Loveland, Ohio – On Saturday, May 7 at 12:45 PM, a parade will leave the John Ramsey Homestead in the White Pillars subdivision and end at the Ramsey-Paxton Cemetary at 206 Ramsey Court; where a formal dedication of new and restored gravestones will take place.
During the ceremony, the Clough Valley Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, in conjunction with the Ramsey-Paxton Cemetery Association, the Cincinnati Chapter/Sons of the American Revolution (SAR), and the Loveland American Legion Post #256 will be marking graves for Thomas Paxton, John Ramsey, and c.
Bagpiper Robert Reid, will lead the parade and perform during the ceremony. The SAR will be demonstrating muzzle rifle firing and conducting the 21-gun salute.
Team 10464 The Bionic Tigers at the KY State FTC Championship
The Bionic Tigers will be competing in the World Championship in Houston, TX from April 20-23. The World Championship features 160 of the top FTC Teams from over 6300 teams around the world, and this is the 3rd year in a row The Bionic Tigers have qualified for Worlds.
Loveland, Ohio – Loveland FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Teams 10464, The Bionic Tigers, and 5040, Nuts & Bolts, competed in the Ohio FTC Championship on March 5. The event, which was held remotely, included presentations to a panel of judges where teams had the opportunity to share the design and development of their robot, their outreach efforts to support STEM and robotics in their community, and their involvement with industry professionals. Teams also submitted scores for 6 robot matches, that were completed on their home fields, trying to score the maximum points possible in two and a half minute matches.
Based on their judging and robot performance, Team 5040, Nuts & Bolts, won the Motivate Award and 2nd place robot performance. The Motivate Award recognizes a team that makes a collective effort to make their team known throughout their community and school. Team 10464 won 4th place robot performance and the Think Award, which is the 2nd highest award for the event. The Think Award is given to the team whose Engineering Portfolio best reflects the team’s journey through the design and build process for their robot.
Team 10464 The Bionic Tigers also competed on March 12 at the Kentucky FTC State Championship at Murray St. University. This competition was their first in-person competition in 2 years due to Covid restrictions, and the event included teams from Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
At the start of the day, the Bionic Tigers and all competing teams presented to panels of judges for evaluation for awards. Teams also submitted a 15-page engineering portfolio summarizing all of their robot design and development, outreach work with other teams and the community, and connections with the professional STEM community. Following judging, they competed in 6 rounds of qualifying matches and were ranked 3rd in a very competitive field. The top 4 ranked teams became the alliance captains for the elimination rounds, and the Bionic Tigers selected two Kentucky teams as alliance partners. They lost a close match in the semi-finals, and the 1st seed alliance went on to win the robot portion of the competition.
Team 5040 Nuts & Bolts
To close out the exciting day, in the awards ceremony the Bionic Tigers won the top award of the event, the Inspire Award. This award recognizes the best all-around team that has shown success in designing and building a competitive robot and shares their experiences, enthusiasm, knowledge with other teams, sponsors, their community, and the judges. The Bionic Tigers also won Promote Award for their video answering the prompt “If there was one thing I would tell my younger self about FIRST it would be…”.
As the Inspire Award winner, the Bionic Tigers have advanced to the FTC World Championship in Houston, TX from April 20-23.
Loveland FTC teams are supported by many generous sponsors including Loveland American Legion Post 256, Sugar Creek Foods, Procter & Gamble, Standex Electronics, CBT Company, Kinetic Vision, Harlow Law Office, and Jarvis Global Investments.
The Bionic Tigers are seeking additional sponsors to help cover the travel costs for the World Championship in Houston. Please contact lovelandroboticsboosters@gmail.com if you are interested in helping sponsor the trip.
Loveland Robotics Boosters will be hosting Breakfast with the Bots, a pancake Breakfast fundraiser, on Saturday, April 9. Tickets are available at www.lovelandroboticsboosters.org.
