Rob Nichols of John Kasich’s campaign!:

Strickland’s campaign shot back that Republicans are trying to change the subject on the same day the New York Times published a story outlining how Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers used misleading accounting gimmicks before the bank collapsed in 2008. Kasich is a former managing director of Lehman’s investment banking division in Columbus.

A spokeswoman for Strickland’s campaign defended the governor’s decision to stand with the president, saying Strickland “has been outspoken about the need for comprehensive healthcare throughout his public service career and has refused to accept taxpayer funded healthcare as either Congressman or Governor until all of his constituents have access to quality healthcare.”

“In contrast, Congressman John Kasich- from his 18 year career in Congress through his seven years at Lehman Brothers- has put Ohioans on the backburner and instead focused on enriching Wall Street and the big corporations,” said the spokeswoman, Lis Smith.

UPDATE: Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols responded to the Lehman Brothers report and the Strickland campaign’s efforts to highlight it.

“It’s the same report that can be written about the state of Ohio, but the big difference is that in the state’s case, Ted Strickland has been the executive who’s accountable for it all,” Nichols told CNN.

Ouch! Lissssss Smith is going to feel that one in the morning. And that will only be compounded by that ugly, dry-heaves and hangover due to the random hunky guys who will send excessive drinks to her table tonight at various bars. (She’s got that boom boom pow!)

The technical point here is that Ted Strickland’s votes in Congress to expand credit to unworthy borrowers were not only responsible for the housing collapse and economic downturn, but they are also responsible for the existence of those once-attractive type of government-underwritten financial products that ultimately, in lieu of a bailout, caused Lehman Brothers to die. But in this case, Nichols’ pithiness is perfect.

From Stateline.org:

Both parties are taking tea party activists seriously and are wary of offending them – if they are not already actively wooing them. Just look at the governor’s race in Ohio. Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich openly touts his tea party credentials in his bid to defeat incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland. “I think I was in the tea party before there was a tea party,” Kasich famously told a Columbus crowd earlier this year. “This is a real movement with a real message about people’s frustrations by broken promises that leaders on both sides of the aisle would be foolish to ignore,” he went on to write in a blog posting.

For his part, Strickland says he agrees with some of the very same things that upset the tea party folks, including high taxes and inefficient government. “I would ask them to evaluate my performance, and I think there is much they could find positive,” he said while he was in Washington in February, noting that he has cut taxes and reduced state government by more than 5,000 employees.

The 5000 number continues to be a joke, because not only are many of those jobs in question simply positions that Strickland didn’t make appointments to and approximately 11,000 state workers currently qualify for retirement, but payroll costs remained about the same while state spending continued to grow.

And not to mention Strickland has raised about 150 fees to extract about $1.2 billion in fees from taxpayers, while accepting billions in one-time mandate-riddled stimulus money to fund schools and health care and obscene loans to keep state public pension plans afloat. Fees and debt are both forms of taxation.

And Ted Strickland not only RAISE state income taxes by 4.2%, he did so retroactively, so people who plan their tax withholdings woke up on Christmas morning to discover that they owed much more to the state.

And what about the 39 MPH 3-C slow train idea?

Ted Strickland embodies all that TEA Party activists oppose.

From the same group that just today announced it booted Ohio ACORN out of Ohio,  Buckeye Institute’s Mayer finds the latest government data troubling:

With the March 2010 employment data, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revised its state employment data back to 1990 (www.bls.gov/eag/eag.oh.htm).  As you may recall, our report, “State of the State: Two Decades of Weak Job Growth and Skyrocketing Government Costs Pose Daunting Challenges for Ohioans,” highlighted several sobering pieces of BLS employment data (original data from the report in parens below).  The new BLS data paints an even more troubling outlook for Ohio.

