In a dramatic move, Ohio Secretary of State John Husted immediately suspended two Democrats on a county election board after they voted to allow weekend voting.

Earlier, Husted issued a directive canceling weekend voting statewide. In 2008, Ohio offered early voting on the weekends and thousands of voters cast their ballot during that time.

Husted issued an ultimatum to Dennis Lieberman and Tom Ritchie Sr., members of the Montgomery County Eleciton Board, to withdraw their resolution to maintain weekend hours or face suspension. The Dayton Daily News has more:

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Today on Facebook, Mitt Romney claims that the Obama campaign is trying to “undermine” the ability of members of the military to vote in Ohio:

President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage. The brave men and women of our military make tremendous sacrifices to protect and defend our freedoms, and we should do everything we can to protect their fundamental right to vote. I stand with the fifteen military groups that are defending the rights of military voters, and if I’m entrusted to be the commander-in-chief, I’ll work to protect the voting rights of our military, not undermine them.

This certainly sounds outrageous, but it is not true. Since 2005, Ohio has had in person early-voting in the three days prior to the election. This year, however, the Republican legislature in Ohio eliminated early voting during this period, except for members of the military. The Obama lawsuit is attempting to restore voting rights for all Ohioans, not restrict them for the military or any other group. From the Obama lawsuit, filed in federal court:

Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit to restore in-person early voting for all Ohioans during the three days prior to Election Day – a right exercised by an estimated 93,000 Ohioans in the last presidential election. Ohio election law, as currently enacted by the State of Ohio and administered by Defendant Ohio Secretary of State, arbitrarily eliminates early voting during the three days prior to Election Day for most Ohio voters, a right previously available to ...

Listening to the talk in Washington is depressing these days for those concerned about the future of our planet. Democrats join Republicans in trying to roll back environmental regulation, any discussion of climate legislation is dead and everyone wants to expand domestic fossil fuel production. But all across America in the midst of a long hot summer, ordinary citizens are telling a different story by confronting out-of-control energy extraction directly.

When she isn’t busy fighting fracking or organizing communities, Deirdre Lally teaches free health and nutrition classes in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. On Lally’s commute, she passes dozens of gas operation trucks and a number of active strip mines.

“While teaching children and seniors how to stay healthy, I look out the window of the classroom and I see nothing but strip mines surrounding the town,” Lally shared in a meeting between activists fighting mountaintop removal and fracking this past spring. “Poison is running into the streams and water tables and coal dust is in the air. How is a population to be healthy when extractive industries are taking over their towns?”

Lally was at Mountain Justice Spring Break, an annual training camp for anti-mountaintop removal activists. For the past several years, students, community members and activists have gathered together each spring to share skills and fight mountaintop removal, an extremely destructive form of strip mining that scrapes off the top of mountains to get to ...

Attorney General Eric Holder spoke to attendees at a summit of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches about the importance of voting as well as the significance of new voter ID laws, which disproportionately affect minorities. The summit was designed, in part, to help black leaders learn about the new laws -- yet Rush Limbaugh and a Fox News contributor attacked Holder's appearance as “reprehensible” and “unseemly.”

Attorney General Eric Holder delivered the keynote address at a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches.

The day also features panels on the state of voting rights, protecting a church's non-profit status, and energizing constituents and congregants to vote.

The Attorney General has announced that he will vigorously defend the Voting Rights Act of 1965, including the Section 5 provision that Southern states or those that have historically disenfranchised black voters must clear any changes to voting law or electoral systems with the Justice Department. [C-SPAN.org, 5/30/12]

McClatchy: Summit Was Planned To “Discuss The New Laws, Their Potential Impact On African-American Voters And How Churches Can Educate Parishioners.” From McClatchy:

African-American churches, historically at the forefront of the nation's civil and voting rights efforts, are grappling this election year with how to navigate through the wave of new voting-access laws approved in ...

Don't Frack Ohio

On May 24, the Ohio’s State Assembly passed Senate Bill 315—one of the worst fracking laws in the nation—by a 21-8 vote in the Senate and a 73-19 vote in the Ohio House that approves new regulations governing hydraulic fracturing in the Utica and Marcellus shale formations running under nearly half of the state. The shale gas provisions are part of a larger energy bill that also addresses Ohio’s renewable energy portfolio standard.

The bill heading to Gov. Kasich’s desk fails to reinvest in Ohio communities, adequately protect Ohioans from the toxic impacts of the fracking industry and address the growing climate crisis.

SB 315 will allow health and safety loopholes. It requires the gas industry to pay less than almost any other state in the country, exposing our communities to the worst excesses of the fracking industry. Doctors will be prevented from talking openly about the sickness they see in their patients, and the gas industry will keep profits flowing out of our communities.

The rumblings you hear when this bill is signed is not the sound of another injection well caused earthquake—it’s the rumblings of a backlash against the politicians who have been bought by the gas industry and have chosen to sacrifice Ohio in return.

Those rumblings will become an uproar next month when we take over the streets and statehouse in Columbus to tell Gov. Kasich: Don’t Frack Ohio! at a rally on Sunday, June 17.

The industry has told Ohioans to prepare for thousands of new wells. Here are some of the worst things about SB 315 that you need to know:

• Fracking companies can hide which chemicals they use in the fracking process by calling them “trade secrets.” What little they do disclose is 60 days after ...

A surprising fact: Gamblers spent more last year at commercial casinos in Indiana than they did at non-Indian casinos in all but three other states — not surprisingly, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The 11 casinos and two racinos (horse racing tracks with slots) are the Hoosier State's third-largest source of tax revenues.

