Guv Kay-suck's Konservative Komedy Kavalcade

Updates from The Heart of it All . . .

Ohio Board of Education Replaces Educators With Public Library

Terhar

Debe Terhar is back in the news.  (Type her name in the Buster's Blog search window for a trip down memory lane.)  She's president of the Ohio Board of Education.  She's a Kasich acolyte, an anti-tax Tea Bagger, a charter school champion, and a gun nut who almost lost her job after her Facebook post comparing Obama to Hitler.  She's leaving her position soon (Yay!) but yesterday she and the other R's on the state board gave us a parting shot. They voted to eliminate the requirement that Ohio public schools have a certain number of elementary art, music, and phys ed teachers, as well as counselors, nurses and librarians.  It's not about cutting those subjects or those position, they swore.  Oh no.  It's about giving "staffing flexibility" to school districts.  One nitwit on the state board said, with a straight face, the new rules will encourage schools to get "creative" in how they provide student services, and suggested they could use a nearby public library or public health facility.

Two For the Price of Two (Replacing One) at the Ohio Dept.of Health

Hodges

DiOrio

Recently, our Wonder Guv appointed Richard Hodges as our new director of the Ohio Dept. of Health.  He's a former Republican state rep, lobbyist and "event planner" who's supremely unqualified for such a position.  Never before has the head of the ODH been a non-doctor.  This is in keeping with Kasich's appointments of anti-abortion zealots to the State Medical Board, a global warming denier as PUCO chief, and an AEP lobbyist as head of the ODNR.  After public outcry about the Hodges pick, yesterday Kasich made a course correction and appointed a real doctor, Dr. Mary DiOrio, to fill the newly-created position of ODH "Medical Director."  She'll be Hodges "backstop" and "will oversee medical issues."  In other words, Dr. Mary will be the real director of the ODH while loyal Republican droogie Hodges will be paid for being a loyal droogie, and together Hodges and DiOria will be paid twice the money of the previous ODH director.  I thought Republicans were supposed to be such responsible fiscal conservatives.  

Barbarians at the Gate of Obamacare

Amstutz

Even John Kasich is sharp enough to realize that the MedicAid eligibility expansion available to all states via Obamacare is a no-brainer good thing.  He's for it, and he's continuing it in his next budget (although I'm not sure why you need to budget for something that's 100% federally funded by the ACA.)  But State Rep. Ron Amstutz (R-Wooster) calls it the"Unaffordable Care Act" (so clever, Ron) and he wants to slash Ohio's MedicAid Rolls, not expand them.  He believes that our additional MedicAid recipients are just a bunch of slackers and moochers gaming the system and getting fat at the public's expense.  A lot of the people on MedicAid, says Amstutz, "are barbarians who don't know how to get up in the morning."  Shame on you, Ron.  Did they teach that kind of stupid shit in the Wooster schools, or did you pick it up all by yourself?