New website - Statehouse News Online

I wanted to let you know that Tom Blumer, BizzyBlog, and I have recently begun writing for Statehouse News Online. We'll both be doing regular posts, sharing information and perspective on items of interest within the state of Ohio.

Statehouse News is the brainchild of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, "a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting new media journalism." They are the sponsor of the Citizen Watchdog training I've been talking and writing about (here and here), though they are not responsible for anything that appears on the Statehouse News site.

StateHouseNewsOnline.com is a collection of independent journalists covering state-specific and local government activity. StatehouseNewsOnline.com is the national leading news website dedicated to providing news from the nation’s state capitols. The news website networks with dozens of state-based news organizations to provide in depth coverage of state legislation, government & special interests, state budgets and political/campaign news.

The site contains both straight news reporting and commentary, often covering stories traditional media miss - or don't have the time to fully investigate.

My first post, "Ohio: Good marks in economic ranking, but still room for improvement," takes at look at how Ohio ranked in the recent Rich States, Poor States annual report.

Tom's most recent "Ohio employment: A tale of three cities," analyzes President Barack Obama's claim that bailing out the auto industry is the reason for the decreased unemployment in the state.

Yesterday, I took a look at the questions that should have been asked at an anti-gun press conference where Columbus Democrats called on a Republican to cancel her 'Shoot for Liberty' fundraiser at a gun club.

I hope you'll make Statehouse News a regular stop - and if you have a news tips or story that isn't getting the attention it deserves, let me know!

Links discussed while filling in on WSPD

Here is the link to the podcast of my interview with C.L. Bryant about his upcoming movie Runaway Slave.

Tom Blumer who writes at BizzyBlog, PJ Media and Newsbusters, expounds on the top media bias stories of 2011, as we discussed, as well as other examples of media malfeasance.

Here are the 2012 predictions from WSPD listeners:

* Steve in Slyvania - predicts no shortage of Toledo city council stupidity (but how to judge?)

* Bob - predicts it will be illegal to talk on cell phones in vehicles in Ohio - even with hands-free technology

* Tim Higgins - Blade will cease 7-day print publication - probably go to a 3-4 day/week publication...Saturday is a dead publication day and Wednesday is coupon - drop so predicts Saturday and maybe Tuesday or Thursday will no longer have daily papers

* Mike in Oregon - SB5 opponents will call to task all Republicans who voted for the bill and the Democrats will take the Ohio as a result.

Filling in on WSPD - today's guests and topics

I'm filling in again for Brian Wilson on 1370 WSPD from 3-6 p.m. and I wanted to share with you some information about the guests we'll have on the show.

At 4:30, Tom Blumer, an Ohio blogger who writes at BizzyBlog and Newsbusters, will join us to discuss the top media bias stories of 2011.

At 5 p.m. we'll talk to C.L. Bryant about his conversion to conservatism and his soon-to-be-released documentary movie Runaway Slave.

Rev. Bryant, from Louisiana, has a Master's in Theology and is a licensed and ordained Baptist minister and pastor. He was the president of an NAACP chapter in Garland, Texas, and was a self-professed “Democratic Radical” who "now believes the values that he once vehemently upheld has led the Black community into a state of bondage to the US government."

Clearly unafraid to talk religion and politics, C.L. is not only a Tea Party Patriot but he is a charter member of the Red River Tea Party and Shreveport/Bossier Tea Party, co-founder of the Desoto Parish Grassroots, founder of the national movement One Nation Back to God (www.onenationbacktoGod.com) and Fellow with FreedomWorks in Washington, D.C. Added to this illustrious list of achievements is independent filmmaker of the documentary Runaway Slave. Runaway Slave is a movie about the race to free the Black community from the slavery of tyranny and progressive policies.

We'll also take your calls and your predictions for what 2012 will hold for us.

Other topics to consider include the upcoming increase in minimum wage requirements in Ohio and other states, and the accepted practice of public sector union members performing union work while on the clock and being paid by the taxpayers.

Hope you'll join us at 1370 WSPD or via I Heart Radio beginning at 3 p.m. Eastern.

Newspaper circulation numbers might not be what they seem

I was doing some research the other day on the circulation numbers of various newspapers and have been watching Editor & Publisher for the news release regarding the March report.

It was featured yesterday:

Today the Audit Bureau of Circulations released the FAS-FAX covering U.S. newspaper circulation figures for the period of October 2010 - March 2011. Complete files containing data on more than 800 daily and weekly U.S. and Canadian newspapers are posted on ABC's website.

