Ace on Facebook: LFUCG's new Annual Minimum License Fee. Discuss.

Lexington's small business owners got a surprise Thanksgiving gift from LFUCG earlier this week: a new annual minimum license fee.

The notice-slash-invoice reads: "Chapter 13 of the Code of Ordinance has been revised to provide for an occupational license and an annual minimum license fee." The explanation of the fee reads, in part: "Every business entity must pay $100, even if there is no physical location in the urban county."

This is what Ace's Facebook Page is chatting about today.

Andrew writes: "It just seems unnecessary. I'm a software engineer who does consulting work. I'm going back to school to hopefully get a Masters or PhD. I don't really want to shut my business down, just in case someone (read: old clients/friends) need a bit of work done — simple stuff that is worth a bit more than a couple of beers, but not much more than that. So now, I get to shell out another hundred dollars — due at Christmas time no less — for basically just existing. It's not like I'm using any city services or anything like that. Then, on the other hand, the city gives large companies tax breaks so that they will move in. I guess it's just the cost of not doing business..."

If you'd like to share your perspective on the Annual Minimum License Fee, for Page 5 of next week's Ace, please email us more about what you do and how the fee will impact your business at editor@aceweekly.com.

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Sports: Beat Like a Rented Donkey

Cats more lame than wild as they throw away season opener
Eric Patrick Marr
Photo by Alex Orlov

** Addendum (Wed. Nov. 19). We just got embarrassed, humiliated and disgraced on national TV last night. Again. This time against Carolina. This is absolutely ridiculous. Ace's Top Dog can dribble and pass better than some of our players, it seems. ESPN's Gameday panel was ripping on us and laughing at us. Something is j-a-c-k-e-d...

#$%!#$%^&*!#$

I'm sorry for cussing. Yet... I'm so not. I HATE losing. I HATE IT, I HATE IT, I HATE IT. I cannot stand it.

We lost to !#$#$%^& Virginia Military Institute?! Isn't that a nursing home? Are you kidding me? After all of this, after enduring last year's horrific losses to Gardner Webb, San Diego State, UAB and Houston, we OPEN UP this season with a big thud?

What the ....?

It was 19-5 before we even got the fireworks smoke cleared out from the player introductions. They made something like 8 of their first 9 three-point shots, all wiiiiiiiide open. We looked completely lost out there, like a bunch of 2nd graders who'd never seen a basketball before.

We committed 25 turnovers that VMI turned into 38 points or something. Michael Porter, son, if you're gonna keep coming out and wearing our state's name on your jersey, then quit coming out afraid. Quit being nervous, for Christ's sake. Pete Carroll at USC wouldn't accept you being nervous and timid. You'd get your clock cleaned playing Wide Receiver in that fashion. Play your game, dude, take it to 'em. You gotta quit playing on your heels, you're getting keep getting killed and it sets the tone for the whole entire team getting killed.

All Wildcats, WTF is up with all these crazy passes and dribbling skills that rival a 3-year old girl's? Damn, my friends and I, we aren't overly athletic, but we aren't THAT STUPID. You guys played like you were up against the USA Dream Team that just captured Beijing gold. You let them dominate you with their defense, especially in the first half, and when they had the ball, you left them wide open, repeatedly, time after time.

Now granted, Jodie Meeks, you played your ass off. My god, I'm glad to have you back on our team. Holy crap we missed you like crazy, last year. Now you just gotta whip your teammates into (mental) shape. You and Patterson gotta take charge, bro.

By far our best five-man set is Patterson, Meeks, Darius Miller, DeAndre Liggins and Perry Stevenson. Their athleticism and playmaking ability is something we've been lacking in Rupp for too many years now. It's good to have some real Kentucky Wildcats back in uniform. DeAndre made one VERY critical mistake, late in the 2nd half, when every possession counted more than ever. On a fast break attempt, he came down and got called for charging, yielding one of his 7 turnovers. Once he learns to control the game (I liken him to Troy Smith, the Heisman Trophy winner from Ohio State a couple of years ago), and not make the costly mistake, he'll be really good for us.

I love what Darius Miller brings to our Kentucky Wildcats. His athleticsm, his length, his passion to play Kentucky Basketball is sweeet. (And since when is slapping the backboard after a highlight dunk a technical foul?)

Perry Stevenson alternates between playing like Arnold Schwarzenegger and playing like he couldn't care less that Dr. Naismith even invented the game of basketball. That frustrates me, and I think most fans.

After the game, during the press conferences, Coach Gillispie said, "they listened to their scouting report better than we did." Fellas, you play for KENTUCKY. You don't play for yourselves. If you don't like that fact, then go play somewhere else. Go play for Virginia Military Institute where no one cares about you, or basketball.

You better bring your A Game from now on, every time you suit up, because you have 4 million people who care about every step you take, every pass you make, and every shot you attempt. You better not EVER not listen to your coaches' scouting report. EVER AGAIN.

