From the monthly archives: November 2010
Gang, meet the Westshore Corridor Transportation Project. It’s a plan to improve the existing freight rail line along Lake Erie, upgrade it, and start a commuter passenger rail service.
It won’t ever move faster than car traffic. It will require government subsidies to stay operational. And John Kasich’s campaign has told the Morning Journal that John Kasich supports it.
The project is entirely different from the 3C high speed railroad between Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, a $400 million program in the engineering phases, Erie County Commissioner Bill Monaghan said.
The 3C project was awarded $400 million [...]
Full Story... →That’s what the WSJ is reporting. Forget the Republicans taking over the world, this is the biggest news of 2010.
When I was a freshman at BGSU in 1985, I took a class called “The History of Rock and Roll”, which at the time was a ground breaking pop culture offering at any college. The first class, our professor opened the hour by playing the number one song on the Billboard charts in 1964 the week before the Beatles arrived, which was Bobby Vinton’s “There I Said It Again.” Then he played “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, which [...]
Full Story... →Long story short. Ted Diadiun writes typically vapid navel gazing apologia for PD bias, hilariously quoting Bill Mason toady, metro editor Chris Quinn (which Anastasia immediately notices). People bring up Connie Schultz in comments. Diadiun claims he and many others at the PD have long been “troubled by the obvious conflict” regarding Connie’s marriage to Sherrod Brown.
Connie, rather publicly, loses it. As is her wont.
Full Story... →If you’ve spent any time at all reading Plunderbund then you’ve already figured out that there are multiple people who write for this blog. Me, Eric, Modern, Tim and sometimes Brian make up the core. And you’ll occassionally see other people as well.
What you probably don’t know is that there is no formal editorial control over the site’s content. Each writer is free to express him/herself as he/she sees fit.
This doesn’t mean the site is some random free-for-all. It takes a lot of work to constantly produce content and to maintain the site. And we all play [...]
Full Story... →Gang, meet House Bill 25. House Bill 25 is a proposal by Representative Adams (of the “let’s repeal the State’s income tax” fame) to “consolidate a number of state agencies. It’s based on a similar proposal former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro (R) first proposed during the 2006 Republican gubernatorial primary against Ken Blackwell. It was offered as “red meat” for the more moderate Petro to offer to try and win over the more conservative elements of his party away from Ken Blackwell.
Here’s what House Bill 25 would do. It would essentially abolish the following agencies ( Full Story... →
I’m really trying to figure out what John Kasich is planning to do about the budget. He’s turning down federal funds for railroads. He’s promised not to raise taxes. He’s putting our Race to the Top funds in jeopardy and he’s talked about eliminating the income tax.
That’s billions of dollars he’s promised not to take in.
And yet he hasn’t proposed one single serious alternative solution to increase revenue.
I’m seriously staring to wonder if he know he needs to come up with a balanced budget by the middle of March.
And today he pushed us further backwards [...]
Full Story... →Ben Marrison is the most unintentionally funny editorial writer in Ohio. Today, he claims that his paper can be trusted to call Kasich out despite endorsing him in the election:
One student asked Dispatch editors how our coverage will change because our editorial page endorsed mostly Republicans and the GOP took control of state government in a landslide on Nov. 2.
…
As we explained to the students, the job of the news pages is not to offer support, but to provide objective reports.
Our mission is to help readers understand what is happening. Newspapers have an obligation [...]
Full Story... →(HT: Commenter “Vel”)
According to yesterday’s Dispatch, incoming House Finance Committee Chairman Ron Amstuz (R-Wooster) blames the federal government for not giving Ohio another dose of federal stimulus before “forcing” them into a round of painful budget cuts that very well politically doom the new Republican House majority back into the minority by 2012.
"We have to manage our way out of one-time funding, and it would help if they just didn’t shut it down in a couple months."
In other words, he’d like the State to ask for and receive additional stimulus money to balance [...]
Full Story... →The Columbus Dispatch had the follow up story in Saturday’s paper:
"The Kasich campaign has not asked, nor do we contemplate, a blanket rejection of Strickland appointments still pending. They will be handled in a thoughtful, deliberative manner," [Ohio Senate Republican Caucus spokeswoman Maggie Ostrowski] said.
We’ll see given that Ms. Ostrowski also stated in the article that the Governor’s picks for the Casino Commission, which Strickland made before the election, should be rejected so that Kasich could make his own appointments to the body.
We’ll see how many of this appointments receive a vote in the Senate [...]
Full Story... →Posted in its entirety after the jump.
November 11, 2010
Dear Friend,
Thank you for your incredibly generous support of the Ohio Democratic Party’s (ODP) 2010 Election effort.
Though last Tuesday’s election results did not go our way, your strong support allowed ODP and our Coordinated Campaign to nearly pull off an upset victory during one of the worst economic climates in generations.
How close was the election?
Full Story... →Update: Follow the Twitter action at Rootscamp with the #RootsOH hashtag
Coming to Rootscamp tomorrow? Cool. Me too! I’ve missed the last two because of work commitments but look forward to doing some progressive un-conferencing. There is certainly plenty to talk about in the wake of the 2010 mid-terms.
For those coming, look me up. I’ll be the guy in the old school PB tee.
For those not coming, see PB for coverage of the camp. I’ll probably blog some and surely tweet a bit as well.
Full Story... →Budget Watch
