Here’s what Governor Kasich sent via his official gubernatorial twitter account last week as President Obama came to Ohio to announce the recess appointment of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and to discuss the economy in general:
First, Kasich is required by the Ohio’s constitution to have the budget balanced, and he had the benefit of his predecessor, Governor Ted Strickland, leaving Kasich a nearly billion SURPLUS in his last budget. Obama’s predecessor? Not so much.
Second, Kasich hasn’t cut taxes, at least not yet. Kasich kept income tax cuts [...]
Full Story... →On Plunderbund, our focus is usually centered around current events or breaking news in Ohio politics. But John Kasich’s monotonous lectures about how he has saved Ohio by balancing the state budget got me to thinking about the past. Each time he is quoted by the media after a rant in which he brags about his budgetary prowess, it is very common to find someone commenting about Ohio’s Constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget. As a result, Kasich’s boasting about the miracle of his balanced budget falls flat. The Constitutional requirement also means that Governor Strickland, the [...]
Full Story... →In the wake of the recent Youngstown-area earthquakes, the debate over expanded oil and gas production in Ohio is heating up. Since one of the primary areas of concern is public and environmental safety, we thought it would be helpful to take a look at violation records for existing oil and gas wells in Ohio to see how the industry is doing.
We took a look at data from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) obtained through public record requests along with data obtained from ODNR’s RBDMS database and we found that 693 gas and oil wells in [...]
Full Story... →To understanding today’s news about the casinos, let’s recap some stories from 2010 shall we?
October 2010: Governor Strickland, acting pursuant to a legislative mandate created by the Republican General Assembly announces his appointments to the Ohio Casino Commission, the regulatory authority that will license the casinos mandated by a constitutional amendment voters overwhelming passed in 2009 with promise it will create as soon as possible tens of thousands of jobs.
“Strickland, to his credit, especially given election-year pressures, [...]
Full Story... →This is my quadrennial tradition of writing a post bemoaning how overrated the Iowa caucus is. Seriously. 120,000 people participated in the Iowa Republican caucuses last night, and that is supposedly a record high. That’s a little over 5% of the Iowa electorate. And that’s a record turnout.
If you added all the votes cast in the Iowa GOP Caucus last night, you’d get the same number of votes Republican candidate Matt Dolan got in 2010 in the Cuyahoga County Executive election alone (and that was only a little over 30% of the vote). John Kasich and Ted [...]
Full Story... →As Brian pointed out in a post yesterday, Kasich’s office is responding to recent earthquakes near Youngstown, and the public outcry about safety concerns with fracking and the toxic waste it produces, not by addressing the public’s concerns but instead by hunkering down and trying (pretty unsuccessfully) to change the subject.
According to Kasich’s logic there’s no reason to slow down on the expansion of fracking since the fracking process and fracking wells are completely safe, it’s only the millions of gallons of toxic waste the process produces that’s a problem. So hey, full speed ahead!
Gas and Oil [...]
Full Story... →In terms of Plunderbund as a business, 2011 has been a big year. October marked the second anniversary of our decision to push the boundaries of political blogging in the state and take the site to new levels. In April we went live with our third major site re-design since 2005. We added several ad placements and began using a combination of Google ads and direct placements to fill out our ad inventory.
We’ve published more and better content than ever and broken more stories than any blog in Ohio has in a single year. Joseph and Modern are [...]
Full Story... →Another of the big developments at Plunderbund in 2011 was the launch of a companion site to track the state budget. The site, Ohio Budget Watch, was primarily active during the spring as the GOP-controlled legislature and Governor’s office drafted what constitutes the single-biggest piece of legislation that gets written in a two-year period. The budget is full of policy changes that affect every day Ohioans. In over 4,000 pages, it would be easy for the party in power to sneak through some fairly horrible new policies, so our reporting was aimed at calling attention to these things before [...]
Full Story... →The Youngstown area experienced an earthquake on New Year’s Eve. It was the 11th earthquake of 2011 in the area, which is really quite surprising since there were no earthquakes here in 2010, or 2009, or any year ever that anyone can remember. According to Bloomberg no earthquakes had been recorded near Youngstown “until D&L Energy Inc. began injecting wastewater from drilling into a 9,300-foot disposal well in December 2010.”
The D&L well, like many of Ohio’s 181 disposal wells, is pumped full of excess fracking liquid, a mixture of water and chemicals, the byproduct of [...]
Full Story... →From a Washington Post story on the correlation being drawn between heavy dumping into a fracking waste well in Ohio and the rash of earthquakes, we get this nugget from Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols:
A spokesman for Gov. John Kasich, an outspoken supporter of the growing oil and natural gas industry in Ohio, said the shale industry shouldn’t be punished for a fracking byproduct.
“That would be the equivalent of shutting down the auto industry because a scrap tire dump caught fire somewhere,” said Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols.
First of all, we’re not talking about a tire dump [...]
Full Story... →Budget Watch
