Play it again, Steve: Price and redevelopment is like AC-DC and chamber music.

I just rolled back into town following a rewarding afternoon at Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which helpfully reminds those among us so inclined to regard history as it really was and not as we now wish it to be that all depictions of the halcyon antebellum Southern “way of life” lacking reference to the sheer brutality of slave labor are, shall we vastly understate, idiotically disingenuous.

Look for photographs this weekend. Until then, and with tonight’s city council meeting probably concluded at this hour (or close to it), here’s an item from today’s Tribune:

Messer wants to be president of New Albany City Council, by Eric Scott Campbell.

New Albany City Councilman-at-large Jack Messer believes he has majority support to make him president of the nine-member legislative panel in 2008, he told The Tribune.

CM Messer certainly has my vote as the best available antidote to sitting president Kochert’s incessant conniving and transparent chicanery, but what really makes the article funny is another in a seemingly endless series of conceptual malapropisms on the part of the 3rd district’s clueless councilman.

District 3 Councilman Steve Price serves on the Redevelopment Commission with Messer. He didn’t know whether he’d vote for Messer, calling (Jeff) Gahan “my first choice,” but Price drew attention to another duty of the president: appointing council members to other city panels.

“I think they want to take me off Redevelopment and I don’t have a problem with that, but I think it should be me or [District 1 Councilman] Dan Coffey. Our districts are directly related” to redevelopment funding, Price said.

That's a hoot. Not that Price comprehends redevelopment in any meaningful way great or small, and yet he hastens to stress the importance of having himself or his conjoined 1st district counterpart in a position to readily obstruct the tenets of redevelopment. As Bluegill presciently noted in a comment a few days ago:

Price's suggestion that he doesn't have time to deal with the redevelopment issues his district supports because he's too busy serving as council liaison to the Redevelopment Commission was a classic.

Alas, when hoary oldies are all you know how to play, you just keep strumming the same tune over, and over, and over.