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But the GOP lost the electoral college and the senate, all statewide races. And they seem positioned to keep losing those. They do win some un-gerrymandered elections, hence the governorships, but the divergence between statewide and jiggered races at the federal level is telling.

I'm very disappointed about Issue 2, but I realized it had no chance when I saw that it took up a page and a half on the ballot. That don't fly. If not for gerrymandering the Republicans are a regional fringe party.

The port authority is just coming off an embarassing scandal. It needs some positive PR. It needs to articulate what its role is and what its plan is.

Fine. Make the IDs free and issue one to everybody. Problem solved.

So people being given paper ballots for the school levy and still voting electronic for everything else? That's not what I would recommend, to put it mildly. The electronic machines at that location should be shut down until the reason for the discrepancy can be determined. Probably BOE error in not including that precinct in the school district, but nothing should be assumed, because it could also indicate systemic malfunction. The polling location should already have full-election paper ballots on hand for disability purposes. Just use those.

Wow. I could recommend technology to help RTA accomplish this extremely simple task, but that tech was made obsolete by smart cards many years ago. Therefore recommending it would be incompetent on my part. Waitaminute, what is the purpose of recording all that data in the first place? Who cares when the trips start and end? All it needs to do is increment. There's this device called a hole punch, which is often used in conjunction with cards to determine how close one has gotten to earning a free coffee.

I would love to be wrong about the esteemed councilman. And if you have the ability to influence such a thing, I wish you well.

"Ignorance-missionaries" is great and I plan on using it. But I don't get how demand has anything to do with this. Competition can produce innovation but it can also produce corner-cutting, particularly where demand is static because the product is universally necessary. Taking money out of the public schools cannot possibly help them. That is explosively illogical. Vouchers are a plan to destroy public schools forever.

What gets me about North Collinwood is that there are several dilapidated apartments near Waterloo that, if renovated, could significantly boost the neighborhood's growth potential. But that's an area where the old-school thinking is still very strong... apartments are for transients and undesirables. Real people, good people, are the ones who buy houses and have babies. I've dealt with Mr. Polensek before and I cannot imagine him ever advocating anything we'd call "growth."

Program... Event... Plaza. Well, at least we don't have anything like that anywhere downtown.

Yes, at some point they might bother adding some apartments to a market of scorching hot demand. But first we shall have our mall parking lot. Nobody should be putting 1-story buildings downtown. Disgraceful foolishness. The buildings we tore down through eminent domain were taller than what is planned for the core of this development.

I don't care who invented it, I'm just glad someone's doing it here.

The city doesn't have enough apartments. I've gone through the reasons and the consequences here before, and I think RTA and the port authority could both be part of the solution. But everyone would have to be on the same page, RTA in particular would have to dedicate itself to real TOD in a way it has not yet chosen to. There are development plans on the table right now that inexplicably do not include apartments. Examples include the plaza at Clifton and 117th, and the restaurant outbuildings in Flats East Bank. The former plan was created by a city-funded CDC, the latter was made possible by eminent domain and considerable public financing. In both cases, our leaders have chosen against pushing for apartments where most cities would. These are places where apartments are likely to succeed and where development is only possible through city assistance, yet the plans for them specifically ignore this obvious pressing need.

Most stations do not sell the 5-ride passes, which are by far the most useful in RTA's lineup. I wish they sold them in 10 and 20 as well.

I believe you're correct, but the public school still ends up with less revenue to cover the same overhead.

In addition to StrapHanger's points, which I second, remember that every bit of landscaping we add creates a perpetual maintenance expense. Consider the battle over who has to mow the treelawns on Euclid.

So am I.

Hopefully not until after the entire project has been redesigned, so that the restaurant can be part of something greater than a one-story outbuilding.

De-funding the public schools hardly seems to enhance choice. What's to offer? It's education. It offers whatever we pay for. Or less than we pay for, if profit comes off the top. Do we worry about incentive structures for the firefighters? No, they do an important job and they need sufficient funding to get it done. The answer to "there aren't enough cops in Cleveland, while Brecksville has tons of them" is not for everybody to leave Cleveland.

Huh? I'd say that *not* having a voucher system makes the level of education more wealth-based. Ever hear the late Fannie Lewis on the subject? The most leftist member of the Clevleand City Council in her day, and the voucher opponents were absolutely petrified to debate her. Even the "West Wing" used the vouchers issue as one of their occasional efforts to provide balance by boosting a conservative viewpoint. Fannie Lewis was determined to make Cleveland into a suburb of itself, and getting kids out of city schools was a key piece of that approach. She may have been leftist, but she was also as anti-urban as they come. Education should not be for-profit. I loved the idea when I was younger, and conservative, but in practice it often results in people getting rich at the expense of students and teachers. A friend of mine used to audit charter schools for a living. He said some were good, others awful, about an equal quantity each way. But in any case, the dollars going to profit were simply removed from the education side. Nothing justifies that.

The POP system speeds up the loading process. Few people if any pay their fares on the vehicle. In my experience the time spent at any one station is never as long as a red light, through there seem to be more stations than lights. I have yet to stopwatch the whole shebang though.

Definitely not unique to CMSD, my mom teaches in Warren. In some cases, disruptive kids are sent to literally roam the hallways during class because there's nothing else to be done with them. All of this, in my opinion, is evidence in favor of passing levies. School staffs are overwhelmed and the students increasingly live in dire straits, which colors their view of the world.

First of all, who is "they"? And how are "they" somehow preventing teachers from enforcing the rules and following through on disciplining the students that cause problems? Administrators often don't want kids removed from classes or suspended or expelled because they believe these actions reduce overall test scores. Increasing competition from charter schools means that enrollment itself has become a competitive metric. It is very difficult today to get a disruptive student removed from a class for any length of time.

Seconded!

The City of Lakewood could have prevented that demo by employing an appropriate policy regime. For example, they could ban new drive-thru operations on Detroit. They could make an open commitment to historic preservation and walkability. Whatever they choose to do, the city's leaders must be held accountable for their choices. McDonalds Corp has no legal authority to plan or zone the City of Lakewood.