Greetings!
It's definitely not a slow news day when the Governor deploys the National Guard to deal with personnel shortages at hospitals around the state because knuckleheads won't get vaccinated. And speaking of COVID, we haven't written about but almost half the Browns team including the starting QB and his first back up, may be unable to play tomorrow's Week 15 game against the Oakland Raiders. Because sports team fan allegiances typically transcend politics, we wonder how many Browns fans will correlate the threat to the team's slim playoff chances to the health policy depredations of those state legislators who oppose vaccine and mask mandates and the fact that 95% of Ohio's COVID deaths this year were unvaccinated.
BULLETIN: ESPN just reported the Browns game has been rescheduled for this Monday night. The NFL was being slammed for its slavish devotion to the dollar by both players, including Browns QB Baker Mayfield and most of the the cable network's sports commentators for refusing to postpone the game. We note this will give the team a very short turnaround for their Christmas Day game against the mighty Green Bay Packers and their knucklehead QB.
Speaking of depredations, we watched the '137 Shots' documentary this week. The portion showing some of the 100 Cleveland police officers and 62 police cars in fantastic and fatal pursuit of two unarmed black people in November 2012 is nearly unfathomable. The film details much that went unreported or somehow slipped through the cracks. We didn't recall, for instance, former county prosecutor Tim McGinty denouncing the cops' behavior that night as unequivocally as he did in the film, leading us to wonder the date of his interview. And watching half a dozen police officers "plead the Fifth" during the bench trial of video game officer Mike Brelo was a sobering reminder of both why Cleveland votes united by Issue 24 and the challenges that mayor-elect Justin Bibb has waiting for him when he takes office in less than two weeks.
One of our city's under-appreciated gems is our double good library system. Not only do we have a top-rated county library, we have the marvelous Cleveland Public Library with its majestic main location at 325 Superior Ave., its awesome Louis Stokes Wing adjacent thereto, and well over two dozen neighborhood locations all in the process of being spiffed up via a $100 million initiative. CPL announced today that it has hired a Clevelander who grew up treasuring the Lee-Harvard branch as its first-ever Chief Innovation and Technology Officer.
Which brings us to this question, more poignant in the light of the mantra of Dr. O'dell Owens that "The higher the graduation rate, the lower the homicide rate": why do we have such wonderful libraries and such obscenely high rates of functional illiteracy in our community?
As always, thanks for reading!
R. T. Andrews
Top three trending posts from this week:
- University Hospitals snags an All-Star as Dr. Greg Hall becomes first medical director of Cutler Center for Men
- CPT || Field for County Executive race may see new entrant
- Mayor-elect Bibb gets Cook's tour of highest levels of Biden administration
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