Once completed between Cincinnati and Cleveland via Columbus, the 250-mile corridor will travel through 12 economically distressed counties and help create thousands of direct and indirect jobs, supporters say. The rail line will serve more than 6.8 million people, or nearly 60 percent of Ohio's population.  

It was an all-around bad week recently for Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Berding. He was unendorsed by the local Democratic Party after a long history of opposing initiatives proposed by Mayor Mark Mallory and other Democrats on City Council and criticizing them on radio and TV. But even his day job as the Cincinnati Bengals' sales director caused him grief. It looked like the Bengals' regular season-opener wouldn't be broadcast live on TV because the game at Paul Brown Stadium wasn't a sellout. Fortunately, at the last minute the team, WKRC-TV (Channel 12) and Kroger stepped in to buy the remaining 5,000 tickets.  

Cincinnati is a city that was settled predominantly by German Catholics, but I doubt if even the most devout modern-day resident knows Latin well enough to understand what "e.g." means. The obscure abbreviation is at the center of the latest debate over whether Cincinnati should build a $185 million streetcar system that connects downtown and Over-the-Rhine with the uptown area near the University of Cincinnati and local hospitals.   

On July 8, an interesting private meeting will occur that could influence who sits on Cincinnati City Council next year. At the request of Mayor Mark Mallory, a high-powered group of Democratic officials will convene behind closed doors to discuss growing discord on council. He called the session after CityBeat's blog reported last week that some Democratic Party precinct executives were angry about recent actions taken by Councilman Jeff Berding, a Democrat who's running for his third term. Those precinct executives are trying to build support for calling for a special meeting of the party's Executive Committee to rescind Berding’s endorsement.  

If you think voters always determine who occupies a seat on Cincinnati City Council, think again. Some of the most memorable names in Queen City politics got their entry to City Hall by means other than winning at the ballot box, including Jim Tarbell, Todd Portune, John Cranley, Roxanne Qualls and Dwight Tillery, among others. Now City Councilwoman Leslie Ghiz is asking her colleagues to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would seek to change how council vacancies are filled. She says her proposal is fairer to voters than the current system for selecting replacements.  

For almost three decades, Invest in Neighborhoods Inc. has overseen how taxpayer money is distributed to Cincinnati's neighborhood groups, doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to areas ranging from Avondale to Winton Place and all points in between. But that role might soon come to an end amid allegations about the organization's slippery business practices and secretive decision-making process.   

A diverse coalition of groups led by the NAACP's Cincinnati chapter that blocked Hamilton County officials from increasing the sales tax in 2007 to build a new jail has set its sights on another project: the city's proposed streetcar system. A petition drive has been launched to place an issue on the November ballot to prevent Cincinnati officials from spending money on the streetcar project without first getting approval from city voters.   

Most individual MySpace profiles include such necessary personal information as TV and movie interests, religion, sexual orientation and links to "MySpace friends," other users linked together through an extensive web of faux social interaction. It's become a popular tool for grassroots organizations and independent musicians, who use the site for cheap and convenient networking. This year some city council candidates are using it as a campaign tool, but few are all that popular in Interland.