Unless you are a member of the 'accredited press,' you cannot get the full report, but a rule change, detailed in the press release, caught my eye:

In the past, the top-line metric that ABC commonly reported was "Total Paid Circulation." This category no longer exists on ABC reports. The new top-line number is "Total Average Circulation," which consists of a publication's paid and verified print and digital circulation, including any branded editions.

So what does this mean?

According to ABC, here is the difference in what they are counting:

o Paid circulation is defined as copies purchased by the individual recipient or a specialized distribution channel (business/traveler)

o Verified circulation includes much of what used to be reported in “other” paid circulation (including third-party copies and copies distributed to schools and newspaper employees)

Yes, copies to employees and free copies to schools are now counted as part of the circulation numbers.

A while back, I learned that the University of Toledo had paid The Blade several thousand dollars to deliver an e-edition of the paper to all students. This information came from a student who wanted to know if their student fees were being used for this purpose and how he could stop receiving the daily email. I don't know the outcome of his efforts, but I do know the UT website states that nearly 21,000 students attend, so that means The Blade's circulation numbers, when released, will include those students, inflating their report.

Some may say this is a more accurate way of reflecting the reach of the newspapers, but there is a problem with what appears to be a simple change: it doesn't allow you to compare previous reports to future ones.

I believe ABC should have included this as a 'new' category in the report - but perhaps they were pressured by the newspapers to not do so.

My friend, Tom Blumer, who writes at Bizzy Blog, compared this report with the one from last March only to find that the new definition doesn't do much to hide the decline in the newspaper industry. He writes:

In a nutshell, ABC has added “verified” to “paid,” and has included copies in “total average circulation” which were formerly excluded from “total paid circulation.” Yet the industry’s top players with rare exceptions still showed circulation declines despite the alleged economic “recovery” many of them continue to tout.

So when we learn the circulation numbers of our local papers, keep this in mind...

Blade's bias gets outside attention

My friend, and fellow Ohio blogger, Tom Blumer, takes a look at the recent dust-up over the Brian Wilson 'monkey comment' as it's now become known.

In case you missed it, the Toledo Blade took an on-air comment from NewsTalk 1370 WSPD afternoon host Brian Wilson, chopped off everything but about 14 seconds and then shopped it around to, primarily, African-American members of the community to see if they could manufacture community outrage over the implied reference of children to monkeys, and the 'obvious,' (so they promoted) racism of the statement.

Eventually, the editorial board issued an apology, clearly admitting that they took a comment out of context, but they still blamed Wilson for saying something that he should have known they would distort.

I looked at the issue in terms of how the local paper 'pushed' an idea they wanted to promote rather than just do what papers are supposed to do - cover the events of the day.

Blumer's post looks not only at a summary of the ridiculousness of the actions by The Blade, but goes further to examine why the comment was more important than the serious issues facing Toledo Public Schools, including their performance and deficits.

He includes a rather damning chart from the Ohio Department of Education that shows African-American students are not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress. He writes:

As bad as the school district is, children from every other identified ethnic group managed to get acceptable results on the latest ODE report card (not that ODE is setting the bar particularly high). Why not African-Americans? What would MLK say?

What indeed?

Blumer also has high praise for Michael Miller's Toledo Free Press column on the matter:

"The next day, the Free Press’s Michael Miller posted a column that would be in the running for the NewsBusters Hall of Fame if it had gone up there."

And he should know - he's a frequent contributor to NewsBusters. He also writes:

Congrats to Miller and all those involved at the Free Press on their persistence. As to the Blade, it must really be a drag to know that those old, reliable tricks that used to work like a charm have lost their power to deceive.

Heaven help Toledo if people like those who run the Blade ever regain control over what “responsible” speech is in that city. If the Blade’s bludgeoners get their their way, parents might not even be able to deliver a “monkey see, monkey do” scolding to their children when their little ones do something dumb in imitation of their friends who have done something dumb.

Be sure to read the entire post at BizzyBlog. Tom understands the problems we have in Toledo - even if most Toledoan's don't. But with news-scaped* stories such as this one, we're beginning to.


(*New term which will be clarified in a future post.)

Labor Day 2010

Happy Labor Day to everyone! As you take a day off work to celebrate the fruits of your labor, here's something to remember:

"The Original Sin which brought us to the brink of bankruptcy and dictatorship was the Federal Income Tax Amendment and its illegitimate child, Federal Aid." ~ Tom Anderson

Also, I highly recommend "Positivity: Labor Day, Its History, and Its Meaning," from my friend and fellow blogger, Tom Blumer. It reminds us why we have the day off.

