Mayor Mark Mallory doesn’t like to say he has a bodyguard. He prefers to call it a “security detail,” and he prefers a particular security detail, his old friend Sgt. Scotty Johnson of the Cincinnati Police Department. The overtime costs quickly mounted. So did criticism, especially after Mallory took his security detail with him to Pittsburgh in September to watch the Bengals play from a private luxury suite at Heinz Field.

Photo By: Graham Lienhart

Best Case of Speaking Truth to Power: When a redesigned Fountain Square was reopened to the public in October, poet Nikki Giovanni shocked little old ladies and former Mayor Charlie Luken by reciting a poem calling gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell a “son of a bitch” and “political whore.” It created one of those faux-firestorms conservatives like to get all fired up about. To make it worse, the poem didn’t even rhyme!

Best Plea for Anal Love by a Republican: Conservative lawyer and activist Chris Finney lost his cool when he began to see that voters were going to dump his political protégé, Republican County Commissioner Phil Heimlich. During a campaign event for challenger David Pepper, Finney started cursing from the back of the room and called Pepper “a little rich fucking asshole who’s never had to work a day in his life.” Asked to quiet down, Finney told a Pepper aide to “kiss my ass.” Most unbecoming of a family-values kind of guy.

Best Lynch Mob Organizer: Few tragedies have captured public attention like the death of 3-year-old foster child Marcus Fiesel. To Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, the case was pure opportunity. He publicly called for the death penalty for Marcus’ foster parents even though the case didn’t legally qualify and even though the homicide occurred in another county altogether, outside Deters’ jurisdiction.

Best Opportunistic Media Frenzy: Perhaps the only thing more obscene than the way Marcus Fiesel was abused by his foster parents last summer was the salacious media coverage by The Enquirer and local TV stations of the legal cases involving the foster parents, the Carrolls. The Enquirer inserted itself in the story several times, from running a front page interview with the Carrolls accusing their live-in girlfriend — who’d been granted immunity in order to testify against them — of involement in the murder to printing the names’ of the jurors who found Liz Carroll guilty. Hell, the obscenities of the war in Iraq don’t get headlines like that.

Best Radio Diatribe: WAIF (88.3 FM) had a most unharmonious year, with its property taxes declared delinquent, complaints about management practices filed with the Federal Communications Commission and an ultimately unsuccessful revolt against the board of trustees. It was all too much for Donald A. Shabazz, board chair, who sent WAIF members a letter decrying “the wicked scheme being hatched by a certain group of racist, right-wing political operatives who are trying to hijack our station and destroy WAIF as we know it.” And WAIF programmers who were suspected of discussing any of these details with CityBeat had their shows taken off the air.

Best Forbidden Synonyms: When The Cincinnati Enquirer announced it was shrinking from a 50-inch web to a 48-inch web, effectively making the paper smaller, Kirby Thornton, strategic marketing director, sent employees a memo warning them not to describe the new format as “shrunk, squished and smaller. … We should use terms such as ‘enhanced’ and ‘improved.’ ”

When Vice President Dick Cheney came to town in October to speak at a Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber function at The Phoenix downtown, war protesters were kept away. The creative folks at CityBeat, situated across Race Street from The Phoenix, unfurled a large banner down the side of our building to try to catch the attention of Cheney and lunch guests. The sign said: “War Is Costly; Peace Is Priceless! Give Peace a Chance,” and an AP photo of it hanging from the building showed up in newspapers across the country. Yes, only a bunch of journalists would use a semicolon (correctly) in a protest sign.

Photo By: Sean Hughes

Best Local Publication Upgrade: Once mainly a collection of ads geared toward upscale Eastsiders (and stories to match), Cincinnati Magazine has grown into an engaging collection of quality journalism under the guidance of Editor Jay Stowe. Former CityBeat writer Kathy Wilson’s work for the magazine has been a great addition; she was recently nominated for a National Magazine Award for her piece on Bill Cunningham, a rarity for city mags like Cincinnati Magazine.

