being “public servants,” often after being appointed to office by our corrupt city council. Still, I can’t help feeling sorry for the Citizens for Better Government (CBG), the group supporting the switch back to the city manager. On October 11, 2011, the CBG circulated a press release that included the following pathetic and misleading argument in favor of the city manager form of government:

“Back in 1979, citizens of Portsmouth were proud and excited for the future. It was in this year that the National Civic League named Portsmouth, for the first and only time, an ‘All-American City’ [sic]. And this incredible award and honor was due to the accomplishments off [sic], amongst many… Portsmouth’s City Manager” [emphasis added].

It struck me as odd that the city manager who was instrumental in Portsmouth winning this “incredible award” was not named. I assumed it was just an oversight that the CBG hadn’t given credit where credit was due. But then I remembered who the city manager was in 1979, and then I realized not mentioning his name was probably not an oversight on the part of the CBG but rather a deliberate omission. The city manager in 1979 was none other than Barry Feldman, the most controversial of the thirty or so city managers that Portsmouth had from 1930 to 1988. In 1980, the city council voted to fire Feldman, as the city charter gave them the authority to do, but the unelected rulers of Portsmouth organized a recall movement that removed the councilmen, not Feldman, from office. Clayton Johnson (according to the Sentinel) got him reinstated. Reinstated or not, no city manager did more to discredit Portsmouth and the city manager form of government than Feldman, so naturally the Citizens for Better Government would not want to mention his name, which had become synonymous with bad government. The Citizens for Better Government not only left out the name of the controversial city manager whom they credited with getting Portsmouth the All-America City designation, they also got the name of the award wrong. The correct name is not the All-American City; it is the All-America City.

The unnamed city manager

If Barry Feldman was such a great city manager, the question arises: why didn’t Portsmouth’s Wall of Fame, created in the early 1990s, include him among the stars on the wall? Again, it might have been an oversight, but that was probably not the case since Feldman had become an embarrassment to the city and had left not long after being reinstated. Turnover was frequent and a destabilizing feature of Portsmouth’s city manager system of government. Feldman’s four years as city manager was the most bitter period in the last sixty years of Portsmouth’s political history. If Feldman is the CBG’s idea of an ideal city manager, then that group should more appropriately be called not Citizens for Better Government but Citizens for Bitter Government, which is what we likely will be returning to if we go the city manager route again. As long as a majority of the city council are the pawns of Portsmouth’s unelected rulers, which is usually the case, it doesn’t make much difference what kind of city government we have, though I think it is better to have a bad mayoral than a bad city manager system. At least a mayor is not designated by the charter as the servant of the city council, which a city manager is. Keeping the mayoral form of government in Portsmouth will assure that the checks and balances that American government at all levels is based upon will be retained, for what it’s worth.

The National Civic League

It’s worth taking a closer look at the National Civic League (NCL), the organization that makes the All-America City awards, which the Citizens for Better Government in its press release glorified as “this incredible award and honor.” There is no denying that the National Civic League is very good at public relations. If one of the aims of advertising is to persuade people to buy products they don’t need and can’t afford, then one of the aims of public relations is to spin the news so much that the public is too dizzy to know which side is up and which down, or which corporation not only profits from but also preys upon the public and which doesn’t, and which politician is honorable (a rare bird) and which dishonorable. Incidentally, the CBG conferred on one of its members, a former controversial Portsmouth councilwoman, the title the Honorable Anne Sydnor, which shows you how much the term honorable can be misused for public relations purposes. The essence of public relations, in my view, is, through deceptive practices, making anything, no matter how bad, look better. Isn’t that why public relations practitioners are called “spin doctors”?

The chief spin doctor of the British government was later forced to resign after she recommended on the day of the 9/11 attacks that it was a good time to release any bad news the government might be sitting on because it would be buried beneath the horrendous news of 9/11. Isn’t that the most cynical kind of public relations you ever heard of? The NCL spins not only on behalf of the cities it selects as clients but even more on behalf of itself. Remember the movie The Miracle Worker? The NCL is so good at spinning that the public might end up believing that America might sink into chaos if the miracle working NCL was not there to rescue its cities from unemployment, poverty, racism, crime, drugs, prostitution, etc. The National Civic League is so good at promoting itself that it would probably get an All-America Public Relations award if there was an organization in the business of annually granting such an award. If you want to see how good the NCL is at spinning itself, visit their website.

Where does the NCL get the money to keep their non-profit organization going? It gets corporate support from a wide variety of private and public sources, everyone from State Farm Insurance to the Sprint Foundation, and from Southwest Airlines to the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado. Covering all public relations bases, the NCL is green, diverse, and intergenerational, serving everyone from kids to senior citizens. In contrast to the Ameresco Corporation, which focuses on energy related areas, including in Portsmouth, the NCL hires out its staff as consultants in almost every conceivable problematic area of municipal life. How effective are they? In Portsmouth’s case, not very. Instead of leading to a brighter future, the All-America City award of 1979 was followed almost immediately by bitterness, recalls, recriminations, and continued economic decline, and in 1988 by the scrapping of the dysfunctional city manager form of government. What form of municipal government does the NCL recommend? The city manager form, of course, which is modeled on the business corporation. The city manager system, a reflection free market fundamentalism, is part of the process of the corporatization of America. What is good enough for General Electric is good enough for the All-America City, to rework an old slogan.

Like a Vanity License Plate or a Bald Pate

The NCL also recommends that cities “Hire NCL to help you dream, create a shared vision, and a specific and achievable action plan.” Are there costs connected with all this? There are, and a city councilman in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a serial All-America City, questioned whether the taxpayers of his city could afford it. When he tried to contact NCL to find out particulars about its operation, he found they played their cards pretty close to their vest. An All-America City award is a little like a vanity license plate: you have to pay extra for it, but does it make a car bigger, faster, or otherwise increase its value? I don’t think so, anymore than it does to have Ohio’s motto, “With God all things are possible” inscribed on your car or head, or should that be “With City Manager all things are possible”?

Such gestures do not work miracles, anymore than having a city manager form of government does. Costa Mesa, California, is a city manager city, but that did not prevent it mismanaging its finances, leading to the firing of about half the 500 plus city employees, one of whom committed suicide by jumping off the city hall. Even if Citizens for ~~Better~~ Bitter Government think it’s “incredible,” becoming an All-America City doesn’t work miracles. I’m embarrassed for them for having to resort to such a pathetic argument in favor of the city manager, but that is not going to stop me from voting against that form of government on November 8th.

How I will be marking my ballot, voting against the city manager charter amendment

VOTE AGAINST TAX INCREASE AND CITY MANAGER

2011-10-04T05:23:00.006-04:00

Lady Liberty Says Exercise Your Right to Vote on November 8

VOTE AGAINST THE INCREASE IN THE CITY INCOME TAX

Here is what the ballot will look like. Vote for fiscal responsibility by filling in the bubble next to "Against the Charter Amendment."

VOTE AGAINST THE SWITCH TO THE CITY MANAGER FORM OF CITY GOVERNMENT

Here is what the ballot will look like, including all the fine print. Vote against city manager government by filling in the bubble next to "Against the Charter Amendment."

American Garden

2011-09-27T06:06:00.000-04:00

American Garden

Is it necessary to cultivate our American garden,

Even as American arteries harden?

Biblical nation of salt, sugar and fat—

What on earth hath ye begat?
Your idea of natural is Snapple?
For god's sake eat an apple!

Robert Forrey 2011

"American Garden" is from my blog (click to link) Poems Old and New.

Jane Murray's Letter to State Auditor

2011-09-23T20:10:00.004-04:00

M. Jane Murray 1920 Dorman Drive Portsmouth Ohio 45662 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

September 21, 2011

The Honorable Dave Yost

Ohio Auditor of State

88 East Broad Street, 10th Floor

Columbus, OH 43215

Dear Auditor Yost:

It is my understanding that legally the City of Portsmouth has been and is now in a state of fiscal emergency. With the experiences I had as mayor, it is my opinion that the only way that financial stability for the city can be restored is through intervention by your office. Having worked with Auditors Barga and Thompson, I know they are fully aware that I inherited a $1.2 M. deficit at the beginning of 2010 and that the city council refused to enact my balanced budget but instead enacted a planned deficit budget in 2010 and have done so for 2011 as well. This is unheard of.

At my request, your office conducted the city’s 2010. It confirms that the city auditor, city council, and previous mayors have violated state statutes by consistently using restricted enterprise and special revenue funds to pay for general government operations. Water, Sewer, Sanitation and State gasoline funds have been diverted to pay for salaries and benefits and general fund operations and services. As an example, in the 2011 city budget, over $1 million of water (enterprise) revenues are being used to pay part of the salaries and benefits of fire department employees. Yet water lines continue to break over and over. A plan for replacing aged lines doesn’t even exist. The disruption and cost of these breaks to residences and businesses continue. The destruction to the streets likewise get no or insufficient attention.

Further bad public policy move is afoot. At the September 12 council meeting and as a way to partially address the city’s budgetary crisis, City Solicitor Michael Jones suggested the city petition the Scioto County Court of Common Pleas for permission to transfer capital monies into the operating budget to help offset the deficit. The city should not be allowed to raid capital funds to pay for operating expenses. There are desperate capital projects for which these funds should be expended. The voters approved these capital funds and mandated in the city’s charter they be spent for capital projects, not general operations. The city previously petitioned the Court of Common Pleas in 2003 for use of the capital monies and Judge Harcha approved the transfer, but warned the city not to make the request again.

To date, there has been no discussion and no planning at all undertaken to address the deficits. The council put an income tax increase on the May primary ballot and it failed. There is another on the November ballot. Even if the tax increase passes, the funds will be insufficient to address the depth of the financial well dug by this government these past 10 years. The salaries are not the problem. It’s the benefits.

It is my opinion that, because they benefitted too, the elected officials contributed to the financial disaster by approving union contracts such that the city pays all pension contributions – the employees contribute $0; employees contribute a mere $25/individual and $50/family monthly for insurance premiums and this only began in 2009; the council gave themselves the same health insurance benefits in the late 90s – though this action was challenged in court and rejected – the benefit continues to this day; 3 weeks of vacation leave after one year employment, 4 after five years, 5 after ten years and 6 after fifteen years (a month and a half); generous sick, holiday, funeral, etc., etc. leave, and the list of benefits go on.

