Cleveland.com:
...In 2005, Bush -- with Portman as his trade adviser -- refused to impose quotas when Chinese imports of steel pipe were flooding this country. The U.S. International Trade Commission, a quasi-judicial body, had recommended the quotas.
Bush said that it wasn't in this country's economic interests to penalize the Chinese. Users of steel pipe, among others, had wanted the steady supply to continue. The case involved steel pipe used for plumbing and fence posts, as opposed to the steel pipe that V&M makes for the oil and energy industry....
....China then kept shipping its circular welded pipe, sometimes with subsidies from the Chinese government, and American steel makers laid off workers in plants around northern Ohio. The American steel industry lost a reported $150 million in profits from 2005 to 2007....
Bush and Portman helped Chinese steelworkers keep their jobs instead of American steelworkers. How do you feel about that? Should Portman be rewarded for losing American jobs and destroying the steel industry in Ohio?
* Ohio taxpayers must be diligent to make sure that our school districts do not buy any of the revisionist books from Texas. Those new guidelines and curriculum sound beyond bizarre. Capecodtoday has just a few of the items from the Texas right-leaning education program:
...The Texas schoolbooks will now inform students that Joseph R. McCarthy was justified in the blacklisting and red baiting actions he took in the early 1950's, the dark era that commonly bears his surname and which generally is understood to have been antithetical to a democracy. Students will be taught that because, after the collapse of Russia, documents indicated there were Russian spies in America, Sen. McCarthy should be exonerated and his fascistic approach forgiven.
American history of the 1950's and 1960's will also be revised to diminish the importance of the civil rights and the anti-war movements. Martin Luther King will share space on the new pages with the Black Panthers, and the word capitalism will be replaced with the term ‘free enterprise system.'
Moving forward to even more recent history, the 5 million revised textbooks will emphasize the presidency of Ronald Reagan as the herald of a positive, conservative revolution, and in the same vein the books will canonize such figures as Jerry Falwell, the radio and TV evangelist who founded the ‘Moral Majority' crusade and who is credited with the ascension of the New Christian Right as a political force....
Trust me, there is even more scary stuff in the article. When your school district offers the public the right to view possible new textbooks for adoption, please make a point to go to those meetings, and actually READ the sections of the books that cover the areas mentioned above. The last thing we want is to have our school children poisoned with the re-written history designed by the right wingers of Texas. The students in Texas are being brainwashed with the conservative philosophy/propaganda of ill-informed, deniers of history. Stand up for our Ohio school children to learn the historical truth, not the new-fangled, revisionist history from Texas.
***With casino gambling coming to Ohio, rules are being hammered out in Columbus.
WKYC.com:
Ohio's House and Senate agree that the state's new casinos should not give away free drinks, allow smoking or let anyone under 21 inside to gamble....
....The House, which is controlled by Democrats, wants the casinos' $200 million in state license fees to go toward urban worker training programs.
The Republican-led Senate bill does not have that provision but, unlike the House measure, it would allow the casinos to extend lines of credit to patrons of no more than $500...
Which part of these competing bills sounds better to you?