Best Blog Beef: Blogger Nate Livingston has been having fun calling CityBeat writers nasty names and rabblerouser The Dean of Cincinnati will go after just about anyone, but another blog battle caught our attention more this year. Brian Griffin at cincinnati.blogspot.com has let up on whipping boy/Enquirer columnist Peter Bronson long enough to target a new nemesis — Larry Gross of the CityBeat-affiliated Living Out Loud blog (theoutloudblog.wordpress.com). Griffin says Gross is too negative about the city, citing his continual posts and columns about downtown restaurants closing. Henny Penny Gross admits to being a curmudgeon and thanks Griffin for all of the free promotion for his site. Who wins? We’ll give it to Larry (of course) for not being drawn in. Now will you two just get it over with and have cyber-sex, already? Damn!

Best Pop Culture Know-It-Alls: Lazer Wolves! Local dudes Joe Rohem, Zach Braun and Matt Ayers (who sings for Rock band Death in Graceland when he’s not boning up on his Run DMC and TV-talk-show sidekicks history) were selected to participate in The World Series of Pop Culture, which aired last summer on VH1. They didn’t win, but they proved to be the most entertaining thing about the entire series with their slackerly, hungover looks and attitude. When they were doing their post-loss interview, the hostess asked if there was anything they would have done differently. Without missing a beat, Ayers — impatiently fingering an unlit cigarette — quipped that he would have “taken a shower.”

Best Foreign Policy by City Council: The February resolution by Cincinnati City Council opposing escalation of the war in Iraq is a mild-mannered thing, self-consciously declaring support for U.S. troops while opposing President Bush’s “surge.” But at least it’s a start.

Best Half-Measure to Stop Capital Punishment: Soon after taking office, Gov. Ted Strickland postponed three executions so he’d have more time to study their clemency appeals. Strickland has said he supports capital punishment but thinks there is evidence it’s unfairly applied in Ohio. Maybe his study will lead to a long-term moratorium.

Best Game of “Hear No Evil, See No Evil”: When Mayor Mark Mallory learned that a neo-Nazi group was contemplating a Cincinnati rally on Martin Luther King Day, he told newspaper publishers and TV/radio news directors — but only after first swearing them to secrecy. That’s not only a poor way to mobilize the public in the name of tolerance and diversity; it’s also a plain dirty trick.

Best Proof That Jeff Berding Is a Republican in Disguise: The city councilman decided to turn his 40th birthday into a political fund-raiser, soliciting contributions from guests. That was no surprise. But unfortunately neither was the makeup of the host committee for the party — it included Carl Lindner Jr., John S. Leffler and GOP supporters.

The Save Our Souls (S.O.S.) art exhibition makes current political events the theme of visual art and poetry. Instead of separating the artistic experience from everyday life and putting it into a hermetically sealed gallery, exhibition founder and curator Saad Ghosn wants artists and the public to discuss reality and art together. This year the event will move to the Cincinnati Art Academy building in Over-the-Rhine (May 25-June 3), where S.O.S. will try to retain its urban roots and grit.

Photo By: Jared M. Holder

Best Proof That Name Recognition Is Everything: Dale Mallory was the Amazing Disappearing Candidate of 2006. That’s seldom a good strategy for a first-time candidate — unless he’s under criminal investigation for alleged theft of funds from the West End Community Council. Not to worry. The mayor’s brother easily won election to the Ohio House of Representatives from the 32nd District, the same seat his brother and father held before him.

Best Covert Apology by a Public Official: When Cincinnati Police Chief Thomas Streicher Jr. remarked at a press conference in August that other police chiefs nationwide “laugh” when residents here complain about crime, an angry crowd attended a city council meeting to express its disgust. The chief’s remarks came just a few days after the husband of Cincinnati School Board Member Melanie Bates was shot and killed in front of their North Avondale home. Shortly thereafter, Streicher was strongly advised by unnamed city officials to go to Bates’ home and apologize for his insensitivity. Which led to…

Best Immature Outburst by a Public Official: After Streicher apologized, the hot-tempered chief drove to The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Elm Street offices and demanded to see editors despite not having an appointment. Once they assembled, Streicher complained about allegedly biased and inaccurate coverage of his earlier remarks, even though every media outlet in town reported a similar account. Peter Bronson, the paper’s arch-conservative columnist, then wrote a sympathetic article about the chief but never mentioned his tantrum.

