OBAMA'S STUMP SPEECH

Well, it's a commencement address (given at Knox College), not a campaign speech. But don't you think this would play well with the nation's voters in 2008?

What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in this new economy? If we made sure college was affordable for everyone who wanted to go? If we walked up to those Maytag workers and told them that there old job wasn’t coming back, but that the new jobs will be there because of the serious job re-training and lifelong education that is waiting for them – the sorts of opportunities Knox has created with the strong future scholarship program?

What if no matter where you worked or how many times you switched jobs, you had health care and a pension that stayed with you always, so that each of us had the flexibility to move to a better job or start a new business?
And what if instead of cutting budgets for research and development and science, we fueled the genius and the innovation that will lead to the new jobs and new industries of the future?

THE TOLL

Just after I mentioned here that the coin scandal is a problem for the Republican gubenatorial hopefuls, the Toledo Blade adds to their dozens of stories on the issue with a detailed article about how it affects the individual candidates. It concludes with something I would love to see:

David Mark, the editor-in-chief of Washington-based Campaigns & Elections Magazine, said if voters have lost trust in Republican candidates because of the coin scandal, it will create serious obstacles for whoever gains the GOP nomination for governor.

"It's not really a hint of corruption, it appears to be outright evidence of corruption for the controlling party," he said. "There's really nobody else to blame when you're in charge."

Except, perhaps, political opponents in the primary.

"It's almost mutually assured destruction," he said. "As soon as one levels a charge at the others, there's plenty of fodder they can use against each other."

The Blade's handling of the coin scandal may be the best investigative series I've read in a newspaper since the Chicago Tribune's death penalty series.

DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME

A crush of work has silenced this blog (and will do so again shortly as I am soon to move out of state for the rest of the year), but I would be remiss if I did not mention that the ever-venal Ohio GOP has finally caused people to pay attention. The Toldeo Blade has been the best media outlet over the past several weeks documenting the mounting scandal, the gist of which is Tom and Bernadette Noe, master fundraisers for Bob Taft, George W. Bush and a whole lot of politicos (including most of the Ohio Supreme Court justices) lost a couple dozen million dollars from Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation funds. Where did the money go? Housing "loans", presidential campaign "donations", and....well, we're not sure yet. Federal and state prosecutors are investigating, and the issue is sure to come up in the GOP Republican primary, where all of the leading contenders have not only gotten money from the Noes, but have had supervisory powers to look into why workers' comp funds were allowed to be "invested in coins" in the first place.

Ohio's Republican Party should have been called out on so many issues (just scroll back through the archives here for a few recent examples), but stealing from disabled workers to fund private houses and the Bush campaign may just be the chicanery that gets people to pay attention. Whether the voters in this state have sense enough to vote them out of any of the monopoly of statewide offices they hold is another question, but at least the media here is paying attention.