From the monthly archives: July 2011
In all of the post-budget excitement an interesting story went somewhat under reported. On June 30th John Kasich held a press conference in Findlay to announce that the state had agreed to offer Marathon Oil two separate tax credits and agreed to exempted certain practices done by Marathon Oil from the Commercial Activity Tax (CAT). These breaks will end up costing the state tens of millions of dollars every year. As the Columbus Dispatch reported the next day:
Marathon Petroleum will get a 75 percent, 15-year job-retention tax credit from the state to keep its 1,650 employees in Findlay and a [...]
Full Story... →When I heard John Kasich had gotten himself invited to play golf with President Obama I was pretty annoyed. Not at Kasich. For him it was a great break. Face time with the President gives Kasich some free press and it gives his anti-worker agenda some credibility.
I wasn’t angry at Kasich for getting himself invited to the golf game, I was angry at the President for letting him come along. As I wrote back in mid-June, I thought it was a slap in the face to labor for the President to include Kasich in his golf game considering [...]
Full Story... →Yesterday, we alerted our Twitter followers and Facebook fans about The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza’s search for the best state based political blogs. We got snubbed in 2009. Sniff. Sniff. Determined to make it this time, we asked you our beloved readers to chime in and recommend us.
Boy did you!
Full Story... →As we’ve already mentioned, Mecklenborg’s license was expired when he was pulled over in April, drunk, pumped up on Viagra, with a woman half his age in the car.
During the video of the incident, he lies, again and again and again, to the officer claiming he isn’t drunk and hasn’t had anything to drink. He later tested over the legal limit for alcohol.
The police report clearly shows that his license was expired. It also shows that he claims to weigh 175 pounds.
Here’s the report:
And here’s a shot of Mecklenborg taking the [...]
Full Story... →With the Kasich budget beginning on July 1st, let’s not forget that means the Strickland budget ended on June 30th. So, according to John Kasich’s own OBM director, what did the State end up with at the end of the last Strickland budget:
$973 million surplus.
Wait, shouldn’t that be $8 billion in the red? We kept hearing about what a horrible fiscal shape the Strickland Administration left Ohio in, but when it’s all said and done, the Strickland Administration left such a large surplus that the State came in with revenues 5.8% larger than projected when it was [...]
Full Story... →What in God’s name is going on with the amendment to repeal the insurance mandate? To review, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was the health-care reform law signed last year by President Obama that, amongst many other reform measures, requires individuals to purchase insurance starting in 2014. Well, it seems that the Ohio Project, the group responsible for collecting signatures to put the amendment on the ballot, forgot to look into the constitutionality of the amendment. This is from the Dispatch this morning:
Even if the amendment is approved in November, the fight won’t be over. Many believe [...]
Full Story... →Over a year ago, the Plain Dealer published what may turn out to be a prophetic story, because for their next act, Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly will be making an effort to place a Constitutional amendment on the ballot during next year’s primary, an election that should see a majority of their base turn out to select their presidential candidate. The amendment is simply the first step in the process of overhauling the practice of law in Ohio. Once the oversight of the practice of law is removed from the Constitution (by vote) and successfully entrenched [...]
Full Story... →On April 16, 2009, the Columbus Dispatch ran a piece titled:
Private lawyer helped craft school plan, GOP questions cost, suspects subterfuge
The article is basically a collection of statements from Republicans railing against Governor Strickland over the hiring of a private attorney to help work on budget language. The attorney, hired from Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, was paid $49,275 to help craft the school funding language in Governor Strickland’s budget.
And, as the headline suggests, the article deals with criticisms from Republicans about the need, cost and lack of transparency associated with hiring outside counsel to assist with [...]
Full Story... →You may have read recently about a bill that would set limits for withdrawals of water from Lake Erie. The Ohio Environmental Council explains well why it’s a bad piece of policy, but in short, HB 231 allows massive, unregulated withdrawals of water by industry from the shallowest of the Great Lakes.
The bill has been so rushed and is so problematic to the integrity of the eight-state agreement known as the Great Lakes Compact (whose primary goal was to preempt against diversions of Great Lakes water to other states and countries), that former GOP governors [...]
Full Story... →Speaker Bill Batchelder got his letter writing campaign on over the weekend by getting a letter to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal regarding the repeal of the estate tax in Ohio. (I like to think he either hand wrote a letter and mailed it to the Wall Street Journal or sent a telegram. For some reason every time I think of him I just get a picture of Mr. Burns in my head.) Considering that the estate tax is one of the Journal’s favorite topics of conversation this whole letter must have been like cat-nip for [...]
Full Story... →Budget Watch
John Kasich goes on national TV and forgets the last six months happened
John Kasich went on Face the Nation Sunday and once again proved that he is living on another planet. This is what he thinks is wrong with the stifiling partisianship in DC right now.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, Kasich suggested that Washington politicians were acting out of their own individual political interests rather than those of their constituents, and called on them to “start thinking about how they’re going to feel about themselves when they leave” office.
“At the end of the day you look yourself in the mirror and you say to yourself, ‘Did I do [...]
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