Fran Fails AGAIN

Fran’s long record of failure continues.

Tried to outlaw residential security doors: Failed
Tried to stop the Taylor Road project: Failed
Tried to get Ed Kelley recalled: Failed
Tried to stop Oakwood: Failed
Tried to stop the Library move: Failed
Tried to get elected to Cleveland Heights City Council: Epic FAIL, coming in second last!

Wonder what she'll fail at next?

FLASH - Safety Levy PASSES

The Safety Levy aka Issue 65 has passed by an overwhelming margin. 

Local nutcase Joe Liptow was defeated by a 2-1 margin in his quest to unseat Ruth Gray.

Despite the support she received from Ed Icove and the anti-Oakwood clowns, serial tax evader Lintashia Ikea Marshall-Wilson was soundly defeated in her quest to unseat Jane Goodman.

Ed Icove defeated Brian Dodge by an over 2-1 margin. Dodge is young and he has good ideas. I hope he'll be back. And there are other ways to make your views heard than by running for council.

He's BAAAAAAACK!

Yup, CrAzY Joe Liptow is back and running for office, again. I don't think his heart is even in it this time since I have yet to see any signs in his ward.

Joe's running against Ruth Gray which just makes me feel sorry for the voters of Ward 1. You can review Joe's history here. It turns out my prediction about Joe coming in dead last was wrong. The last place "winner" was George Martin, who probably would have gotten more votes if people didn't learn he'd been convicted of child molestation.

Joe's added on his insanity with a series of posts at the cleveland.com website where he stated that he favors the demolition and redevelopment of Quarry Park – which would mean losing the Splash Pool, baseball fields, and the Dog Park. No one has ever considered the removal of this park that serves so many. There is zero chance that Liptow’s proposal would gain any traction but the fact that he mentions it is a demonstration of how out of step he is with the average South Euclidean. Ironically Liptow decries the development of several acres of wooded area, now the Cutters Creek development which just happens to sit across the street from his house. He has also endorsed Fran Mentch for Cleveland Heights city council even though she's on trial for assaulting the library director! Liptow’s so transparently self-serving in addition to his documented inappropriate behavior at city council meetings demonstrate that Joe Liptow is unfit for any office. My advice is to sty away from this nut unless you want to be pelted with spittle every time he starts ranting & foaming at the mouth.

FLASH! Heights Council Candidate Busted for Assault

Fran preparing to stike...

Click here for the gory details.

Fran Mentch is such an odd duck. When she doesn’t get her way, she huffs & puffs & goes batty. Fran’s just like a certain candidate for South Euclid city council who SPAT on a public servant.

A Patch for South Euclid?

I once called South Euclid the Rodney Dangerfield of suburbs. We don’t get no respect. We’re considered the poor little brother of the East Side, so much so that people in our conjoined twin Lyndhurst continually ask for surgical separation even though South Euclid is the stronger of the twins and Lyndhurst would shrivel up without us. South Euclid may be poor, but we’re scrappy and we don’t pine for others’ approval.

Nowhere is that more true than when it comes to media coverage. Our town is underserved with the Sun Messenger which has one reporter covering several burbs and scant coverage on TV unless something terrible happens – if it bleeds it leads. Oh, and a few independent bloggers like myself. That’s not enough for a city with a population of 22,000.

There is another online news source, known as the Patch. Several local suburbs each have their own piece of the Patch. Cleveland Heights population about 46,000 has a Patch. Westlake, population 32,500 has a Patch. So do Solon, population 23,000 and Twinsburg, population 19,000. Beachwood has its own Patch, even though their population is less than 12,000. Patch combined Mayfield Heights, Mayfield Village and Highland Heights into one Patch and called it the Hillcrest Patch, covering a population of 30,700.

Why don’t South Euclid and Lyndhurst have a Patch? The combined population of SE-L is over 36,000, more than Westlake, more than the Hillcrest triad and three times that of Beachwood.

To know the answer to that question, you need to know the truth about what Patch really is. The Patch Media Corporation is owned by AOL, which a friend of mine likes to call “Asshole online”. Thus Patch isn’t some kind of “voice of the people” as they like to sell themselves by allowing any idiot to set up a blog there. It’s the same corporate owned BS as any other news outfit under a different name.
 

Take a look at the screen grab. Most of the communities here skew white, and either are part of the outer ring of suburbs or have very large populations like Cleveland Heights and Lakewood, places too big to ignore even though we’d like to.

Like any other corporation, they follow the dollar. And the powers that be at Patch have determined that South Euclid and Lyndhurst do not have the right “demographics” to satisfy the requirements for our own piece of the Patch pie. In other words, we’re not rich enough or white enough to merit a Patch of our own.