David Miller is the Publisher and Editor of Loveland Magazine
Loveland, Ohio – Whistle Stop Clay Works (WSCW), an intimate pottery studio in Historic Downtown, is excited to announce that Bonnie McNett has purchased the business from co-founders Tim O’Grady and Kay Bolin. The studio, which opened in 2010, will have ownership transferred effective April 1, 2022.
“We could not be happier or more excited for the future of Whistle Stop Clay Works, the pottery students, and the Loveland area. Whistle Stop is a vibrant, interactive business and a real asset to this community,” said current co-owner, Kay Bolin.
The acquisition of WSCW by McNett will allow the studio’s mission of bringing the ceramic arts to Loveland to continue and provide local residents a way to explore their creativity and relax with friends and family. McNett, who has been Operations Manager for five years, brings an energy and vision to WSCW that has helped the business prosper and grow. She has been an instructor at the studio for 8 years and has been involved in the ceramic arts for over 30 years
O’Grady and Bolin decided it was time for them to try retirement again. Both had previously retired from a textile company, but in 2010 bought the property at 119 Harrison Avenue and converted the building to the WSCW teaching studio and art gallery.
Whistle Stop Clay Works is a ceramics studio located in historic downtown Loveland, Ohio. The studio offers classes for adults and children, workshops, private parties, team building activities, firing packages for artists with home studios, and an art gallery. The studio is located at 119 Harrison Avenue and can be reached at (513) 683-2529 or at www.whistlestopclayworks.com.
House Speaker and Ohio Redistricting Commission co-chair Bob Cupp, center seated, speaks with House Minority Leader Allison Russo, right seated, as fellow co-chair state Sen. Vernon Sykes looks on. The ORC agreed to hire two outside mapmakers to assist in the process of legislative redistrict after a third set of maps was struck down by the Ohio Supreme Court. (Photo: Susan Tebben, OCJ)
Legal mediators were added to the mapmaking team on Tuesday by the Ohio Redistricting Commission.
Two members of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals were approved by the commission to act as mediators as the process of creating a fourth map dictating legislative maps.
Catherine C. Geyer and Scott Coburn were chosen after talking with the commission at their Tuesday meeting. They both are listed as circuit mediators on the 6th Circuit’s website, with Geyer listed as having alternative dispute resolution experience and Coburn noted for his work in civil mediation since 2005.
“Mediators manage the process and the parties manage the solution,” Geyer said when explaining their role.
Neither of the mediators have experience with redistricting cases, they told the commission.
The legal mediators act as neutral parties to address issues that come up as the mapmakers come up with map ideas and commissioners wish to register input in the process, or when disagreements come up.
“I think the advantage you have in this scenario … here, there’s the advantage of everyone trying to get to the shared goal,” Coburn told the commission.
The mediators are “the best deal you can get,” according to Geyer, because they are “on loan from the court,” so come at no cost to the commission.
House Speaker Bob Cupp and other GOP members of the commission asked about confidentiality rules and legal privilege when it comes to the mediators. He said it may be necessary for commissioners to be able to have confidential conversations, even as the Ohio Supreme Court directed them to make the process even more transparent.
Geyer said the commission and the mediators would have to lay down rules on what constitutes legal privilege and confidentiality, but state Sunshine Laws on public meetings would still apply, meaning any decision making would have to be done in the open.
The mediators also emphasized that while the process has a lot to do with the mapmakers, the commission members should be committed to being available as well.
“I think access to the decision-makers would be the most important thing from the mediator’s perspective,” Geyer said. “We could get headed down a particular path, only to find out that one of the commissioners is not in agreement.”
Geyer and Coburn will now join the original four caucus mapmakers, along with Professor Michael McDonald and Douglas Johnson, chosen by the commission on Monday night to act as independent mapmakers.
Also at its Tuesday meeting, the commission set a schedule up to their March 28 deadline. Meetings are set for:
Wednesday – 5 p.m.
Thursday – 7 p.m.
Friday – 2 p.m.
