News

The Metropolitan Housing Coalition has found that, among other things, vacant properties unequally plague western Louisville. Read the report here:

Leading up to the fiscal cliff negotiations, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly reminded President Obama about his 24-point thumping in Kentucky in a private phone call.

The conversation typifies the icy relationship between McConnell and the president—the two have rarely met, spoken or been seen in public together.

As Politico reports, the GOP leader was warning Mr. Obama early to cool on the campaigning if he wants to make progress with lawmakers.

From Politico:

Don Stewart, McConnell’s chief spokesman, said McConnell’s comments to Obama “were in the context of trying to find a solution” to the budget crisis. The GOP leader told the president that continuing to engage in a public-relations blitz against Republicans “could have the opposite effect of what he was trying to accomplish,” the spokesman said.

Stewart added: "This, by the way, is sound advice."

The White House declined to comment.

Speaking on the House floor Wednesday, Democratic Congressman John Yarmuth says lawmakers can provide certainty during the fiscal cliff negotiations by extending the Bush era tax cuts to middle-class Americans.

Yarmuth mentioned Republican Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma as an example of finding bipartisan cooperationg. Cole has been in the news this week for breaking with his party leaders and advocating the GOP should make a deal with Democrats to raise taxes on the wealthiest two percent.

Check Yarmuth's floor speech:

The Metropolitan Housing Coalition will release its annual housing report Thursday, the same day Network Center for Community Change—or NC3—will hold a public meeting in Smoketown, addressing a key criticism of vacant property highlighted in the report.

For the past few months, residents and NC3 volunteers have been walking the Smoketown neighborhood and taking notes on vacant properties. The group similarly mapped the Shawnee neighborhood earlier this year.

Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship tells the Wall Street Journal that despite incorporating several companies in Kentucky, he doesn't have plans to return to the coal business.

In an interview with CNN, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., warned that the Republican Party is in danger of becoming a "dinosaur" unless it adopts more libertarian policy positions.

Watch:

Ray Kurzweil, arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist, is one of the leading inventors of our time and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Among his inventions, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition device, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

It's hard to believe there was a time when it was illegal to produce, sell and ship alcohol. Then again, in some places Prohibition might well have never been repealed. I lived in a dry county (Pulaski) myself, where I had to drive 50 miles to buy wine. The inhumanity! My delight at moving to Louisville, a block from Old Town Liquor, must have been something like the elation tipplers felt on Dec. 5, 1933, when the experiment known as Prohibition was repealed.

This week on our audio diary series "The Big Break," Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice Samantha Beach tackles an unfamiliar role in "A Christmas Story," while Louisville Ballet trainee Claire Horrocks prepares for "The Nutcracker." The Kentucky Opera studio artists are on hiatus until January, but Brad Raymond finds he still has plenty to keep him busy over his break.