What is it about Donald Trump that has motivated so many people to get out their old psychology textbooks and notes from college days to understand this bizarre man? In fact, The Donald is such a bizarre figure to the commentariat that he has become the subject of verbiage that identifies him variously as a sociopath, narcissist, and pathological liar, all the while harboring an ample amount of hypocrisy and projection.
But these descriptors for Trump only scratch the surface. For those who have discarded their psych books, […]
Full Story... →It’s standard practice to not answer questions from reporters when answering them will detract from the message of the day. That was the case Wednesday, when Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general and state treasurer, made repeated statements that he wasn’t going to talk about whether he would or would not enter the race for Ohio governor next year.
Cordray, a Democrat, lost his race to continue as Ohio attorney general to Mike DeWine in 2010. Since that loss, he’s been running the CFPB, a federal agency that Republicans in Washington want […]
Full Story... →Ohio’s kids will head back to school in about a month. Stores have already swapped the sunscreen and pool floaties out of their seasonal sections. Now it’s all backpacks and school supplies.
Families are enjoying their last few weeks at the pool, finishing up summer sports seasons, and not-so-secretly looking forward to using “sorry, it’s a school night” as an excuse to send their kids to bed early.
It’s also time for another back-to-school season tradition.
This week The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio’s behemoth online charter school, started its yearly push to poach students from traditional public schools […]
Full Story... →In 15 years as a journalist, the most gut-wrenching, powerful story I’ve ever written happened this past January when I interviewed Athens resident Alex Andrews less than a week after he had been shot in the face through his kitchen window around 2 in the morning by an unknown assailant.
He remembered it all, in vivid detail.
As I wrote in The Athens NEWS at the time:
He remembers getting up at around 2 that Thursday morning for a snack. He recalls cutting up vegetables. He remembers hearing a sound at the window and turning to see the […]
Full Story... →Case File A Secret, Too
A three-judge panel dismissed an ethics complaint against Ohio Supreme Court Justice Sharon Kennedy that was filed by ProgressOhio and signed by doctors, patients, consumer groups and medical students.
Though the ethics complaint was dismissed, the identity of the deciding judges and legal reasoning remain secret.
“This dismissal shows that Ohio’s most powerful state court is also its least accountable,” said ProgressOhio Executive Director Sandy Theis. “Those handling the complaint refused to even identify the judges who cleared Kennedy.”
A brief letter that announces the dismissal states, “[u]nless the justice against whom the […]
Full Story... →It’s not a new rule, but whether she likes it or not, and regardless of her claim that she’s her own person, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor’s burden going forward as she runs for governor next year is to carry Gov. John Kasich’s cross, hand hewn over eight years from policies and programs that ranged from merely misguided to brazenly bad.
Now that he’s endorsed her for his job, Kasich’s cross will naturally weigh heavy upon her like the burden Ohioans feel who face an uncertain, if not fearful future from tax cuts they didn’t benefit from, and healthcare benefits they […]
Full Story... →Some week, huh? It’s getting so that a columnist can’t limit the words to a single exciting episode.
So let’s begin with Donald Sr. He and Melania shot off to Paris for Bastille Day (As if he cared about such trivial things). But, yep. Photo-ops galore where he told the world that France was “beautiful” and, to her face exclaimed to Brigitte Macron, the French president’s wife, “You’re in such good shape,” undiplomatically adding, “She’s in such good physical shape. Beautiful.”
(She’s 64; Emmanuel Macron, 38 – a non-issue for French voters.)
But The Don had to find […]
Full Story... →After being caught lying last week about Ohio, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence came back with – you guessed it – more lies.
Lying has become the default modus operandi of the Trump Administration, so this should surprise exactly no one.
From the Columbus Dispatch:
Pence, former governor of Indiana, singled out Kasich during a speech at the National Governors Association gathering in Providence, Rhode Island.
“I know Gov. (John) Kasich isn’t with us, but I suspect that he’s very troubled to know that in Ohio alone, nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck on waiting lists, leaving […]
Full Story... →Ohio’s junior U.S. senator and deficit hawk in Washington, Rob Portman, waltzed to an easy win last year when he used the state’s nation-leading opiate crisis as his chief campaign strategy to appear reasonable.
What was unreasonable was the senator voting against a budget bill that funded his plan, claiming “wasteful spending” in other parts of the bill forced him to vote to orphan his plan that he crowed he worked so hard to get into the bill.
“Commonsense conservative” Rob Portman – President George W. Bush’s budget director – is against government spending when it comes […]
Full Story... →The choice advocates have opened a can of worms that may erupt into warring factions within the choice movement. The floodgates of draining public funds from public common schools into private unaccountable and non-transparent hands have been opened. The current federal administration intends to flood choice programs with public funds. The same is true in Ohio and many other states.
The choice factions are each lobbying for a market share that fits their agenda. The corporate charter school moguls have a bevy of lobbyists that ply substantial influence on the flow of public dollars to private education entities.
Parochial education leaders are ramping up […]
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