Saturday – 4 p.m.
Sunday – 4 p.m.
Monday – 10 a.m.
Thursday and Friday’s meetings are set to have virtual options, so members of the commission who may not be able to attend in-person can still call in. They will also be streamed for the public on The Ohio Channel.
The leading candidates for the Ohio Republican U.S. Senate nomination met in Gahanna Friday. Two of them nearly came to blows.
The candidate forum hosted by FreedomWorks didn’t make it through opening statements before former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel began attacking investment banker Mike Gibbons. The other candidates, state Sen. Matt Dolan, former GOP chair Jane Timken and author J.D. Vance did their best to avoid the fracas.
The substance
The moderator took candidates through foreign policy, big tech “censorship” (twice), critical race theory, the opioid crisis and their feelings on Donald Trump’s presidency. The candidates largely agreed on support for Ukraine, but complained about how Congress approved a nearly $14 billion support package.
“You can not just put, in the dark of night, all of these spending provisions into a bill, plop it on peoples’ desks and say you’ve got 12 hours to vote for this,” Dolan argued.
Vance has argued against engaging the Ukraine war — raising eyebrows by saying he didn’t really care what happened. His position hasn’t really changed, but the framing has. Instead of emphasizing neglect, he uses the conflict to criticize establishment Republicans who couldn’t fund Trump’s border wall and to warn against American adventurism.
“The only thing that will salvage Joe Biden’s presidency is if a bunch of stupid, weak-willed Republicans let this guy bumble us into a war that we have no business fighting,” he told the crowd.
Biden has, from the outset and repeatedly since, insisted that American troops will not be sent to fight in Ukraine.
Timken decried big tech as, “the weapon of the cancel culture and the woke left.”
But beneath the red meat rhetoric, their arguments weren’t that dissimilar from what many on the left have demanded. Break them up, don’t let companies profit on your data, reform or eliminate section 230, the candidates argued.
“There is no reason that Facebook or Meta as it’s called should be as powerful as it is, and also, meddling in our elections,” Timken said.
The confrontation
From left, moderator Brandon Boxer, Matt Dolan, Mike Gibbons, Josh Mandel, Jane Timken and J.D. Vance. Photo by Nick Evans, OCJ.
Almost immediately, it became clear that Mandel would use the forum to attack Gibbons. In his opening statements Mandel argued the fight for the “soul of the Republican Party” was even more important than the fight against Democrats.
“Here’s the fork in the roads,” he argued. “Down one path goes these squishy, RINO Republicans many of whom have been pro-China over the years.”
He rattled off the list of excommunicated Republicans — Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney — before turning to Gibbons.
“(He) had all these companies here in America and made money selling them to China,” Mandel said. “That is not the path that we should be taking in this country.”
Mandel repeatedly steered his answers into Gibbons’ investment holdings criticizing him for shipping Ohio jobs overseas, selling companies “to China,” or simply holding stock in Chinese firms. By the third time he tried it, Mandel’s tactic was met with sustained boos from the crowd.
“Again Josh is showing his ignorance,” Gibbons said after one critique tied to Lordstown Motors. He then turned to the former state treasurer and asked, “Josh, do you know anything about economics or finance at all?”
Gibbons also made a dig he uses regularly on the campaign trail — Mandel has “zero” experience in the private sector.
That’s incorrect. Mandel has served on corporate boards and advised payday lenders since leaving office in 2019. He also served in the military.
The confrontation between the two became more heated, with Mandel jumping out of his seat after Gibbons told Mandel, “You might not understand this,” about a stock trade.
“You’ve never been in the private sector in your entire life,” Gibbons insisted. “You don’t know squat.”
“Two tours in Iraq,” Mandel growled, “don’t tell me I haven’t worked.”
The other candidates traded uncomfortable laughs as the moderator broke up the incident while the crowd booed.
“You’re dealing with the wrong guy,” Mandel said returning to his seat. “You watch what happens, p—-, you watch what happens.”
