Ohio

It will be interesting to see how much national play this story gets. My guess is: "little."

Following up on a matter on which I initially posted last month, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported yesterday that the prosecutor for Hamilton County, Ohio, where the county seat is Cincinnati, is bringing charges related to improper voting against three people – including a longtime poll worker and a nun. In connection with the poll worker, reporter Sharon Coolidge notes something that should earn today's prize for inadvertent deadpan humor (in bold):

UPDATE: The post has been revised from its original presentation to reflect the fact that the Cincinnati Enquirer covered the story but chose not to identify the person involved, even though her name is a matter of public record.

On Wednesday, local Cincinnati TV station WCPO did a report (HT John Fund at National Review via Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin's blog) on how "The Hamilton County Board of Elections is investigating 19 possible cases of alleged voter fraud" (Cincinnati is the county seat of Hamilton County).

The most potentially outrageous case involves Melowese Richardson, who "admits to voting twice in the last election." Even though "she has worked the polls since 1988," she offered a hopelessly lame excuse for the multiple vote. She may also have voted four additional times under others' names, and also appears to have helped her granddaughter vote twice. Excerpts concerning Ms. Richardson's alleged voter fraud, which the left insists never, ever happens, follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):

It's not very often that a federal judge begins a ruling by saying that "Sometimes even a person with excellent vision does not see the forest for the trees." That happened yesterday in a case involving former First District Democratic Congressman and sore loser Steve Driehaus, whose district mostly comprised the western two-thirds of Cincinnati's Hamilton County. Yet it's not news at Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

After his 2010 defeat at the hands of Republican Steve Chabot, Driehaus sued the Susan B. Anthony List in federal court  for defamation and -- get this -- "loss of livelihood." Why? Because, during that campaign, SBAL told Driehaus's constituents -- correctly, it has since been proven -- that his vote for ObamaCare was a betrayal of his pro-life principles. Yesterday, despite his obvious conflict of interest as former president and director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Cincinnati, Judge Timothy Black, a Barack Obama appointee, found a way to do what he should have done in the first place, and rejected Driehaus's nonsense. 

There has been no shortage of deceptive ads, factually-distorted statements, and outright fabrications from the political left over the campaign year to choose from, but leave it to the Tampa Bay Times's PolitiFact to give its "Lie of the Year" award to the Romney campaign. The now infamous "falsehood" in question was Romney's claim that Jeep was planning on moving production of some of its vehicles to China. This was in fact technically true, but PolitiFact trademarked it as its "Lie of the Year."

In a fit of glee, multiple left-leaning news outlets have promoted the proclamation, including of course, MSNBC. [video below, MP3 audio here ]:

Continuing his wire service's sadly predictable kid-glove treatment of the Occupy movement which sometimes verges on open romance, Chuck Murr's Tuesday evening story at the Associated Press on the sentencing of three of the five participants in the foiled plot to bomb a major bridge in a Cleveland suburb utterly failed to note the active involvement of the convicted domestic terrorists (the sentencing judge's characterization) with Occupy Cleveland. It also failed to note a supportive tweet sent by Occupy Wall Street (HT Twitchy.com) claiming "entrapment" and linking to a legal defense fund web site.

By contrast, in its coverage of the sentencing today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's James F. McCarty reminded readers, complete with a link back to the paper's May 2 story describing their involvement, that all five were "members of Occupy Cleveland movement."

In the quadrennially important swing state of Ohio, one of the Toledo Blade's featured front page stories on Sunday wondered if Mormonism would shape Romney's policy. Following an endorsement of Obama last week in which there was no mention of the president's beliefs, religion editor Timothy Knox Barger's penned a 2,500 word piece that resorted to scare tactics and conjecture.

Among them was a seemingly legitimate concern that Romney might try to impose a ban on certain things that he's known to abstain from himself -- like coffee for instance.

Toledo Blade reporter Tyrel Linkhorn got sucked in by Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne's misleading email to Chrysler employees today. The Politico's Alexander Burns relayed Linkhorn's gullibility to the rest of the nation -- or at least the few people scattered throughout the nation who might bother to read it.

Marchionne, as quoted by Linkhorn told employees that "Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand. It is inaccurate to suggest anything different." While that may be true, it doesn't change the fact that the company announced plans to build a new Jeep model in Italy which will be exported to Europe and North America. As Bloomberg reported early this afternoon:

Assessing the presidential race in the Midwest with Chris Hayes on Thursday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said Ohio Gov. John Kasich may be the "cockiest of all of the cocky breed of the Republican governors right now," but his loss on union bargaining rights was so stinging "I actually think the Republican establishment in Ohio is pretty wussy compared to what they were like in 2010."