You got beat by a bunch of dudes who hadn't beaten a Div-I school in years. For some of them, their coach said, it was their first college game EVER.

And YOU were at home, on opening night, in front of 23,000+/- fans who'd been waiting all summer and fall for this night.

And you lost it for us.

#$%^&*!^?$

You owe us for this one. You owe us, big time. Bigtime.

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What's the Matter with Kentucky?

Guest Essay by David Schankula

Electoral map from fivethirtyeight.com

Election over! Let’s recap.... Barack Obama is our new President. According to Bill Cosby and Karl Rove, Obama’s historic win is due in part to Cliff and Claire Huxtable, the First Family of 1980s television. According to most everyone else, it’s due to the yawning gap between the Republican party and the reality that is most Americans’ lives. Obama’s victory is part of a larger political picture.

In the midterm elections two years ago, Democrats picked up 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate. This year, that national swing continued. Democrats wrenched at least another six Senate seats and 20 more in the House from Republican control. And they’re not even done counting the votes.

Three incumbent Republican Senators are still hanging on for dear life—in Minnesota, Georgia, and Alaska; and four races remain undecided in the House—in California, Ohio, Virginia, and Alaska. The Democrat appears to be an all-but-declared winner in that Virginia race. If so it continues a remarkable flip-flop for our neighboring commonwealth, a historically Republican state, where the Governor’s mansion and both US Senate seats have switched from Red to Blue in recent years.

The GOP’s problem in Alaska is even clearer. Even if both Republicans—Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young—ultimately win, their protracted battles clearly define the party’s great weakness: Republicans are not who they claim to be. Stevens is a convicted felon and, after years of palling around with criminals, Young is under federal investigation for corruption. Both men are hanging on for dear life in a state swooning with love for Republican governor Sarah Palin. With her at the top of the ticket they should have cruised to victory, but when Alaska finally counts all its votes (and up to 100,000 votes might still be missing), these guys may just end up being two more Republican losers. This is the 21st Century Republican Party.

The original Republican Party was born in 1854, under a banner of abolitionism and small-government. Its ideology flourished in New England but over the past 150 years, the Party’s platform has changed, and now America’s north-eastern states are solidly Democratic. Over the past several elections those few Republicans who remain have steadily lost their seats. Lawrence Cafero Jr., the Republican leader of Connecticut’s House of Representatives, told the Associated Press that the party’s national image has damaged his state GOP. He knows when the problem started, too: with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Republican Revolution,” when a group of 50 firebrand ideologues took Washington by storm and wasted half a decade alternately shutting down government and investigating Cuban cigars. “They lost their way,” Cafero said, “and I think
more and more New England people, especially those who were Republicans basically because of smaller government and less government intrusion into our lives, started to see their party led by people whose foremost issues were social issues, religious and values and morals, etc.”

So, New England went Blue. In Levittown, Pennsylvania a different sort of change has taken place. A postwar suburban blueprint of a town where 17,000 houses were built and no blacks were allowed, the biggest obstacle facing Democrats this year was race. As the New York Times reported this past Sunday: “A lot of people in Levittown needed the five months between the primary election and Tuesday to get used to a new idea. After Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, followed by a financial crisis that shook Americans to the core, they came to terms. If Mr. Obama’s race had been a factor, they eventually had to weigh it against other concerns. “For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean,” Mr. Sinitski, the heating and air-conditioning technician, told me. “I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there. I could see that he was highly intelligent, and that matters to me, but my instinct was still to go with the white guy.”

But the change was simple. Ultimately, in the face of a never-ending war in Iraq and a cataclysmic economic collapse, race didn’t matter much to the voters of Levittown. In 2004 they’d given their votes to George W. Bush. Four years later, they voted for Barack H. Obama.

And so did Pennsylvania. By 11 percent.

If comparing Obama’s win to Bush’s previous ones is instructive, setting it against Bill Clinton’s 1992 triumph is positively enlightening. Political math whiz Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com crunched those numbers and found that while Democrats had yielded a handful of states including Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia—the DNC had offset those losses with big wins, from a clean sweep of the Northeast to big gains across the West. “Essentially,” they wrote, “by sacrificing 50 or so Electoral Votes from the inland South, the Democrats have taken about 60 votes from former swing states and turned them into Lean Democratic states, and another 44 or so from former lean Republican states and turned them into swing states. This is a good trade-off.” And sure, maybe it’s a good trade-off for the nation—hell, Barack Obama’s the President!

But what does it mean about Kentucky? Why are we bucking a national trend? With the election now over, it is time to take stock and set a course for the future.

So here’s a simple question: What’s the matter with Kentucky?

■ David Schankula is a founder of The Lexicon Project, a member of ACE Weekly’s Community Advisory Board, and a child of Lexington’s 3rd District. He can be reached at david@lexiconproject.com.

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