The incident is in keeping with Mandel’s increasingly belligerent campaign. He’s taken to ending campaign ads with the tag line “send in the marine.”
A few minutes after the confrontation, Vance, who is also a marine corps veteran, chastised Mandel.
“I think the way you use the U.S. Marine Corps, Josh, is disgraceful,” Vance said. “It’s not a political football for you to toss around.”
After the event ended, Gibbons waded out into the crowd to shake hands with attendees, but refused to talk to reporters. Instead, his campaign sent out a press release after the fact calling Mandel “unhinged, unfit and flailing.”
Mandel handled things differently.
When the forum concluded, he shook hands with his opponents and rushed off stage. He weaved through attendees and made a beeline for the service kitchen.
In a straw poll, Mandel got just 4.6%, dead last among the candidates on stage. The winner was J.D. Vance with about 43% of votes.
Speaking after the event Vance called Mandel’s conduct “embarrassing,” but he didn’t want to belabor it, instead focusing on how the crowd had reacted to the points he made during the evening. But asked about Mandel’s exit, Vance smiled and paused.
“Well,” he said. “If I’d had his debate I may have run for the kitchen, too.”
Both FirstEnergy Corp. and its shareholders argued to a federal judge that they shouldn’t be forced to publicly disclose which executives ordered the payment of political bribes that the company admitted to in a related criminal case.
The two parties are awaiting judicial approval of a proposed settlement from a derivative lawsuit filed by FirstEnergy’s shareholders. The settlement would call for FirstEnergy’s insurers to pay the company $180 million for damages incurred via the company’s role in what prosecutors have described as the largest public corruption manifestation in state history.
In an agreement with prosecutors reached in July 2021, FirstEnergy as a company admitted to a $60 million bribery scheme anchored by the then-Speaker of the Ohio House, and another $4.3 million bribe to Ohio’s then top utility regulator.
The statement of facts in that agreement, however, anonymizes the FirstEnergy officials involved in the scandal. The agreement also called for FirstEnergy to pay a $230 million penalty and cooperate with investigators to possibly avert a charge of wire fraud against the company.
Delaying any possible approval in the shareholder’s derivative case, U.S. District Judge John A. Adams asked the shareholders’ attorneys last week to state who at FirstEnergy ordered the bribe payments,
Jeroen van Kwawegen, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, demurred and didn’t answer the question, prompting Adams to cut short the hearing. Adams then issued an order calling for any “interested parties” to either provide an answer to his question or offer a good reason why they can’t divulge the information. He threatened the lawyers with contempt and possible expulsion from the case for failure to answer.
The shareholders, in arguments submitted Wednesday, offered to privately tell the judge who at FirstEnergy ordered the bribes. They said they couldn’t do so publicly because doing so would breach confidentiality rules associated with discovery (the pre-trial evidence exchanging process) and mediation.
The shareholders’ lawyers said their obligations are to their clients and to FirstEnergy itself — not the public.
“Such public disclosure could also be harmful to FirstEnergy considering the myriad related criminal and civil proceedings, the ongoing regulatory investigations, and the securities class action pending in the Southern District of Ohio where FirstEnergy is a defendant,” they wrote.
Kwawegen attached emails attached to the filing showing he asked lawyers FirstEnergy and its former executives if they’d agree to voluntarily disclose some of the information. He was rejected by the company, its former CEO Chuck Jones, Dennis Chack, and Mike Dowling (whose lawyer said they are not inclined to provide a “blanket waiver” but asked for specifics). Jones, Chack and Dowling were all fired in October 2020 amid an internal investigation.
FirstEnergy made similar arguments. The lawsuit and settlement, its lawyers said, are aimed to recover for harm done to the company because of its actions. Any public accountability, they argued, “risks harm to the interests of FirstEnergy and its stockholders, which is exactly the opposite of what a derivative litigation is supposed to do.”
Notably silent on the issue: federal prosecutors. They didn’t weigh in either way before the court. A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio Kenneth Parker didn’t respond to an inquiry.