That sounds a lot like a taunt that Ohio Republicans may want to tack to the bulletin board. They were discussing how Wisconsin doesn't look as good as they think it should:

Updated below | Not only has the Obama administration failed to live up to its promise of "transparency," it appears the president's reelection campaign shares the same issue. Politico media reporter Dylan Byers noted this morning that "Joe Vardon, a reporter with the Columbus Dispatch, says campaign aides stopped him from speaking to voters at a rally featuring Vice President Joe Biden in Canton, Ohio, today."

"Reporters NOT ALLOWED to talk to voters at Biden/Canton event," Byers quoted a Vardon tweet, "Saddled up to two 'Scotts' — both white, mid-50s — campaign tapped me on shoulder, said I wasn't allowed." In an update subsequently filed a mere eight minutes later, Byers noted that "Amy Dudley, a spokeswoman for Vice President Biden, emails" the following:

As their circulation numbers continue to decline, the self-described mainstream media has errected a new idol for Americans to worship: so-called “fact checking” websites which ostensibly exist to vet claims from all sides about political disputes.

A review of one such site, PolitiFact Ohio -- an arm of Cleveland's Plain Dealer -- shows that the supposedly non-partisan fact-checkers there have a distinct bias against the Republican running for Senate in the state, Josh Mandel, in comparison to his Democratic opponent, current senator Sherrod Brown.

Leading off Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, fill-in anchor Savannah Guthrie declared the presidential race in one key battleground state all but over: "Tonight, both candidates are in Ohio as a spate of new polls shows the all-important bellwether may be slipping away for the Republican challenger."

In the report that followed, correspondent Ron Allen reiterated that "new polls show Ohio slipping away" from Romney and quickly asserted the cause: "Romney down by ten points in a new poll out this morning, and nearly that in another recent poll, after that video of Romney talking disparagingly about the 47% who pay no income tax."

All this week during the 11 a.m. Eastern MSNBC Live program, "we're going to look at the ballot battles that could decide the race for the White House," MSNBC's Richard Lui noted today as he set up a segment with two liberal opponents of voter ID laws -- "wired into the concerns of minority voters" -- Ohio State Senator Nina Turner (D) and Common Cause staff counsel Stephen Spaulding.

Although Lui briefly quoted from two officials for True the Vote, a conservative anti-voter fraud group that supports voter ID laws, he failed to bring on any representatives of the group, even though Turner was there to rail against what she sees as the racist motives behind the Ohio Secretary of State's move to cut back on in-person voting hours.

This afternoon, NB's Kyle Drennen did a great job of runnng down the pathetic contention by establishment press "fact-checkers" that vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan somehow lied or misled viewers during his speech Wednesday night concerning the closure of the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin and what presidential candidate Barack Obama said at the plant in 2008.

No, WaPo, New York Times, and the Associated Press (called out by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air), the plant didn't close before Obama was elected; it closed in April 2009. But since we're on the topic of lies about auto plant shutdowns, let's look at one from late April and early May 2009 told by President Barack Obama himself with the assistance of his car czars and other apparatchiks. I blogged about this in mid-May 2009. My full post, which also appeared at NewsBusters, includes noting non-existent national press coverage (only the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Stephen Koff and other local reporters in the towns affected raised their voices). 

As we at NewsBusters have documented repeatedly, MSNBC has done its level best to hype voter ID laws as a "voter suppression" attempt by the GOP to "disenfranchise" voters who traditionally fall into the Democratic column. Today's MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts was no exception.

Roberts informed viewers of ruling by a judge on the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court yesterday -- read the PDF of it here --  that refused to grant a temporary injunction to block the state's new photo ID law. To discuss the ruling and the decision by opponents of the law to appeal, Roberts interviewed Penda Hair of the liberal Advancement Project, a group opposed to new voter ID laws. However, Roberts both failed to bring on anyone who would defend the law nor did he press Hair with any tough questions. Additionally, Roberts let Hair get away with a misleading argument about early voting in the neighboring state of Ohio.

A small business owner in a crucial swing state has found herself losing business from loyal customers due to her ad being featured in a Mitt Romney campaign ad. It seems her customers believe she is a Romney backer, but in fact she prefers to keep politics out of her business. And so this business owner demanded that the Romney camp either pull the ad or blur her deli's name from the frames that it's in. The campaign, she says, ignored her pleas.