Specifically, from January 1990 to January 2000, Ohio’s job market added 714,900 jobs (720,200), which was the 37th best in America.  From January 2000 to January 2010, Ohio’s job market lost 635,000 jobs (544,100), which was the 2nd worst in America.  From January 1990 to January 2010, Ohio had the 3rd (6th) worst job market in America — Ohio added a net of 79,900 jobs (176,100) over 20 years, or less than 4,000 per year (9,000) for Ohio’s 11.4 million people.  This growth amounted to an increase in jobs of 1.9% (4%) from 20 years earlier.  Only Rhode Island (-1.7%), Michigan (-2.2%), and Connecticut (-4.9%) had worse job markets.

Yikes! Read the rest of the details here.

After so many embarrassing YouTubes of the Gov. looking off his A-game, I don’t blame him:

Let that be a lesson to you “Cheerleaders for Failure.” Get out of line, and Gov. Strickland becomes a “Skull Crusher for Success.”

Yesterday, from the ticklish Congressman:

From 2006:

Not that it’s any of my business, but Massa might LOVE the new “metro designer colors” on the 2nd floor of the mansion and flashy pink marble Strickland had installed in his private shower in 2007.

This is very Monty Pythonish… saving a guy to kill him:

Prison officials have found themselves in a conundrum: saving the life of an inmate in order to carry out his death sentence.

With his execution less than 36 hours away, guards on Ohio’s death row found inmate Lawrence Reynolds Jr. unconscious Sunday night inside his cell.

Instead of traveling to the state’s death house near Lucasville, Reynolds was taken to a nearby hospital in Youngstown to be treated for a possible drug overdose.

His condition merely delayed his execution. By Monday afternoon, Reynolds, 43, was emerging from the coma and Gov. Ted Strickland had issued a seven-day reprieve.

So instead of just letting him die, the State of Ohio spares no expense, in terms of money and time, to save this man’s life and slowly nurse him back to health… before sending him to Hell.

Spokesbabe Julie Walburn’s (Ohio’s Glam Reaper) lack of answers makes me suspicious:

Prison spokeswoman Julie Walburn, said Reynolds, like other inmates nearing execution, was under a ”death watch” Sunday and his actions and mood were being monitored closely.

Walburn could not say what pills were used or how Reynolds might have acquired them. She said it appears to be an intentional overdose, but the prison wouldn’t classify it as a suicide attempt.

An investigation is under way, she said.

With that sweater on at the beekeeping convention, it looks like Francis is ready to get pollinated! bzzzzzzzzzzz

If true, I’m happy for her… She’s never had that type of action at home… but perhaps I should bee nice!

And not to bee outdone, Ted likes to wear yellow too… next to a giant pile of stinking filthy garbage:

The trash is in the same condition he put Ohio’s economy in.

As the Dayton Daily News reported, there is some serious junk in Ohio’s application for the Federal Government’s Mega-Sweepstakes for $400 of education funding, in which Ohio was just named 1 of the 16 final competitors.

But as Emmy Partin on the Fordham Foundation notes, being named a finalist might actually HURT Ohio’s chances of winning the jackpot:

The states that didn’t make the “sweet 16” are re-crafting their applications and considering legislation to make their second proposals more appealing. If Ohio loses the race in April, we will have lost a valuable month or more that could have been spent improving our proposal and our legislative landscape.  Given the state’s legislative schedule and the unprecedentedly slow pace of our legislature this session, there will be little to no opportunity to make changes in state law to aid our second-round proposal.

Ohio could also use an extra month to build broader support for its application. The current application was crafted mainly behind closed doors with no real input from outsiders (other than the teachers unions). In fact, Republican lawmakers were not even shown the application prior to its public release. The reforms it should take to win the Race to the Top will be tough to enact here and will require support that extends across ideologies and from the Statehouse to the classrooms.

Instead, Ohio will spend the next month hoping for a win and sitting on its hands.  If that win doesn’t materialize, we’ll head into round two with little time or space to do much differently beyond reworking our text.

So Ohio loses for winning! ouch

Considering that the only thing remotely substantive in Ted Strickland’s State of the State was about creating “green jobs” by manipulating the tax code and corporate welfare, The Toledo Blade uncovered a HUGE embarrassment:

Toledo and its northwest Ohio neighbors have missed out on coveted manufacturing jobs in the solar industry because of a failure by state officials to attract companies with tax incentives or create a viable market for solar panels in Ohio, a Blade investigation shows.