The derivative lawsuit traces back to the passage of House Bill 6 in 2019. The energy overhaul legislation, among other provisions, provided a massive bailout of two nuclear power plants owned at the time by a FirstEnergy subsidiary. Federal prosecutors said the legislation was worth $1.3 billion to the company.
To ensure it passed and thwart a referendum attempt to repeal it, FirstEnergy admitted to providing $60 million to a nonprofit secretly controlled by then House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford. Householder allegedly used the funds to elect a slate of candidates that would support his bid to become the House Speaker, engineer the bill’s passage, thwart a repeal effort, and enrich himself personally. He has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial, scheduled for January 2023.
FirstEnergy also admitted to secretly paying $4.3 million to energy attorney Sam Randazzo just before Gov. Mike DeWine named him chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Randazzo has not been accused of a crime and has denied wrongdoing.
If the gun lobby gets its way, more than half the country will have permitless carry laws in place by the end of 2022.
Just in the past week, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Alabama Governor Kay Ivey sided with the gun lobby and signed new permitless carry bills into law, ignoring widespread opposition from law enforcement, community leaders, and their constituents.
These laws are dangerous, and for obvious reasons. Permitless carry laws allow people to carry concealed handguns in public without a permit, without training, and without a background check. Even far-right extremists and white supremacists.
Give to Everytown and Help Defeat the Gun Lobby’s Extremism
As of February 2022, it is now official and incontrovertible: the Republican Party is the party of sedition.
The official governing board, the Republican National Committee declared that January 6, 2021, rioters who attacked the Capitol were “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” So the rebels and thugs breaking into our Capitol, by hitting, choking, and smashing police officers in the head with fire extinguishers, shouting “Hang Mike Pence,” were engaging in the same activities as a high-school debate club.
These “ordinary citizens” had just been whipped into insurrection by the Big Lie—by Donald Trump, the execrable Jim Jordan, and others who wanted the mob to forcibly stop congress from doing its duty to certify the results of an election that Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security called “the most secure in American history.”
We have since learned that the insurrection was planned. Not a “demonstration” that went too far, but an attempted coup. The plan was to intimidate Mike Pence to refuse to certify the duly elected electors, have the Republican House pick bogus electors from states that voted for Biden, and keep Trump in office.
Fortunately, this scheme was devised by idiots like Rudy Giuliani, Jim Jordan, and Sidney Powell.
But even that brain trust came closer than it should have. Mike Pence, knowing that he had no power to do what Trump insisted, held firm. After four years of groveling at Trump’s feet, treason was a bridge too far—he followed the law. But later in the day, the sedition caucus of 147 Republicans in Congress, sadly including our own Steve Chabot, voted to overturn a free and fair election.
Most sane Republicans were shocked.
But in the year since the insurrection, when even more proof of the plot has come out, the Republican leadership has continued to insist, against all evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen—Big Lie One.
Now we have Big Lie Two—that the rioters’ coup attempt was just a bunch of Rotarians visiting the Capitol.
Surely, most Republican office holders are not so stupid as to believe either lie themselves. But they still parrot it to the gullible. Because these people know better, they are both liars and hypocrites.
The GOP I proudly was a part of for over four decades has become not the party of Lincoln, freedom and civil rights—but of voter suppression and outright racism; not of Teddy Roosevelt, national parks and trustbusting—but of slashing taxes on billionaires; not of William Howard Taft, Robert A. Taft, and principled conservatism—but of worship of an authoritarian sociopath of no beliefs except in his own rantings of the day; not of Dwight Eisenhower, Stan Aronoff, John Rhodes, and effective bipartisanship—but of hate and disruption; and the party of sane and measured foreign policy has become I know not what.
Until about last week, some of us thought that possibly, just possibly, the GOP could be saved. Perhaps when Trump and his ilk were gone, sanity could be restored. But when Mitch McConnell said of the GOP Big Lies, “We saw it happen. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was,” he was not praised and honored for defending truth. He was excoriated by most other Republicans for contradicting the Big Lies.