You didn't hear about that story? Well, you certainly would if it actually happened, but, you see, this is the case of deli owner Debra Krause-McDonnell whose complaint is with President Obama's reelection campaign, reported Jane Prendergast in today's Cincinnati Enquirer:

On May 2, Matt Sheffield at NewsBusters ran down a list of national media outlets which failed to report the Occupy movement connections of the five men arrested by the FBI for plotting to blow up a suburban Cleveland bridge, despite the fact that the Cleveland Plain Dealer began noting those relationships from the get-go.

Matt wrote that the Associated Press recognized the connections, but watered it all down by "letting an Occupy Cleveland spokesman's claim the men 'weren't affiliated with or representing the group' go unchallenged." Yesterday, after one of the five arrested entered a guilty plea to avoid a probable life sentence, an unbylined AP report waited until the final of 13 paragraphs to even mention Occupy, and then proceeded to engage in the same dishonest downplaying -- even though evidence revealed a few days after Matt's post proved an undeniable, high-level relationship (bolds are mine; HT Instapundit):

Barack Obama has trouble telling the truth.

This is the man who admitted his memoir "Dreams of My Father" was semi-fictional. “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Translation: On some pages, I’m taking poetic license with the facts to burnish my image.

New York Times reporter Mark Landler spun for the president in Ohio in Friday's "Obama, Hitting Road in Rust Belt, Offers Tough Talk on Jobs and Trade."

Landler, whose reporting on Obama is getting more gushy as the election nears, shone his journalistic flashlight on any slivers of good economic news he could find and suggested they would benefit Obama in the Midwest.

Neil Munro at The Daily Caller is pointing out that Barack Obama has a truth-telling problem when it comes to being outspent on his previous campaigns. Someone should alert Politifact and its users in the press corps.

“I got outspent when I ran [the] first time for Senate,” the president claimed in his campaign speech Thursday in Maumee, Ohio. Munro found "Obama was misleading." Yeah, that's one word you could use.

As Obama prepared to tour northern Ohio cities by bus on Thursday, NPR's Morning Edition was trying to take apart the Republican challenger to liberal Senator Sherrod Brown. First, correspondent David Welna dismissed 34-year-old GOP state treasurer Josh Mandel as someone "who could easily be mistaken for a teenager."

Then he added that "independent" (read: liberal media elite) fact-checkers think he's throwing false allegations at his liberal opponent, like he was the "deciding vote" for ObamaCare:

The last national press reports on the five men arrested Monday for plotting to blow up a Cleveland-area bridge reassured everyone that none involved were in responsible roles in the Occupy movement. On Thursday, the Associated Press's Thomas J. Sheeran wrote that Occupy Cleveland spokespersons "said the men were associated with the group but didn't represent Occupy Cleveland or its non-violent philosophy." An earlier AP report paraphrased a claim that they "had been associated with the anticorporate Occupy Cleveland movement but don't share its nonviolent views." Reuters carried this quote: "They were in no way representing or acting on behalf of Occupy Cleveland."

Well, last night, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Michael Sangiacomo reported that at least one of the five was once in a sufficiently responsible position within the Occupy group to represent it while signing a lease for space the group used. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the wire services just noted and others will do with what follows:

On March 1, 2011, 14 year-old Makayla Norman of Dayton died of neglect at the hands of adults (her mother and three others) who were responsible for her care and safety. Makayla weighed 28 pounds when she died, and was found "covered in bedsores, living in filth and starved to the point the she looked more like a skeleton than a teenager." On Friday, her mother pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering children. The cases of the three other adults go to trial on April 16.

In January, an investigative report by Cox Newspapers Dayton-area staff writers Josh Sweigart and Doug Page identified several parties who could and should have prevented the neglect in the first place, or detected it while in progress: "the home care agency responsible for feeding her"; "an extensive bureaucracy where officials say fraud is a massive and growing problem"; her case manager (among those indicted), who "worked for CareStar of Ohio"; and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Bizarrely, two months later, while barely mentioning any of the aforementioned parties in their report, Mary McCarty and Margo Kissell at the Dayton Daily News, using questionable methods and verbiage (to be noted later), decided that one other element in Makayla's life should be nominated to receive part of the blame -- homeschooling:

Sure, there is really "no way, theoretically or otherwise" that yesterday's school shooting in Chardon, Ohio, could have been prevented, self-confessed Second Amendment opponent MSNBC's Alex Wagner noted in a closing commentary on her eponymous program this afternoon. She then immediately delving into a gripe that America's fruited plain is riddled with incredibly lax gun laws thanks to that most evil of evil bogeymen, the "gun lobby" [video follows page break; MP3 audio here]:

I admit that I haven't kept up with trends in establishment press local crime coverage. But an item at Toledo-area blogger Maggie Thurber's place about a robbery-related story in Monday's Toledo Blade caught my attention. I hope the perspective Maggie saw on display is an outlier. I'm concerned that it may not be.

