Daily Archives: February 18, 2016

A bit of an own goal by the Minter campaign

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“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

— Revelation 3:16

One of the minor sidelights of our state campaign season is the issue of endorsements, especially on the Democratic side. Do you support the hometown favorite, or the party stalwart? The one who wants to be the 44th male president, or the one who wants to be the first female?

You can sense the pressure in the way things filter out. Established officeholders who don’t have to face the electorate? Peter Shumlin and Pat Leahy go for Hillary Clinton. Officeholder who will be on the ballot this year? Peter Welch is studiously neutral.

Non-officeholders contending for top Democratic nominations? Matt Dunne, Dave Zuckerman, and Kesha Ram have all endorsed Bernie.*

*As a correspondent informed me, I made a quick-draw mistake there. Zuckerman and Ram are officeholders, of course. I wrote in haste, and I apologize to Zuckerman and Ram for the attempted impeachments.

And then there’s Sue Minter, who hadn’t said anything publicly about the race until this week, when she half-heartedly indicated a preference in an interview with WCAX’s Kyle Midura. It wasn’t pretty.

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The Kasich Files: a scandal-ridden, failing education system

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Another installment examining John Kasich’s woeful record as Ohio Governor, in advance of the “reasonable” candidate’s appearance in Colchester on Saturday. 

Previously in this space, I wrote about the disgrace of John Kasich’s push for school choice in Ohio. Last summer, the state official in charge of school choice was forced to resign after submitting fraudulent statistics to the federal government — statistics designed to conceal the fact that charter schools weren’t working. The disgraced official “admitted scrubbing data on failing… charters to improve their standing.”

Bow Down Before Your Benevolent Overlord!

Bow Down Before Your Benevolent Overlord!

(By the way, the wife of that disgraced former official? She used to be Kasich’s chief of staff, and is now a top staffer in his presidential campaign.)

Well, there’s more bad news on Kasich’s sorry education record, courtesy of a Washington Post article entitled

The Education Mess in Ohio Under Gov. John Kasich

The Post ticks off a lengthy list of failures and cover-ups, including:

*a scandal-ridden charter school sector

*budget cuts for traditional public schools at the same time as increased funding for  charter schools and school vouchers

*controversial state takeovers of “failing” schools

*a questionable teacher evaluation system that uses as one factor the standardized test scores of students, against the recommendation of assessment experts

*the botched administration of the Common Core test known as PARCC (which the state later dropped).

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The Kasich Files: rabidly anti-choice

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Now that John Kasich is planning a Town Hall in Vermont, I’ll be exploring his extremely conservative, and not very successful, record as Governor of Ohio. Enjoy.

Best of times, worst of times for Vermont Republicans. The good: they’ve finally got a credible, plausibly centrist candidate for governor — one who, in the mold of Jim Douglas, can put a smiley face on biz-friendly conservatism.

The bad: Oh, those presidential candidates.

Many in the VTGOP, glumly scanning the field, are latching onto Ohio Gov. John Kasich as the alleged “adult in the room,” the technocrat, the non-ideologue. I suppose we’ll see plenty of Vermont stalwarts at Kasich’s town hall on Saturday.

But to see John Kasich as anything other than a cookie-cutter conservative firebrand force-feeding the ALEC agenda to his home state, takes quite a bit of squinting. And wishful thinking.

Previously, I wrote about his fraudulent (literally) school-choice push, woeful jobs record, and how he has put the squeeze on local governments to save his state-budget bacon. Today, hey, it’s Planned Parenthood.

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