If there was a time when the GOP breathed its last dying breath, this was it. The Republican Party became the Big Lies Sedition Party, mandating that its members believe the obvious lies. (I would term it Treason Party, meaning the common definition, but someone will counter that the Constitution has a specific definition.)
There is no hope for resurrection. Everyone associated with the present GOP who has supported what the party has become must be driven from office. A new party must be formed, based on some of principles above. Trump may comment from prison for countless felonies.
GOP delenda est. What’s to be done with the ashes I must leave to others.
The tattoo on my left forearm is inspired by the 15th song on the album, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).”
Olivia Rohling
by Olivia Rohling
We all have a favorite album. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s that one album that you can listen to for days on end and never get sick of it. For me, that album is Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.
This is the third album released by the Canadian Indie-rock band, following Funeral (2004) and Neon Bible (2007). Arcade Fire is made up of husband-and-wife duo Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, Win’s younger brother, William Butler, Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kingsbury, and Jeremy Gara.
The Suburbs speaks to what it’s like growing up living in suburbia, and how comforting yet isolating that feeling can be.
“Will and I were born in a really small town in Northern California, kind of near the Nevada border,” Win Butler said in an NPR interview, “Like you know maybe 50 people on the side of a mountain. We moved to the suburbs of Houston when we were young.”
Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs is the third album released by the Canadian Indie-rock band, following Funeral (2004) and Neon Bible (2007.) Image courtesy of The Alternative.
The album begins with the song, “The Suburbs,” which talks all about suburban living. Key lyrics such as, “In the suburbs, I learned to drive,” and “But in my dreams, we’re still screaming and running through the yard,” allow the listener a chance to feel what it’s like to live a “suburban” lifestyle. Not to mention the ending of “The Suburbs” blends seamlessly into the beginning of the next song, “Ready to Start” which is just plain awesome sauce! The song is sure to give your eardrums butterflies!
Many songs on the album seem to purposely blend into one another. “Empty Room” blends into “City with No Children,” “Half Light I” blends into “Half Light II (No Celebration),” “Month of May” blends into “Wasted Hours,” and “We Used to Wait” blends into “Sprawl I (Flatland).” Talk about satisfying! The album is so well done that you won’t get sick of listening to all 5,316 minutes of it over and over again like I continue to do to this day (thanks, Spotify Wrapped)!
“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is my personal favorite song on the album. My proof of loving the song is located right on my left arm where I have a tattoo that says, “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” The song really is just that good! Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne is Haitian, so the band strategically used the term “Mountains Beyond Mountains” because it comes from a Haitian proverb that means “beyond mountains, there are more mountains.” I look at the Haitian term on my arm and it always gives me the feeling that opportunities are inexhaustible and when you surmount one great obstacle in your life you merely gain a clearer view of the next one.
In “Sprawl ll,” Régine sings “Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small, can we ever get away from the Sprawl?” This lyric goes back to the theme of growing up in suburban sprawl and wondering if there is more to life than suburbia.
If you would like to not only listen but feel the meaning of “Sprawl ll (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” you can listen to the band’s 2011 Coachella performance of this song below. Disclaimer: every time I watch this performance it brings me tears!
The Suburbs by Arcade Fire puts suburban living into music form and does so in a way that will make you want to get up and dance! That, my friends, is why this album really is all that and a bag of chips.
My top three favorites songs from The Suburbs:
“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”
“Deep Blue”
“Modern Man”
Click this image to hear samples of my three favorite songs on the album.
Nervous about donating blood? There are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there, let’s dispel some of those rumors with a quick fact check!
The Critical Need
Hoxworth Blood Center is in need of Type A and O blood, and platelet donors! If you are eligible to give, please schedule your next donation as soon as possible by calling us at (513) 451-0910 or visiting the Hoxworth HomePage
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