Best Use of a Study You’ve Never Seen: Cincinnati officials finally released copies of a study on police deployment to the public in late June, one day after city council members got a copy and more than six months after the study was completed in December 2005. When reporters previously tried to get a copy, they repeatedly were told that only the Cincinnati Business Committee — which paid for the study — had possession, and no one at City Hall had a copy. Once the document was released, however, many of the study’s recommendations for improving the police department’s operations matched almost verbatim with Mayor Mark Mallory’s own plan for fighting the city’s rising crime rate, announced in a much-publicized press conference Mallory held six months earlier.

Best Hope for Citizen Protection: The Citizen’s Complaint Authority (CCA) now has Kenneth Glenn as its executive director. A former cop, Glenn knows what it takes to do the job and he sees how citizen oversight can help the police do a better job. Citizens are not the enemy when holding cops accountable. Now all the CCA needs is a budget increase that shows the city cares about protecting citizens as much as they want to fund cops.

Best Stretch by a Blogger Scorned: When the self-styled Dean of Cincinnati couldn’t get singers Tracy Walker and Jake Speed to answer questions about the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC), he rhetorically asked if they weren’t “complicit in the gentrification of Over-the-Rhine and the driving of poor people out of their homes.” Their offense? “The duo recorded a song commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce — some of whose board members also sit on the board to 3CDC.” The Cincinnati Beacon, the Dean’s Web site, has a knack for raising interesting questions and absurd conspiracy theories.

Best Interesting Interpretation of Local History: Peter Bronson’s book, Behind the Lines: The Untold Stories of the Cincinnati Riots, painted the 2001 uprising as another manifestation of liberalism run amok. But the Enquirer columnist’s paean to the courage of the CPD had some pretty entertaining points of view — asserting that snipers were in the crowd attending Timothy Thomas’ funeral and suggesting that a Louisville teacher injured by a police beanbag wouldn’t have gotten hurt if only she’d stayed home, where she belonged.

When the incendiary black activist was gunned down outside City Hall last spring, Roger Owensby Sr. gave him a grave site next to Owensby’s own son, who died, unarmed, at the hands of Cincinnati Police in 2000. The gesture was a generous farewell to a man who alienated many but who sincerely wanted a more just community.

Photo By: Jymi Bolden/CityBeat

Best Way to Duck Responsibility: Mayor Mark Mallory kept his head down when city council re-criminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Getting caught with a tiny part of a joint can now land you in the joint for 30 days in Cincinnati. Mallory refused to sign the bill but also refused to veto it, allowing it to become law without his approval.

Best Familiar Media Voice: Kevin Osborne was the best City Hall reporter in print when he worked for The Cincinnati Post. That paper’s woes have caused the departure of many fine journalists, and when Osborne landed at The Enquirer, which seems not to know a good writer when they have one in their midst, he was relegated to a suburban bureau, a total waste of his connections and talent. Since arriving at CityBeat in last spring, he’s the writer to read for scoops at City Hall — and elsewhere in the urban core. Nobody does it better, and we’re glad to have him on board.

Best Way to Clear Out the Riffraff: When Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce in October, the Secret Service cleared the sidewalks, ordering neighbors to stay indoors and effectively placing the area surrounding Ninth and Race streets under lockdown. The Cincinnati Police fully cooperated, placing a mounted officer and his horse at CityBeat’s front door (across from The Phoenix, where Cheney was speaking) so no one could leave.

Best Shameless Pandering to Attract Angry White Voters: Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters made it clear in a TV commercial this fall that he doesn’t like people connected with Cincinnati’s Collaborative Agreement for police reform and those he termed “riot sympathizers.” Deters made the comments in the unsuccessful re-election campaign of Hamilton County Commissioner Phil Heimlich, his fellow Republican, to appeal to white, suburban voters. Trouble is, when Deters sought re-election to the prosecutor’s office in 2004, he quickly called on lawyer Kenneth Lawson for help, who spoke in radio commercials that aired on stations with predominantly black audiences. You know Lawson — he’s the attorney who helped negotiate the Collaborative Agreement.

Best Political Use of Mutated Seafood: A TV commercial aired by Democrats last fall against U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Westwood) tried to peg the lawmaker as a Beltway insider more interested in the perks of his job than the concerns of his constituents. As the politician in the ad is offered an unusually large shrimp by a tuxedo-clad waiter, the scene is contrasted with a working class family trying to make ends meet by dining on a meal of fish sticks and pork and beans. The spot is unintentionally comical because, as anyone who knows the fashion-challenged Chabot can attest, trendy cocktail parties just aren’t his style. Chabot won re-election in November.