Though the 2010 Audit warns the city not to expend enterprise and restricted funds for other purposes, the city intends to continue this process. At the last council meeting and by emergency action (also contrary to law), the council approved a proposal by the city auditor to spend $8,000 for a consultant to devise sufficient rationale for the city to continue to raid these funds as they have in the past.

Having been a local government professional for many years, I can attest to the desperate situation of the city’s infrastructure, the myriad problems facing our neighborhoods, sewage backing up in dozens of people’s homes, crime, drugs, prostitution…and the list goes on. Yet none of these issues have been nor will be addressed fiscally should the city continue down the same financially disastrous road.

I join others and respectfully request that you: 1) take over the financial responsibilities of the city similar to your actions for Scioto County; and, 2) do whatever you can in your capacity as Auditor of State to stop the city government from using capital funds for the intent and purposes described above, and urge you to take legal action if necessary. Unless the community can get help from outside, from your office, I have no doubt things will deteriorate rapidly and dramatically. The residents, the citizens will be the big losers.

Sincerely,

M. Jane Murray

Cc: Charles F. Barga, David B. Thompson

TRASH TALK

2011-09-13T07:54:00.007-04:00

Portsmouth's Trashy Municipal Building

Portsmouth is in the news again! Not for drugs but for trash.

When Janice Shanks recently hauled two bags of trash to mayor Malone’s office in the Municipal Building, a local newspaper reporter, Frank Lewis, happened to be in the Municipal Building and wrote a story about it. The trash story went viral even in the virile Lone Star State. The story appeared in newspapers in Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston, San Antonio, etc. A friend of Janice Shanks in Texas read about it on Yahoo. It has possibly been reported in every state in the union, by one means or other. It was even reported in Idaho and Maine. How do you like them potatoes?

The trash story has appeared in the Huffington Post, as redneck Portsmouth Mayor Jim Kalb’s trash-talking midnight email to me did in September, 2009. (Click here for that story.)

Reports of it have appeared in thousands of newspapers, television stations, web sites and emails across the country and around the world. Malone got himself and the city a million dollars of publicity, bad publicity, by the way he mishandled the trash. And of course buck passer that he is, Malone’s blaming the mess on Bill Beaumont, the City Service Director. That was one of Kalb’s tricks, to blame Beaumont, and Malone is following suit. Miscommunication is the word Malone used to describe what happened. It’s not miscommunication, it’s mismanagement, his mismanagement.

Janice Shanks is a sweet woman with a sense of humor and she’s taking it in stride. When I asked her about it, she replied with tongue in cheek, “It must have been a slow news day.”

Portsmouth Poster Boy for Dysfunctional Government

As this trash mix-up illustrates, Malone has become the national poster boy for dysfunctional government. Janice Shanks’s trash had not been picked up because our financially strapped city did not have the money to pay sanitation workers on the day it was scheduled to be picked up. Besides that, a truck had broken down and another was being repaired out of town because there was no one qualified in Portsmouth to work on it. The trash pick up on Monday, Labor Day, was canceled and then on Tuesday the sanitation workers picked up the trash for the homeowners whose trash should have been picked up on Monday. Are you still with me?

The homeowners whose trash pick-up day was Monday got their trash picked up on Tuesday, but those whose trash pick-up day was Tuesday never did get their trash picked up all week.

More Trash Than Meets the Eye

There is more trash in this story than meets the eye. Reporters for the Portsmouth Daily Times do not write stories that might offend or embarrass the rich and influential. Yes, we have a number of rich and influential people in Portsmouth, even though the city is too poor to pay for trash collections on Labor Day. PDT reporters do not write stories that might reflect poorly on the rich and influential nor on the politicians who serve their interests.

Although he was groomed by one of the rich and influential to be mayor-in-waiting, Malone has apparently fallen out of favor, probably partly because he doesn’t know how to serve their interests and partly because he likes to take off on junkets, as Kalb liked to take off for long geezer biker race weekends in the South. Now a lawyer, John Haas, is president of city council, and therefore next in line to be mayor. The rich and influential would probably like to elevate Haas to the mayor’s office because a lawyer in the mayor’s office, even a deadbeat one, is worth ten philandering preachers in the bush. It’s true that Haas’s personal life would shock voters almost as much as Malone’s would, but the PDT doesn’t report on the scandalous lives of Portsmouth politicians and public employees. For example, when former public employee Tom Bihl was leading the campaign to recall Jane Murray, the PDT never reported on his shenanigans when he was police chief and auditor. If any reporter had revealed Bihl’s record during the recall campaign against Murray, he would have probably been out of a job like previous reporters who had written something that embarrassed the rich and influential.

Trashing and SLAPPing Mayor Murray

Jane Murray was our deficit hawk mayor. Unlike our clueless city auditor, Trent Williams, she made it her business to know where the money was coming from and where it was going. Because of her zeroing in on the budget, they first clipped her wings and then they SLAPPed her silly. SLAPP stands for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. City councilor Mike Mearan SLAPPed me for calling him a shyster in River Vices, so I had to pay a lawyer to defend myself. Murray had at least three such nuisance suits filed against her, the aim of which, I believe, was to drive her out of office and into bankruptcy as a result of her legal expenses.

Malone’s attempt to save money by cutting back on trash collecting is ironic because he contributed $1000 to the Committee in Support of Police and Fire, a political action committee that is supporting the measure on November’s ballot that will increase the city income tax. Note that the committee is in support of police and fire fighters, not city sanitation workers. The passage of the income tax measure will not improve the trash situation or Malone’s chances in the election.

Mayor Malone Contributes to Tax Increase

Mayor Malone contributes $1000 to campaign to increase city income tax

Why is Malone supporting the increase in the city income tax? Because he wants the support of the police and fire department when he runs in the next mayoral election. Does he need the support of the police and fire personnel more than he needs the support of the homeowners and registered voters of Portsmouth? A number of the police and fire personnel do not live in Portsmouth and therefore are not voters, but even if they aren’t, they are good at campaigning and will be going door to door, in Portsmouth, in uniform, in support of the income tax increase. But will they support Malone in the next mayoral election? With Horner as police chief, I doubt it. It will cost Malone a lot more than a thousand dollars to get their support.

If Malone had personally paid for the overtime portion of the sanitation workers’s Labor Day pay, instead of contributing to the Committee in Support of Police and Fire, he would have done far more to help his chances in the next mayoral election. But I predict Malone will lose the next mayoral election by a wide margin, as he has twice in the past. Malone has a trash problem all right. A rich white trash problem.

Drunk on Celebrity

2011-09-08T15:19:00.000-04:00

Lisa Roberts and Chief Charles Horner as Annie Oakley and Marshall Matt Dillon

Portsmouth Police Chief Charles Horner and Lisa Roberts, R.N., of the Portsmouth City Health Department, are apparently drunk on the celebrity they have gained as a result of the national and international coverage of the notorious drug problems in Portsmouth and Scioto County. But just like the big hats in the photo above, fame appears to have gone to their heads. Horner and Roberts were dubbed the Matt Dillon and Annie Oakley of Portsmouth by Marianne Skolek, a blogger who lives in South Carolina but writes about Portsmouth on a website in Oregon. Skolek has done a great job exposing Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, the drug that caused the death of her daughter and many thousands of others. But even if Skolek is an expert on pills, I would say she doesn’t know beans about the politics of Portsmouth. If she did, she would not have mistaken Horner for a Matt Dillon and Roberts for an Annie Oakley.

Yet, to her credit, Skolek was not willing to let the celebrities she had helped create get away with mugging. When she saw the photo above, which was posted on a public website, Skolek gingerly chided Horner and Roberts for behaving unprofessionally. Skolek’s point, which was well taken, was that there is nothing funny about the addiction epidemic, no matter how you look at it. If Horner and Roberts were looking for laughs, they should have looked elsewhere. Roberts took umbrage at Skolek’s criticism and shot back, “We have paved new paths. We are ‘Trailblazers.’ People need leaders and Hero’s [sic] today more than ever.” Yes, we do need leaders and heroes more than ever, but we should be the one to choose them. We don’t want them choosing themselves. We don’t want our public officials getting drunk on celebrity.

Those of us who do not just blog about but also live in Portsmouth would never choose Horner as a hero. Austin Leedom, on The Sentinel, Teresa Mollette, on her website, and I on River Vices (click on the links below), have been exposing Horner as a fraud for a long time. Horner is, in the Texas expression, all hat and no cattle. He is, at best, the Barney Fife; at worst, the J. Edgar Hoover of Portsmouth—lying, prying, spying, and conniving. As Leedom wrote, “Horner has a long record of refusing to prosecute law violators and a sorry record of making errors of the worst kind in his bumbling attempts as leader of the Police Department and as commander of the Drug Task Force.” Teresa Mollette wrote, “Chief Horner infringes on the fundamental rights of all citizens of Portsmouth, Ohio. Through intimidation, coercion, and threatening tactics, he continues in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of rights, privileges and immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States and the city of Portsmouth, Ohio.” I wrote just recently on River Vices, “Each of the last four mayors wanted to fire Horner. They understood he was not to be trusted. They understood he is incompetent, disloyal to the bone, and insubordinate to boot.”

As for Ms. Roberts, she is proving herself more the Nurse Betty than the Annie Oakley of Portsmouth. According to the Portsmouth Health Department website, she works in the Office of Injury Prevention (OOIP), where she serves as coordinator. The kind of injuries and deaths the OOIP seeks to prevent are those related not to drugs, at least not directly, but to vehicles, of all kinds, from kids’ tricycles to semi-trailer trucks. How then did she become the unofficial spokesperson for the city government on the drug epidemic? By attaching herself to and becoming a spokesperson for SOLACE, the support group founded by Jo Anna Krohn in the spring of 2010. Krohn has tended to stay in the background, with others, especially Roberts, becoming the public face of SOLACE, which she has helped transform into a virtual Political Action Committee for Horner.

Do you get the picture? Horner is no joke. He is a serious impediment to the fight against drugs and crime, and no real progress can be made as long as “Matt Dillon” has his hand around the throat of Dodge City and as long as “Annie Oakley” is taking aim at, and feeling the muscle of, the dopey looking chef. The above photo, taken outside of the Fork and Finger Restaurant may become as infamous as the one of Neil Hatcher giving the finger in front of Clayton Johnson’s Fourth Street estate. One picture is worth a thousand words.

Links

The Sentinel (http://portsmouthohio.tv/),

Mollette website: http://portsmouthcitizens.info/blog/?cat=54),

River Vices (http://rivervices.blogspot.com/2011/08/black-mold-of-portsmouth.html

The Black Mold of Portsmouth

2011-08-25T15:23:00.025-04:00

“The black mold Adelphia building still stands, or rather rots, on Washington Street, a monument to the hanky-panky our politicians play by taking worthless property off the hands of the well-heeled.”

