The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Greetings From Ohio!
UPDATE: Klanville, USA?

Posted on | February 25, 2011 | 25 Comments

MARION, Ohio
One of my 18-year-old twin sons has a girlfriend here, and he has a four-day weekend break from the Christian academy where he is currently a senior. So he spent his hard-earned money to rent a car and I was enlisted as driver to bring him here. We left Hagerstown, Md., at 8 p.m. last night, driving through rain that turned to snow as we got north of Columbus, Ohio, and arrived here at 3 a.m.

We slept in the living room of the girlfriend’s family’s home, and when I woke up at 9 a.m., I immediately set up my laptop and ordered my son to get me connected to the household WiFi system, the password of which is more complex than the encryption at the CIA. Once that was accomplished, I ordered my son to go to the nearby Bob Evans restaurant and fetch me breakfast and a copy of the Columbus Dispatch.

He took the girlfriend with him.

The snow is about six inches deep outside, and still coming down. And now the son and girlfriend have returned. The top front-page headline in the Dispatch:

Panel rejects union favoritism
In another blow to organized labor and the legacy of former Gov. Ted Strickland, the Ohio School Facilities Commission yesterday repealed policies favoring unions for school-construction projects.
The commission, now controlled by appointees of GOP Gov. John Kasich, unanimously approved a resolution stating it no longer would approve contracts in which those bidding for projects were required to designate who would do the work, how much they would be paid or other mandates.
The move reverses policies enacted under the former Democratic administration that allowed districts to require the payment of prevailing wages and the use of project labor agreements mandating the employment of union workers.
“We hope to make our scarce tax dollars go farther,” said Ohio Budget Director Timothy S. Keen, who chairs the commission. . . .

Suck it, AFL-CIO.

OK, so now you know what’s going on with me, and what’s up in Ohio. And it’s time to eat my breakfast.

UPDATE: Here’s a photo of the front page of the Dispatch:

Sorry for the poor quality of the photo, but if you’ll look at the lower right corner of the paper, you’ll see this headline:

Ohio ‘patriot’ organizations doubled, report finds

Ah, yes, it’s our good friends at the SPLC, their scaremongering propaganda turned into a local story by Dispatch staffer Randy Ludlow:

Reflecting a national trend, the number of anti-government “patriot” groups doubled in Ohio between 2009 and 2010, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The conspiracy-minded organizations, which generally view the federal government as their foremost enemy, expanded from 13 to 27 in Ohio, the report says. Nationally, their numbers grew 61 percent, to 824 groups.
“Patriot” groups, including self-styled militias, have grown amid economic frustration and “the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at minorities and the government,” the report states.
The report reflects a number of radical-right groups scattered across the state but does not estimate their number of members.
Ohio Homeland Security Executive Director Rob Glenn said the numbers belonging to such groups are limited but that state officials continually are looking for signs that extremists might move from rhetoric to violence. . . .
Glenn said the state has trained more than 350 police officers to recognize the signs of hate groups and others, including left-wing and radical environmental groups, that might be moving toward violence.
Of foremost concern is “homegrown violent extremism” that constitutes terrorism, he said. “That’s what keeps us up at night,” Glenn said.

Someone at the Dispatch needs to teach their copy desk how to write better headlines:

HEARTLAND OF HATE
Racist Reign of Terror in Bloody Buckeye State

That stuff sells newspapers, and if you’re going to publish press releases from the SPLC on your front page, you might as well go whole-hog with the sensationalism. Get your money’s worth, see?

Alternatively, you could do some actual reporting and see whether there is any justification for the SPLC’s claim of an alarming surge of extremist activity in Ohio. Except for his phone call to the OHS executive director, Ludlow’s actual “reporting” on the dreaded extremist menace was summarized in a single sentence:

The Dispatch attempted to contact the Ohio Minutemen Militia, which bills itself as a new statewide group, but received no response to an e-mail seeking comment.

Somebody phone the fucking Pulitzer Committee. We’ve got a winner!

One phone call, one e-mail, and the rest of it just repeats the SPLC press release — and this story made Page One!

Interestingingly enough, I went over to check the SPLC’s “Hate Map” to see what kind of extremist action was (allegedly) happening in Ohio and discovered that this town we’re visiting, Marion, is headquarters of the Brotherhood of Klans, which the SPLC describes as “one of the largest and most widespread Ku Klux Klan organizations in the United States.”

Great: My son’s girlfriend lives in Klanville, USA.

So far, I haven’t seen any brownshirts goose-stepping down Main Street here, but a quick search online reveals that, according to the Census Bureau, Marion County is 91% white. And the other 9% are presumably living a nightmare of fear, dreading the next midnight raid of the Klan.