Since 2007, thousands of those jobs have gone to states where companies were enticed by a mixture of tax credits, grants, and additional incentives to make solar products there.

While northwest Ohio has gained its share of acclaim in the solar industry through the success of First Solar Inc. and University of Toledo spin-offs such as Xunlight Corp., thousands of laid-off factory workers have yet to find work from the gains made here in the research and development of thin-film photovoltaics.

That’s because, according to solar industry analysts, consultants, and executives, Ohio is fighting both the perception and reality of noncompetitive tax structures and incentive packages compared with other states.[...]

Scott Sklar of Washington-based Stella Group Ltd., a strategic marketing and policy firm for renewable-energy companies, estimates that Ohio – and especially Toledo – has missed out on about 3,000 solar-based jobs in the last few years.

That’s obviously disheartening news for a state that shed more than 200,000 jobs from 2000 through 2007, a region battling double-digit unemployment, and a city like Toledo that was dubbed a solar “hot spot” in 2007 because of success stories such as First Solar and Xunlight.

“In my mind, Ohio could have three to five times the amount of renewable-energy companies it has now if incentives were orchestrated in a way to attract those businesses,” Mr. Sklar said. “Toledo would’ve definitely gotten some of those jobs.”

Would Ohio Jobs Czar Lee Fisher care to comment?

The public sector is recession-proof:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Despite a major budget crisis that state leaders say forced them to make painful cost-cutting decisions, Ohio managed to reduce its payroll by only 1.5 percent last year.

The small reduction for state government contrasts with the private sector, where companies are lopping off chunks of employees’ pay and sending many to the unemployment line. Overall, wage and salary income, which includes both public and private sector jobs, is on pace to decline by 4.3 percent in Ohio for 2009, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.[...]

Last year’s payroll decrease followed a disappointing 2.5 percent increase in workers’ pay from 2007 to 2008. The payroll jumped that year despite Strickland’s repeated calls on state agencies and elected officials to limit personnel spending.

The 2009 payroll figure, which the state released last month, was $3.24 billion, down from $3.29 billion in 2008.

As he travels around the state this year in his re-election campaign, Strickland surely will tout his success in downsizing the state government. He can also bring up the 5,000 jobs the state has shed since he took office in 2007.

But those cuts were offset by the agencies that increased their payroll last year.[...]

The Office of Budget and Management topped the list with more than a 50 percent increase, from an $8.5 million payroll in 2008 to a $13.3 million payroll last year.[...]

Another state agency with a higher payroll last year was the State Employment Relations Board. Its payroll jumped from $2.1 million to $2.9 million.

And public sector employees are often better paid their their private sector counterparts, especially when considering the extra benefits and generous pension plans that our state can’t afford and is already burning through billions of dollars in Federal loans that cannot be paid back.

If Ohio is going to improve its business climate, it would take a Gov. John Kasich who must be ready on day one to clean house, much like Gov. Christie in New Jersey. John sounds like the man for the job, which is why so many state and local government busybodies are already screaming bloody murder about his fiscally responsible proposals.

Errrr… or maybe not:

These comments to Buckeye State Blog were at the conclusion of Progress Ohio’s Roots Camp, a gathering of fringe activists, bloggers, 9/11-truthers, socialists, and dunderheads who all came together so Progress Ohio could justify its existence with pictures and keep that sweet Peter Lewis/George Soros money flowing.

It’s comforting to know Strickland is keeping his fingers crossed for failing Ohio schools in the Federal Government’s education funding mega-sweepstakes. Blow on the dice for luck, baby… students need some new $400,000 videos and cultural anthropologists!

From Jim Provance in The Toledo Blade:

A former Ohio State Highway Patrol superintendent said yesterday he and former colleagues are concerned that investigatory decisions are being increasingly influenced and politicized by the Strickland administration.

