ProgressOhio

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night

The surreal passage of the budget bill 97-0 in the House today with no rancor and no amendments was eclipsed by dozens of marching pink-shirted stripper momstudents.  The women were personally lobbying against SB 16, the so-called Anti-stripper Bill which has already passed the Senate (24-8) and may be ridiculously headed for the fall ballot in Ohio. The uncomfortable married guy-officials blushed all over the marble floors. 

The whole color-co-ordinated action was lovingly recorded by leering largely male electronic media and the "Dancers for Democracy" were able to broadcast their message of sanity for the General Assembly over the public airwaves.  You can't buy p.r. like that.  Sincere thanks to the women organizing this resistance to creeping fascism in Ohio.

Budget, Shmudget

Come on Democrats, get it together.  Is there nothing in $53 billion worth of spending you could improve upon?  The GOP in the House had 800 amendments to Strickland's budget plan and the Democrats had none.  Instead, the giddy Dems are falling over each other to unquestionally back the new Governor and wallow in bipartisan self-congratulations.

Just because Strickland's clever budget proposal has stumped the Republicans is no reason for the Democrats in the legislature to suspend representation. Some instant term-limited newbees are forgetting to do their job.  It is not disloyal to Strickland to fight for what you believe in. The House deal-making sickens, again. No guts.

My Lunch With David McCullough

Everyman always comes to the Statehouse eventually, and today Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian David McCullough was the guest speaker at a lunch in the Atrium.  Afterwards, he signed his works under the inside shadows of the limestone pillars --- Truman, John Adams, and 1776 among them --- and chatted with history lovers and book readers.

"I have a bionic arm!" the white-haired McCullough boasted as he speed signed a couple hundred of his works, each on the title page, of course. McCullough also expanded on his answer to one audience question, "What is the most important forgotten story in American history?" McCullough aswered correctly: Why, it's the story of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 --- no slavery North of the Ohio River, public education for everyone, and an informed democracy --- and this, 2 whole years before the US Constitution! How quick we forget.

I asked McCullough if he had read Washington Irving's Life of Washington? (For his classic biography, Irving interviewed surviving revolutionaries who knew Washington) Some of it, he says. I asked about Gore Vidal's final memoir, Point to Point Navigation --- A Memoir , in which Vidal fears that his book reading generation is gone forever and that books will now fade as a popular art form. "Well, I don't agree with that!" McCullough spat. More later.