North Annex: Either a strip mine or pawn shop mentality on the part of Floyd County's officialdom.

Interconnectivity in today's Tribune:

Sekula pushing for local historic preservation group (Daniel Suddeath)

Appraisals for North Annex lowered (Chris Morris)

While Greg Sekula rallies the preservationists, elected officials like Larry McAllister and Ted Heavrin (both county councilmen, and evidently registered as "Democrat" in that peculiar local "well, not really" sort of way) rarely make it through a news cycle without providing more evidence for the need to rally the preservationists.

So, how much is the North Annex (as a historic structure) and the open land around it really worth?

Heavrin and his ilk say that greenbacks are the only determining factor, but of course they lack the simple courage to fairly consider, much less implement, a LOIT tax, one that might relieve the immediate need to sell off what few assets remain available to them before it can be determined whether the building and property might be worth even more as an adaptive reuse that incorporates the surrounding green space in some fashion that approximates 2009, not their preferred milieu of 1947.

Sekula's troops obviously disagree, and I tend to side with them. Some people see a tree as something to be felled and sold, while others view the woods as a place worth something in and of itself. Same goes for a building. The biggest considerations in the future of the North Annex site are how proposed development pertains to environmental matters (i.e., run-off from the asphalt twinkling in Heavrin's eyes) and the relationship of the site to Community Park.

Sell off the North Annex property and the money's gone. We'll be back to where we started, and still without a revenue stream for future needs. Use it to enhance the quality of life, and it may provide what amounts to an annuity. Accordingly, Morris quotes Heavrin: “But like everything it comes down to money.”

Wrong.

There are times when it comes down to creativity and thinking outside the box, and Heavrin stands as a prime example of how our county council fails that test.

Bank Street Brewhouse wants you to join us on television: Monday, November 16, 5 - 9 ... in the morning.

As previously noted, yesterday was a heavy day in Indianapolis. John and I went north to hawk NABC drafts, pausing momentarily in the early afternoon to accept Indiana Main Street's award to Bank Street Brewhouse as "Business of the Year" in a statehouse rotunda photo op. I ended up wearing a tasteful British brewery fleece instead of the suit, with my "These Machines Kill Fascists" t-shirt underneath. There was some flashing along the way.

NABC brewers Dave Pierce and Jesse Williams spent the day in the brewhouse planning the festivities for a television gig that materialized without warning on Thursday afternoon.

Seems that this coming Monday, November 16, Bank Street Brewhouse will be the scene for "Fox in the Morning's" remote spots of Manufacturing Mondays, a new segment by Keith Kaiser. He'll be helping brew a batch of Community Dark, and we'll be on the tube at intervals between 5:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. -- that's right, IN THE MORNING.

Some readers no doubt will remember a similar feat for Gravity Head 2008 at the Public House, when Terry Meiners joined us: Gravity Head tailgate breakfast party on the WHAS-11 morning show.

Coincidentally, having contributed a piece about breakfast and beer to LEO, the brew team concluded that there would be an exclusive beer-paired breakfast in honor of the Monday morning telecast. Chef Josh was unable to commit, but it has been determined that Jesse Williams will don the whites and invade Chef's Bank Street kitchen to cook. I'll turn it over to Dave:

Here is Chef For The Day Jesse's menu:

Roasted Red Pepper, asparagus and Capriole Farmstead Chevre' Quiche, paired with NABC Farmhouse Saison

Biscuits, Gravy & Sweet Potato home fries:
Whole wheat Porter biscuits made with NABC Bob's Old 15-B, country sausage gravy made with lean pork raised on NABC's spent grain, paired with NABC Bob's Old 15B Robust Brown Porter

Pear Galette paired with NABC Tafelbier.

Coffee? Any of you coffee people out there want to trade beer for beans?

In short, NABC will provide coffee, food, and pairing beer once the clock strikes 7 a.m. There'll be a tip jar for the early risers. We need a head count, so please RSVP. It already has been blurbed on Facebook, so don't respond again here.

Okay -- it's a work day. So what?

Stay tuned! This should be a fun (albeit unexpected) beginning to Bank Street Brewhouse's Grand Opening week.

Bank Street Brewhouse Grand Opening Week begins Tuesday, November 17.

Can intellectual honesty and integrity win a New Albany election...

or are there just too many idiotic straight ticket voters?

