Donald Trump

For local political party leaders, the trouble with presidential election years is that they don't happen in a vacuum.

While there is no more important decision voters will make on Nov. 8 than who will be the 45th President of the United States, a county party chairman has to worry about all the down-ticket races as well – the county commissioners, the county office-holders, the local judgeships.

Is the Our Lady of Perpetual Motion Marching Band  still marching? Forty years ago today the band led the First Annual WEBN-FM Fool's Day Parade, on what the station called March 32nd, 1976.

The annual Fool's Day Parade was my favorite day of the year for radio listening. WEBN's parody songs, fake floats, spoof commercials and real and/or fictional celebrity appearances were filled with cutting edge satire, social commentary and OMG moments.

The pictures were wonderful, because they were all in our imaginations. Truly radio at its finest.

In a speech before a wildly enthusiastic crowd, billionaire and GOP presidential contender Donald J. Trump bounced from one subject to another in a stream-of-consciousness speech.

Some of it was familiar ground – criticism of the news media, Hillary Clinton, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (his principal opponent in Tuesday’s Ohio primary) and his insistence that, as president, he will build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico “and make Mexico pay for it.”

  SHARONVILLE - In his nearly eight months of campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination, Ohio Gov. John Kasich has been, as he described it to hundreds of friendly suburban Republicans here Saturday morning, “unrelentingly positive.”

He has not engaged in the name-calling and yelling that has marked most of the televised GOP candidate debates. But he has also never called out his chief rival in Tuesday’s critical Ohio primary, billionaire Donald J. Trump, for the angry tone he has set for his campaign or the violence that often erupts at his campaign events.

UPDATED 9:23 AM SATURDAY:

A release from the Donald J. Trump Campaign now lists a 2:00 rally in West Chester at the Savannah Center on Chappell Crossing Boulevard.  Tickets available here:

ORIGINAL STORY: 

A mid-day Sunday rally for presidential contender Donald J. Trump at the Duke Energy Convention Center has been called off.

Eric Deters, who was the Northern Kentucky chairman of the Trump campaign told WVXU that there were "some problems" with the Duke Energy Center that could not be worked out, but he said the campaign is still trying to schedule a rally with Trump in Cincinnati before Tuesday's primary election.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Donald J. Trump, locked in a critical battle for Ohio’s 66 Republican delegates in Tuesday’s primary election, will crisscross the state this weekend, including stops for both in Cincinnati.

Thursday morning, Linda Caudill, the Hamilton County chair of Trump’s campaign, said the campaign signed a contract “late last night” with the Duke Energy Convention Center to hold a Sunday rally.

She said she had no details on the rally but said they are expected to be released by the Trump campaign later today. This story will be updated.

The idea of Donald Trump as his party’s presidential nominee is clearly getting under the skin of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

He’s probably not tossing and turning through the night, but he is clearly worried about it. And what he is worried about is the impact a Trump candidacy would have on his ability to keep his Republican majority in the U.S. Senate in a year when so many GOP senators are in tough races.

  It’s really hard to deny now that, believe it or not, Donald Trump may be unstoppable in his march to the Republican presidential nomination.

Ohio’s governor, John Kasich, one of the five GOP contenders still standing, doesn’t think so, but it is really very hard to see the narrow path Kasich will have to trod to supplant Trump when the Republicans meet in Cleveland in July for their presidential nominating convention.

  John Kasich - who was re-elected as Ohio's governor  in 2014 with 64 percent of the vote - is trailing Republican front-runner Donald Trump by five percentage points among likely Ohio GOP primary voters, according to a poll released Tuesday morning by Quinnipiac University. 

The Quinnipiac Poll had Trump with 31 percent support among Ohio Republicans, compared to 26 percent for Kasich. 

 There are no less than 13 candidates for the Republican presidential nomination who would like to see a big hole poked in the balloon of front-runner Donald Trump and see him shrivel up and go away.

But there seems to be only one of them doing anything about it – the only one willing to bell the cat.

And that one is Ohio’s governor, John Kasich.

  To say this 2016 presidential campaign has been unusual so far is belaboring the obvious. So we apologize for that.

But it has been very, very unusual.

“The campaign is unlike anything I have ever seen,’’ said Mack Mariani, associate professor and chair of the political science department at Xavier University. “If you had made this a movie, it would not have been believable.”

Let us take, for example, Ohio’s own entry into the Republican presidential scrum, Gov. John Kasich.

You’ll never watch Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” the same way after reading this column.

I always learn a lot about TV when former NBC late-night programming executive Rick Ludwin returns to speak to students at Miami University, his alma mater.

On Thursday night, he revealed NBC's camera tricks on Fallon’s top-rated “Tonight Show” to overcome limitations of cramped Studio 6B in New York’s Rockefeller Center – and a few other observations about Stephen Colbert and the changes in TV’s late-night landscape.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich was in a jovial mood when he met with reporters Thursday at the Statehouse, as he took a break from the presidential campaign trail to conduct some Ohio business.