Former Col. Richard Collins, who was asked to resign along with his boss last year by Gov. Ted Strickland to resolve what was described as personality conflicts, told a Senate committee that December’s decision to scuttle a planned sting at the governor’s residence fits the pattern.

“I think we have a responsibility to stay independent,” said Mr. Collins, who spent more than 31 years with the patrol, six of them as commander of the patrol’s Findlay District.

“We offer, as we have other administrations, to provide overviews of criminal cases that we were involved in, but as far as how we proceed with those investigations, how we work with local elected prosecutors … that’s our responsibility, not the responsibility of the civilian authority, the lawyers, and the legal section,” he said.

The Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary-Criminal Justice Committee is holding hearings looking generally into allegations of interference by civilian officials in highway patrol investigations and specifically the decision to call off the sting at the governor’s mansion meant to catch someone in the act of slipping contraband to an inmate working there to convey back to the prison.

It remains unclear what the contraband was, although conjecture among officials has ranged from drugs to tobacco.

“Regardless of what that was or was not, once we knew that some kind of transaction was going to take place, I think it was the highway patrol’s responsibility to intervene,” Mr. Collins said.

He said that if he were still head of the highway patrol at the time, that sting would have proceeded as planned.

Superiors had raised safety concerns, questioning the wisdom of allowing the apparent transaction to take place on the grounds of the governor’s home. Ultimately, the woman who was planning the drop was tipped off.

“Would the Secret Service allow a package to be thrown over the White House wall if they didn’t know what it was?” Sen. Nina Turner (D., Cleveland) asked.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Tim Grendell (R., Chesterland), said he “intends to use the full investigatory powers of this committee to get to the bottom of what I believe is a growing stack of evidence that politics is overcoming public safety.”

Mr. Collins was promoted to superintendent by Henry Guzman, Mr. Strickland’s first director of public safety, with whom Mr. Collins admitted yesterday he often disagreed. The governor ultimately asked both for their resignations.

And in related news, Randy Ludlow at The Dispatch reports that Legislative Inspector General Tony Bledsoe has questions for lobbyist Thomas Fries about his contract for The Anchor Companies, which is known for their hiring of illegal immigrants:

The office’s lawyer sent a letter to Fries yesterday inquiring about his lobbying on behalf of The Anchor Companies and the potential need to amend his registration and activity statements.

Fries, a long-time lobbyist and friend with Gov. Ted Strickland, began lobbying for the company on July 23, 2008, when he met with Kent Markus, the governor’s chief legal counsel. Yet, Fries did not disclose that activity to Bledsoe’s office.
Fries did not reveal he was lobbying the governor’s office on Anchor’s behalf until Sept. 10, 2008, when he and an Anchor lawyer filled out lobbyist registration statement.The statement arrived in Bledsoe’s office nine days later.

The Columbus real-state company had been accused of filing falsified records with the state to hide the non-payment of prevailing wages and the hiring of illegal immigrants to remodel a state-leased office building at 770 W. Broad St. for use as the state prison offices.

The SAME DAY Fries filled out his registration requirement, Ted Strickland’s super-duper lawyer who has been at the center of a handful of corrupt situations, met with State Highway investigators to question the Patrol’s jurisdiction in the matter. This was the Strickland Administration so intent on paying off political supporters that they were willing to actively involve themselves in tipping off criminals of a forthcoming drug sting.

Kent Markus is about to politically hang.

Republican consultant Terry Casey debated Attorney Scott Pullins on liberal-pinhead Ann Fisher’s radio show on WOSU, All Sides. Fisher is lucky, as she may have found the only Ohioan who truly supports the 3-C train who also doesn’t work for an astroturf PR firm.

Click here to listen.

I understand Scott is trying to emulate conservative icon Paul Weyrich in his defense of trains, but there is no getting beyond the point that THE TRAIN GOES 39 MPH AND WILL BE QUITE INCONVENIENT! This entire project just has too much of a creepy-crawly centralized-planning feel to me.

Maybe Ted Strickland will hire Pullins to keep the train campaign on the tracks?