Or so you might believe if all you had to go on was the SPLC and the half-assed “reporting” of the Columbus Dispatch.

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Category: Ohio

Comments

  • http://twitter.com/AmPowerBlog Donald Douglas

    Well, check this out when you’re posting on Wisconsin. Some lady screamed “I’m going to lose my chemo!” ‘Wisconsin Assembly Passes Governor Walker Budget’.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    And you gotta love that midnight ram-through on the vote. Nice to see SOMEONE in the GOP has been reading Pelosi/Reid’s book…

  • Anonymous

    They voted to balance the Wisconsin Budget by killing her. Obviously some sort of Northwoods Pagan Sacrifice. Typical Wisconsin legislative process I assume, only this year they didn’t sacrifice taxpayers on the progressive alter.
    I’ve no doubt voting to kill that woman will be reported as News by the usual nitwits. Great links, thank you.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Gillen/1366479171 Dan Gillen

    ah our buddies at the SPLC finding those wily racists under almost ever tree and shrub in this country. of course if pressed for time they could just look in the closest mirror.

  • whitehorserides

    Whatever Stacy says!

  • TearDownTheWalls

    Let me get this straight, Stacy. When the Columbus Dispatch runs a banner headline over a story that reads like a Kasich press release, it’s great reporting (or at least not worthy of any of your insightful journalistic criticism). But when the same paper on the same front page runs an article which quotes from the despised SPLC release, it’s an example of “half-assed” reporting.

    Someone once said that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds and we certainly can’t accuse you of that! What a piece of work . . .

  • http://ak4mc.us/2c/2011/ McGehee

    But when the same paper on the same front page runs an article which quotes from the despised SPLC release, it’s an example of “half-assed” reporting.

    You obviously want to defend SPLC (for no other reason than it’s being attacked here, by Stacy McCain, but that’s surely enough for you, right?) but lack a basis for arguing on their behalf — and having seen Stacy’s previous discussions about SPLC you know you’ll be flayed alive if you try.

  • Anonymous

    The story that you say “reads like a Kasich press release” actually managed to quote members of the Schools Commission, including a Democrat state senator. It appears that the reporter actually left the newspaper office and attended the commission meeting — what a shocking concept!

    By contrast, it appears that Ludlow merely (a) received the SPLC report, (b) called the OHS official, (c) sent an e-mail to one “militia” group listed in the SPLC report, and (d) filed a story that gave no inkling of whether the alleged extremist surge has resulted in any actual criminal activity.

    Given the gravity of the SPLC’s claim — that the number of anti-government extremist groups doubled in 2010 — one might expect that there would be some corroborating evidence of this alarming increase in the Violent Hate Menace. Go read Ludlow’s article again, and you will find not a single mention of any criminal activity, not even a reference to the FBI’s own hate-crimes report.

    So whereas with the Schools Commission story, we find a reporter doing what reporters usually do — attending meetings of government agencies and reporting their actions — with the Ludlow story, we find an utterly unskeptical reporter providing fluffy public relations for a leftist organization which (as anyone with a Nexis account can easily learn) has been repeatedly exposed as perpetrating a Hype-the-Hate fundraising scam.

  • TearDownTheWalls

    Actually, McG, Stacy’s frothing anti-union animus is what pushed my button on this one. I was struck by his simultaneous fawning over one article while whining about another on the same page, especially since both sorta read like press release journalism (something I’m just sure Stacy never did).

    So, no, I wasn’t particularly motivated to defend the SPLC. However, I’d be as likely to believe anything Stacy wrote about that group as I would one of Gadhafi’s rants about the sources of his woes.

  • Anonymous

    What is really scary is that Homeland Security considers them a reliable source. The document that caused so much outrage a couple years ago which was written/composed by a staffer hired under Bush slandered returning vets to people with Ron Paul bumper stickers. The part of that story that I found so alarming was the total reliance on the Internet as a basis for the report. This was supposed to be a report outlining actual domestic threats for the purpose of protecting the public and was scrutinized by the writer’s superiors.

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    Columbus is my hometown! These days it amazes me how left they are, because I always grew up with right-leaning politics, and therefore my perception of Ohio was apparently a little different than reality. Of course, it is a college town…..

  • TearDownTheWalls

    Sigh.

    Maybe my point-by-point reply to your post was too long and the auto-Wombat took it down. I’m not going to try to do it again (I’m sure that breaks your heart), so I’ll just urge your readers to actually read the Ludlow SPLC article. He did cite the report on various “racist” or “hate” groups such American National Socialist Party, Aryan Nation, white-power Skinheads, several Klan chapters and black-separatist Nation of Islam groups. But the reporter turned to an Ohio Homeland Security official for confirmation and it was that individual who raised the specter of violence, saying that it kept him up at night.