Five years ago, on July 24, 2006, articles about the Adelphia Building appeared in the Portsmouth Daily Times and the Community Common. Written by Jeff Barron, the opening line of the PDT report was, “Several members of the city building committee gave good reviews to the former Adelphia Communications building Wednesday for use as a police station.”

The Building Committee members were Mayor Jim Kalb and his sidekick Terry Ockerman; First Ward councilman Mike Mearan, who was the chairman; antique dealer Kevin Johnson; and pawnbroker Jim Robinson. The committee was accompanied on its visit to the Adelphia building by Police Chief Charles Horner and Captain David Thoroughman.

The committee didn’t just give good reviews to the building; it fell in love with it. Robinson was quoted as saying, “[I]t seems to be perfect for what they’re wanting. There’s no reason to look anywhere else. My vote would go for it.” He wasn’t talking about the Taj Mahal; he was talking about the ugly, leaking Adelphia building. And what did antiques dealer Kevin Johnson say? He said he was happy with the building because it solved a lot of problems. The Adelphia building didn’t solve any problems, as far as I can see. Instead, it created a lot more. For one thing, the black mold in the Adelphia building was worse than in the Municipal Building, so how would moving the police department from the Municipal Building to the Adelphia building solve any problems? But Chief Horner was in favor of the move. Why? I believe he was in cahoots with Neal Hatcher and Mike Mearan, two big backers of the move.

All the News Unfit to Print

Jeff Barron wrote a sentence in his article that makes it easy to see now why he would later be canned. “The building has a musty smell in it and some parts of the ceiling have fallen down.” Barron didn’t realize that there is always news that the PDT does not consider fit to print, news that might upset advertisers or somebody with influence, such as Andy Glockner who didn’t like it when Barron reported that a man who had been arrested for dealing drugs was a mechanic at Glockner Motors. As a PDT reporter Barron had no business smelling anything or noticing anything falling down, even if it was the ceiling. The musty smell may have been the black mold, which nobody noticed, not even Chief Horner, who is now claiming to have been made ill by black mold in the basement of the Municipal Building.

With twenty-twenty hindsight, we now know the Adelphia building was a swindle, as the Marting building had been before it. The absentee Adelphia landlord’s lawyer, Mike Mearan, the chairman of the Building Committee, had engineered the crooked deal by foisting the building off on the city, which still has it on its hands, like a dead dog run over by a truck five years ago. The Adelphia building still stands, or rather rots, on Washington Street, a monument to the hanky-panky our politicians play by taking worthless property off the hands of the well-heeled. The city doesn’t have the money to tear the unsightly building down, so it remains a monumental eyesore, as it was back in 2006, when the committee and Horner made goo-goo eyes at it. Horner since then has made goo-goo eyes at least several other buildings he’d like to move the police force to.

Kalb The Count

“. . . ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine for the Adelphia building and one against.”

Not only the Building Committee, but everybody in Portsmouth was for moving the police force from the Municipal Building to the Adelphia building, according to Mayor Kalb who will probably be back snoozing on the city council after the November election. Kalb told the Community Common on that same day, five years ago, July 24, 2006, “When we had the Martings’ forum at Portsmouth High School, 99 out of 100 people that turned in a ballot believed the Police Department should be in the former Adelphia Building.” Can you believe that? Who counted those ballots? Was it Kalb? Was he The Count? Who cast that one dissenting vote? Probably one of those uncooperative CAVE people.

The city accepted the Adelphia building on the condition, stated in ordinance 20-2005, that “said real estate . . . is free from all environmental hazards.” If ever the city came into possession of a building that was not free of environmental hazards, it was the Adelphia building, which was about as free of environmental hazards as the Gulf of Mexico was of oil pollution during the oil spill of 2010. The absentee landlord, who had allowed the building to deteriorate for years, unloaded the building on the city so he could get a tax write-off, but he could get it only if the building was free of environmental hazards and only if it was subsequently used for some public purpose, which it hasn’t been. It sits there useless five years later, as contaminated as ever. Did the landlord illegally claim his tax write off to the IRS? Only the absentee landlord knows.

Each of the last four mayors wanted to fire Horner. They understood he was not to be trusted. They understood he is incompetent, disloyal to the bone, and insubordinate to boot. He works hard as police chief, but what he works hard at is trying to undermine whomever the mayor might be before the mayor can fire him. He currently has the well-intentioned but naïve Solace group in his pocket. Nine women from Solace reportedly sat in the front row of the city council meeting last Monday night to complain about the mold in the Municipal Building and to say that the police force should have a new police station. If the Solace-inspired levy to support drug rehabilitation programs goes down to defeat next November, it will in part be because Horner has infiltrated that group like black mold does the interior of old, leaking buildings. Horner is the black mold of Portsmouth politics, and the air will continue to be contaminated until some mayor succeeds in firing him.

McGruff the Crime Dog

In an article in the PDT (19 August 2011), “SOLACE Vows to Find PPD New HDQ,” Horner is quoted as saying, in compliance with the mayor's restraining order against him shooting off his mouth, that he has not had any direct discussions with SOLACE members about finding a new home for the police station. But there Horner was (in the photo below) at the emergency meeting of SOLACE, hours before the Monday night council meeting at which members of SOLACE showed up to support Horner and his campaign for a new police station. The distrustful dog in the photo apparently hilariously, like McGruff the Crime Dog, tried to take a bite out of Horner. SOLACE may find next November that there are a lot of voters in Portsmouth who feel like McGruff and don’t trust Horner. It is a shame the good people of SOLACE have allowed their organization to become so politicized and exploited by Horner.

Police Chief Horner (on left) at the emergency kitchen cabinet meeting of SOLACE on Monday, August 22, just after "McGruff" tried to take a bite out of him, not long before the city council meeting that evening. Is this what Horner meant by having no discussions with SOLACE members?

Gerlach Says No to City Manager

2011-08-16T09:38:00.000-04:00

Frank Gerlach, former city manager and mayor of Portsmouth

I don't think there's anything wrong with the city manager-council form of city government for some cities, but Portsmouth never has been and is not likely ever to be one of those cities. Nobody knows that better than Frank Gerlach who has served as both city manager and mayor. As Mark Shaffer wrote in the Scioto Voice (18 July 2001), Gerlach believes reverting to a city manager would be a step backward. "I would say the city needs a mayor rather than a city manager," Gerlach concluded.

That is not to say, and Gerlach is not saying, that the current mayor-council system is satisfactory. Far from it. That system needs to change, but reverting to the city manager system would only make things worse.

In case you have not read Mark Shaffer's Scioto Voice story, I am reproducing it here. Like Jeff Barron and Mike Deaterla, Shaffer used to report for the Portsmouth Daily Times before that newspaper stopped making even a pretense at providing balanced news coverage about the city.

Portsmouth Murals Cover Up

2011-08-12T12:14:00.030-04:00

Mural of Muse of Art on Portsmouth Floodwall

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Portsmouth Murals. But if the Portsmouth murals can be said to have an Achilles’ heel, then it’s the way they don’t depict unpleasant truths about the city, past and present.

A little known incident is a good place to begin a discussion of the “cover up.” Among the very last of the fifty-two panels on the main flood wall are panels #49 and #51, the Muses of History and Art. Muses are figures from what we call Greek mythology or what more accurately should be called Greek religion, for who is to say which religions are mythological? The Greeks believed that the Muses, or goddesses, were spirits who inspired artists to create. The Greeks and Romans did not hesitate to depict the muses sculpturally as topless, or bare breasted, and that is the way they have often been depicted in sculpture and painting in the Christian era.

Bare-breasted is the way Robert Dafford intended to paint the muses in murals #49 and #51. “However,” according to a footnote at the very end of A Thirst for Land (2004), “the Portsmouth Murals trustees thought that this might cause a bit of controversy and asked that the paintings be ‘covered up.’” Dafford apparently complied with the trustees’ wishes and covered up the muses. Muses may have inspired Dafford to paint the murals, but the Trustees of Portsmouth Murals, Inc., who were paying him, largely with public money, called the tune. At all costs, even the cost of the truth, controversy must be avoided. The last thing the Trustees of Portsmouth Murals, Inc., and the Chamber of Commerce wanted depicted in the murals is the naked truth.

Black Friday

It is not just breasts that got covered up or omitted in the Portsmouth murals. The mistreatment of blacks is among the great crimes of American history. One shameful example from Portsmouth’s past was the so-called Black Friday. In “Relics of Barbarism,” which is Chapter VII of his History of Scioto County (1903), Nelson Evans wrote about Black Friday: “On January 21 [sic], 1830, all the colored people of Portsmouth were forcibly deported from the town. They were not only warned out, but they were driven out. They were forced to leave their homes and belongings.” A Thirst for the Land repeats Evans’ account of Black Friday, and the historian C.G. Woodson mentioned Portsmouth’s Black Friday in The Education of the Negro (1919), providing the correct date of Black Friday—January 1, 1830. (The date of the proclamation and of the expulsion were probably not the same.) Of the fifty-two panels on the main flood wall, couldn’t one have depicted this tragic event in the city’s history? The point is not to have a Murals of Shame. There is much to be proud of in Portsmouth’s past, but to exclude an episode as important as Black Friday distorts history. Doesn’t the bible say the truth can make us free? Whether it’s Portsmouth’s racism, unemployment, poverty, drugs, prostitution, or political corruption, covering up or ignoring the truth helps perpetuate rather than remedy the wrongs.

Missing Memorial Mural

Until such time as Robert Dafford paints a Black Friday mural, Theodor Kaufmann’s painting of fugitive slaves (below), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, could serve as a substitute for the yet-to-be-painted, probably never-to-be-painted, missing memorial mural, “Black Friday: Expulsion from Portsmouth.”

City Manager for Portsmouth: Deja Vu All Over Again?

2011-08-05T19:22:00.003-04:00

City Manager Barry Feldman after being suspended by City Council

Portsmouth’s unhappy experience in the early 1980s with the city manager-council form of government helps explain why the voters decided to return to the mayor-council form of government in 1988. Now some misguided folks as well as the usual crooks want to switch back to the city manager-council form of government. When will they ever learn? It’s as if Barry Feldman never existed. Feldman was the city manager of Portsmouth during the early 1980s, a period of political upheaval that he was primarily responsible for. I don’t see Feldman’s name on Portsmouth’s Wall of Fame, which occupies the river side of the floodwall. If it was a Hall of Shame, Feldman’s name should be right up there with all the other crooks. (For more on Feldman, click here.)

