From the monthly archives: May 2011
The Ohio Health Care Association, a predominately nursing home industry interest group, is presently running this television ad about Kasich’s Medicaid budget. An ad that begins with an image of John Kasich, a bunch of hospitalized elderly patients, and ends with a flatline as someone, literally, pulls the plug.
And Governor Kasich is pissed about it, and decrying the influence of campaign dollars in Medicaid policy. Wonder if he has the same take on charter schools? Nah.
Full Story... →If Josh Mandel’s math skills were anywhere close to his political ambition or self-promotion skills, he’d be a really good State Treasurer. Three months on the job and already plotting his next political campaign promotion to the United States Senate, and Josh Mandel can’t name a single noteworthy achievement in office… so, he’s taking credit for what Kasich is doing instead, with one exception.
Mandel still refuses to say publicly what his stance is on Kasich’s SB 5 or Paul Ryan’s “Let’s get rid of Medicare and throw the seniors to the private insurers” plan. Some Senate candidate.
Full Story... →Today the Dispatch ran a seemingly innocent Op Ed in support of the charter school changes included in the house budget bill. The Op Ed was written by Thomas F. Needles who the Dispatch identifies as an employee of a “Columbus-based government-relations consulting firm”.
In the piece Tom defends the changes to Ohio’s charter school laws and goes so far as to claim that White Hat Management, the for-profit charter school company who stands to directly benefit financially from the changes, is “a proven and effective education management organization.”
More on Tom in a second, first a little [...]
Full Story... →We’ve received more than a few emails asking where people can donate to help get the Senate Bill 5 referendum on the ballot, so I thought I would pass along some information I received from the group leading the charge.
We Are Ohio finally has their donation page up and they are collecting money to help purchase “survival kits” for signature gatherers:
Our volunteers are on the streets, starting at dawn, working into the night and the elements are often working against them. For this reason, they need a survival kit
Each survival kit includes the following items:
Clipboard [...]
Full Story... →Imagine for a minute the media coverage that would have resulted if Governor Kasich proposed cutting the state funding for students with disabilities. School districts would be required to identify students with Deafness, Visual Impairments, Orthopedic Impairments, Specific Learning Disabilities, Autism, Traumatic Brain Injuries, and more, but any district spending requirements would be eliminated.
Or imagine the number of national media outlets that would have descended upon Columbus if Governor Kasich announced the slashing of funding for students identified as Black, stating that these 281,445 students across the state would only receive educational opportunities through one of the state’s Educational Service [...]
Full Story... →That’s not a misprint. When the GOP passed the budget bill this week, they left a provision in the teacher performance pay section (that is NOT distinctly different than Senate Bill 5, regardless of Mr. Batchelder’s lens) that shall measure a teacher’s performance by considering whether the teacher is a “breather” as is defined in Ohio Revised Code. [Sec. 3317.141; B2, page 1685].
Okay, so they don’t exactly use the word “breather” in the legislation, but they could have. In the budget bill legislation, as in SB5, they have mandated that school boards will develop salary schedules based on a [...]
Full Story... →While John Kasich continues to delay making decisions about Ohio’s new casinos, delaying billions of dollars in new development in Ohio, Kasich’s new casino commissioners (who are paid $60K/year to attend one meeting a month) have decided to sign an expensive lease on some swanky office space downtown.
Scott Pullins wrote about the new lease yesterday afternoon:
According to the April 6th meeting minutes, the commissioners took on the most pressing issue of the month, the need for plush downtown office space. Apparently, state government is absolutely out of office space in the Central Ohio area because [...]
Full Story... →Seriously, Columbus Dispatch, if you’re going to report something like this:
Salaries at JobsOhio will go to development professionals who will also be able to serve as advisers for start-ups that receive venture capital from JobsOhio.
Then you need to get the reaction, even if it’s just stunned silence, from someone, anyone, from the Ohio Ethics Committee.
Not that we didn’t try to warn the folks in the General Assembly when they considered HB 1. I did (on my birthday no less!):
We cannot expect an ethical administration within JobsOhio under a legal system that permits the employees [...]
Full Story... →Two words: Willie Horton.
The Rs know there won’t be any Democratic votes for Kasich’s budget. And if someone is released early under the new sentencing reforms, and that person happens to commit a violent crime, they want the Democrats to be on the hook too.
It was a purely political CYA play, and it worked as expected. The House just passed the bill 96-2.
Full Story... →In a post yesterday, we had a brief note about the “parental trigger” in the amended budget bill passed by the House Finance Committee. They reduced Kasich’s proposal to take over failing schools into a pilot program for the schools within the Columbus City School District.
Sec. 3302.042. (A) The department of education annually shall rank all schools statewide that are operated by a city, exempted village, or local school district in order according to the schools’ performance index scores.
(B) This section shall operate as a pilot project thatapplies to any school that has been ranked in the lowest [...]
Full Story... →Today’s Dispatch article about Mark Kvamme adds a new piece to the puzzle that suggests there is something highly unusual about his interest in JobsOhio and Ohio in general, especially for a guy committed to return to his California-based venture capital firm by the end of this summer.
We know that Kvamme first worked on Kasich’s ‘00 Presidential campaign as a “Senior Internet Strategist.” We know that for years John Kasich was able to keep his oldest and closest congressional aides paid by keeping them on the payroll of his federal PAC, New Century, which did little but… keep [...]
Full Story... →Budget Watch