And that’s why South Euclid and Lyndhurst don’t have a Patch and we don’t need one.

Douchebags of year: The Tsarnaev family

There’s nothing like a terrorist attack on US soil committed by a legal resident alien and his naturalized American citizen brother to point out the weaknesses in our immigration system, our FBI and our collaboration with other nations. Before you all start screaming, I am not blaming President Obama for this. We’ve had homegrown terrorism before. Anybody remember Timothy McVeigh? This is a systemic long term issue that needs to be discussed.

Of course it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. But we shouldn’t willy-nilly accept anybody into our country just because they want asylum from their own country. We should ask questions first. Are they asking for asylum because they’re genuinely oppressed, or because they are legitimate criminals wanting to escape the law?

So we have the Tsarnaevs, a family of four, who came to this country after bouncing around the Balkan provinces. The mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, made money giving facial massages during which she parroted the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like the whopper that 9/11 was a Zionist inside job. After a while, she and her husband ditch the country and leave the kids behind. And we all know what happened then. Turns out Mom can’t return to the US to pick up her older son’s corpse because she’s skipped the country while facing charges for felony shoplifting. While she rants about how America stole her sons, she forgets that in a jihadist country her hand would have been cut off for theft. The poor dad can only shake his head. For all the talk of submissive women in Islamic culture, the dad sure seems pussy-whipped. I feel sorry for the uncle from Maryland, who seems like a stand-up guy who believes in his adopted country. He was right about his nephews. They were “losers” who maintained their extremist views while adopting the worst parts of American culture, living the “bling” lifestyle while mooching off the taxpayers and getting stoned while tweeting misogynistic drivel.

I’m not an immigrant basher. My parents were immigrants who came to America in the aftermath of World War II seeking a better life. They never forgot their roots, but once they came here they assimilated into American culture rather than bend that culture to fit their roots.

Here we are with Republicans ranting about Mexicans who only come here and do the lousy jobs no natural born citizen will do, when the real problem comes from another place altogether. Things need to change.

Look at what happened in 1980 during the Cuban boatlift. Hordes of Cubans came to our shores, and we unquestioningly granted them asylum status because we hated Fidel Castro. Turned out, many were criminals that Castro was happy to be rid of, and now we were stuck with them. But this was in an earlier era when getting information on foreign nationals was a lot more difficult.

We live in the era of information. There needs to be more international cooperation when it comes to sharing criminal records. Yeah, I know the paranoiacs Birchers and tea partiers are going to cry “New World Order!” They can suck it up. Mitt Romney made a big hullabaloo during last year’s election when he said the Russians were our greatest adversary. (Actually, he slipped and called them “Soviets” which shows what a time warp his mind is in.) But if we’d listened to the Russians about Tamerlain Tsasnaev we might have stopped this plot.

Oh, and just to prove I’m not some “Ugly American” here are my two cents on the burial controversy. I am glad that Tamerlain Tsarnaev has finally been properly buried and I have no issue with it being on US soil. This business of forcing his corpse on some other country or dropping him in the ocean like Osama Bin Laden is complete baloney. Our country has properly buried the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald, Andrew Cunanan, and Adam Lanza. If we can bury them, we can bury the latest nutjob.

As for Russia, I think Putin should grant Chechnya independence, evacuate all the Russians there, then declare war and bomb the crap out of them.

Douchebag of the Month: Thomas Treer

Thomas Treer bills himself as a historian. I have no idea what he did to earn that title. Did he graduate with a degree in history? Has he been published? Or does he just watch the History Channel?

 

As far as I can see, all Thomas has done is write a letter to the Sun Messenger decrying the existence of linkage between South Euclid and Lyndhurst.

Perhaps Thomas, who I understand is in his 20s, should live up to his billing as historian and learn about the roots of Lyndhurst’s snobbery toward South Euclid.

Back in 1924, when the South Euclid-Lyndhurst School District was created, there was a vocal group in Lyndhurst opposed to the joint district. They wanted Lyndhurst to have its own district. Why? They spouted some vague generalities about local control. But the real underlying reason was that South Euclid was home to a large Jewish population, which was not the case in Lyndhurst at the time. Since Jews have historically excelled academically, the concern among Lyndhurstians was that this would put their kids at a disadvantage. Despite Lyndhurstians’ concerns, South Euclid-Lyndhurst was for generations one of Ohio’s great success stories until Reaganomics came along and slashed federal education funding. In more recent years, there have been renewed calls for Lyndhurst to separate from South Euclid which in an area with declining population has zero chance of happening. Mostly these comments have surfaced in internet forums, and they’re clearly driven by the increased number of African-Americans in the district, most of who live in South Euclid. One kind of bigotry has been replaced by another.