Under the council-manager form of government the city manager is supposed to follow the direction of the city council, but in 1980 Feldman followed the orders not of the city council but of the plutocrats who control Portsmouth. A plutocracy is government in which the wealthy hold political power, and Portsmouth has been a plutocracy since at least as far back as 1980. In 1980, a majority of three council members wanted to fire Feldman, which they had the right to do under the city charter, but the plutocrats helped organize a successful campaign to recall the the three councilmen. Their recall was an example of plutocracy, not democracy, at work.

The basic problem with the council-manager form of government is that instead of checks and balances, it concentrates the legislative and executive powers in one branch of municipal government—the city council. Under the city manager-council form of government, the city council exercises both executive and legislative functions and the city manager is merely the administrative servant of the council. Under the city manager-council form of government, the city manager is the servant of the city council, a housekeeper: at worst, which is what Feldman was, the city manager is the eunuch in the harem of prostitutes financed by the plutocracy.

Bottom of the Barrel

Under the present city charter, anyone can run for city council provided he or she is a registered voter, and therefore at least eighteen years of age; anyone can run for city council who has lived in the city for at least five years (that’s the Portsmouth Boy provision) and have been a resident for at least six months in the ward they are seeking to represent. They don’t need to be high school graduates; they don’t need to have finished grade school. They don’t need to pass a mental competency or drug test. They can be a fool, a crook, and a crony, and too often are. They are the failures and the losers, they are the bottom of the barrel of bad apples. And these are the ones who are going to tell the city manager what to do?

If the the majority of city council members were honest, intelligent, and competent, the manager-council form of government would make sense. But when was the last time the majority of the Portsmouth City Council were honest, intelligent, and competent? In 1980, that’s when, but that majority was recalled from office precisely because they were, intelligent and competent and above all honest. While there have been notable exceptions, of course, like Bob Mollette, the majority of the Portsmouth city council is usually dishonest, dumb, and incompetent, and they serve the interests not of the public but of the plutocrats—the wealthy lawyers, developers, and beneficiaries of the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership. A city manager would be at the mercy of the failures and political hacks—the Bauers, the Kalbs, the Malones—who gravitate to city council with the hope of becoming mayor by default—by recalls, by resignations by those facing recall, and by indictments.

In summary, the council-manager form of city government would make Portsmouth a worse, not a better place, and God and now the rest of the country knows our notorious, corrupt, pill-popping river city is bad enough as it is.

Cartoon from early 1980s showing city manager Feldman mauling Portsmouth taxpayers

City Solicitor Mike Jones: Gotcha or Botcha?

2011-07-27T17:28:00.001-04:00

Did Mike Jones play “gotcha” or “botcha” in the charter amendment case?

The case of Patricia Smith, et al. vs. the Board of Elections of Scioto County, et al., involves the challenge to the results of the special election of Feb. 3, 2009. In that election the voters approved an amendment to the Portsmouth City Charter to limit the taxing power of the City of Portsmouth. That amendment read, in part, “No taxes may be levied on the property owners of the City of Portsmouth for the retirement of any bonded indebtedness without the approval of such levy by a majority of electors [emphasis added] of the city of Portsmouth. Bonded indebtedness for the construction, acquisition and/or improvement of city property costing more than $100,000 in total may be incurred only by approval of a majority of the electors [emphasis added] of the city at the next general election or a special election called by the Council. . . .” If instead of “electors” that proposed amendment had said “voters,” there would have been no court case and I would not be writing this piece, but the law, like life, is not an exact science, and mistakes are often made.

Too often life is a matter of trying to minimize or, conversely, to take advantage of the consequences of mistakes. Smith, Evens, et al., represented by Rodeheffer and George L. Davis, the III and IV, is trying to take advantage of the mistake the authors of the proposed charter amendment made when they used “electors” instead of “voters.” Electors are those citizens eligible to vote. Voters are those electors who actually vote. All voters are electors, but not all electors are voters. There were approximately 6000 electors who could have voted in the Feb. 3, 2009 special election. If a majority of electors was required to pass the proposed amendment, then it didn’t pass, because only 584 of those who voted were for it, and 584 is clearly not a majority of 6000+ electors. Smith, Evans et al. challenged the results of the special election in the Scioto County Common Pleas Court, which agreed with them and invalidated the results of the election.
However, the Ohio Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling, pointing out that Smith, Evans, and other residents of Portsmouth, including city officials, such as the city solicitor, should have challenged the language prior to the special election. The Supreme Court stated, “Appellees could have raised their claims in a timely pre-election protest to the petition,” and, “Election contests may not be used as a vehicle for asserting an untimely protest.” It was common knowledge in Portsmouth prior to the special election that City Solicitor Mike Jones was telling others with relish that the language of the charter amendment was faulty and that if it did pass it would be challenged in court. Instead of objecting to the wording of the amendment prior to the election, Jones played the game of gotcha! That is how he, like the city solicitor before him, saw his job: betraying the people on behalf of Portsmouth’s puppet masters. But we now know, from things like the “misfiring” of Mayor Kalb and the “mistrial” of Harald Daub, that Jones plays the game of botcha! much better than he plays gotcha!

Will Democracy Triumph?

The case is now under consideration in the Scioto County Court of Common Pleas, with visiting Judge William J. Corzine presiding. After showing the persistence of a bulldog, Essman is no longer involved in the case, but four citizens, Jerry Conkle, Austin Leedom, Harald Duab, and Ray Mitchell, have become defendants in intervention, petitioning the court to dismiss the motion of Smith, Evans, et al., to invalidate the results of the Feb. 3, 2009, election. Only time and Judge Corzine will tell whether democracy will triumph. In the meanwhile the results of the special election remain in effect, and the city government cannot pull the financial shenanigans it has in the past, such as it did when it unloaded the decrepit Marting building onto the taxpayers of Portsmouth. The taxpayers owe a vote of thanks to Essman and the others who have worked so hard and long on their behalf.

Mr. Albrecht Goes to Washington

2011-07-19T18:48:00.063-04:00

Jeffrey Albrecht speaking to WSAZ prior to his flight to Washington, D.C.

Do Republicans really believe what Henry David Thoreau wrote in his essay “Civil Disobedience,” namely, “That government is best which governs least”? Tea Partiers seem to believe it in spades. Their motto could be, “That government is best which governs not at all.” But if Republicans believe this, do they practice it? Are Alaskan Republicans, for example, or at least the Palinistas, rugged individualists or are they hooked on government aid as much as addicts in Scioto County are on Oxycontin? Are they hypocrites who denounce government aid except when it can help them build a bridge to nowhere? Because the Bachman family farm took government subsidies, is Michelle Bachman any less a hypocrite than Sarah Palin?

I thought about Republican hypocrisy when I heard that Jeff Albrecht and three other Portsmouth businessmen, along with Portsmouth’s unelected Uncle Tom mayor David Malone, had flown to Washington, D.C., on 12 July 2011 in a corporate jet to lobby politicians on behalf of a private corporation, the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC). The four businessmen flew to Washington to pressure elected officials and especially the president to co-sign a $2 billion dollar loan to USEC so that it can proceed with its plans for a centrifuge project in Piketon, a small community located about 15 miles up Route 23 from Portsmouth. “Locals Lobby D.C. for USEC Approval,” was the headline of the story Frank Lewis wrote for the Portsmouth Daily Times. But they’re not lobbying for “approval.” They’re lobbying for a $2 billion dollar guaranteed loan. “Ohioans Go to D.C. to Push for Uranium-Plant Guarantee” was the more accurate headline of Jessica Wehrman’s report in the Columbus Dispatch (click here). In a New York Times story (20 July 2007), “Cost Cutters, Except When Spending is Back Home,” the lede reads, “House Republicans who rode a wave of voter discontent into office last year may be pushing for spending cuts, but they’re also quietly funneling millions of federal dollars back home.” That’s what Republicans Rob Portman and Jean Schmidt may be doing on behalf of USEC, risking not millions but billions of taxpayers’ money.

Should the government be involved in co-signing a $2 billion dollar loan for any private corporation, let alone one that critics say is badly mismanaged? According to principles Republicans swear by, shouldn’t it be the so-called free market, not the federal government, that decides whether USEC completes the centrifuge project in Piketon or whether it goes bankrupt, which it may if the government guaranteed loan doesn’t come through? What were these Republican businessmen from Portsmouth doing in Washington lobbying in favor of what may turn out to be Ohio’s version of Alaska’s bridge to nowhere? Do Albrecht, Lute, Schmidt, and Glockner, the four Portsmouth businessmen, really believe in competition for everybody except themselves? Are they opposed to government intervention in business except when the business is in their backyard? Aren’t Republicans supposed to stand for free enterprise, not free lunches? Aren’t Republicans supposed to believe in “hands off government,” not “government handouts”? Aren’t Tea Party Republicans going so far as to threaten to shut down the government if it doesn’t stop spending and lending, if it doesn’t stop borrowing and “tomorrowing”? Don’t they understand that if the centrifuge in Piketon goes kaput, the government as co-signer will have to fork over $2 billion of tax payer money to some bank?

It is ironic that the Portsmouth contingent seeking government financial support was led by Jeff Albrecht, because he was the owner of the Ramada Inn, in Portsmouth. Over the years, the Ramada scraped by with the assistance of public dollars: Shawnee State University lodged job interviewees and unhoused students in its spare rooms, of which there were usually plenty, and, in addition, government agencies lodged non-violent offenders waiting to appear in court to face various charges. If things were any worse, Albrecht might have reserved a floor for Section 8 tenants. Among seasoned travelers Albrecht’s Ramada gained notoriety as “The Queen of the Rust Belt.” (Click here.)

Golden Opportunity for Government Assistance

Albrecht’s golden opportunity for government assistance came in October 2008, when presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, campaigning in southern Ohio, had breakfast at Albrecht’s Ramada Inn. Albrecht implied to Wehrman of the Columbus Dispatch that he personally served the future president breakfast. In any case, Obama’s presence provided Albrecht with an opportunity to ask for government help. According to Albrecht’s own account in the Dispatch, he asked Obama if he would support a loan for the United States Enrichment Corporation if he was elected president. Albrecht told the Dispatch reporter that Obama had promised him he would. This was good news for Albrecht because the USEC’s centrifuge project would be good for business in Portsmouth and therefore good for Albrecht’s Ramada Inn.