Best Political Upstart: The No Jail Tax PAC can’t claim all the credit for voters rejecting a proposed tax hike to build a new county jail last fall; any new tax levy faces suspicion in these parts. But the PAC took the lead in pointing out we don’t need a new jail in the first place, and that might have clinched the debate.

Best Sign That Voters Can Detect a Fraud: Gambling is hardly the bugaboo it once was, even in the conservative Midwest. But a proposed constitutional amendment to allow slot machines at race tracks in Ohio went down to defeat at the polls in large part because people realized the “Earn and Learn” gambling initiative was deceptive in its claims to be a way to pay for college scholarships for the needy.

Many people here and around the world think Raymond “Buz” Buse is the public relations person for Cincinnati. He might think the same thing; he certainly works harder than anyone to market the city and region to outsiders. His job with the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber is to promote Oktoberfest, Taste of Cincinnati and various Chamber events, but really he’s all about finding creative ways to market Cincinnati as a fun, interesting and offbeat place. Those efforts resulted in Buse recently being named PR Professional of the Year by PRWeek magazine, an award given each year to the best corporate, nonprofit and agency public relations teams and their PR campaigns. See, even that generates more positive spin for Cincinnati. He’s always working…

Photo By: Raymond Buse

Best New Balance of Power: Power to the people! After 44 years of domination by Republicans, Hamilton County voters finally woke up to the fact that it might be time for a change. Electing David Pepper (and tossing out Phil Heimlich) not only gave County Commissioner Todd Portune a fellow Democrat, it created a majority which no one younger than 50 could really remember. We’re counting on these guys to do something with their newfound power.

Best Place to Buck a Trend: All across America, 2006 was the year of the Democrats. But not in Cincinnati, where the well financed John Cranley lost the 2nd District congressional race to incumbent Steve Chabot (R-Westwood). Cranley did almost everything right, winning the endorsement of the Blue Dog Democrats and bringing in former President Clinton to stump for him. But Cranley could never quite bring himself to say the war in Iraq was a bad idea — and that’s the main issue that returned his party to power nationally.

Best Example of Abusing Legal Discretion: In March, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters decided not to indict anyone in connection with the altering of more than 1,000 addresses of voters on referendum petitions while the documents were in the custody of State Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. (R-Mount Lookout). Brinkman was paid $40,000 to gather the signatures for Citizens for Community Values, which sought to overturn a Cincinnati anti-discrimination law protecting gay people. The addresses changed were for signers who lived outside Cincinnati city limits and were replaced with addresses for people who live within the city and have the same or similar names. Critics said the effort could only come from someone comparing the names with the rolls of registered voters. Deters acknowledged that the alterations probably were illegal but chose not to indict the group, stating its lawyer had erroneously told members it was an acceptable tactic.

Best Political Stunt in a Courtroom: No one really expected Hamilton County Municipal Court to allow a group of war protesters to subpoena Donald Rumsfeld for their trespassing trial. But the effort sure got people talking, and that was the whole point: to make people discuss the war in Iraq.

Best Poke in the Ass: The vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) for women will protect against 70 percent of the strains of the virus that can lead to cervical cancer. With 100 kinds of HPV, it isn’t a cure-all, but considering that it’s a rather harmless drug what can not result in infection — the vaccine is made up of proteins, not a dead virus — it’s a serious option for preventing some forms of cancer. It takes three shots over six months at $120 a poke to complete the vaccination. It’s a lot cheaper than chemo and worth the co-pay to discuss it with your doctor.

Best New Tax Law: For decades, war resisters have urged people not to pay the federal excise tax on their phone bills. First levied during the Spanish-American War, the tax has helped pay for many an aggressive war launched by the U.S. government. Last year a federal court ruled the tax has been improperly applied, and the IRS gave everyone a refund on their 2006 income taxes.

Best Unintended Civics Lesson: After learning about a text-message pissing match between some students, Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputies searched every student entering Northwest High school one day last fall. The American Civil Liberties Union, remembering some quaint provision in the Constitution forbidding unwarranted searches and seizures, offered to file suit. But not one parent took advantage of their offer. What’s the harm in giving up a little freedom here and there?

