From the monthly archives: March 2011
We’ll be doing more on this soon (and I know I’m a few days late on breaking this story) but I wanted to make sure you were aware that Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks has launched a campaign in Ohio in support of John Kasich’s union busting agenda.
According to the press release the budget for the first phase is $5.6 million, and will include organized grassroots rallies and protest activities to counter union events.
Organized grassroots rallies? WTF? I guess they figure for $5.6 million they can hire some people to show up and ‘protest’ against the protesters. Based on [...]
Full Story... →Jon Husted is all a-Twitter (TM) about today being Democracy Day, a day to celebrate the ratification of the 26th Amendment which lowered the voting age to 18 that is held by Rock the Vote and the National Education Association (NEA… you know, one of those free loading teachers unions).
Ironic given that Husted has publicly been very quiet about is House Bill 159, a bill that requires the use of a government issued photo identification card which lists your address or a recent address any time you vote. Currently, a person could vote [...]
Full Story... →Quinnipiac was the first polling outfit that polled Kasich’s approval rating in January. At the time, they had it as 30% approval, 22% disapproval, which we noted was substantially worse than Strickland’s first approval rating when he took office and even his approval as he left office. At the time, conservatives dismissed the January poll saying it was premature to be polling Kasich’s job performance:
(Culling handles state gov’t issues for Americans for Tax Reform)
So two months later after SB 5 and the emerging budget fight, how’s Kasich doing?
Full Story... →I meant to have this post up last night, and I apologize for the delay. But I think you’ll find this follow up to yesterday’s analysis by Greg Mild was well worth the wait.
With the huge increase in funding to charter schools that Kasich is proposing in his budget, it seems worthwhile knowing where that money is going. According to Greg, the bulk of it will be going to charter schools who receive 2.5 times as much funding per student as public schools.
I used my editorial privileges to change Greg’s headline and trim the content [...]
Full Story... →WBNS in Columbus has the headline that just made every resident in Lucasville who, like me, remembers the 1993 Lucasville prison riots take notice.
And, no, that’s not what some progressive critic of Kasich’s budget alleges. It’s an actual Kasich Administration proposal:
Watchtowers built to give prison guards an eagle-eye view could soon be vacant under a plan proposed by Gov. John Kasich.
The state said they are obsolete and provide a false sense of security but union officials said they are vital to guard and prisoner safety, 10TV’s Chuck Strickler reported.
The guard towers at the Southern [...]
Full Story... →It’s amateur hour in the Governor’s Mansion again. Today, the Cincinnati Enquirer has a story about how Governor Kasich’s budget is going to result in a huge hits for hospitals which are scheduled to lose nearly half a billion in Medicaid funding. The story also reports how children’s hospitals like the one in Cincinnati are going to take a disproportionately larger cut than adult hospitals.
Yes, you’ve read that right, Governor Kasich’s actually penalizes hospitals who provide medical services to children. This, of course, has to be a huge, horrible mistake, right? RIGHT?!?
"We didn’t [...]
Full Story... →Ohio law required that Governor Kasich submit to the General Assembly his budget by March 15th, 2011. Technically, Kasich complied with the law in the narrowest sense of the term. But Kasich’s budget is still largely a mystery to most seasoned budget watchers for one simple reason.
Full Story... →So the Dispatch has a story about how Kasich’s “Jobs” budget is running into the Law of Unintended Consequences. For example, Kasich’s budget calls for 2% of employer pension contributions to be shifted over to employees. How does this create jobs? Kasich doesn’t even offer an explanation. It just helps Kasich balance the budget by, again, simply mandating that someone else pick up the State’s spending.
Anyway, the pensions have a requirement that they can pay off their obligations within thirty years. If not, they have to make adjustments to their contributions and/or benefits, which, after the battering [...]
Full Story... →We’ve been focused on events in Columbus lately, because honestly, that’s where the news has been. That doesn’t mean the Ohio delegation in Washington should think we’ve lost interest. You might ask, well, what have they been up to? Did a Republican really call Tea Party Conservatives “knuckle draggers?” Did somebody really push for expanding nuclear power on the very day the earthquake struck Japan? Did Jean Schmidt show the briefest flash of sanity? Can you really find one main point and two supporting links for each and every one of them? Well…
Full Story... →During the campaign, John Kasich attempted to make a serious play for the votes in Ted Strickland’s base of Southeastern Ohio, visiting the area number of times hammering Governor Strickland on the issue of jobs in the community:
"I’ll get a team of job creators focused on this area – people down here have been promised and misled for 50 years . . . I will focus on this area like a laser beam when I’m governor." –John Kasich [Source: WSAZ (Oct. 22, 2010)]
Voters still backed Strickland in the region… albeit in a much smaller margin than the Strickland [...]
Full Story... →As we’ve been discussing here at Plunderbund, Ohio’s GOP-controlled legislature is trying to rush through a crap-load of really partisan bills while everyone is distracted by SB5.
One of the worst is HB159. With few exceptions, Mecklenborg and Blessing’s bill would require everyone to show a current Ohio driver’s license or state ID in order to vote.
The goal here is obvious: to make it more difficult for Democratic voters to cast their votes in 2012.
Daniel Tokaji, a well respected expert on Election Law at OSU, wrote a scathing piece about the bill today in which he [...]
Full Story... →Budget Watch
