The decline in sales tax receipts in March for Cuyahoga County was the highest in two decades, indicating troubles in retail sales here.

 How far away can the end be?

 Someone alerted me to a WCPN show yesterday where Chris Evans of the Plain Dealer described County Commissioner Tim Hagan as aptly as anyone could.

 Ohio’s jobs picture looks more than dismal. It’s pathetic.

 The secrecy of the dealings between Squire, Sanders & Dempsey lawyer Fred Nance and MMPI suggests we won’t know how bad a deal the County Commissioners have made until it’s much too late.

Never in my memory has there been such a scramble as the mauling going on over the $1 billion in public funds sitting out there for a Medical Mart.

 It’s good that Tom Haley lived a long life. He expressed the fear that he would not.

 Boy, how the profiteers will fight over a $1 billion. Forest City will not go into the night quietly.

A buddy of mine – I'll call him DC - just had a rough couple of weeks. One of DC's friends had his house invaded by gunmen... another friend went ballistic and killed five family members, and himself... and DC was denied a job because he is “colored”. This last problem is the most serious, because it causes the first two, a million times over each year in America, and seems all too commonplace here in real NEO.

 While some people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and feed and clothe themselves and their children too many are living too high in these desperate economic times.

 It’s pretty discouraging when you have to depend on the greedy to save you.

The Plain Dealer announcement of Dan Gilbert’s casino proposal looked very much as a free front page, glitz-up color ad for gambling: $1.8 billion in annual revenue, 20,000 jobs and $60 million in tax income.

Anyone who watched Jon Stewart’s dissection last night of Jim Cramer, of CNBC - and really all “conventional” journalism - got a lesson in why newspapers and TV news simply cannot – or will not - serve the American public.

I thought it rather amusing that the Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) listed its priorities for stimulus money from Washington recently as the Plain Dealer quoted Sherwin-Williams CEO Chris Conner, GCP’s chairman. Just the guy who would know what the ordinary Cleveland resident most needs. Laughably, three pages over the PD by happenstance reports Conners’s annual income. A measly annual rate of $6,203,510.

 Just another regular guy telling us what to do with our public money.

 You can imagine why this country – and especially this county – IS (and should be) going down the drain. I return to Cleveland to find our wonderfully generous politicians are giving Eaton Corp. more than $90 million in gifts. Or should I say you and I are giving Eaton, which had sales of $15.4 billion and earnings over $1.1 billion last year, the gift.

The money continues to roll in – into the County – and out of your pockets.

Well, wouldn’t you know it?

Strategic direction : it's such an important thing, as Ed Morrison has long driven home.  Strategic doing, to me, involves careful planning and action - and its reassuring to see the core of talented thought leaders that have comprised this collective.

A lot of folks will want to further write off downtown Cleveland after the recent violent shootings of two Clinic employees.  The violence can happen anywhere.  It's time that we looked harder at ourselves.

Why would MMPI (Medical Mart Properties Inc.), the firm chosen to build and operate the medical mart and convention center, already be offering to subsidize the first 25 occupants of the Cleveland med mart?

And why is MMPI saying that it will be diverting business from its other spots to Cleveland?

Is business that bad already?

I also don’t like MMPI’s executives saying that these new $1 billion facilities will “live or die on the success of the health care market place.”

This all makes me even more nervous than I was about this debacle of the deal.

Long-time Cleveland writer John Ettorre at a journalism meeting this week asked Susan Goldberg, Plain Dealer Editor, whether the newspaper might be losing some male perspective because several top editors were women. Not the most politically correct of questions but it could have elicited a valuable exchange.

Goldberg instead was sharp in her response before an audience of a meeting sponsored by the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalist, according to Crain’s Cleveland Business:

So you may think that investing in a medical mart is something Cleveland just has to do. That’s what they said about so many things that I’m not going to list here but you know the money that’s been expended on downtown this and that over the last 20 years in Cleveland. Cleveland wasn’t alone. Other cities did the same. Now here’s a study of the same kind of “investments” made in St. Louis and how much it has helped that city. How many jobs, how much economic activity did it produce? Who actually benefited from the public give-away of our money?

During the first anti-trust trial between the city of Cleveland and the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. (CEI), I walked up to the company’s former chairman Elmer Lindseth. He had been attending the trial as a spectator. I asked the 78-year old retired executive if he ever had expected to see the day that the corporate leaders of CEI would ever be brought into a court of law by the city. He hesitated to answer. I asked him if maybe he didn’t want to respond. He smiled and said, “The times are different and things change.” Things do change.

Just what I feared.

If the Cleveland Mall site is chosen for the Medical Mart & Convention Center we could expect a raid on the historic Cleveland School headquarter building on E. 6th, across from the present convention center. It sits on valuable land next to the mall underground parking facility in front of the Marriott Hotel.