Notes From My Knapsack 9-17-06
Jeff Gill

Get the Wideblade Shovels Out

Every election season there are certain constants.
Fall color, which is coming out on tree tops and forest edges, in soybean fields going yellow north to south, is also showing in yard signs for candidates and issues. Their red, white, and blue motifs, or focus group tested swirls of more exotic colors, clash a bit with the sweetgum leaves turning a more muted rainbow, but they are a sign of the times.
Another indicator is the BS output factor going on setting "high" from all kinds of candidates, state and local.
Writing for the papers, one is expected to avoid using the words "lie" or "lying," so any of us who try to scribble down something for print have to dance around words like prevarication, unsubstantiated, patently untrue, and so on.
Our Ohio governor’s race is pushing my good will to the absolute limit. Frankly, Ted Strickland has hardly said a word to make me want to vote for him, but he can rest easy on my account. Ken Blackwell has done a masterful job of making me want to crawl over ground glass lit on fire with kerosene to vote against him. No, I’m not holding back.
First we get the TEL amendment, which aside from any other dishonest statements made about how it will impact local government, Blackwell has made a sudden post-primary about-face and says, with Emily Litella, "Never mind."
But this utterly disingenuous education funding plan makes my blood boil, or at least causes a neck vein to throb. Aside from the demonization of administrators – and aren’t we all getting pretty tired of this one? – his plan will pass no additional dollars to the budgets of local school districts, but he’s skating on the thinnest ice of truth when he claims it will.
Like so many state funding of education tricks (see entry under "lottery dollars, no net gain from"), he proposes to give with one hand and take away with the other.
Because, you see, and trust me, Mr. Blackwell knows this quite well, the money he’s not giving to what his campaign calls administration, so he can give "more" (coff, hack, arrrgh) to the classroom, is required by both state and federal to be spent. It includes special education and special needs programs that delivers or provides education to kids we didn’t used to even try to teach. All those dollars that are spent on aides and health care support and special instructors and program support: the Blackwell plan calls "adminsitration."
There’s more like that, but you get the idea. And if we are required to offer this – which is a great thing, by the way, as opposed to warehousing the disabled and handicapped – and the state is "giving" us those dollars for the classroom (as they define it) only, where do the missing dollars come from?
Need I tell you?
So if this benighted plan were to be implemented, there would just be that much more pressure on passing local levies at higher millage. Which is their point. Make the funding process so byzantine and opaque, and on purpose (why do we have to pass 5.99 mills to get 1.7? It takes a powerpoint and thirty minutes to explain, but it’s all mandated by state law), so local voters get mad at their school boards and, here they are again in the bucket, the administrators.
And Blackwell isn’t even the worst of it. We’re treated to yet another round of skillfully misdirectional ads about "Ohio Learn and Earn," with the tagline "A lot of good will come of this." My Aunt Sadie. This is effort number 27 from the gaming industry (did you hear the words "slot machines" in their ad, at a lower sound volume and in a rush of words, otherwise carefully stated) to con us into giving them, well, OK, we’ll settle for 70% of the profits this time. But you poor saps get 30% for yer kids scholarships, so vote already!
No good will come of this, and when they trot out the line that sulky horse racing folk are really small family farmers who need our support in their tourism related business, I want to gag.
Am I making endorsements here? Sadly, there isn’t much to endorse in Ohio politics right now. But I can see what could actually be worse than the status quo, and that’s what we’re looking at this November.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he isn’t too happy about state-supported lotteries, either. Argue with him and make your points at knapsack77@gmail.com.