Er, on second thought I bet Ted will never get over the Pullins Report blog. (This is my favorite ONN moment of all time!):

Apparently Kent Markus let this one happen because there wasn’t anything to cover up:

State troopers arrested a man today who they say was trying to smuggle a half-pound of marijuana to an inmate working at the Ohio State Fairgrounds.

Eugene S. Christian, 24, of Columbus, was charged with attempting to convey drugs into a detention facility, a third-degree felony carrying up to five years in prison.

Christian was attempting to get the marijuana to a Pickaway Correctional Institution inmate who was working on a community-service detail at the fairgrounds, according to the State Highway Patrol.

The arrest came after troopers and the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction developed information about the attempted drug conveyance.

Christian is scheduled to be held in the Pickaway County jail in Circleville.

Read more here from Randy Ludlow.

A fantastic letter to the editor in The Dispatch:

Regarding the Friday Dispatch article, “Ohio has no idea how to pay U.S. back for jobless benefits,” the first rule to follow when you find yourself in a deep hole is to stop digging. It is basic economics that if you tax an activity, you tend to get less of it, while if you subsidize an activity, you tend to get more of it.

Unemployment insurance pays workers to be unemployed and funds this with a tax on employment. The natural outcome is fewer jobs and more unemployment. Experience rating only partially offsets the adverse incentives this program creates.

Since we all want more jobs and less unemployment, unemployment compensation is completely counterproductive.

Congress and the states have compounded this folly by extending benefits repeatedly during this recession, so that they now continue up to 99 weeks in most states, including Ohio.

Not surprisingly, the average duration of unemployment is almost 50 percent higher than any other time in the past 60 years. The Ohio fund is already $2 billion in the hole and is expected to grow to $3 billion by year’s end.

Unfortunately, Congress compels the states to participate in this program. However, if Nebraska can be exempted from the burden of expanded Medicare, there is no reason that Ohio’s congressional delegation shouldn’t be able to get us exempted from the burden of expanded unemployment.

J. HUSTON McCULLOCH
Professor of Economics and Finance
Ohio State University, Columbus

Just like how Gov. Strickland described Sentor Jim Bunning’s efforts to block funding for additional unemployment benefits as “outrageous and hard-hearted“, there is no doubt he would say the same about the cold bucket of truth McCulloch just dumped in The Dispatch. And by discouraging people from taking work, people are not only less productive but they also become less employable the longer they are out of the market.

With teenage-unemployment officially being 26%, which the real numbers being much higher… especially among blacks, Gov. Strickland, as a long-time supporter of minimum wage increases, has a record of not knowing which policies by their very definition cause unemployment.

As it is, Ohio will not be able to pay back loans to pay for unemployment compensation, and will probably have to beg the Federal government to forgive the loans. But that won’t stop Gov. Strickland from going out on the campaign trail, telling you that the state will take care of you forever as long as you vote for him!

Instead, Ohio needs a governor like John Kasich who actually understand that to generate wealth and prosperity, Ohio must unleash the same entrepreneurs which Gov. Strickland would rather shake down to pay off voters with more unemployment compensation.

As an update to a story Paul Aker of 10 TV in Columbus broke, the Auditor’s Office will hunt down these tax dollars which state workers should have never been paid. More agencies are now involved:

As a friend of mine joked- If you are a manager of a state government office and Paul Aker gives you a call, the best thing to do is to turn in your resignation, go home, and drink lots of Draino because it is OVER.

Gov. Strickland’s out-of-state fund raising trips average $48,000 each.

Is that even worth the travel expense and the time away from his office doing important business… such as covering up called-off drug stings at the Governor’s mansion?

This is incredible:

A state investigation of an alleged scheme to cover up the use of illegal immigrants to remodel a state-leased office building is now in the hands of the Franklin County prosecutor’s office.

But state troopers say they had to stand their ground to ensure the case reached the prosecutor.

Former State Highway Patrol Lt. Col. William Costas, who retired this month as the agency’s No. 2 leader, said investigators had to defend their authority to investigate the case under questioning from the top two lawyers to Gov. Ted Strickland.