Story time: I remember when my son came home from Elementary school one day. He was excited about a visit from the Chief of the Lyndhurst fire department. He told me how the fire chief was talking about how the South Euclid and Lyndhurst fire departments work together, and he joined his hands together interlacing his fingers to describe how the two departments were “like brothers.” My son told me with pride that he wanted to become a fireman. Of course, the week before he told me he wanted to be a baseball player, and the week after a football player. So you know how it goes.

Look, I don’t agree with the library’s move and I have yet to meet anyone who does. If Tommy wants to use the Library issue as yet another wedge to try and drive a division between South Euclid and Lyndhurst apart he should be upfront about why he wants it. But if he wants to do something about the Library’s move, he should do something besides bashing South Euclidians.

And that’s why I am naming Thomas Treer as March 2013’s douchebag of the month.

FLASH: Heights "activist" busted for pot

Garry Kanter, house flipper and self-proclaimed voice of the people was busted by Heights cops and a DEA task force on March 20. It's nice to know Heights cops can occasionally be called upon to do more than write speeding tickets. As for Kanter, this is no ordinary marijuana bust. There were "allegedly" 59 pot plants in his home and 5 pounds of hash oil. This is obviously more than is needed for "personal use" even for someone of Garry's...proportions. This is drug trafficking.

Doubtless Garry will accuse Mitchell Scnheider, Jane Goodman, Georgine Welo, David Miller and probably me of planting the 59 pot plants and tipping the police.

Douchebag of the month: John Ellis Bush

The Bush family keeps rearing their ugly inbred heads. George W. Bush has been out of office four years, and the country is still digging itself out of the mess he made. Dubya’s kid is a “reporter” for the Today Show despite her utter lack of qualifications for the job. Desperate Republicans are even talking up John Ellis Bush aka Jeb as a presidential candidate in 2016.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice…we’re screwed.

And in December, George H. W. Bush suffered a prolonged illness that wound him up in the ICU.

Now there’s a report that the e-mail accounts of several Bush family members were hacked. Isn’t it hilarious that members of our moneyed elite are using AOL accounts? You can view family photos, which are as boring as any family’s. You can see Dubya’s atrocious paintings where he documents his obsession with painting self-portraits in the bathroom.

The hack reveals that both Dubya and Jeb were not happy about the idea that Bill Clinton might give a eulogy at GHWB’s funeral. Jeb Bush saluted his ailing father’s “kindness and good nature” and pointed to “how kind he was with President Clinton and he helped restore his sordid reputation. A very tough thing to do but with kindness, dad probably helped Bill Clinton than anything he himself has done.”

Excuse me, Jeb? Ever hear of the Clinton Foundation, which has done so much to improve the lives of so many? What’s Poppy been doing since he was tossed from office in 1992? Skydiving and promoting his sons’ political careers. The only time GHWB has done any charity work is when Clinton has pushed him into it.

Clinton spent much of his eight years in office working to undo the damage Reagan and Bush did. Remember how great things were in the 90s? Budget surplus, low unemployment, strong growth, falling crime rates. Average Americans don’t need a reminder of all Clinton did for our country, and how Dubya screwed it up. That’s why Clinton is received like a rock star wherever he goes, while the Bushes go slouching away toward Kennebunkport.

But the sore losers need to keep harping about Monicagate as if that was the only noteworthy event in Clinton’s presidency. People like Jeb Bush are obsessed about blow jobs, which shows you where their minds are. At least Poppy Bush has had to class to not bash Clinton in public. In fact, their friendly relationship has led some to jokingly refer to Bush as Clinton’s surrogate father. (Clinton’s real father died three months after Clinton was born.) The elder Bush’s affection for Clinton must make Jeb and Dubya jealous. Maybe that’s why Jeb obsesses about Clinton’s “sordid” behavior.

But just how sordid was Clinton’s behavior? Is it unprecedented among our Presidents? Hardly. In fact, if you want to learn more of sordid behavior, you need only look as far as Clinton’s predecessor, Poppy himself. Ever hear of Jennifer Fitzgerald? Probably not, because while the media in 1992 was obsessing about Jennifer Flowers, they were looking the other way despite Bush’s well known years long affair with his assistant: Jennifer Fitzgerald. Only one channel, CNN dared investigate it, and was rebuffed as pushing sleaze.

Whatever you think of Bill Clinton’s private behavior, or that of any of the Bushes, remember that Clinton never lied the country into a war that cost 4,487 American lives!