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Last month The Free Press reported on illegal and unfair premiums that the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (BWC) charged to hundreds of thousands of employers from 1991 to 2009. BWC agreed in July to pay $420 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of the harmed employers, rather than continue the agency’s appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court.
In upholding a common pleas court’s ruling that BWC owed employers hundreds of millions of dollars, Ohio’s Eighth District Court of Appeals in Cuyahoga County said a “cabal” of lobbyists and BWC bureaucrats had “rigged” the employers’ premium rates. The common pleas court said BWC knowingly and intentionally established the illegal and unfair premiums and admitted at trial to doing so.
If Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) can convince the Ohio Statehouse to pass “Annie’s Law” or HB 469, all first-time DUI offenders wishing to drive during any probationary period will have to install a breathalyzer in their car and pass it for the car to start.
MADD’s Ohio office in Columbus believes the law is innovative because it allows driving privileges to first-time offenders in lieu of a judge denying them the right to drive for any determined amount of time.
The bill is known as Annie’s Law in honor of 36-year-old Annie Rooney, a successful lawyer from Chillicothe who lost her life last year when her SUV was slammed into by a habitual drunk driver.
MADD says they’ve gotten the message that single mothers, occupational drivers – and anyone else dependent on their car for that matter – need to drive to survive.
Will precinct-by-precinct, 15 minute-by-15 minute election night results that are available only to the Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, compromise the security of the statewide election?
In Ohio’s notorious 2004 presidential election, called by pollster Lou Harris “one of the most corrupt in U.S. history,” one of the signs of election tampering was the impossible results flowing from precincts in Republican rural Ohio. In Cyde, Ohio they initially reported 130 percent voter turnout.
In Perry County, one precinct came in at 120 percent, another at 114 percent. In Miami County, the Concord Southwest precinct claimed 679 out of 689 voters cast ballots overwhelmingly for Bush. They later admitted to The Free Press that only 549 people signed into the polls and that the other votes had been the result of bad computer tallies.
Now with Ohio’s new election night reporting system it is easier than ever to stack the deck and bring in the cybervote at the precinct level.
Secretary of State’s strange secret software patches suspected purpose to steal election
While some attention is focused on the risks inherent in placing untested software patches on county election tabulators, another election technology is being aggressively deployed throughout Ohio. That technology, the e-pollbook, appears to reduce lines at the polls, increase convenience and be a more modern way to verify voter identity and precinct location. The technology as deployed brings with it new possibilities for tampering with elections and whole new vectors for cyber attack.
What is most alarming is the potential for this technology to compromise the secrecy of the ballot. E-pollbooks could allow people with access, from election officials and private contractors to Ohio Secretary of State John Husted, to know how you voted.
The United States Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, allowed Ohio’s notoriously racist voting laws to remain in place during the 2014 election. Ohio Secretary of State (SoS) Jon Husted has embraced the new Jim Crow policy of limiting access to the polls by poor, elderly and black voters.
Husted, under a twisted version of “equality” has limited Ohio’s nine major urban areas to having only one early voting site each, guaranteed to create long lines as it did in the 2004 and 2012 elections. In 2008, then-SoS Jennifer Brunner allowed the Franklin County Board of Elections to establish five early voting centers in the greater Columbus area.
Last week, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld federal Judge Peter Economus’ historic ruling protecting African American voting rights in Ohio. In a September 4, 2014 opinion, Economus held that the actions of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted violated both the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by erecting illegal barriers to keep minorities and the poor from voting in the Buckeye State.
Striking Reynoldsburg teachers want the public to know one thing: they’re on the picket line because they care about students first.
The strike is more about what the Reynoldsburg school district is forcing on the students and teachers than winning a compensation package that’s on par with neighboring districts, said the Reynoldsburg Education Association (REA), the teachers’ union.
The Reynoldsburg school district, led by Superintendent Tina Thomas-Manning, called an “education ally” of Gov. John Kasich by the REA, has been pushing hard for teachers to accept a merit-based pay system.
Conservatives and Capitalists have long been among supporters of merit-based pay claiming it will help to close “the achievement gap.”
Critics of merit-based pay say it is a veiled effort to privatize education by replacing teachers with technology, increasing class sizes, increasing the number of standardized tests and growing the number of for-profit charter schools.
John Crawford III went shopping at WalMart. John Crawford III was going to buy a pellet gun. He picked one out. He called his girlfriend on the phone and was chatting casually. He was shot dead by a policeman before he reached the checkout line. He was black. The officer who killed him with two rounds from an AR-15 was white. According to both a grand jury and a special prosecutor appointed by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, no crime was committed other than a man shopping while black.
DeWine had refused to release the store surveillance video (above) to the public prior to the grand jury being empaneled, claiming that would contaminate the jury pool. Crawford's family had seen the videotape and claimed that DeWine had promised to release it. This did not stop the special prosecutor, Mark Piepmeier, from showing the video to a key witness prior to the grand jury, enabling that witness, Ronald Ritchie, to possibly change his story.
NEW YORK — The massive People’s Climate March, the most hopeful, diverse, photogenic, energizing, and often hilarious march I’ve joined in 52 years of activism — and one of the biggest, at 400,000 strong — has delivered a simple message: we can and will rid the planet of fossil fuels and nuclear power, we will do it at the grassroots, it will be demanding and difficult to say the least, but it will also have its moments of great fun.
With our lives and planet on the line, our species has responded.
Ostensibly, this march was in part meant to influence policy makers. That just goes with the territory.
But in fact what it showed was an amazingly broad-based, diverse, savvy, imaginative, and very often off-beat movement with a deep devotion to persistence and cause, and a great flair for fun.
Because what must happen most of all is organizing from the grassroots against each and every polluting power plant, unwanted permit, errant funding scheme, stomach-turning bribe, planet-killing frack well, soon-to-melt reactor, and much much more.
Two vans and a big bus filled with truly great people—the new Climate Riders—on their way to New York City for the People’s Climate March pulled up to the First Watch for breakfast this morning in Columbus, Ohio.
Twenty-four hours on the road each way to march for a few hours against the corporations that are killing our planet.
Kansas/Missouri Climate Riders stop for breakfast in central Ohio on their way to NYC. Local author Harvey Wasserman is kneeling in front in his “Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth” t-shirt. Photo credit: Samantha Allen
“I hate the Koch Brothers,” one of them tells me over pancakes. “They are wrecking the Earth for all of us.”
Another, Chris, borrows my bike to ride down the street to a bakery, then does it a second time to feed the drivers.
Bob Hart, Green Party Congressional candidate for twelfth district of Ohio came out in opposition to an expanded American military role in combating ISIS in Syria. The Press release read in part “President Obama and Congress have chosen to sacrifice additional U.S. troops, and further degrade our economy and constitution, by illegally broadening the ongoing wars in the Middle East to include Syria.”
Hart's statement referred to the recent announcement by President Obama that airstrikes targeting ISIS would be carried out in Syria. The President also has asked Congress to grant the military the authority to arm and train friendly militias inside Syria.
The friendly militias are on the short end of a three way struggle between themselves, ISIS and the Assad regime which is allied with Iran. Both Iran and the United States have special operations troops assisting Iraqi forces combating ISIS in Iraq.