If you missed it: Mitt Romney put together and delivered a very good speech tonight in Chillicothe, Ohio. I’ll be putting up the video as soon as I find it (and the prepared remarks after the fold). But the gist of it was that the Romney-Ryan campaign has no intention of allowing Obama-Biden to define unchallenged Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the Republican party, conservatism in | Read More »
Well, your ability to guess why the Murray Energy Corporation today announced that it is closing a mine in Brilliant, Ohio will be largely dependent on whether you rely on local news or not. If you’re just paying attention to local news… you won’t be told at all why a coal mine that employed 239 people at its peak laid off 24 of its remaining 56 | Read More »
One of the things that I did as part of attending the Breitbart Awards last weekend was attend a panel on C-Span’s new video library service. It’s actually pretty useful: it allows you to take clips from C-SPAN and email them, Tweet them, embed them and whatnot. For example: say you wanted to show a clip from today’s disastrous Ohio speech that Obama made. What | Read More »
The first of many from the Romney campaign: I myself counted enough raw footage from today’s Ohio speech to make a dozen Republican attack ads. I don’t know who the heck told the President that it was a good idea to make a speech that tacitly conceded failure for the last four years, and half-demanded, half-begged for another four years in office. Particularly since in | Read More »
Will this be the 2012 election map? If the Obama administration keeps up their War on Coal (literally: they consider coal more dangerous than terrorism), quite possibly. And it may be at least partially because of coal.
…which is why, of course, I am asking it. The background… comes in three parts: Vice President Joe Biden, when he was Senator Joe Biden, happened to be a sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act. We’ll pass to one side for a moment the current (as in, this week) controversy over the latest iteration of the law – it’s up for reauthorization – to | Read More »
Let me present to you the amazing amount of scrutiny that apparently needs to go into a Barack Obama campaign ad, just to understand what it actually means. Level Minus One. This is the scrutiny that is done by the creators of the ad itself (that is to say, none at all). Summary of said ad (second video at this Hot Air link): this Brian | Read More »
It’s all because of racism, of course: But the main quarrels Democratic voters [in Jefferson County, Ohio] have with Mr. Obama have nothing to do with race. They include his rejection of one proposed route for the Keystone pipeline, a stance they say will harm this area, whose backbone, the Ohio River, is lined with metal mills and coal mines. Oh, I’m sorry, but that | Read More »
[UPDATE: I've had folks note that the original map is not quite the same as the final, approved map. There's been some tweaking of districts; not enough to particularly change any of the practical results found below, but enough to be noteworthy. Fair enough.] I was over at Larry Sabato’s site today* and I came across this report that an attempt to referendum the Ohio | Read More »
(Via The Campaign Spot) And… it’s subtle. Executive summary: Ohio loses two districts, overall. Republicans Steve Austria and Mike Turner end up competing with each other in the same district. Democrats Marcy Kaptur & Dennis Kuchinich, ditto. Democrat Nancy Sutton loses her district and gets thrown into a district that heavily favors her new Republican opponent Jim Renacci – and she doesn’t get to bring | Read More »
As it happens, this Wall Street Journal article discussing Ohio’s (among other states’) credit upgrade by Standard & Poor – and Ohio’s fairly dramatic drop in unemployment in a year – came out the same day that I spoke with Governor Kasich about his budget and labor union reform successes. The latter (SB5, which was in many ways an even stronger reform package than Wisconsin’s) | Read More »
[UPDATE: I have been made aware that the individuals in this video are county employees, not state ones.] OK, let me set the background. You are a public sector employee for the state of Ohio; this probably means that you are a Democrat. You are probably aware, however vaguely and dimly, that there is a group out there who went around a few years ago | Read More »
Gov. Kasich is, of course, one of the freshmen Republican governors that took over large swathes of the Midwest last election cycle. We discussed both union reform (in the form of SB 5) and the upcoming budget battle – including about why both are so necessary for Ohio. The Midwest is probably the most interesting region of the country right now, from a political science | Read More »
In Ohio, the final vote on SB 5 was 53-44; it’s already passed the Ohio Senate, but changes made to the bill require another quick vote on the legislation either today or tomorrow. This particular legislation goes a bit farther than the groundbreaking Wisconsin union reform bill; it redefines collective bargaining privileges for public sector union employees to cover wages only, institutes merit pay for | Read More »
…and the technical term for what it promises to be is “doozy.” There’s an $8,000,000,000 hole in the budget that needs to be filled (Ohio requires balanced budgets), and despite polling suggesting that Kasich could get away with raising taxes to fill it the Governor apparently won’t. It’s expected that the budget will cover the gap by privatization programs (including selling some prisons), leasing out | Read More »
The bill is SB5, and it will limit future collective bargaining for Ohio state employees to base salary: it passed the Ohio Senate with a one-vote margin (all hail the power of having a strong enough majority to allow you breathing room: elections matter, folks*). The bill now goes to the House, where the GOP has a 59-40 advantage: and a simple majority constitutes a | Read More »
…on public sector unions. Gov. Kasich is unamused at the notion that it’s somehow unacceptable to even note that public employees are getting great deals on healthcare at taxpayer expense – and by great deals I mean ‘Ohio public sector employees are paying between one half and three-quarters what Ohio private sector employees pay:’ The 9%/23% number there*, by the way, is one of the | Read More »
Meet Ohio State Rep. Robert F. Hagan. Democrat. You can tell that he’s a Democrat, because he’s perfectly comfortable with using racially-charged language on Facebook: A Broadview Heights woman is accusing state Rep. Robert F. Hagan of using a term that some believe has a racist connotation on a social networking site. Hagan, D-60th, of Youngstown, used the term “buckwheat” in a Facebook posting Saturday. | Read More »
If my pet theory is correct, then very possibly: Ohio legislators will be unveiling today the Heartbeat Bill, which would ban abortions where a fetal heartbeat can be detected (H/T: Weasel Zippers). This would effectively put the cap on abortions in Ohio at being absolutely no later than six weeks, and quite possibly earlier: pro-choice agitators are already simultaneously claiming that the proposed law is | Read More »
This is Marcy Kaptur’s seat, and Rich is pretty determined to win it. Rich is a businessman who’s running for the first time – which seems to be a theme for Republican nominees these days, along with military veterans and medical doctors; go figure – and we talked about the race for a bit: Rich’s site is here. Nice guy; check him out. Moe Lane | Read More »
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