On the basis of Obama’s alleged promise, Albrecht made an important business decision. He decided to transform his Ramada Inn, “The Queen of the Rust Belt,” into a completely renovated Holiday Inn. He made this important decision in spite of the fact that a Holiday Express Inn had not too long ago failed to make a go of it in Portsmouth, just a couple of traffic lights up Route 23. In fact, not only had Albrecht in his words “invested significantly” in transforming the Ramada into a Holiday Inn, he had borrowed money to do it. He decided to borrow money at least in part because of the promise Obama had allegedly made to him to support a government guaranteed loan to USEC. Who in their right financial mind would have loaned Albrecht anything based on a promise a campaigning politician, a Democrat, had allegedly made to him during a campaign stop in Portsmouth?

From what I know of Albrecht’s ability as the operator of the Ramada Inn, I think anybody who loans money to him is engaging in unsafe financing. The Ramada had been mismanaged for a long time and did not improve in its dying days. Elijah on Yelp.com said in 2009, “Guests beware, your money is better spent by staying at a quality bed and breakfast rather than this dump.” Things weren’t any better in 2010, when Nicole wrote, “The Ramada Inn in Portsmouth Ohio was one of the most unsanitary, gross hotel rooms I’ve ever stayed in!” Location! Location! Location! Albrecht's Holiday Inn is in downtown Portsmouth in the same location the Ramada was, with the same security problems, even though the Portsmouth Police Station is directly across the street. That fact had not stopped the police chief's son from dealing drugs at the restaurant in the Ramada, I was told. “During my stay,” one disgruntled guest complained online, “five vehicles including mine was broken into while parked in the Ramada parking lot. My car in particular was right in front of the lobby. When I told the front desk what had happened, they said that this happens all the time.” Critics are saying the same thing about USEC, whose reputation for mismanagement is not quite as bad as Albrecht’s, but USEC’s stock has plummeted like a lead sinker in a fishless pond. Moody’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded USEC, somewhat the way TripAdvisor, an online website, downgraded Albrecht’s new Holiday Inn. Although it is the newest of Portsmouth’s four major motels, Albrecht’s Holiday Inn has been rated last by TripAdvisor.

The Obama administration will probably back the loan to USEC, even though Fuel Cycle Week (click) a nuclear energy newsletter, says such a move would mean the federal government has formally adopted USEC “as a ward of the state.” Guaranteeing the loan may be unwise but it is not hypocritical. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are not infected by the virus of free market fundamentalism, although the liberal Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman is not so sure about Obama. Ohio’s Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, once a critic of the centrifuge project, is now a strong proponent. In the current depressed economy, Brown, Obama, and other Democrats cannot afford politically to oppose the project, even if its prospects for success are not very good, anymore than are the prospects of Albrecht’s Holiday Inn. The loan made to Albrecht, like the loan that will likely be made to USEC, may have to be written off. Let's keep our fingers crossed on the centrifuge project for the sake of USEC’s employees.

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

If USEC doesn’t get the $2 billion dollar loan guarantee from the government, and if Albrecht’s Holiday Inn is no more profitable than his Ramada Inn, then he will no doubt blame President Obama not only for the jobs that aren’t created in Piketon but also for the guests who choose not stay in his Holiday Inn. It is much easier, to my way of thinking, to tilt the playing field to favor Portsmouth Boys or rig the bidding at an auction in Athens, Ohio, which Albrecht was suspected of doing (click here), than it is to control what happens in Washington, D.C. The four Republican businessmen who visited Washington, and Albrecht in particular, may learn that it is much easier to have the mayor of Portsmouth in their pocket, and on their corporate jet, than it is to have the Democratic president of the United States keep his campaign promises, even if Albrecht once fed him bacon and eggs at the Ramada. Mr. Albrecht and his Republican cohorts may have flown to Washington for government assistance, but the chickens, which must make do with chicken feed, will still come home to roost in Portsmouth.

Chickens coming home to roost at the Holiday Inn

We Got Trouble in River City: Ameresco, The Music Man, and the Portsmouth Boys

2011-07-04T19:28:00.020-04:00

George P. Sakellaris, Founder and CEO of Ameresco

Established in 2000, Ameresco is an energy conservation company that grew rapidly in its first six years or so by aggressively marketing its energy saving services to customers in both the private and public sector, to schools and hospitals, to businesses and municipalities both large and small, to everyone, that is, who could profit from the more efficient use of whatever kinds of energy they were consuming. Ameresco arrived on the corporate scene just as the Enron Corporation, much of whose business was in gas and electricity, was about to implode ignominiously. Profiting from massive fraud and deception, Enron had grown steadily in the second half of the twentieth century when most Americans consumed much more than they conserved. Ameresco’s growth, by contrast, occurred at the beginning of the new millennium, by which time the conservation rather than the consumption of energy was becoming a big business. Energy conservation became a crusade not just for those in the private sector, such as Ameresco, but for government as well, at the local, state, and national levels. Wearing its green hat, like the Jolly Green Giant, Ameresco cooperated with public bodies and agencies on behalf of conservation. Instead “Keep America green, bring money,” Ameresco’s slogan, referring to energy, is “Green, Clean, and Sustainable.” But for some brands, such as Salem Cigarettes, green has become a racket. “Think Clean Keep it Green” is the slogan on the green colored package of Salems, a leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States.

The founder and CEO of Ameresco is the sixtyish Greek immigrant George P. Sakellaris, who said of himself, on Linked In, “I am a hands on leader, and I bring the same professionalism and enthusiasm to every project.” His biography, or what we know of it, reads like the typical Horatio Alger American success story. “I have won many prestigious awards,” Sakellaris wrote. Among those prestigious awards was his 1999 Horatio Alger Award for Distinguished Americans. In the lexicon of American mythology, the name Horatio Alger is synonymous with success. But the prospects for Ameresco and for the field of energy conservation in general are not nearly as promising as they were before the Great Recession that began in late 2007. Ameresco’s Initial Public Offering, in 2010, which had the aim of raising money for its expansion and for servicing its debt, was lackluster. The disappointing response to Ameresco’s IPO could be a harbinger of hard times ahead, not just for Ameresco but for the whole energy conservation industry. The bloom may be off the green rose. When Ameresco’s first quarter earnings were released a few months ago, resulting in a stock market dip, Mr. Sakellaris ignored his company’s policy of not commenting publicy on fluctuations in its stock and hastened to CNBC to nervously explain that first quarter returns were normally the lowest of the four quarters for his company. So the 3.5% profit the quarter was nothing to worry about. He told CNBC, “Market Trends are very, very good.” His underlying message appeared to be, “Don’t Panic!” But if he doesn’t look panicked on that interview, he does look nervous, and maybe he has reason to be.

Ameresco’s Poor Report Card in Portsmouth

In regard to promises made and not kept, Ameresco has a poor report card in Portsmouth. Cynics might see a passing resemblance between Ameresco’s CEO and Harold Hill the traveling salesman in The Music Man, who came to the fictional River City, Iowa, shortly before July 4th, in 1912, to take advantage of its unsophisticated citizenry. (Watch “Ya Got Trouble Right Here In River City” by clicking here.) Though he prides himself on being a “hands-on” CEO, Sakellaris did not himself come to Portsmouth. Ameresco grew too fast for him, headquartered in Massachusetts, to have his feet everywhere and his hands on everything. But his Midwestern representative, Jeff Metcalf, out of Indianapolis, was very much “hands-on” in Portsmouth. It was standard operating procedure for Harold Hill in his sales pitch to promise more than he could deliver. That’s what Mefcalf has been accused of having done in the Ohio river city of Portsmouth: promised more than he delivered.

At the 13 November 2006 meeting of the Portsmouth City Council, Metcalf promised, according to the minutes, that “every meter in the City will be installed within a year.” Four years later, in a 24 March 2010 memo to Mayor Jane Murray, Patricia Williams, the city’s Public Utilities Computer Programmer, listed eight ways in which Ameresco had not lived up to its promises to Portsmouth, including Metcalf’s that the meters would be installed within a year. Williams wrote in the memo, (1)“We have changed over 500 meters that were supposed to have already been changed by Ameresco and were not.” She explained that the city had to pay city workers overtime to change the five hundred meters that Ameresco workers, four years later, had failed to install. Not only that, city workers found new uninstalled meters lying in pits next to the unremoved old meters. (2)Ameresco workers sometimes mixed up which meters went with which address, resulting in confusion and loss of revenue. (3)“Meters were put into pits at vacant lots and inactive accounts. We have brand new meters sitting in pits of vacated homes that will never be used unless we come upon them and pulled them to be used somewhere else.” (4)“We have lids that have not been drilled and meter transceiver units mounted [im]properly (too numerous to mention). ” (5)The workers who were hired by Ameresco were supposed to be certified plumbers and apprentices, but “[t]he people they hired were heating and air conditioning people who had no experience in this field.” (6)“Multiple repairs had to be made to various customers’ lines and property due to the fact of inexperienced people changing meters.” (7)“Inaccuracies in paperwork caused many billing nightmares. It took considerable time to correct inaccurate meter numbers and reads to make sure the customers were charged accurately.” (8)“We have changed 139 meters to date and many more need to be changed because they have already become non-registering. This causes loss of revenue not to mention the cost of ordering new registering.” Williams ended her damning memorandum with the comment, “In closing, I would not give Ameresco any good references.” (Williams’ memo can be found on Teresa Mollette’s Portsmouthcitizens website by clicking here.)

I don’t think Jane Murray will be giving any good references for Ameresco either. In an email to me (2 July 2011), she wrote, “[T]he Ameresco deal is about as preposterous as the financial instrument used for repayment. This called for a nearly $1 Million debt payment per year for 10 years. This decision was made at the same time that more than 60 homes were inundated with sewage thanks to the lack of public policy and code enforcement from the city, resulting in major storm water runoff problems from development at SOMC, Hillview, and others.” Murray went on to explain, “The Ameresco deal essentially was to pay nearly $9.5 Million to have a company replace water meters, light bulbs, street lights, traffic lights, and windows. Director of the Water Department, Sam Sutherland told me that the whole thing was a disaster and that he pleaded with Jim Kalb over and over to not do the deal.” But the deal was done and Murray inherited a looming financial disaster. She is not the only one in Portsmouth who thinks the Ameresco deal was a disaster.

