We at WWE! wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a firefighter — scared of heat, untrained in CPR, never helped anybody ever. That didn’t stop today’s news of the difficult philosophical question facing some of Ohio’s bravest public employees — whether to force state Republicans to raise taxes on rich people or give up their collective bargaining rights forever — from affecting us.  

Here’s something that the backward-thinking Luddites who oppose Cincinnati’s planned streetcar system won’t tell you: A plan to convert a rundown part of Seattle into a district targeted to attracting the so-called “creative class” has worked better than expected — and the success partially is due to a new streetcar system.  

Here they go again. Just as Far Right conservatives in Congress created a crisis over the federal debt ceiling so they could advance their true goal of nibbling away at Social Security and Medicare, so are fringe factions closer to home using a backdoor maneuver to block Cincinnati’s mass transit options for the next decade or more.  

It’s refreshing to hear Cincinnati City Councilpersons discuss forward-thinking concepts — remember when they figured out a way to get the garbage picked up for free so no one had to pay for it? Buncha geniuses.   

If Ohio’s execrable new governor thought he was going to stop Cincinnati’s long-planned streetcar project by blocking $51.8 million in state funding for the project, he’d better think again. Led by Mayor Mark Mallory and City Manager Milton Dohoney Jr., city officials last week unveiled a new, shorter Phase One for the proposed system. The revised project now will be comprised of a four-mile initial segment from downtown’s Fountain Square to Findlay Market in Over-the-Rhine, at a cost of $95 million.  

It’s typically not a big deal to hop on a city bus in the morning, ask the bus driver if it’s going in the direction you think you left your car the night before and then enjoy the air-conditioned ride back to wherever you got wasted (Metro bus driver: “I ain’t mad at ya.”). Such understanding is apparently not always to be expected by professional drivers in Austin, Tex., one of whom recently determined on his own that two women shouldn’t be escorted in the direction of a Planned Parenthood clinic for fear that they might get abortions.  

An acquaintance of mine has gotten into the habit of snapping a photograph with her cellphone while filling up her gas tank. In one instance, it cost her $72.28. She recently urged her online followers to take part in a national Post-It Note campaign at the gas pump. In her words, “Every time I buy gas, I leave a sticky note on the gas pump which says, ‘How’s that Hope & Change working out for you?'  

While hopes appeared to dim last week for Cincinnati’s long-planned streetcar system due to a series of legislative setbacks, local leaders say the project is far from dead. “With any large project, I always preface anything by saying that it’s always a very long process and there are always obstacles,” says Vice Mayor Roxanne Qualls, one of several City Council members supporting the project.  

If everything goes as planned, Cincinnati’s streetcar system connecting the University of Cincinnati to Over-the-Rhine and the downtown riverfront will carry its first passengers on Reds Opening Day in 2013 — about 25 months from now. That’s the unofficial target date for the system’s opening, according to City Hall sources. But readers can safely bet that between now and then there will be plenty of overheated and inaccurate rhetoric designed to confuse citizens and block the project.  

NASA today made an announcement that even the most jealous scientists recognize as a big deal: the finding of the first rocky exoplanet outside our solar system. Speaking to the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, veteran exoplanet hunter Geoffrey Marcy called the discovery “a planetary missing link,” “a bridge between the gas giant planets we’ve been finding and the Earth” and “fucking super unbelievable.”