When Brennan calls, the Ohio GOP listens

LET ME BEGIN by saying that William G. Batchelder has lied to us.

If I'm wrong, let him deny it.

As the Columbus Dispatch has reported, the Republican speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives has now admitted that he has known all along who wedged in a couple of amendments to the House-passed state budget that are more than friendly to charter school titan David Brennan of Akron. Until that worse-kept secret was confirmed by Batchelder himself, the veteran Medina politician and blueblood conservative had insisted that he had no idea whose fingerprints were on the amendments. And whose fingerprints were they? No less than Batchelder himself admitted they were inserted by the Republicans at Brennan's request. As if we didn't already know!

Batchelder has never impressed me over the years as an operative who left anything to chance. That was truer than ever as he assumed the leadership of the House Republican caucus in Columbus. So if he didn't know, he wasn't doing his job. If he did know, he must have assumed the questions would vanish. Connect the dots: He was lying, and for a pol of his decades of experience, he wasn't very good at it .

The Brennan amendments, clearly bought and paid for, are preposterous: a for-profit charter schools outfit like Brennan's White Hat Management has received $230 million in taxpayer money from the state. Yet his agents insist that because public money was now in the hands of a private company, White Hat didn't have to account for how the money was spent. Make me laugh.

There's more: White Hat would keep the desks and other school equipment that you and I have paid for if the charter school fails. (Can any Republican lawmaker with an iota of honesty defend such reprehensible baseness with a straight face?) Inasmuch as the Republican House passed the entire bill and sent it to the Senate, you need not guess about the dismal ethics of the happy-go-lucky GOP lawmakers who are blithely on the dole. Keep in mind that Brennan is known as the second largest contributor (millions) to the Republicans over the years of his ascendancy as Daddy Warbucks.

Meantime, White Hat is being sued by the boards of some charter schools to air out where the public money has been secreted. However, that trial was oddly put on hold for 60 days by a Columbus judge who asked that the two sides try to work out a new contract.

Among those shocked by the court's delay was Sen. Tom Sawyer, the Akron Democrat on the Republican-dominated Ohio Senate Finance Committee. He said he was "amazed" the court would force a delay while the legislation is being considered and suggested that Brennan has turned his attention to the Senate to sustain his interests. Sawyer predicted a"recrafted substitute" would be drawn in the Senate. Still, the Republicans control that body, too, and there are fewer mouths to feed.

We are witnessing a shameless gouging of the public interest in the halls of the General Assmbly and if it ends up that way it is a sign that the GOP class down there has sold whatever soul it still has left.

The free enterprise system stretches across a wide spectrum. At the high end are a couple of kids with a lemonade stand in their front yard. At the lowest end is how Batchelder and friends are doing business these days and the public be damned.

Kasich's state of the state: Full of sound and fury, but....

GOV. KASICH'S State of the State boilerplate address was familiar to all of us who have witnessed the battle cries of chest-pounding politicians who are obligated to speak to a friendly audience. To his delight, he promptly gained traction with the top-heavy Republican legislature by defiantly promising that he would not raise taxes, an always-productive applause line. I had to go back to Calvin Coolidge to track the genetic origin of such sweet-sounding thoughts. (Silent Cal allowed that taxes were "legalized larceny".)

Having successfully established that story line, Kasich, in his usual pugnacious mode, then went on for more than an hour to tell us a lot of things that, unfortunately, we already know: the state is broken; the best and brightest are packing up their brainpower and leaving Planet

Buckeye; we're being screwed big-time by China; your grandmother is better off at home than in a nursing home.

He also slipped into his extemporaneous comments some gratuitous references to John Kennedy and endurable Democrats, so long as the other side went along with his ideas. Oh, the ideas. The few examples that he offered in leading the state in a new direction would hardly dent the huge deficit.

But for all of his avowed tolerance of new ideas, we heard none. You'd think he would have projected one smashing game changer in his long Rhodes-like narrative besides promising us that he would rise above politics in reforming the way we deal with our problems. You remember Jim Rhodes. A half-century ago he rode into power by promising jobs and no new taxes. Since then, the definition of taxes has changed and are now called "fees". But that's another story .

Well, now we must await the Kasich budget that arrives on March 15. He says it will be a

blockbuster to turn the state around. It might even prod pigs to fly. We'll see. Keep your binoculars handy.