The governor’s office said it was making sure the patrol had proper jurisdiction, but Costas charges that the lawyers were trying to throw up a roadblock. In the end, the investigation proceeded without interruption.

The Sept. 10, 2008, meeting in which Kent Markus, who is chief counsel to the governor, and Jose Torres, his deputy, questioned the patrol’s role will add fuel to a political issue brewing at the Statehouse. Republican lawmakers are asking whether political meddling has afflicted patrol investigations.

“We were told we should not investigate,” Costas said. “The meeting had no valid purpose. There was no question we had authority (to investigate) … they were trying to control what we did. They tried intimidation.”

Prosecutor Ron O’Brien finds the questioning by the governor’s lawyers odd, saying it was clear the patrol had authority to investigate and serve search warrants in the case.

Strickland’s office believes that “furious” ex-patrol leaders who left with “hurt feelings” now are lashing out over deserved questioning they received at the 2008 meeting, Wurst said.

An investigation by The Dispatch found that the meeting came after a lobbyist close to Strickland met with Markus on behalf of the company under criminal scrutiny. The two men met two days before the patrol began its probe.

The case centers on the Anchor Companies and its affiliated companies and criminal complaints of hiring illegal immigrants and covering up the activity in records submitted to the state.

In early 2008, the state signed a lease with an Anchor subsidiary that called for remodeling the Columbus real-estate firm’s building at 770 W. Broad St. to house offices of the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. The state now leases the building for $1.1million a year.

In June 2008, union complaints were filed with the Ohio Department of Commerce accusing Anchor of employing illegal immigrants and not paying state-required prevailing wages to laborers.

Larry Gunsorek, 63, of Bexley, president of Anchor Management Co., faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty in U.S. District Court on Nov. 5 to hiring illegal immigrants to work on the state prison offices and other properties.

On July 23, 2008, commerce investigators contacted the patrol and asked for help investigating allegations that Anchor had submitted fraudulent documents to the state. The patrol opened a criminal case two days later.

Please read the rest of the article here. Prosecutor O’Brien notes that it is clear that the patrol was the appropriate agency to look into the investigation.

And guess who the lobbyist was? Thomas Fries Sr., a former Democrat legislator, who represents Anchor Companies and worked with Makus. Fries’ son Andrew, is an aide to Strickland who makes $41,273/year. And another son, Thomas, makes $100,178 as the executive director of the Ohio State Racing Commission, which is a board appointed by Strickland himself!

The total donations from Fries family has $23,750 to Strickland since 2005.

These details are minor compared to what is about to hit next. And between Paul Aker and Randy Ludlow, Kent Markus’ corruption is about to be the final nail in the coffin of Ted Strickland’s political career.

Funny stuff:

As Catherine Candisky reports, Ohio’s unemployment-compensation-fund problem isn’t going away anytime soon:

It has been more than a year since Ohio depleted its unemployment-compensation fund, and with the fund’s debt surpassing $2billion and growing, a fix is nowhere in sight.

No one has even proposed what should be done to shore up the fund – not the governor, not the General Assembly, not an advisory panel made up of business, labor and legislative leaders.

In fact, state leaders can’t even agree on who is responsible for solving the problem.

The Unemployment Compensation Advisory Council threw its hands up 15 months ago after it was unable to reach consensus; it said the legislature would have to figure out a solution.

GOP leaders in the Senate say Gov. Ted Strickland must come up with a plan. The governor has urged the council to take another crack at it.

Absent action from the Statehouse, Ohio will owe the federal unemployment trust fund an estimated $3billion by the end of the year. Interest payments on the loan, which begin to accrue on Jan. 1, are projected at $120 million a year.

And while Ohio has no way to pay back this money, Ted Strickland is out on the campaign trail promising voters that we will be able to extend their unemployment benefits for an extra year.

The numbers involved here, including the amount that would have to be paid every budget on this debt makes the required subsidy on Ted Strickland’s 3C slow-train look like chump change.

Maybe Strickland’s plan is that Ohio, like a 3rd world country, will ask the Federal government to start forgiving debt?