The Ameresco Contract: “A Horrible, Disastrous Investment”

The dim-witted Portsmouth Mayor signs Ameresco Contract

When the traveling salesman of Ameresco began making visits to Portsmouth around 2005, peddling energy conservation services, he found a number of easily bamboozled Portsmouth Boys in public office, including the aforementioned Jim Kalb, the dim-witted Portsmouth mayor. The Portsmouth Boys fell for the Ameresco sales pitch hook, line, and meter. Three different witnesses have told me that after the meeting at which the city council had voted in favor of the contract, Ameresco representatives had whooped it up in the parking lot outside the Municipal Building as if they had just bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24 dollars. As a result, Portsmouth city government, which was getting by financially only by juggling accounts and cooking the books, is now in precarious financial straits and is trying to increase the city income tax to bail itself out. Like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” First Ward councilman Kevin Johnson has pointed out in an email to his colleagues in city government that Portsmouth is, as a result of Ameresco’s broken promises, if not buck naked, down financially to its last fig leaf. (Johnson is not a Portsmouth Boy and he was not on city council when Kalb signed the Ameresco contract.) The expensive services and equipment that Ameresco promised—the equivalent of the musical instruments and the uniforms Hill promised in The Music Man—do not appear to be paying for themselves over time, as Ameresco had promised. According to Johnson, that promise has not been and is not likely to be fulfilled. “From a business perspective,” he wrote in his email, “I am most concerned as to how the $647,625 in ‘claimed’ savings for one year compares to the $940,000 payments the City of Portsmouth must make to BankAmerica each of ten years. . . . Even if these ‘claimed’ savings are real and stay the same for the foreseeable future,” he continued, “it will take the City 14.5 years to recoup its investment—at which time, if not before, much of this equipment will need [to] be repaired or replaced—therefore ending up as a horrible, disastrous investment by the City of Portsmouth” (emphasis added). On CNBC, Sakellaris said there was no cost to his customers, that Ameresco contracts were “revenue neutral,” because the energy savings the customers would make over the period of the contract would pay for the loans the customers got from third parties. In the case of Portsmouth the third party was the Bank of America. If a contract turned out not to be revenue neutral, Ameresco “guarantees” to make up the difference to the customer. We shall see what we shall see.

The American Dream or the American Nightmare?

George Sakellaris was a Horatio Alger Award winner in 1999, but so was Enron’s CEO Kenneth Lay the year before—just prior to Enron’s unraveling. Lay was subsequently convicted of securities fraud. Ameresco is located in Framingham, Massachusetts, not Houston, Texas, and Portsmouth is a real river city in Ohio, not a fictional one in Iowa, but that did not stop the Portsmouth Boys from buying $9.4 million dollars worth of trombones, in a manner of speaking. The Music Man ends with a miracle when the boys of River City, Iowa, learn overnight to play the instruments, and Harold Hill, after falling in love with a music teacher, sees the light. In real life miracles don’t happen. That’s why we have Hollywood. The workers Ameresco hired never did learn how to install the meters. By the standards of the Horatio Alger myth, Horatio Alger, the son of a minister, was an abysmal failure for it was finally revealed a hundred years or so after it happened that he was a minister who had fled to New York after it was discovered that he been sodomizing boys in his Cape Cod parish. Instead of being obsessed with the American virtue of making money, Horatio Alger, like the ancient Greeks he admired, was obsessed with boys. In his obsession with boys, which he sublimated in his fiction, Alger neglected almost everything else. In 1899, when he died, he was practically broke. Are the Portsmouth Boys, after having been seduced by a traveling salesman, leaving the taxpayers of Portsmouth pregnant and barefoot? After she was recalled from office, Jane Murray started a blog, WeGotTroubleRightHereInRiverCity. I wonder why she named it that?

What does our current unelected Uncle Tom mayor say about Ameresco? “We still have our yearly payment that we pay to Bank of America,” David Malone told the Portsmouth Daily Times (10 May 2011). “But the project is still going,” he reassured the public. “Ameresco is still doing their part in the project contract. As far as I know everything is going along real well.” As far as he knows everything is going along real well? What Malone knows about budgets and spreadsheets, and about finances in general, is so minuscule that even a molecule of H2O would dwarf it. If he had been the mayor who negotiated the Ameresco contract, instead of a mere cheer-leading, mayor-in-waiting councilman, God knows where the city would be now. I am expressing only my opinion, a right afforded me under the free speech provisions of the Constitution, but I think the lesson to be learned from this Ameresco business, at least where Portsmouth is concerned, may be to beware of Greeks bearing gifts, even if they are wrapped in recycled green paper. The financial fireworks ahead for the city of Portsmouth, partly the result of Ameresco’s apparently broken promises, may make the fireworks on the Ohio River this Fourth of July look like sparklers.

Fireworks, Portsmouth, July 4th, 2011

Smokers' Lungs

2011-06-24T15:08:00.001-04:00

A non-smoker's and a smoker's lungs

To deter smoking, the Food and Drug Administration has proposed putting five gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. Some experts believe this will not be an effective deterrent. When asked his opinion on the FDA proposal by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David J. Linden, author of Compass of Pleasure, said studies have shown the effectiveness of anti-smoking warnings wear off fairly rapidly. This is at least partly because the circuitry of the brain of an addicted person is permanently rewired. There is no such thing as ex-alcoholics, for example; rather, there are alcoholics who no longer drink, just as there are nicotine addicts who no longer smoke. Perhaps addicts need to understand that they are always going to be addicts; the goal is not to be somebody you are not. It is hard enough to be an addict who successfully successively says no; to be an addict who is not an addict is impossible because your brain knows better. You and your brain have to be on the same page or the book is not going to make sense.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr, a Canadian environmental psychologist works with communities to instill lasting behavioral change. The Boston Globe reported McKenzie-Mohr believes such information campaigns, like the FDA's, “have virtually no likelihood of changing behavior.” He apparently knows other ways to help the addicted.

All in the Family

I am the ninth child in a family of sixteen (counting my Irish- and Norwegian-American parents), all of whom survived into adulthood except the second child who died in the diphtheria epidemic following the First World War. Everyone in the family, except me, became smokers. How I escaped has always puzzled me. One possible explanation is that in grade school our class visited the Boston Museum of Science, where I saw a smoker’s and a non-smoker's lungs suspended in formaldehyde in a glass display case. I think the display was not far from the museum entrance, so it was hard to miss. Children are very impressionable and highly educable. I’m not certain I learned my lesson about the evils of smoking from that ghastly smoker’s lung I saw as a child, but I think having a smoker’s lung at the entrance of every grade school in America might be a far more effective way of deterring smoking than putting gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. By the time a kid takes a cigarette out of a package, somewhere between the ages of eleven and say fifteen, it is already too late. Peer pressure and the billions of dollars the cigarette industry have spent, directly or indirectly, to addict kids, will have their effect, and as for adults who have been smoking for years, forget it, because that's what most of them will do, forget it, as studies of anti-smoking warnings have shown. The chances are a smoker’s palpable lung near the entrance of grade schools will do more to deter kids from smoking than a hundred gruesome graphics on cigarette packages. If the lung I witnessed once when I was about nine or ten made such a difference, what would it do witnessed over and over again, K through 12?

In addition to being heavy smokers, my family were also heavy drinkers of both alcohol and coffee—strong black espresso-like coffee the morning after. Following my father’s and older brothers’ examples, I began drinking coffee in the morning at about the age of eight and was so strung out on caffeine by the time I was fifteen that I knew I had to break the habit and I did, but I continued getting an occasional fix on coffee ice cream, which habit I did not break until I was in my early twenties. I might not have been able to break the caffeine addiction if I had been addicted to nicotine. Since addiction to nicotine lays the groundwork for all the other addictions, reducing its occurrence could have far reaching benefits. As the twig is bent, so shall the wee grow. In Portsmouth, now notorious as the Oxycontin capital of America, how many have graduated from caffeine to nicotine to oxycodone? Instead of using the purloined Indian Head rock to teach kids in south-central Ohio about their cultural heritage, as state representative Todd Book preposterously proposed, how about having a smoker’s lung at the entrance not just of each grade school, but of the middle school and high school too? Maybe if some of our addicted politicians—addicted to dishonesty as well as to drugs—and their puppet masters would will their lungs to the public schools, they would be doing more in death for future generations than they ever did in life.

5: Oxy & Contin: From Zanesville to Zanzibar

2011-06-19T05:42:00.001-04:00

“ 'You’ll probably find it hard to believe and you might even think I’m crazy,’ the doctor said, spreading his arms wide apart to indicate how wide of the truth what he was about to say might seem.”

Chapter 5

“It’s only Heck,” the embarrassed doctor said when the rat hopped out of the drawer up on to the desk.

“Who?” the man with the shaved head said.

Now that she was over the shock of seeing the rat in the drawer, Barbie felt sorry for the confined creature. “The poor thing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” the man with the shaved head said to Barbie, seeing an opportunity to display his wit. “He’s top drawer, ain’t he?”

“I wish I hadn’t screamed,” Barbie said. “I mean rats have feelings too, don’t they?”

“It probably couldn’t breathe in there,” the hollow-eyed woman sympathized.

“I know rats aren’t as clean as cats, and baby rats aren’t as cuddly as kittens,” Barbie said, “but that’s no reason for people to treat rats like, well, like . . .”

“Like rats,” the man with the shaved head quipped.

“Exactly,” Barbie said.

“But why was the rat in the desk in the first place?” Madelyn asked.

“Because he’s my pet,” the doctor said.

“Pet rat?” Barbie said, looking at her mother. “And I can’t have a pet kitten?”

“You can’t have a pet kitten, and you can’t stay here another minute. Please go home now, Barbie,” her mother insisted.

“But why was the rat in the desk?” Barbie asked, repeating her mother’s question.

“I’m done answering questions,” the doctor said. “I would like everybody out of my office.” When no one appeared willing to be the first to exit, as is sometimes the case with guests at a party, he said, firmly, “Now!”

Clutching her prescription as if it was a winning lottery ticket, the hollow-eyed woman left. The doctor scribbled an Oxycontin prescription for the man with the shaved head.

“Here's yours, Theodore,” the doctor said.

“Call me, Ted, doc,” the man said as he put his copy of The Road to Serfdom under his arm. He stopped in the doorway, and said, the tattooed inscription on his brow looking like an epitaph on tombstone, “Oh, by the way. In case anyone's interested, I'm a lay preacher.” Before she left, Barbie wanted to give Oxy and Contin a hug, but they were still in her mother’s arms, so she didn’t dare. Not that they noticed. They were still staring bug-eyed at the rat on the desk.

