GOP Controlled Ohio Senate Goes in the Bag for Ohio Utliities

The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a story in its November 12, 2007 edition about the energy bill that just passed the Ohio Senate. Perhaps not surprisingly, the GOP controlled Ohio Senate worked over Governor Strickland's plan and,guess who got screwed? If you answered Ohio's consumers, you win the prize! And what is that prize you ask? Well, let's just see what the Ohio Senate has in store for you:

Electric rates for consumers than can never be lower than they will be in February of 2008

Deep discounts for large commercial users of electricity.

No requirement that electric companies use renewable sources until 2025 and then only if such sources do not raise the overall average price of electricity more than 3%.

In short, Ohio's consumers are going to get the shaft courtesy of Ohio's Grand Old Party which never met a large corporation it didn't love.

Republican Answer to Republican Corruption? Privatize It!

If you click here you can listen to a story that aired today on WKSU by Karen Kasler. The story concerned the audit report that was done on the Bureau of Workers' Compensation concerning the Republican corruption represented by Thomas Noe. Of course, both State Auditor Mary Taylor and Speaker of the Ohio House John Husted assured Kasler that public corruption is really a bi-partisan problem.

Kasler didn't point out in her story that the Noe scandal was the largest scandal in Ohio history, that it occurred under a Republican Governor, that the person involved, Noe, raised money for Bush and Ohio Republicans. She didn't point it out but we will. The recent scandal at the BWC wasn't a bi-partisan scandal, it was a Republican scandal. Noe was a Republican. The people who should have uncovered it but didn't, namely the State Auditor and the Ohio Attorney General, were Republicans. This has nothing to do with any party but the Ohio Republican Party.

The story got even better as Husted advocated privatizing the BWC. So let's see if we get this straight: a Republican fundraiser is corrupt; as a result of this corruption millions of dollars are lost by the BWC; Republican state officials don't prevent it from happening; and after it has happened, the Speaker of the House wants to privatize the system so he can steer more state contracts to his Republican friends in business. Yep, that makes a lot of sense.

We got a different solution: make some Republican crooks do some hard time and make sure that their sentences are known to other people who contract with the state government. Let's have some of that good old Republican law and order that we hear so much about.