Best Way to Demean the Vulnerable: A Kings Island Halloween attraction, “The Asylum,” brought a protest from the Hamilton County Chapter of the National Association for the Mentally Ill. The theme park’s TV and radio commercials played on ancient stigmas about mental illness making people dangerous. Apparently it’s still acceptable to mock that particular minority group.

Best Cancellation: Want a speech on civil rights? Nobody does it better than Cincinnati attorney Al Gerhardstein. His reputation apparently reached all the way to the People’s Republic of China, where he was invited to speak on the topic to groups of lawyers and officials in July. But then somebody realized their mistake: Gerhardstein really believes in freedom of speech and assembly. The invitation was rescinded just in the nick of time.

Best Way to Fool a CPD Detective: Last spring the Cincinnati Police Department claimed 286 people staying at the Drop Inn Center had already been arrested in 2006. But the Drop Inn Center looked at the list of names and found that more than two-thirds of them hadn’t stayed at the homeless shelter. Are the police so easily fooled by scoundrels giving false addresses, or were they deliberately using bad data to intimidate the Drop Inn Center?

Best Pandering to a Demographic: We’re sure that everyone with a degree in journalism at The Cincinnati Enquirer is proud to be associated with the latest marketing trick, cincymoms.com. The paper didn’t reveal that some of the topics on the site’s message boards were posted by women paid to spark reader discussions. Ten women were hired as paid “discussion leaders” to post items on the boards in an attempt to generate feedback without the newspaper ever identifying the leaders for readers or making it clear that they’re being paid. Isn’t it possible that moms — and everyone else — might simply prefer to read a responsible, thorough newspaper that tells us what’s going on in the world and in our hometown?

Best Conjuring of Marie Antoinette’s Spirit: Even with a looming budget deficit that threatens to close some of Cincinnati’s health clinics and swimming pools in the near future, city council still approved a $150,000 renovation of council chambers. While council was on break last summer, workers made several changes to the room, including bulletproofing the dais where members sit, presumably to protect their feet from gunfire. Expenses included $53,859 to expand the wooden dais where council sits and another $6,150 to install bulletproof panels, as well as $38,840 for mechanical system replacements and upgrades including providing Ethernet access to each member’s seating area.

Best Homemade Hats: Avtar Gill is an unassuming, self-educated artist who paints rocks and baseball caps, the latter with slogans touting civic virtues such as peace, justice and liberty, and gives them to political and media figures who catch his attention. His kindness, on view at just about any protest or controversial government meeting, is contagious.

Best Practical Progressive: Kristen Barker of the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center helped engineer a nonviolent anti-war sit-in at U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot’s office last fall and a Fountain Square peace rally. Her commitment, energy and charm have been a major asset in mobilizing local opposition to the war in Iraq.

Best Draconian Punishment: Chris Monzel wants to rid Cincinnati of all those disgusting, vile, good-for-nothing, low-life former sex offenders who have done their prison time and earned their second chance at life. The best way to do that is to block a treatment center. Instead of doing what will really prevent repeat offenses — treatment — Monzel wants to leave former offenders without the resources they need to change so they can re-offend and go back to jail. Former sex offenders who get treatment have one of the lowest recidivism rates of all criminals. Apparently Monzel missed that class when he was getting a degree in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Best Under-Dog Legislation: The minimum wage is finally on the rise in Ohio. Business types prefer to let “market forces” dictate wages, but the for-profit mentality doesn’t seem to realize that their quest for profits comes at the expense of low-income earners. Whether or not the $6.85 per hour increase will bring about wholesale layoffs and destroy business in this state, as predicted by minimum wage opponents, has yet to be determined. We haven’t heard about any collapses in Cincinnati yet, but it’s still early.

Best Lock ’em Up and Throw Away the Key: Robert Newman won the class action lawsuit against brought against Hamilton County for jailing indigent defendants. Public defeners failed to provide adequate representation for their clients because they didn’t bother to ask if clients could afford to pay fines and failed to request indigency hearings to keep them out of jail. Debtors prisons were supposed to be outlawed but it took Newman’s efforts to bring an end the practice in the Queen City.