“What’s going to happen to the kittens?” Barbie asked.

“Never mind what’s going to happen to the kittens,” her mother said. “It’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t get your little behind home as fast as you can.”

Barbie replied petulantly, “Oh, why did we ever leave Zanesville!” Sulking, she turned on the heels of her Keds and left.

Except for the rat and the kittens, Madelyn and the doctor were alone in the office. The doctor looked at Madelyn, waiting for her to leave. Instead, she deposited the kittens on top of the tall, three-drawer metal file cabinet. Being higher than they had ever been before, at least physically, the kittens crouched together anxiously.

“Why are you putting them up there?” the doctor asked.

“Because I’d like to I have a word with you, doctor,” she said. “I think you owe me an explanation.”

“Isn’t it you who owe me an explanation?” the doctor replied, walking over and closing the door, causing Oxy and Contin to look at each other in alarm, because they understood in the way cats have of understanding things, that even if they could get down from the file cabinet, there was no escape from the office.

“I owe you an explanation? For what?” she asked.

“For them,” the doctor said, nodding toward the kittens. He moved closer to them. Because he was only five foot four, he stood about eye to eye with the elevated kittens. Intimidated by his piercing eyes, which were enlarged by his thick glasses, they edged as far back on top of the cabinet as they dared.

“I’ll apologize for Barbie,” Madelyn said, “but those are not my kittens.”

“Then whose are they?”

“I don’t know that they’re anybody’s,” she said. “But I know whose rat that is. What I don’t know is why it was in your desk.”

“Why was Heck in my desk? That’s what you want to know?” He stopped staring at the kittens and stared at her.

“Yes,” she said, wilting a bit under his gaze.

As he stared at her, she wished, instead of confronting him, that she had left his office when he asked her to. Realizing there was nothing to stop him from firing her, she was suddenly very anxious. She recalled what Barbie had said about wishing they had never left Zanesville. She craved an Oxycontin, but they were in her pocketbook, which was locked in her desk in the outer office. “It’s probably none of my business,” she muttered, taking a step back, giving ground, both literally and figuratively.

“You’ll probably find it hard to believe and you might even think I’m crazy,” the doctor said, spreading his arms wide apart to indicate how wide of the truth what he had to say might seem. But I’ll tell you anyway,” he continued, as he began kneading the back of the rat’s neck with the knuckle of the middle finger of his right hand.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, noticing her startled look.

“Wrong?”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen anybody pet a rat.”

“Oh,” he said shrugging, “it’s just a habit. I wasn’t even conscious I was doing it. But petting a rat is really no different from petting a kitten, is it?” To prove his point, the doctor stopped kneading Heck’s neck and reached up and took Contin in his arms. “See,” he said as he began rubbing the back of Contin’s neck. Taking advantage of being in the doctor’s arms, Contin licked his fingers eagerly, finding traces of Oxycontin on them.

“But why was the rat—”

“Call him Heck, please,” the doctor interrupted her.

“Why was it—why was Heck—in the drawer?” she asked.

As he considered whether to answer her question, the doctor put Contin back on top of the file cabinet. Relieved to have his sister back, Oxy welcomed her by wagging his little tail, but when he nuzzled with her he picked up the scent of fresh Oxycontin and began licking her mouth ravenously.

“Some people might say instead of bats in the belfry, I’ve got rats in the drawer,” the doctor told Madelyn, with a humorless grin, as he resumed Heck’s backrub.

The phrase Madelyn was thinking of, as the doctor resumed his massage of the rat, was not that he had bats in the belfry but that he didn’t have all his marbles. But all she said was, “I wouldn’t say that. I’m just a hick from Ohio. What do I know? If people at Harvard keep rats in drawers, they must have a reason.”

With a condescending smile, the doctor said, “You think people keep rats in drawers at Harvard?” Picking up the rat up by his hind quarters and looking him straight in the eye, the doctor said, “Well, I suppose we should explain, shouldn’t we, Heck? There’s no point in keeping her in the dark, is there?”

Heck made vigorous motions with his paws, as if he were a mute lifeguard giving swimming instructions to a passenger on the deck of the Titanic. Like children watching from the balcony of the theater of the absurd, Oxy and Contin looked down on the scene in complete perplexity.

Looking at his wrist watch, the doctor told her, “We’re wasting time. Why don’t you go out and tell our impatient patients there'll be a delay.”

When Madelyn stepped outside, she saw the line had thinned out. Because of the cold and delay, some of the less desperate—deserters from the army of addicts— had drifted away. Without saying what it was, Madelyn announced that the doctor had to deal with an emergency inside.

“It don’t have somethin’ to do with those kittens, does it?” asked a wiry fellow in a Caterpillar Tractor cap. “I think they got the rabies myself,” he said, only he pronounced it “rabbis,” and he spat a mouthful of chaw as an exclamation point. When she went back inside, Madelyn was shaking with tremors, craving an Oxycontin, but when she discovered that her drawer was unlocked and her pocketbook not in it, she hurried to the bathroom to see if she had left it there, which she sometimes did, but it wasn’t there either. If only she could remember what she had done with her pocketbook. Had she even taken it out of her car that morning? She took a moment to brace herself before going back in the doctor’s office, but she stopped before reentering when she heard his voice. Assuming he was on his cell phone, she decided to wait before entering.

“I know, I know,” she heard the doctor say. “She probably isn’t going to believe me, but I’ve got to tell her something. What?” There was a pause. Madelyn assumed the person at the other end of the call was telling the doctor something. “Oh, it’s reassuring that you think so,” he said with a tinge of sarcasm, “but what you and I think is one thing, but what she thinks is another. What was that?” Another pause. “Yes, yes, I agree. I should have kept my mouth shut at Harvard. But we’re not at Harvard anymore, are we?” Pause. “All right! All right! Let’s not get into that again. Yes, yes, I know. I couldn't have trusted Summers. I know, I know. He’s a snake. I should have listened to you.” There was another pause after which the doctor said in a lowered voice. “What? She’s standing outside my door?” There was a pause. “Madelyn,” the doctor called. “Are you out there?”

“Yes, doctor,” she said entering guiltily, embarrassed to have been caught eavesdropping. The doctor, was seated behind the desk facing the rat. But how could whoever the doctor had been talking to know she was outside the door?

“How long were you out there?” he asked.

“Just a few seconds” she fibbed. “I thought you were on your cell phone.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said.

“You weren’t?” She looked around the office. Except for the kittens on the file cabinet and the rat on the desk, there was no one else in the office. “Who were you talking to?”

“I was talking to Heck,” he said.

“What?” she asked incredulously.

“Well, not exactly talking,” he said.

“But how . . . ?”

“I’ll try to explain,” he said.

“Yes, doctor, why don’t you explain what this is all about,” Madelyn said finally, sinking emotionally drained into the chair that had been previously occupied by the hollow-eyed woman.

What Madelyn had on her mind at that moment, however, was not the hollow-eyed woman or the man with the tattooed inscription on his shaved head, or Barbie, or the kittens on the file cabinet, or the rat on the desk, but her missing pocketbook with the Oxycontin.

“Oh, by the way. In case anyone's interested, I'm a lay preacher.”

Sarah Palin's Midnight Message

2011-06-12T12:39:00.008-04:00

“Palin Says She Didn’t Err on Paul Revere”

Headline in the New York Times

Sarah Palin’s Midnight Message

Listen to Fox News, children, and you shall hear,

Of a midnight ride that’s very queer,

But not in April of Seventy-five

When none of you were yet alive,

But, now, when Palin says, “If the Yankees march

By land or sea from the town to-night,

Hang a dollar sign above the arch
Of the Old North Church as a signal light—
One if by Todd, and two if by me;
And I waiting on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Republican village and farm,
For Tea Partiers to be up and to arm.”

Then she slips away and with muffled oar
Silently rows to the opposite shore,
Just as the moon rises over the bay,
Where thousands of redacted emails lay
Stating ungrammatically she’s declared war
On every S.O.B., near and far,
Who doesn’t know their ass from NASCAR,

And on every traitor who’s never tried
To stop the creeping socialist tide.

Meanwhile, Todd through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with pricked up ears,
Checking out massage parlors as he sneers
At all who can’t see Russia from their door.
He says, “My growling mama grizzly will eat

Up all the cowards whose fears

Of Global Warming are so G(al)ore.”

Next he climbs the Old North Church tower,
Crowing to the bats in the belfry overhead

And with his Alaskan derring-do tread

Scatters the pigeons who cower

In the rafters that round him made
A hiding place for all those candidates afraid

To stick their necks out, except the Mormon, so tall,
The biggest RINO of all.
Then Todd pauses to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of Beantown
Where RomneyCare has cast such a pall.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead
Kennedys, their graves on the hill,
Wrapped in a silence so deep and so still
That Todd could hear the departed Ted
And other liberal ghosts who’d spent
Taxpayers’ hard earned money and lent

Even more to General Motors—the road to hell

Is paved by Goldbrickers under the spell

Of the New Deal’s disciples at the Fed.
A moment only Todd curses the aforesaid,
And suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On his moose hunting mama grizzly far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay—
Where each redacted email floats
Like an armada of paper boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to misspeak and deride,

Booted and furred like a clothes horse in stride,
On the opposite shore prances Wasilla’s Pride.
Now she pats her horse’s hide,
Now she gazes at Russia, so far but so near;
Then, impetuous, she stomps the earth,
And resolves to reduce her ample girth;
But mostly she watches with a squinting glower
The belfry of the North Church tower
As it rises above the graves on the hill,
Where the Kennedys lay somber and still.
And lo! as she looks, on the tower’s height
A glimmer, and then a dollar’s light!

She springs to the saddle, the bridle she turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on her sight
A second dollar sign in the belfry burns.

A stream of unconsciousness, her smile so sweet,

Each wink of the beauty queen in the dark
Spirals virally on the internet—a Palin remark
Speeds electronically with each tweet,

Faster than a speeding bullet, faster than light,
For the fate of Palination is riding this night;
And the spark struck out by that tongue in its spite
Kindled the dame into fame on Grub Tweet.
She has left Wasilla and mounted the steep,
High above candidates with promises to keep.
Over their sheer stalking heads she glides
As she crosses the knees of her plump carcass

Under the expensive skirt from Nieman Marcus

And the cesarean scar it allegedly hides.

It’s twelve by the village clock

And she still hasn’t announced
Whether she’d put her head on the block
And risk derailing the gravy train if she got trounced

In the 2012 presidential slog,

After which there’d always be some wag to ask her,

“Are you the same Miss Sled Dog

Who eats, shoots, and leaves Alaska?”