We know that both the local Democratic and Republican parties have perennially lacked the gumption to take positions on local issues. We know that as a result, running under their respective banners has no real meaning outside of pandering to the least among us. At the local level, there's simply no way for anyone to self-identify as a Democrat or Republican. There are no stated platforms or even fairly consistent rhetoric or performance records to compare.

Some will suggest that their allegiances are born of support for the national or state parties, but to do so is turn our republic on its decidedly non-pointy head with excrement spiraling down rather than cream being upwardly mobile.

So, the question: Are there enough reasonably intelligent people sufficiently engaged to overcome the pandering and insert some honesty into the process or should potential candidates just resign themselves to tucking their integrity down between the seams of their underpants in order to "win", thus proving that they may not be worth voting for in the first place?

Sipes makes it official.

Connie Sipes will not seek re-election to her District 46 State Senate seat. At tonight's Jefferson-Jackson dinner, she introduced the party's annointed choice to run in her place next year: Charles Freiberger, current County Commissioner.

Howard Dean was excellent, and when he told the assembled local Democrats that they should stand for something, not nothing, the silence was audible. But we'd expect that, wouldn't we? Council members in attendance were John Gonder and Bob Caesar. The Confidentials had a good time, and the NABC flashed on the screen, though not as Dean spoke.

Care to comment? I'm outta town all day Friday, so unless Bluegill swoops in ...

Not that any of the Republocrats will even be there, mind you.

The reaction of tonight's Jefferson-Jackson crowd to Howard Dean stands to be Priceless.

In more ways than one.

Carnegie Center to sneak a peek at the documentary Carbon Nation: Wed., November 18.

(Submitted. Know that there'll be a grand opening party across the street all the while on the 18th)

Carnegie Center Presents Free Sneak Peek of Documentary Carbon Nation

Discussion to Follow with Director/Producer Peter Byck

Wednesday November 18, 2009, 7-8:30 pm

The Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana will present a free special sneak peek of scenes from Carbon Nation, an upcoming documentary about climate change, on Wednesday November 18 from 7 to 8:30 pm. Carbon Nation is an optimistic (and witty) discovery of what people are already doing, what we as a nation could be doing and what the world needs to
do to prevent (or at least slow down) the impending climate crisis. Here's the great news director and producer Peter Byck shares with audiences: we already have the technology to combat most of the worst-case scenarios of climate change, and it's also very good business as well. Filmmaker Byck wants inspire the great portion of Americans that know there's a problem, but don't know what they can do - and don't realize they need to act now. Visit www.carbonnation.tv for more information. Carbon Nation is presented in conjunction with the Carnegie Center’s current exhibit Earthworks: Art Quilts by Pat DaRif, Joanne Weis, & Valerie White, on display through December 30.

Carbon Nation features interviews with over 200 people, including Richard Branson (CEO, Virgin Group), Thomas L. Friedman (New York Times), Former CIA Director James Woolsey, Van Jones (Founder, Green For All), Col. Dan Nolan, U.S. Army (Ret), Amory Lovins (Chairman, RMI), Janine Beynus (Founder, Biomimicry Institute), Art Rosenfeld (Commissioner, California Energy Commission), Denis Hayes (Founder of Earth Day), Ralph Cavanagh (NRDC), Lester Brown (Earth Policy Institute), John Rowe (CEO, Exelon), Jim Rogers (CEO, Duke Energy), and many more climate change pioneers.

Louisville filmmaker Peter Byck, Director and Producer of the documentary, will talk about the project and show about 20 minutes of clips from the film, followed by a dialogue with the audience about the film and the topic of climate change. Peter Byck has over 20 years experience as a director and editor. His first documentary Garbage won the South by Southwest Film Festival. (It screened in scores of festivals in the U.S. and Europe and played at the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center.) The Christian Science Monitor wrote about Garbage: “One part ‘Roger and Me,’ one part ‘60 Minutes,’ and one part ‘This Is Spinal Tap,’ stitched together with a sense of witty serendipity.”

The Carnegie Center for Art and History, a department of the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library, offers a full schedule of changing exhibitions and other educational programs. Visit www.carnegiecenter.org or call 812-944-7336 for more information on current exhibits, events, and classes.

Today's Tribune column: "Downtown for a reason."

Often I'll be speaking with someone about my bicycling commute to work (either NABC location), and the response will be some variant of this: "You're lucky to be able to do that."

Nope. Luck's nice, but it isn't the same as planning. Both now and previously, my choice of home was made with factors like this in mind. That's why ...

