Bad days for GOP in Indiana and Cuyahoga Falls

WHAT A COINCIDENCE! While Republicans in Ohio and other states are eagerly trying to rig voting laws to crush un-rampant "voter fraud", they really didn't need Charlie White, Indiana's secretary of state, to mess up the Republican brand of honesty and decency. On the other hand, he does prove that fraudulent votes are a living issue, at least at the highest levels of state government.

White, you may have heard, has just been convicted on six felonies: three for voter fraud, two for perjury and one for theft. And wouldn't you know that when he campaigned for secretary of state in 2010 he described "election integrity" as a major issue and reassured the voters thusly: "Charlie will protect and defend Indiana's Voter ID to ensure our elections are fair and protect the most basic and precious right and responsibility of our our democracy - voting."

That noble claim has since been removed from his website.

Back in Ohio, where fraud has been determined to be virtually non-existent, the GOP lawmakers are continuing their fraudulent quest to deny many voters, as Charlie White once described it, their "most basic and precious right." (Voters that the GOP has profiled as Democrats.) They are said to be hopeful of offering a revised restrictive law before...yep...the November presidential election. The Plain Dealer has quoted our own Republican secretary of state, Jon Husted, as saying he wants the current voting law - a newer version that was downright political porn - to be repealed to avoid "voter confusion".

Sorry, Jon, but nobody seems to be more confused about voting rights than the lawmakers on your side.

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The way things are going at City Hall in Cuyahoga Falls, Mayor Don Robart may yet have to concede we are living in 2012. His unyielding denial to a request by a same-sex marriage couple seeking family rates at the Natatorium is now in its next phase with the city's law director saying a rate adjustment could be possible. The mayor first declared that nothing could be done because state law prohibits it. It soon became known that it is, in fact, being exercised at other places in Ohio.

Now Robart is resorting to his look into the distant past, telling the Beacon Journal as he groped for an explanation (beyond his probable cultural bias) that rates have been in place for more than 40 years, so why change them now? If so, what other rates- utilities, taxes, etc. - haven't been changed during the same period? ? But Robart continues to resist, saying if same-sex couples are granted family rates it could lead to "massive abuse" by unmarried heterosexual couples. To borrow a term from Robert's GOP county chairman, that,of course, would "be a scandal of Biblical proportions."

To make the mayor's stance even flimsier, the couple applying for the family rate - Coty and Shane May, who were married in Washington, D.C., involves a wounded Iraqi veteran who would use the pool as part of his rehab. That, you must admit, is about as tsk-tsk as the you can get about the mayor.

Think of it: A GI who nearly lost his life in Iraq and moves about with a cane now finds his appeal resisted by a mayor who has nothing more to support his position than he simply doesn't like the idea. Cash it in, mayor. You're not holding the winning cards.