So let's get to what's happened in the past three days in the real world while we were all busy watching fireworks and drinking beers, shall we?The Great Recession dropped incomes in 111 of 120 communities in the Greater Cincinnati area, according to a report today by The Cincinnati Enquirer.  The recession lasted from 2007 to 2009, though its reverberations are still being felt today.  The drop hit wealthy neighborhoods like Indian Hill and low-income areas like Over-the-Rhine alike.  The average drop in income was more than 7 percent across the region, though reasons for the loss and how quickly various neighborhoods have recovered are highly variable.  Wealthier places like Indian Hill, where income is tied more to the stock market, are well-positioned to continue an already-underway rebound.  Meanwhile, places with lower-income residents like Price Hill still face big challenges.• A Centerville man filed a lawsuit against Cincinnati’s Horseshoe Casino Friday, charging that the downtown gambling complex engaged in false imprisonment and malicious prosecution last year.  Mark DiSalvo claims that he was detained while leaving the casino after a dispute over $2,000 in video poker winnings.  DiSalvo wasn’t able to immediately claim the winnings because he didn’t have the proper identification, but was told he would receive paperwork allowing him to claim the money later.  He says he waited two hours before receiving the forms.  Afterward, as he stopped to check the nametag of an employee who was less than kind to him, he was confronted by casino security officers, who called police.  Three Cincinnati police officers were originally named in the suit as well, but the department settled out of court.  DiSalvo claims casino employees and police gave false testimony about him and his prior record.• Sometimes, something is better than nothing.  At least, that appears to be the thinking for groups supporting the Hamilton County Commissioners’ compromise icon tax plan to renovate Union Terminal.  The Cincinnati Museum Center board decided to back the commissioners’ version of the plan last week, despite earlier misgivings.  That plan replaced a proposal by the Cultural Facilities Task Force that would have also renovated Music Hall.  Now the task force, led by Ross, Sinclaire and Associates CEO Murray Sinclaire, is regrouping and looking for ways to fund the Music Hall fixes without tax dollars. “ Initially we were very disappointed and somewhat frustrated because of all the time we spent” on the initial proposal, Murray said, but “we’ve got an amazing group of people with a lot of expertise and we’ll figure it out. ”Meanwhile, Republican Commissioner Chris Monzel, who helped orchestrate the new, more limited deal, has said he supports it.  Initially, he indicated he wasn’t sure if he would vote for the plan himself.  The backing of the Museum Center board has swayed him, however, and he now says he’s an enthusiastic supporter of the effort to shore up Union Terminal.• The Cincinnati Cyclones have a new logo, which is exciting, at least in theory.  The team’s prior logo looked a lot like a stack of bicycle tires brought to life by a stiff dose of methamphetamines, and the one before that looked Jason Voorhees fan art.  Neither of which is really all that bad if you want to strike fear and confusion (mostly confusion) into the hearts of your opponents.  But the team, making a bid for a higher level of professionalism, tapped Cincinnati-based design and branding firm LPK for a new look.  The results are slick and clean, with the team’s colors adorning a sleek sans-serif font and a big “C” with a kind of weather-report tornado symbol in the middle.  The team’s marketing reps call the new logo “versatile,” while fans have taken to the team’s social media sites to call it boring and generic and to compare it to water circling a toilet bowl.  Personally, they can put just about whatever they want on their jerseys and I’d still hit up any game on $1 dollar hotdog night.  Not a lot of hockey options around here.• In the past three days, federal judges have stayed or struck down some of the nation’s strictest laws against women’s health facilities that provide abortions, enacted last summer in Texas and Louisiana.  The laws stipulated very specific standards for clinics.  The Louisiana law, which was put on hold by a federal judge Sunday night, set requirements that facilities have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles, a rule that could have shut down every clinic in the state.  The Texas law stipulated that clinics had to meet the same standards applied to hospitals, which would have dictated how wide hallways had to be in the facilities and other burdensome rules.  That law was struck down by a federal judge Friday.  The law would have caused the closure of 12 clinics in the state.  Ohio has laws similar to Louisiana’s requiring hospital admitting privileges.  That has caused problems for many facilities here, including one in Sharonville which a Hamilton County magistrate ordered to stop providing abortion services last month. 

There is an old saying that goes, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."  It’s alternately been credited to writer Mark Twain and British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. No matter where it originated, though, the quote applies well to unemployment figures released by the U.S. Labor Department. Earlier this month the Labor Department reported the nation’s unemployment rate dropped for the fifth consecutive month in January to 8.3 percent, its lowest level in three years.  That is good news, but not quite as good as it first appears. Using that measure, 12.3 million people are unemployed, which is a decline of 0.2 percent from December. The number of long-term unemployed — those jobless for six months or more — was 5.5 million people, accounting for 42.9 percent of the unemployed. Critics of how the government calculates the unemployment rate, however, say it’s misleading because it doesn’t count so-called “discouraged workers.”  Those are people who are jobless and have looked for work sometime in the past year but aren’t currently looking because of real or perceived poor employment prospects.  In other words, they’ve given up. Federal data shows a disproportionate number of young people, African-Americans, Hispanics and men comprise the discouraged-worker segment. Including those workers, the unemployment rate was 16.2 percent in January.  Some analysts, however, believe that grossly understates the numbers. ( The highest the rate got during the Great Depression was 25 percent in 1933.)Here’s some context.  In the modern era (1948-present), the U.S. unemployment rate averaged 5.7 percent — reaching a record high of 10.8 percent in November 1982 and a record low of 2.5 percent in May 1953.As economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has noted, “we started 2012 with fewer workers employed than in January 2001 — zero growth after 11 years, even as the population, and therefore the number of jobs we needed, grew steadily. ”Krugman added, “at January’s pace of job creation it would take us until 2019 to return to full employment. ”In a little noticed report, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stated last week that the rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this nation since the Great Depression. Additionally, the CBO — which is the official, objective analyst for the federal government — estimates that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014.If that’s not depressing enough, consider this: The share of unemployed people who have been looking for work for more than a year — referred to as marginally-attached workers— topped 40 percent in December 2009 and has remained above that level ever since. The CBO stated the high unemployment rate’s primary cause is weak demand for goods and services as a result of the recession and its aftermath, which results in weak demand for workers. To produce the largest increases in employment per dollar of budgetary cost, the agency recommended reducing the marginal cost to businesses of adding employees; and targeting people most likely to spend the additional income — generally, people with lower income. “Policies primarily affecting businesses’ cash flow would have little impact on their marginal incentives to hire or invest and, therefore, would have only small effects on employment per dollar of budgetary cost,” the CBO’s report stated. “Despite the near-term economic benefits, such actions would add to the already large projected budget deficits that would exist under current policies, either immediately or over time,” it added. “ Achieving both short-term stimulus and long-term sustainability would require a combination of policies: changes in taxes and spending that would widen the deficit now but reduce it later in the decade. ”Let’s make that clear — economic stimulus for poor people who would actually spend the money is most effective, and to have an impact the federal deficit needs to increase in the short-term. Republicans, are you listening?