Post Tagged with: "Ohio"

Monday night Ohio Governor John Kasich delivered his state of the state speech.

Governor John Kasich speaking with attendees at the 2016 First in the Nation Town Hall (photo by Gage Skidmore/CC-BY-SA-2.0)

He cribbed the biblical Reagan “city on a hill metaphor” to describe Ohio:

All of these things have helped Ohio move up to higher, more solid ground, and, if you look, the clouds are moving apart and the sun is beginning to shine, and we can get a glimpse of the summit ahead. We’ve got much further to go, but the success we’ve had gives us the confidence to climb higher. We’re not hopeless, we’re hopeful. We’re not wandering, we have direction. Let’s keep going.

As an Ohioan, I’d like to tell a different story.

It’s a story that appears in bits and pieces in city & school financial reports, in letters to the editor and editorials, in economic analyses, but the full story has largely hid from public sight because it’s not a single sensationalist event.

It’s not a story about a person or administration because you have to go back further than that to see the pattern.

You have to go back further than that to see how a state gets budgeted back to the stone age.

The pattern is simple but takes place over a long period of time: shift tax burden, create deficit, blame government, defund government, repeat.

And unfortunately, it’s a story that’s not just happening in Ohio, but at a national level and in many states across the nation because it’s being pushed by influential corporate groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The story begins in 2005 …

I noticed something about the campaign yard signs as I was walking our dog the other night in our quiet neighborhood of Cheviot, Ohio.

None of them were red. This may not seem odd until you realize that Cheviot is in the heart of a district which Republican Steve Chabot won by 70,000 votes in 2012.

There was no way all the candidates here could be Democrats. Could they? What was going on?

My curiosity led me to the following informal survey of campaign signs in Southern Ohio.

If you read the top quote from an article in today’s Enquirer (picture above), what would your first thought be about what the article is about?

I think the Enquirer does a great job of presenting what would appear to be an unbiased article to a close reader, yet at the same time never really undermining the conservative claim in the title quote, “‘Legitimate rape’ rarely causes pregnancy” to the casual reader.

If you’re interested, here’s how to edit an article to achieve this effect.

The campaign to pass Issue 2 is in full swing in Ohio so I thought I’d review the pro-Issue 2 marketing, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how best to fight against it. Remember, Issue 2 is the issue which limits collective bargaining for state employees such as police, firefighters, […]

From the category of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: This week John Kasich issued proclamations honoring Ohio’s public employees and teachers. Dear Union Thugs … ahem … err, Ohio Teachers … Ok, that’s not how it starts. Read the full text here and next time the governor goes after […]

A couple of things John Kasich didn’t mention during his Ohio campaign: Kasich is calling for repeal of the state’s collective bargaining law for public employees Kasich wants to eliminate all state income tax despite a budget shortfall of $8 billion Kasich is exploring the sale of major state assets, […]