Tom has two other posts on politicizing Labor Day, which are must-reads as well:

* Politicizing Labor Day, Part 1: DOL Scrubs Samuel Gompers Quote from Its ‘History of Labor Day’ Page

In this post, Blumer explains that many unions used to believe in the power of bargaining - not the power of government regulation - to affect the change they wanted to see in the workplace. And Samuel Gompers, the subject of the post, was an opponent of governmental welfare programs:

"...Gompers believed that “social insurance cannot remove or prevent poverty.” Moreover, he maintained that welfare is “undemocratic” because it tends “to fix the citizens of the country into two classes, and a long established system would tend to make these classes rigid.”

He then contasts that history and perspective with how Labor Day is viewed today:

* Politicizing Labor Day, Part 2: DOL’s Solis Uses Holiday Address As Propaganda and Attack Vehicle

Enjoy your Labor Day.

Ohio RINOs

My friend and fellow SOB Alliance blogger, Tom Blumer, has an excellent column showing all the machinations going on with the Ohio Republican Party candidates.

In RINOs, RINOs everywhere, he takes a look at several states where the GOP party leaders are backing individuals who really don't represent the core Republican values, and its especially egregious in Ohio where Gang of 14 member Mike DeWine will probably be the endorsed candidate for Attorney General. (Blumer's updated article along with current links is posted here.) As Tom explains:

Until he decided he wanted to be Ohio’s next attorney general, (state GOP chairman) Kevin’s (DeWine) relative, former U.S. Senator Mike DeWine, was last seen being repudiated twice by Buckeye State voters in a 17-month span in 2005-2006. First, despite spending $1 million, his son Pat finished a distant fourth in a June 2005 GOP primary race to fill an open congressional seat. That thrashing was accurately seen as a proxy repudiation of Mike over his participation in the Gang of 14 and other conservative-betraying votes. After yet another vote in November 2005 to stop drilling for oil in Alaska and a 2006 GOP primary where two completely underfunded challengers blockaded by ORPINO nonetheless took 28% of the vote, Mike DeWine lost his U.S. Senate reelection race against far-left Cleveland-area Congressman Sherrod Brown by a stunning 12 points.

Second-cousin Kevin and the ORPINO gang decided that this awful track record justified clearing the AG field for Mike, even though DeWine’s primary opponent Dave Yost had already racked up a 5-0 record in December and January GOP county endorsement meetings and had earned an intense level of tea party and other grassroots enthusiasm.

Nobody seems to want to own up to what Kevin and ORPINO did next, but all of a sudden early this week Yost, whose campaign slogan was “A Prosecutor, Not a Politician,” decided that he wanted to run for state auditor instead. Not coincidentally, ORPINO was also unhappy with the not-beholden CPA who had just started his own auditor campaign after Kasich selected Taylor.

As Tom concludes:

"...I understand that there is serious thought being given to going the third-party route in certain of the down-ticket races. I suspect that similar third-party moves are under consideration in other states and in higher-profile races. ORPINO and its compadres in other states will only have themselves to blame if this comes about."

I agree!

Cleveland's foreclosure mess made worse by government

The City of Cleveland contributed to the foreclosure crisis by helping low income people buy homes with mortgage payments they couldn't afford. So far, the loss in the federally-funded Afford-a-Home program is $2.3 million.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has the special investigative report:

The city of Cleveland has aggravated its vexing foreclosure problems and has lost millions in tax dollars by helping people buy homes they could not afford, a Plain Dealer investigation has found.

The city provided mostly low-income buyers with down payment loans of up to $20,000 through the federally funded Afford-A-Home program, but did little to determine whether the people could actually afford to keep their homes.

That lack of oversight persisted for years, even as hundreds of loan recipients defaulted on mortgages, many within two years, the newspaper found by analyzing property and loan records covering the period between 2000 and 2007.

For example, nearly half of 584 homes sold by the top three for-profit companies that tapped into the program over the eight years have gone into foreclosure. More than one-third of those homes have sold at sheriff's sale or sit abandoned because banks did not take them back.

What makes that so costly to taxpayers is that the city has virtually no chance of recouping its investment once a property is sold at sheriff's sale.

The loss in Afford-A-Home dollars from failed purchases from Cresthaven Development Corp., Rysar Properties Inc. and Pebblebrook Properties Inc. thus far totals more than $2.3 million.

Presented with the newspaper's findings, city officials acknowledged problems with the Afford-A-Home program and ordered tighter eligibility standards for buyers and sellers.

And Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog correctly looks at the failure of 'government oversight' and the voters in the fiasco:

CRA mandated that banks originating first-lien mortgages extend them to undeserving borrowers, or face brutal challenges to their ability to continue in business during regulators’ audits and to other business moves such as mergers and acquisitions. As would be expected, short-term survival instincts overcame sound underwriting. Now, according to leftists, it’s the banks’ fault for doing what they were intimidated into doing.

But then, proving again that the term “government oversight” is usually an oxymoron, the city agency, even with no similar level of threat looming in the background, doubled down. Even if the apps were submitted by development companies who should have known better or were lying about certain key information (that appears to be the case in two sidebar stories Gillespie relates), that doesn’t excuse the complete failure of oversight, and absolutely doesn’t justify the program’s continuance on auto-pilot for many years despite obvious early-stage problems.

Many in Cleveland still persist on blaming someone else for why the city’s foreclosure situation is much worse that the vast majority of other cities in the US. Look in the mirror, guys. Every city’s bankers faced similar CRA problems, and to the extent they did what first-lien lenders in Cleveland did, you can hang the blame on Uncle Sam and CRA. But it’s Cleveland’s residents who elected the people who created the agency that threw federal second-mortgage money at people with apparently little if any concern over whether it would be repaid, ultimately turning entire city blocks into barren wastelands. Though it’s a popular claim among lefty bloggers in and around Metro Cleveland (maybe “Metro Mistake” is a more appropriate term), George Bush and the evil Republicans sure as heck didn’t do this.

I wonder what the the records in Toledo would show? As Blumer says, "Journalists there ought to get to work."

The definition of stupidity....

I often mention Tom Blumer, who writes at BizzyBlog, for his writing on economics and accounting issues. One of his recent posts is a must-read for this area.

Kelo, GM, and the Stimulus: Three Big Government-Induced Failures details three examples that, as Tom puts it, "clearly demonstrate that government should be the last place people look to for solutions to economic problems."

He also asks the age-old question: if the lessons are so clear, why do people keep doing things that don't work?

Hmmm...sounds like he could have used Toledo/Lucas County as examples as well.

I hope you'll read the entire article - and maybe add BizzyBlog to your daily reading as well.

What you get for the money

With apologies to HGTV and their show of the same name, here's a terrific article about ACORN and what it does from fellow State of Ohio Blogger Alliance member Tom Blumer, who writes at BizzyBlog and NewsBusters.

As Tom explains, several news reports about the amount of work being done and people being served caught his attention. It started with this:

Every month more than two dozen people walk into ACORN's Cincinnati office on Central Avenue for help with avoiding foreclosure and finding financial aid programs.

Followed shortly by this:

Locally, that means about 20 clients a month will be turned away, said Amy Teitelman, the local and state director of ACORN.

And then this was found:

Six years later, in 1986, the organization created the ACORN Housing Corporation to "build and preserve housing assets." Since its inception, according to its Web site, the corporation has assisted more than 45,000 families to become first-time homeowners and has rehabbed more than 850 vacant or abandoned housing units.

As Tom writes:

Even if those totals were for only 5 years instead of 23, that would be 1.57 families per office per week (45,000 divided by 110 cities divided by 5 years divided by 52). It seems pretty obvious that the real number is a lot lower than 1.57. Again assuming only 5 years instead of 23, the rehabs are less than 1.6 per city per full year (850 divided by 110 divided by 5). Habitat for Humanity (this is a huge understatement) runs circles around that.

On a side note, I wondered just how much money ACORN had gotten during this time frame for the 45,000 families and 850 vacant homes, and found this reference:

One of its affiliates, ACORN Housing Corp., has received $53.6 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development over the last 15 years, $27.8 million during last year alone..."

But if you really want to know what you get for the money, Tom examines the number of tax returns ACORN helped people prepare. News reports about the IRS cutting off funding for this service all report that ACORN provided help on about 25,000 returns nationwide.

But the United Way of King County served 13,631 people, Tom says, "over half as many returns as ACORN did in the entire country, and provided their services for free."

What Tom doesn't address and what I could not find (at least, not in 20 minutes of Internet searching) was how much money the IRS was 'cancelling.' I find it strange that the news stories all mention how many people were supposedly served but never mention the dollar amounts ACORN had gotten.

Without this information, it's hard to know what you get for your money, but as Tom explains, there's still time to find out:

Local reporters ought to be all over this, assuming they're interested in digging for the truth instead of parroting ACORN's press releases and talking points. National reporters should be ashamed that they have ignored the obvious indications that ACORN's offices really accomplish very little of value on behalf of the poor people they allegedly serve.