    How’s that not news-worthy?

  • Anonymous

    Not just better than they are, better AT IT than they are.

  • Anonymous

    Homeland security official.

  • Quartermaster

    SPLC would be newsworthy if they ever admitted that most of what they report are lies told in service to the moonbats. My observation of “Homeland Security” types is they are mostly drones. Few are employable anywhere else. To hear that one is having trouble sleeping is not surprising. He’s probably checking under his bed to make sure Osama isn’t hiding there.

    I lived in Ohio for 13 years (ended on 2 Jan 2005) and was unimpressed by most of the people running Ohio Government. The stereotypical stories about southern politics were true about Ohio. Ohio was also the Klans last remaining stronghold when I moved there in July of 1992. The state has long been politically corrupt, suffering under RINOs and Demonrats for 150 years.In the last 20 years the electorate is slowly waking up realizing just how stupid they have been.

    Strickland was a reaction against Taft’s corruption and a wake up call to the Ohio GOP establishment. They didn’t like Kasich, but he couldn’t do much in the state as long as he was in Congress. Blackwell, on the other hand, was loathed by the GOP establishment in Ohio. They were glad to hold him back while they got RINO Taft elected, and then served him up as a burnt sacrifice after Taft had the state hating Republicans.

    I held County Office as a Republican and got a lesson in how the Ohio GOP establishment works, and I hated it. I learned why we ended up with Dubya, and then McCain. As a result of the attitudes I learned about, along with many others, the TEA Party was born.

  • Quartermaster

    The Unions have well earned all the animus they are the target of. Sorry if that bothers you, but that’s how it is.

    You need to learn Pournelle’s Iron law of Bureaucracy. The Unions haven’t just followed it. They have exemplified it. Unions exist to support thugs like Trumpka and McEntee in the style to which they have become accustomed. Those morons are paid as much as industry executives are paid, for doing almost nothing other than pushing socialism.

    Unions are a danger to the American way of life. They are of far more immediate danger than radical Muslims. With Madison, they have jumped the Shark. They will be toast. I hope it’s well burnt on both sides too.

  • Quartermaster

    Elect me Ruler of the world, and SPLC will have to pay back taxes all the way back to when they were started. Smear artists are all they are.

  • Trivialrecall

    Having lived in Ohio since 1984, I can vouch for the general unreliability of the Dispatched. I can also say this is true of almost every newspaper in this state. Sarcasm follows…That article should have read that Marion is only safe to live in if you are white. Marion is a nice town really, I liked it a great deal when I visited a few years ago.

    As for the GOP in this state: They leave a lot to be desired. Ken Blackwell was treated extremely poorly by many of the RINO members in this state, mostly because he beat their chosen candidate Jim Petro. They also wanted to scapegoat him because they knew the left HATED him, and they felt they could gain some points with the RINO squishies.

  • Anonymous

    If elected ruler of the world you’d make them pay back taxes?

  • The Wondering Jew

    The fact that the dishonorable, slandering thieves at the SPLC are taken seriously by the lamestream media is one of the most obvious indications of the lamestream’s media’s worthlessness.

  • Anonymous

    Perhaps this explains where she got the preposterous notion that she
    would loose her chemo. Demonrat senators are liars.
    http://badgerblogger.com/?p=19242

  • Ejenkins

    The Dispatch actually used to be a good newspaper. That turned when the Wolf family gave up control. It has sunk to hack reporting supported by scads of AP stories. The only quality item in the paper is the photography which can be first rate.

    I grew up in Ohio (between Marion and Columbus) and the feeling here is more cocern about radical left groups and mosques coming in. The liberal bent in Ohio became more prevelant when the colleges and universities (there are tons) actively sought, got permission and then motivated (with mandatory attendance) students voting. Now students vote in large numbers and not just on national issues and candidates, but local and state issues and candidates. The vote liberal and Democrat and then they go home (usually Jersey, NY, CT, PA and other east coast locals) to mummy and daddy leaving us with their ignorant and childish votes. I live in a small village where the student voting population is the same as the number of village residents that can vote.

    As a conservative I can state without hesitation that the media (such as the Dispatch, Enquirer and the Plain Dealer), Democrats and Republicans (such as Bob Taft) combined with the unions up north and the students have altered Ohio to the bad.

    But I still love Ohio.

  • Taxpayer

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  • Stephen Morgan

    I’m not racist.. I just hate democrats who happen to be black. and I’m from Indiana…

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