You see, someone robbing a convenience store in the Glass City was killed during the attempt, and the "Blade Staff" in the unbylined story called him a victim -- twice:

Conservatives had some significant victories in Tuesday’s scattered elections across the country, but the broadcast network evening newscasts on Wednesday night – with the exception of one topic on NBC – decided to only highlight, as did the morning shows earlier in the day, setbacks for conservatives.

“Ohio voters rejected a Republican-backed measure that limited the collective bargaining rights of public workers,” CBS anchor Scott Pelley noted of the measure which won by 61 to 39 percent, but neither he nor ABC’s Diane Sawyer informed viewers a ballot measure which will bar ObamaCare’s mandate won by an even more overwhelming 66 to 34 percent.

Yesterday's election saw three especially controversial ballot measures, two in Ohio and one in Mississippi. Ohio voters voted on a measure to restrict collective bargaining rights, similar to the Wisconsin law passed by Gov. Scott Walker earlier this year, and on a measure to opt out the national health care mandate imposed by Obamacare. Mississippi voters voted on a ballot initiative to declare that life begins at conception, seeking to ban abortion altogether. However, the only measure to pass was the health care mandate opt out in Ohio.

What are your thoughts on the three ballot initiatives? Are you surprised by the outcomes? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Earlier this evening (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I cited a few of very many examples where the press has not hesitated during the Obama years, and really since Barack Obama became the frontrunner for the Democratic Party's nomination in 2008, to engage in uncalled-for creativity to avoid calling a statement made a lie or an unlawful action illegal. One of the lastest: A Raleigh New & Observer reporter concluded that in implying that North Carolina has bridges in imminent danger of falling -- specifically, by asking his audience: "Why would we wait to act until another bridge falls?" -- Obama "may have" merely "over-suggested the risk to public safety."

Jim Kuhnhenn's report at the Associated Press tonight on the President's visit to the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River connecting Cincinnati to Covington, Kentucky appears to have taken the cover-up of the president's misleading statements to a new level, as seen in the following excerpted paragraphs (bolds are mine):

David Lewis is running for Congress as a Republican in Ohio's Eighth Congressional District for the seat House Speaker John Boehner currently holds. To be kind, Lewis doesn't stand a chance. To be not as kind, the establishment press is using Lewis's candidacy as an excuse to attempt to cast doubt on the ability of Tea Party activists and the GOP establishment to get along. To be clear, there's plenty of reason for the existence of such doubts, but David Lewis's candidacy is certainly not one of them.

To the chagrin of the GOP establishment, I'm a fan of serious primary efforts, especially against incumbents who may have lost their way. But Lewis's effort is not serious. It is fundamentally flawed in its premise and completely miscasts Boehner's current prolife record. It also has given the press an opportunity to distort the priorities of the Tea Party movement.

Yesterday, at organized labor's traditional Labor Day picnic at Cincinnati's Coney Island amusement park, Vice President Joe Biden gave the keynote address. His key lines, as reported by Carl Weiser at the Cincinnati Enquirer's Politics Extra blog (video is here at MRC-TV): "... this is a different kind of fight. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the labor movement. This is a fight for the existence of organized labor. You are the only ones who can stop the barbarians at the gate! That’s why they want you so bad.”

Biden's statement is in an important aspect more problematic than the more widely (but not sufficiently widely) noted "son of a b*tches" comment made by Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. in Detroit yesterday at a Labor Day event President Obama keynoted. While Hoffa was threatening and hateful, he was at least in theory speaking only for Big Labor (though Obama has essentially adopted it by not condemning it). In Cincinnati, Biden, who was elected to serve all citizens of the country, personally characterized a large plurality of those he is supposed to be serving with a word which means "savage, primitive, uncivilized persons." Biden's "barbarians"comment has received very light establishment press coverage, as did what appears to have been a singularly unimpressive number of people who actually heard his speech: