Updated your bookmarks, read it daily, and get prepared to link it on your blogs consistently. There are not enough Pulitzers out there for this paper's post-2004 election coverage. That paper is the Toledo Blade, and their work extends far far far beyond the Coingate coverage they have dominated for the past several months.
Take today's paper for example:
Here's
the first reason you will want this site bookmarked for constant reference.
They were executives, lobbyists, evangelical Christians, political veterans and rookies, and a rare-coin dealer from Maumee. They bankrolled a president.
Thirty Ohioans collected at least $4.1 million for George W. Bush's re-election campaign last year - exceeding Sen. John Kerry's entire take from the state. They raised $2.4 million more for the Republcan National Committee.
They are Ohio's "Pioneers" and "Rangers," President Bush's most prolific fund-raisers. Most Ohio voters have never heard of them, but the White House knows them well.
They have sat on crucial policy committees and won choice appointments. In the last five years, their firms have conducted more than a billion dollars of business with the state and the federal government.
One was Tom Noe.
Prepare to meet the rest.
The Blade assembled a team of six reporters to investigate how the Bush-Cheney campaign raised millions to win the Buckeye State.
Using raw data, the reporters assembled portraits of each of the top fund-raisers' poltical donations. They also built a database of checks cut by the state over the last five years and mined federal databases to track the state and federal dollars paid to the firms of Ohio's Pioneers and Rangers.
Over the next four days, The Blade will introduce you to the 29 men and women who engineered a fund-raising landslide for Mr. Bush in Ohio and helped deliver him a narrow victory in the state. The series will show:
And this isn't some partisan witch-hunt either. One of the angles they are prepared to cover is what Kerry's large donors stood to gain should the results have been reversed in 2004. You want to talk pay-to-play? Culture of corruption? The Blade is doing the research and writing the manuscript for all Americans concerned with the taint money places on the political process. From a SEPERATE article in today's paper:
The Ohio business leaders and lobbyists who steered at least $4.1 million to President Bush's re-election campaign last year collected more than $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for their companies and clients, a Blade investigation shows.
The fund-raisers who helped deliver the battleground state - and ultimately the 2004 presidential election - also received choice appointments from state and federal officials. The posts included an ambassadorship to Germany and a seat on the Ohio State University board of trustees.
Others made millions from unbid contracts varying from supplying ball bearings to the military or office furniture for federal agencies.
This is like a whole alltogether different "Fitzmas" in Ohio. But it's more like Hanukkah, because we can expect gifts for several days in a row.
And in case you needed some icing for this cake; the one newspaper in Ohio that understands better than any other the culture of corruption permeating Columbus, the Toledo Blade, endorsed three of the four Reform Ohio Now amendments today--including the most important of the lot, State Issue Four (redistricting):
Ohioans who are embarrassed by the national attention paid as recently as last year to our clumsy, inefficient, and occasionally unethical elections - and that should be all Ohioans - should be encouraged by a grass-roots initiative that would make the necessary repairs.
While we have already expressed our concerns about State Issue 2 and the problems we see with unlimited absentee voting, we have no such reluctance to support the other three proposals in a constitutional reform package advanced by a citizens group called Reform Ohio Now.
Voters should embrace State Issues 3, 4, and 5 because they represent a great opportunity to fix what ails Ohio's overtly political elections system. They will do that by putting in place reasonable campaign contribution limits, creating a bipartisan commission to establish the boundaries of congressional and legislative districts, and removing oversight of elections from the Secretary of State.
This is by far and away the most coveted newspaper endorsement in Ohio. And the paper itself is quickly becoming one of the best in the country.
Update [2005-10-30 16:38:8 by ttagaris]: More Ohio for you, and especially good news for supporters of Howard Dean's presidential campaign from way back in 2003. In OH-15, Franklin County Commissioner Mary Joe Kilroy (the first elected official in Ohio to endorse Howard Dean, to the best of my knowledge) has decided to run against Deborah Pryce. This district was 50/50 in the presidential election, and will be Pryce's most difficult election in some time.
In OH-3, Dean for Ohio Communications Director Dr. Stephanie Studabaker will run against 2-term incumbent Mike Turner. Before Turner was elected, the seat was held for a LONG time by Democrat Tony Hall. The third is one of those gerrymandered seats, but includes a large portion of the highly-Democratic Dayton, Ohio.