BAYLOR: (We're) downtown for a reason

It was no accident that in 2003, we bought a house on East Spring Street. Granted, there were fortuitous convergences, like being acquainted with the people who were selling the property, but the decision-making process did not occur on a whim, a prayer or a dare.

Somewhere Ayn Rand is fondling a bracelet made of Reardon Metal.

Teabagger poison?

Indiana's property tax caps get counties moving toward income taxes, by Lesley Stedman Weidenbener (Courier-Journal).

When the Clark County Council passed an income tax increase last month, it joined two dozen other Indiana counties working to shift their budgets away from property taxes, a move the General Assembly has encouraged for two years.

Expect immediate comment from my fellow local columnist, Debbie Harbeson, who yesterday took a scathing Libertarian cudgel to State Representative Ed Clere's Nov. 3 piece in the Tribune, Grant will boost entire community, in which Clere wrote:

Federal stimulus money is flowing into Georgetown. As a result, the town’s sewage will stop flowing down the hill to New Albany. It’s a big win for both communities - and a benefit to the rest of Floyd County and Southern Indiana.

Yesterday, Harbeson issued a challenge: Let’s clear the rhetoric.

Wow, it must really feel good to be federally stimulated. At least Indiana Rep. Ed Clere makes me think so. I’m sure he’s right because the deal he recently brokered as paid political middleman would certainly make some people feel good. I do have friends and family who will benefit from this forced transfer of funds from one group to another so it’s nice to know someone locally is being stimulated.

I feel like I should be reading these at a sports bar ...

Local food (and groceries) in the news.

The summer growing season has passed, but interest in local food seems to be heating up.

Much of this interest can be traced to the experience of New Albanians attending the recent Milwaukee leadership training, like Ted, who posts a video you need to watch: Growing Power Inc. Community Leadership Institute, the Power of Urban Farming.

Another attendee sent this link: Urban farms plant seeds of hope; Indy woman fights blight with garden on lot she bought for $500, by Dan McFeely (Indy Star). New Albany has plenty of patches like this one. If John M. is reading, how did the St. Marks garden work out the past summer?

Many of us were there for the grocery coop meeting: New Albany working toward grocery co-op (News and Tribune), and there's a Facebook page for the possibly emerging New Albany Grocery Coop movement.

Do we have any updates from the New Albany Farmers Market? I seem to recall hearing of a proposal to have a winter program of some variety.

America’s Most Wanted – with a slice o' Coffey Cake on the side.

Do we deserve any of this?

You know, as punishment for some variety of karma wastage?

New Albany councilwoman says ‘I’m innocent’; Diane McCartin-Benedetti arrested for DUI, by Matt Thacker (News and Tribune).

New Albany City Councilwoman Diane McCartin-Benedetti didn’t have much to say Monday following her weekend arrest for operating while intoxicated by refusal. However, she said her story will be told at a later date.

“I’m innocent and the facts will be forthcoming,” McCartin-Benedetti told The Tribune.

Score at least one point for the council woman. Lest we've forgotten, Americans are presumed innocent until proven guilty, or at least that's the assumption. She’s not a black male, and that bodes well for her in purely statistical terms (kindly note that I abhor profiling in any form).

Not unexpectedly, the main local news sources are choosing to entertain us even further by enlisting Dan Coffey in the cause of subjective analysis, enabling him to fulfill the only political mandate that he really knows: Interjecting his own agenda into places where it seldom belongs.

So it is that the same etiquette-challenged council president who earlier this year mistook Studio’s for a costume party and impersonated a copperhead snake, later threatening bodily harm to an educated citizen, now helpfully notes that there is a reason why his fellow council time servers didn’t admonish him at the time.

… Coffey said he does not condone McCartin-Benedetti’s action, but he does not expect the council will take any action against her because it has no policing authority.

Indeed it doesn’t, although ethical authority might be a different and reachable goal, but as with his own transgression and the manner by which it was swept under a rug of indifference, Coffey sees to it that there’ll be no concepts like that on his watch.

Remarkably, it gets even worse. Apparently it’s Halloween every day on West 7th, as Coffey makes the reporter wait on the porch while he ducks into a nearby water closet, dons the plush vestments, approaches the stand with a plastic cup of Welch’s and a plate of stale Ritz crackers, and straddles a standard of piety that congenitally escapes his own political realm.

“I hate to see anybody in a difficult situation, but the bottom line is we all make mistakes,” Coffey said. “Sometimes it actually ends up making us a better person.”

Verily, that’s a straight line for the ages. Where’s Milton Berle when you need him most? However, there’s even more mirth to come:

Coffey said McCartin-Benedetti’s arrest underscores a growing problem in New Albany.

“If you look at all the development downtown, it’s all been alcohol establishments,” Coffey said. “Downtown is just saturated with them.”

That’s one breathtaking grandstand.

We know from the start that Coffey's as perpetual a political non-entity as we’re likely to witness in our lifetimes, but just for the fun of it, we'll take him at his caterwauling word and concede that yes, it’s true: There are a few places downtown that sell alcoholic beverages.

Of course, this plain fact has nothing whatsoever to do with Benedetti’s consumption (if any) and arrest. There are places to drink in the suburbs, too, and also package stores. One might run a basement distilling operation and pour the yield into a flask.

Then again, we already knew that rarely does a nonsensical Coffey utterance correspond with reality outside of his pre-determined spin-cycle needs, and in his present zeal to co-opt Benedetti’s misfortune for his own personal and political self-aggrandizement, Coffey is able to play a double game, holding out an olive branch of sorts to lure the council woman into his obstructionist hovel, and blaming downtown revitalization (“them people”) for the first of what we can expect will become a long list of evils and travails.

Amid the exaggerated nothingness of Coffey’s stunted game playing, it’s worth recalling that the downtown food and beverage establishments slated for ritualistic attack by the Coffey cabal were made possible by the state's special riverfront development area rules for three-way licenses, and in turn, these rules could not be implemented without an affirmative vote by the city council.

That's right: New Albany’s city council duly approved the riverfront development area and the regulatory regime leading to the “saturation” against which Coffey froths – not yesterday, but in 2006 – and by a unanimous vote. Even Steve Price was for it, at least after being assured that the video poker machines at the VFW remained safe and sound.

Yes, and this means that three years ago, Coffey voted in favor of what he now finds expedient to decry, surely dismissing the inherent hypocrisy as a standard that doesn’t apply to him. Exactly how does Coffey explain his previous vote?

We’re left to guess that as is customary with him, he didn't have the right information at the time – and has been busy fabricating freshly spurious “facts” ever since by means of the sausage grinder he keeps for just such cases.

As always, it’s a purely depressing spectacle.

Has Skittles the Cat registered for a primary run against the Wizard next time?

Some afternoon porno irreverence.

No doubt with Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana's recent propaganda barrage ringing in his ears, one of my friends posted this comment on Facebook:

According to google, Louisville is number one, two years running, when it comes to internet users searching for porn! As a former Louisvillian, I have never been more proud!!!

I replied:

Finally, some recognition. The flip side of it is that many of us hereabouts are so backward, we didn't actually FIND any of it.

I say: Keep it local. Makes you wonder why people bother with the Internet when Cleopatra's is right down the street ... and on the way to the boat.

Previously: C-J: "New Albany again rebuffed in battle against adult bookstore."

But it was a peachy photo-op, wasn't it?

In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash recalls the fall of the Berlin Wall in the context of the year 1989, "the biggest year in world history since 1945."

With Mikhail Gorbachev's breathtaking renunciation of the use of force (a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history), a nuclear-armed empire that had seemed to many Europeans as enduring and impregnable as the Alps, not least because it possessed those weapons of total annihilation, just softly and suddenly vanished.

Nowhere in this article does Ash so much as mention Ronald Reagan's name ... nor should he.

Time flies, and walls come tumbling down.

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall began falling. Mr. Gorbachev had a hand in it, although he did not obey Ronald Reagan's exhortation to the letter, grab a jackhammer, and assist in the actual demolition.

Why the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, by Charles S. Maier (Telegraph.co.uk)

... By the summer of 1989, socialist fraternity was fraying badly, and Hungary was no longer willing to act as a gatekeeper. Once Budapest party leaders allowed East Germans to exit to Austria in September 1989, the final act of the GDR began.

Last year I posted this four-part essay that tells the story of why I was in East Berlin in 1989 just prior to the GDR's collapse. I've been remixing these to send to my friend Suzanne, who'd I'd have never known if not for sharing a communal tent with her and six other volunteers that summer. Recently we began corresponding again after a gap of a few years, and it's been good to hear from her and know that life's okay in what used to be East Germany.

Pilsner, Putin and Me (Part One).

Pilsner, Putin and Me (Part Two).

Pilsner, Putin and Me (Part Three).

Pilsner, Putin and Me (Part Four).