Cleary, the idea that gambling is sinful has vanished in much of the heartland — Iowa has 18 casinos — and increasingly on the coasts. Or let's just say that the immorality attached to the activity and to preying on the working class, lonely elders and other vulnerable groups that flock to casinos has faded before the god of lower taxes. But that easy-come of living off gamblers seems to be vanishing as nearby states get in on the action.

Indiana has relied on attracting players from neighboring Kentucky and Ohio. Kentucky still doesn't allow casinos, but Ohio has succumbed. The Horseshoe ...

It was Teacher Appreciation Week this week. Unfortunately, someone forgot the appreciation part.

President Obama, for one, kicked off the week by proclaiming that from now on the week would also (instead?) be forever known as National Charter Schools Week.

Declaring charters to be "incubators of innovations," the president praised charter schools for having "brought new ideas to the work of educating our sons and daughters."

Apparently, no one had sent the president the memo that charter schools are hugely controversial, particularly with teachers.

What's "Innovative" About Charter Schools?

In fact, the week before the president exuded about charter schools, a new study was presented by the National Education Policy Center revealing that one "innovation" that large charter school franchises definitely can not claim is cost savings.

The study looked at the per-pupil spending of charter schools operated by major charter management organizations (CMOs) in New York City, Texas and Ohio with district schools and found that many high profile charter network schools outspend district schools of similar size, serving the same grade levels and similar student populations.

But probably teachers' biggest beef with charter schools is that they don't have to play by the same rules that public schools do, while they ...

Senate Republicans last night successfully filibustered the Buffett Rule, a minimum tax on millionaires that the GOP has falsely claimed would actually hit small business owners and “job creators.” The Buffett Rule, the GOP says, is a gimmick that doesn’t raise enough revenue to merit consideration and is simply a weapon of class warfare, not a means to bring about more equity in America’s tax structure.

A new report from Innovation Ohio and the Center for American Progress, however, shows that the Buffett Rule is far from just a gimmick. According to the report, some of America’s wealthiest zip codes — ritzy communities like Fisher Island, Florida and Wyoming’s Teton Village ...

Today was a big milestone for people who care about public health and a livable climate. Two utilities announced the planned closure of nine coal plants in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, bringing total retirements (executed and planned) since January 2010 past the 100 mark to 106.

Today was a big milestone for people who care about public health and a livable climate. Two utilities announced the planned closure of nine coal plants in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, bringing total retirements (executed and planned) since January 2010 past the 100 mark to 106.

Two plants ...

Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland.   Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries.  The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice.  US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger.  As Glen Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined.

One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia.  Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times. 

Human rights’ advocates rightly point out that solitary confinement is designed to break down people mentally.  Because of that, prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture.  The conditions and practices of isolation are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination.

Medical experts say that after 60 days in solidary peoples’ mental state begins to break down.  That means a person will start to experience panic, anxiety, confusion, ...

When the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched “Operation Dixie” in the aftermath of World War II, with the goal not just of organizing unions in the states of the old Confederacy but of ending Jim Crow discrimination, Southern segregationists moved immediately to establish deceptively named “right-to-work” laws.

These measures were designed to make it dramatically harder for workers to organize unions and for labor organizations to advocate for workers on the job site or for social change in their communities and states.

In short order, all the states that had seceded from the Union in order to maintain slavery had laws designed to prevent unions from fighting against segregation. The strategy worked. Southern states have far weaker unions than Northern states, and labor struggles have been far more bitter and violent in the South than in other parts of the country. It was in a right-to-work state, Tennessee, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting the struggle of African-American sanitation workers to organize a union and have it recognized by the ...

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that President Obama’s 2012 election strategy would feature a White House battle against an unpopular and intransigent Congress.

Today, the administration fired the first shot. Obama announced this morning his intention to use a recess appointment to nominate Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new regulatory agency that was created by the Dodd-Frank legislation but has been leaderless since the summer because of Republican obstruction in the Senate. “Today, I am appointing Richard as America’s consumer watchdog,” Obama said at a raucous event in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with Cordray at his side.

Recess appointments are common ways for presidents to install nominees the Senate won’t confirm. So common, in fact, that Republicans took pre-emptive measures and wouldn’t allow Congress to actually go on recess during this break—they held meaningless “pro forma” sessions at least every three days, where the session would be gaveled in and then gaveled out just as quickly.

But Obama went ahead and nominated Cordray anyhow. While the Justice Department under Bill Clinton said that Congress must be out of session for three days in order for a recess appointment to be valid, the White House rationale is that the entire pro-forma maneuvering is a “gimmick,” in the words of White House communications director Dan Pfieffer, and no such three-day timeframe exists.

As Ian ...

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After their decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result.
 
For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real the promise of American democracy.

That is why, on Saturday, civil rights groups and their allies will rally outside the New York headquarters of the Koch brothers to begin a march for the renewal of voting rights in America.

For the Koch brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund campaigns with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious “ READ FULL POST 24 COMMENTS

No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.

You might have missed OWS's win amid the recent wave of Occupy crackdowns. Police raided Occupy Denver, Occupy Salt Lake City, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Portland, and Occupy Seattle in a five-day span. Hundreds were arrested. And then, in the early morning hours on Tuesday, New York City police descended on Occupy Wall Street itself, fists flying and riot shields at the ready, with orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict the protesters. Later that day, a judge ruled that they couldn't rebuild their young community, dealing a blow to the Occupy protest that inspired them all.

Instead of simply condemning the eviction, many pundits and columnists