Coming into 2008, my priority as CityBeat editor was implementing our “refreshment” project, with new features, an updated cover look, section fronts that made our opinion columns more prominent and a redesigned Web site. My priority as the organization’s lead editorial voice was to help get a Democrat elected president.  

Though our collective attention was often fractured by the local media’s coverage of poor people getting arrested, gay rights and cigarettes, national issues like housing market crashes and America’s increasingly diminished standing among the international community, we at WWE! were lucky enough to have a public medium to express our feelings and enough Internet access to look up the stuff we didn’t know anything about.  

Bootsy and Patti Collins; John Cranley; Elliott Ruther; Brian Powers; Shake It Records; Eric Vosmeier (Know Theater of Cincinnati); Aaron Sharpe (WNKU-FM); Andrew DeWitt (Deweys Pizza); Fairmount Girls; Lightborne; John Madden; Joan Kaup; Kathy...  

It begins with a strange and stiff little figure from the 17th century, "Robert Gibbs at 4-1/2 Years." Young Gibbs appears as a miniature adult, in the fashion of the times, holding gloves as his father might, painted by an artist known only as the Freake-Gibbs painter.  

When President Bush, one of Karl Rove's best friends, gave Rove the nickname of "turd blossom," it spoke volumes about both men. Just as the name implies, a turd blossom is a flower that grows out of a pile of shit. Specifically, it's a desert wildflower in west Texas that flourishes among cow droppings.