YESTERDAY WE DISCUSSED THE COMING PENNSYLVANIA BLOW OUT. NOW... WHAT ABOUT OHIO?

Don't feel sorry for the Ohio GOP. They've earned everything the voters are getting ready to dish out to them-- and then some. Both the latest Quinnipiac Poll and the CBS/NY Times poll show a gigantically energized Democratic base in Ohio, a largely dispirited Republican base and Democrats up and down the ticket beating the stuffing out of discredited and dazed Republicans. It's a hard pill for the GOP to swallow, having ruled the Ohio, virtually unchallenged, as a one-party state for... long enough for the systemic and endemic corruption to have thoroughly rotted the state's democratic (small "d") traditions.

That appears to be about to come to a screeching halt. The widely reviled Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, the Katherine Harris of the 2004 presidential election, can't seem to poll into the 30's in his hapless bid to replace outgoing GOP crime boss Bob Taft. Incumbent Repug Senator Mike DeWine is looking at a prohibitive 14 point gap between himself and progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown. And Sherrod's got all the momentum. Once safe Republican House seats are up in the air and it looks like the Democrats will at least take Bob Ney's former seat plus seats currently held by right-wing extremists Mean Jean Schmidt and Deborah Pryce, and with danger lights flashing wildly for Steven Chabot.

And in the midst of all this, one of the GOP mainstays of both party identity and criminal identification, Tom Noe, just started his trial. This is the big trial, a judge already having sentenced him to 2 years and change for lesser, unrelated offenses. This is the trial, which began today, that will remind Ohioans for the next several weeks that it was collusion by the entire Republican Party hierarchy, from the disgraced, retiring to Taft to current candidates like Montgomery and Blackwell who set up system of corruption of such magnitude to have never been seen anywhere in the United States-- and to have robbed Ohio citizens of as much as a billion dollars a year.


Noe may be the poster boy; the Ohio Republican Party, as an institution, of which he was a major power, is far more guilty. A major fundraiser for the entire panoply of crooked Republican politicians from Taft, Blackwell, Petro, Voinovich, DeWine, Boehner, Pryce, Montgomery right up-- or down, depending on your perspective-- to Bush and Cheney, Noe was at the apex of GOP power in Ohio until he was caught red-handed with his fat fingers in the cookie jar, in this case the State Workmen's Compensation Fund. "He is charged with corrupt activity, theft, money laundering and forgery. If convicted, he could get up to 10 years in prison on the corrupt activity charge alone." His defense is basically that he wasn't stealing because the GOP-government gave him permission to do whatever he wanted. It promises to be a great trial which is expected to drag on past November 7... making headlines all along the way.


WEDNESDAY UPDATE: A FLIER