It’s one by the old village clock

When Wasilla’s Pride enters Lexington

And sees the liberal media gathered to mock

Her arrogant ignorance of the past.

Gazing at her with a hungry glare,

They assemble there for a repast,

To feed electronically on a telegenic moron.

It’s two by the village clock

When her entourage pulls into Concord town

Where she knows Thoreau drowned

In the pond after hitting his head on Plymouth Rock,

And Charlton Heston, wearing only a jock,

Fired the shot heard round the world.

She looks ahead to the Fox Evening News,

The one network not controlled by Jews,

For her glorification of guns to be unfurled.

You know, from her bestsellers, which nobody’s read,

Of how she would rather be dead than red;

Of how she left Alaska, with its long winter’s sleep,
Because she had lucrative engagements to keep;

Of how she had flown after losing her water,

And how Levi had impregnated her daughter;

And then how that daughter had gone on the stump

And made a nice bundle getting over the hump;

Of how this family of Alaskan chillbillies

Keeps getting richer than Beverly Hillbillies;

And of how Katie Couric tried to mess up her head

By asking her what, if anything, she’d read.

Twitterin’, Facin’, and sometimes emailin’—

Through the night rides Sarah Palin;

With only the maverick McCain to thank,

She counts her money all the way to the bank;

The pink rogue elephant in a canter,

With every Givenchy eager to pant her;

Without a misgiving, doubt, or care,

She’s made herself a millionaire.

Distorting history and mauling each fact,

She’s like some P.T. Barnum act.

What’s the midnight message of Sarah Palin?

In America, any ignoramus can make a fortune failin’!

Or if you prefer to Rin-Tin-Tin it,

There’s a sucker born every minute.

Robert Forrey

Alaskan Chillbillies

Jim Tressel: Nearer My God to the Shoe

2011-06-05T12:52:00.002-04:00

“Alright, have it your way—you heard Brutus Buckeye yelling ‘Go Bucks!’”

On the occasion of the fall of Jim Tressel, I have taken the liberty (above) of photoshopping a famous James Thurber cartoon (shown below). But Thurber and his fellow Buckeye classmate Elliot Nugent provided a fuller treatment of the conflict between the body and the mind, or the flesh and the spirit, or between football and academic freedom at the Ohio State University in the play they co-authored, The Male Animal. Only in the play, it's not called The Ohio State University, it's called Midwestern University. A movie of The Male Animal was made in 1942, with Henry Fonda playing a prof who is suspected being a communist and, even worse, not a fan of the university football team. Jack Carson plays the lunkhead ex-football star who returns on Homecoming Weekend and tries to hook up with the prof's wife, whom he had dated when they were undergraduates.

If a play is ever written or a movie made about the Jim Tressel era at OSU, I think it will be called Nearer My God to The Shoe ("The Shoe" is the nickname for the Buckeye's stadium) and the heavy will not be the lunkhead football player but the geeky president of the university who sells out the Coach as Judas did Jesus.

"Alright, have it your way—you heard a seal barking."

The Buckeyes: Ohio's State Religion

2011-06-02T09:28:00.007-04:00

* * *

“For those that don’t have religion, there is football.” A line from the 1975 movie Night Moves, in which Gene Hackman plays a former professional football player turned floundering private detective who is going around helplessly in circles in a world devoid of meaning and values.

* * *

“Trust ye not in lying words . . .” Jeremiah 7:4

State Religion

The word fan is short for fanatic, which is a person who idolizes and blindly worships someone or some thing. The sports fanatic is second cousin to the religious fanatic. The religious fanatic worships a god, the sports fanatic worships a star player or a favorite team. Religious fanatics have holy places and so do sports fanatics. Catholics have the Vatican, Muslims have Mecca, and Buckeye fans have Ohio Stadium, on Woody Hayes Drive.
The Buckeye religion depends upon young men, many of them African-Americans, to perform the violent rituals that the fanatically faithful live to watch. A central myth of the Buckeye religion is that these young men are clean living and stalwart amateurs who without remuneration, other than board, room, and tuition, perform the violent football ritual for the faithful. While OSU makes millions, the players get trophies and medals they trade for tattoos. One player who traded some memorabilia said he and his mother were struggling financially while others were making lots of money from the program. He mentioned no names, but in 2010 the annual revenue from the program was $68 million and Tressel's salary package was $4.1 million. Some players are from single parent families and from impoverished backgrounds where drugs and crime are rife. The single parent is often a poor mother. That is the player’s excuse, but what is Coach Tressel’s?

If Tressel is the minister of the Buckeye religion, OSU president Gordon Gee is the bishop, but in the Buckeye religion the minister is much more powerful than the bishop as Gee revealed when he quipped to reporters, “I’m just hoping he,” meaning Tressle, “doesn’t dismiss me.” Because they are incriminating, if not devastating, important truths can sometimes be revealed only in jest. In the Buckeye religion, the geek is the lowliest, most pathetic creature in creation, not worthy of washing the feet of a coach who has not only won a national title but beaten Michigan nine out of the last ten meetings. Not since Wally Cox, TV's Mr. Peepers, roomed with Marlon Brando have we had such an odd couple as Gee and Tressel. For the trustees to have hired the bow-tied Gee for a second go-round was a good way of emphasizing who is really the boss at OSU—the coach of the football team. But by revealing an inconvenient truth, Gee may have brought his own retirement that much closer. If the coach has got to go, can the geek be far behind?

If the eighth circle of hell is reserved for those football players who get caught, the ninth circle is reserved for those who get caught and reveal inconvenient truths about “the program,” as the Ohio State system is sometimes called. Running back Maurice Clarett has been consigned to the ninth circle because not only was he caught red-handed but he then blew the whistle on the whole program.

Maurice Clarett consigned to the Ninth Circle of Hell

In our intensely competitive society, being Number One is tantamount to salvation. “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” Vince Lombardi liked to say. That's the first and only commandment of big time college football. Jim Tressel has put a pious spin on “winning is the only thing,” by saying, in effect,“Winning is the godly thing.” Winning is a goal so worthy of reaching that cheating to reach it is acceptable provided you don’t get caught. This is as true in football as it is on Wall Street. The hypocritical Tressel got caught and now the nation is shocked, shocked to learn that he was forced to resign because he and his recruits have not always played fair and square. It’s a very big news story not only in Ohio but throughout the country and will be for at least forty-eight hours. This is not just an athletic crisis. This is a spiritual crisis because OSU football is the state religion of Ohio. The state motto, which Tressel highlighted in The Winners Manual, is “With God all things are possible.” The unwritten corollary is, “Without the Buckeyes, nothing is possible.” There is no other category that Ohio has ranked first in, and thereby been redeemed by, except OSU football. Five times Woody Hayes (blessed be his name!) took the Buckeyes to the Promised Land. A national title is the state’s salvation. Jim Tressel did it once, but he got caught and now he will be consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell. Hayes is a saint for having five times filled up the spiritual emptiness at the heart of it all. Jim Tressel did it only once and now he’s been caught. The fans will turn on him the way they turned on the forty or so players who were caught in his ten years as coach. Along with everyone else, even Brutus Buckeye might turn on him. I can imagine the disgraced coach saying to the Buckeye mascot, “Et tu, Brutus?”
“Lasting goals are also from God, and they affect the people around us for good,” it says in The Winners Manual. Well, maybe around Him but not exactly around Tressel. There is Robert Reynolds, to take just one example, who early in Tressel's tenure infamously choked the Wisconsin quarterback well after the whistle had blown, knocking him, or choking him, out of the game. Whatever possessed Reynolds to do that? When he was later suspended by the Tennessee Titans for failing a drug test, we have a possible explanation, though the win-at-any-cost-because-God-is-on-our-side spirit of OSU football may have been the only inspiration he needed, though it should be pointed out that the Buckeyes choked and the Badgers came from behind to win the game. For anyone with eyes to see, it was clear whose side God was on that day.

OSU linebacker Robert Reynolds who gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “an athlete who chokes.”

In Memoriam: Eileen Perry

2011-05-17T16:42:00.000-04:00

In Memoriam: Eileen Perry (1964-2011)

Eileen helping coordinate a political rally, May 1, 2009

Eileen Perry was a member of the Concerned Citizens Group of Portsmouth and Scioto County (CCG). The opening sentence of the Articles of Incorporation for the CCG reads, “The purpose of this organization shall be to actively promote the lines of communication between the organization and local government.” Nobody was better at communicating with, or holding accountable, local government than Eileen. In letters-to-the-editor, in statements at the Portsmouth City Council meetings, and in cell phone calls to city officials and fellow Concerned Citizens, she kept the lines of communication open. In spite of a serious chronic illness, which ultimately led to her death, she was very active in the movement to make Portsmouth a better place to live. She will be sorely missed, not only by her family but by her many friends, including her fellow Concerned Citizens.

River Vices

Three Bankrupt Mayors

Haunted House from Hell

Just Who is Getting Screwed and Who is Doing the Screwing?

The BCS Dumb Ox Trophy

Top Ten Postings of 2011

The Illustrated Ballad of Dr. Lundeen

Look Deeper

'Twas the Night Before Christmas

Hornergate

Matt Dillon AWOL

Wanted for Pilfering from the C.I.P. Fund

Trent Williams's Double Talk

Bankrupt DeSimone's Crappy Properties

Fiscalholicism

A Sewer Runs Through It

Black Friday

Kalb's Record

The Morning After (the election)

VOTE AGAINST TAX INCREASE AND CITY MANAGER

The Billboard from Hell

Halloween, 2011

Rick Rattled

Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . .

Citizens for Bitter Government and the All-America City

VOTE AGAINST TAX INCREASE AND CITY MANAGER

American Garden

Jane Murray's Letter to State Auditor

TRASH TALK

Drunk on Celebrity

The Black Mold of Portsmouth

Gerlach Says No to City Manager

Portsmouth Murals Cover Up

City Manager for Portsmouth: Deja Vu All Over Again?

City Solicitor Mike Jones: Gotcha or Botcha?

Mr. Albrecht Goes to Washington

We Got Trouble in River City: Ameresco, The Music Man, and the Portsmouth Boys

Smokers' Lungs

5: Oxy & Contin: From Zanesville to Zanzibar

Sarah Palin's Midnight Message

Jim Tressel: Nearer My God to the Shoe

The Buckeyes: Ohio's State Religion

In Memoriam: Eileen Perry