Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

Last night, I was called to fill in for someone at a community forum, speaking about Proportional Representation.  I was happy to do my part for the campaign, but I think the most rewarding aspect of the experience was meeting an older gentleman who has lived in Cincinnati long enough to remember PR.  He asked me, during the question session, why the City ever got rid of PR in the first place.  I told him that the Republicans who then controlled Cincinnati did not want minorities and Democrats earning so much control—and that they got rid of it to maintain Republican rule.  The older guy shook his head “yes,” and said my comments matched his recollection.

Then I thought of this fairly recent post from the Cincinnati Blog.  That’s when I found out that Alex Triantafilou, over at the Hamilton County GOP, had actually been bragging about the Hamilton Party’s racist history on Proportional Representation.  Triantafilou wrote:

The Hamilton County Republican Party has historically stood against proportional representation as a method of electing members of city council. The most important factors identified by the Republican Party in opposing this measure is the confusion in how the system operates and the cost associated with implementation. After vigorous debate and discussion, our Party is urging a vote of “NO” on Issue 8.

I followed the link on Cincinnati Blog, and read the above paragraph in its full context at the Hamilton County GOP blog.  It was my intent to link to both these items today.  I was surprised, however, to see that Cincinnati Blog had posted an update, which I had missed:

[UPDATE: 9/25/2008]: The post to which the following refers has been deleted from the Hamilton County GOP Blog without comment. Since Triantafilou is relatively new to the blogosphere, perhaps people will overlook this serious breach of blogger etiquette (generally, it is understood that one does not delete posts--updating or editing for typos is fine--in this manner). I’ve no idea whether our post here has anything to do with the deletion.

I spent some time this morning, hoping to find a cached copy from a number of different services—but the cached copies were either too old or too new.

Alex Triantafilou ought to be ashamed—for opposing PR, for bragging about the racism of his own party, and for deleting the web page in question.  If anyone can find a cached copy, please post, for historical purposes.

Thank you for reading (and printing from) The Cincinnati Beacon.