Last week The Columbus Dispatch reported on what has been a recurring theme all year: Ohio conservatives are evil extremists!

Richard Gunther today called the new congressional map signed into law last week by Gov. John Kasich “stunning” for its representational unfairness, saying it is twice as unfair as the next-worst democratic systems in the world.

“This is a very, very bad map,” said Gunther, a scholar of world democracies. “This is extremely unfair to the citizens of Ohio.”

Emphasis mine. Humorous background: in 2009 Secretary of State Husted, then a member of the state senate, proposed a plan to replace Ohio’s partisan redistricting process… and Democrats killed it.

The Dispatch story doesn’t provide this context, nor does it mention that world democracies scholar Richard Gunther is a registered Democrat who has given $950 to Democrat candidates and causes since 2005.

Based on Gunther’s unbiased calculations, the elected Republicans who drew districts according to the standards of the Ohio Constitution are turning us into Russia!

Even the Duma, the lower house of parliament in Russia – a questionable democracy – earns a score of 7 against Ohio’s 24 on the scale. [Higher numbers are worse]

Gunther said any fair congressional district map should include three principles: competitiveness, compactness and keeping intact communities of interest.

“This map brutally violates all three of those principles,” Gunther said.

Gunther is clearly exercised that Republicans haven’t drawn a map beneficial to Democrats. Let’s hear a competing opinion:

Referring to Ohio’s new congressional districts, Tokaji said, “This is the worst example of elected officials serving their own craven partisan interests of anywhere in the country.”

The Dispatch fails to note that election law professor Daniel Tokaji is a registered Democrat who has contributed $350 to Democrats since 2005. Leftist college faculty hate it when Republicans win elections? Stop the presses! Here’s a snapshot of the new map:

No, wait – that’s Chicago, the most democratic place on earth! Compare this to Ohio’s new map and see which looks more Russian (consider also Maryland districts 2, 3, and 4).

Like much of the Midwest, Ohio’s electoral landscape is dotted with several big, blue cities surrounded by red-voting yokels. Whether you want the Democrat voters split into as few or as many districts as possible depends on whether you’re hawking unicorn rides.

What do Gunther and Tokaji recommend? A citizens’ commission for drawing legislative districts, like the one recently gamed by Democrats in California:

The citizens’ commission had pledged to create districts based on testimony from the communities themselves, not from parties or statewide political players. To get around that, Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party’s interests.

Neither party likes to lose, and both complain as loudly as practicable when at a disadvantage. Crying about cheating is a glass house proposition for the average Democrat, but look for the Ohio Democratic Party to add this to their 2012 violin concerto just the same!

Despite passage of Senate Bill 5, which requires all teachers to kick the shins of no less than three (3) Democrats daily or be subject to a firing squad, Ohio conservatives should remember where much of the state GOP stands. Being more fiscally responsible than the Democrat alternative is hardly an achievement; we need to do a better job of weeding out Democrat-lite candidates during the primaries.

When the House proposed stronger voter identification rules this spring, Speaker Batchelder et al. took fire from the usual quarters, with the race card played early and often. Secretary of State Jon Husted (R, by Ohio standards) opposed the bill’s photo ID requirement, based on the assumption that it’d take more than a friend’s utility bill and 5 minutes at your computer to forge an AEP statement.

The gentle, moderate legislation passed last week by the Ohio Senate enjoyed effusive praise from Cleveland Democrat Shirley Smith:

“This bill in its current form is oppressive. It is racist. It is discriminatory,” Smith said.

Of course, the House requirement for photo ID was coupled with the guarantee of free cards for indigent Ohioans, but the Senate’s even-less-demanding legislation is still racist. Any bill that requires any likely Democrat voter to put forth even the tiniest effort is “racist,” as far as totally non-racist Democrat senators like Shirley Smith are concerned… yet these are the colleagues Ohio GOP senators feel compelled to please.

As soon as the House budget arrived in the Senate, the Senate began adding water to the original bill’s cuts and reforms. Senators decided the transparently wasteful policy of multiple-prime contracting should be tweaked instead of eliminated. First steps to a merit pay system for public employees are apparently something GOP senators will oppose with the public unions:

What’s more, rigorous performance evaluations in these states are not just in place to help determine which teachers to let go. They also will help identify and reward highly effective teachers and tailor professional development in ways that help improve instruction. Ohio should do the same, and the teacher-evaluation language presented to the Senate achieved just that.

Unfortunately, the Senate has dropped these provisions from its version of the budget, preferring instead to maintain Ohio’s status as a laggard state with archaic laws that force districts to consider only seniority when making layoff decisions.

The budget fight leads to the same question as Senate Bill 5: are voters serious about getting government out of our way? Forget the hitch – the Ohio Democratic Party’s entire wagon is class warfare, leaving the GOP to make a case for smaller, cheaper state government. Though every budget is a biennial tug-of-war, a union victory this November would mean Ohio politicians dare not challenge the unions’ costly influence again.

Voters ought to have a clear choice come referendum time – bow to leftist demands for higher taxes, or support reforms that empower the taxpayer for a change. Mercifully, enough Republican state senators voted for SB 5 to give us the second option!

Cross-posted at Third Base Politics and Columbus Tea Party.

Good news: with a week to go until what really ought to be a Republican landslide, I believe I’ve got this election-year bout of partisan hackery out of my system. Back to writing boring things about politics and boring things about other topics at a roughly 1:1 ratio!

To recap, nobody should vote for Maryellen O’Shaughnessy. Unless you’re a public union member, in which case go for it; after all, your dues are paying for her campaign! If possible, even fewer than zero people should vote for Mary Jo Kilroy, a socialist who has no business telling businesses what to do. OH-15 and America in general are better off without her, however much the leeches at the AFSCME might disagree. Noticing a pattern here?

Outside of Ohio, one of my satirical Bob Etheridge (D-NC) ads was picked up by his opponent Renee Ellmers’s attack site, which is just dandy as far as I’m concerned. Ellmers – like John Kasich, Steve Stivers, and most of Ohio’s GOP ticket – seems like an incredibly easy choice given the alternative.

As President Obama would say, let me be clear: I am not a party guy. I worked a couple of trivial events for Congressman Boehner during high school, volunteered when Dubya visited Troy in 2004, and put in a few hours at Ken Blackwell’s headquarters in 2006. But, despite all my transparently racist fear-mongering, I have little love for the Ohio GOP. Bob Taft? Mike DeWine? George Voinovich? These are hardly the sort of steely conservatives we can count on to do what’s politically difficult and economically necessary, and the state party has no shortage of their kind.

If being the grandson of a county commissioner is good for anything, it’s b.s. detection. From a young age I got to see that some of the movers & shakers in my own party are miserable human beings, and that most of the folks in the other party are not. As final reminders to vote, you should read this piece by Frank at IMAO and check out this video!

In my last post about Franklin County Clerk of Courts Maryellen O’Shaughnessy, the Democrats’ candidate for Ohio Secretary of State, I touched briefly on an important question: What kind of raises were low-level Clerk’s office staffers receiving while O’Shaughnessy was cranking her Chief Deputy’s salary up to $105,000? You may want to get caught up if you’re going to be voting in Ohio this November.

I mentioned how strange it was for a candidate endorsed by boatloads of unions to devote such a huge portion of her salary budget to a single administrator. “Strange” was, of course, sarcasm: it’s not uncommon for Democrats to talk in heated tones about the avarice of private employers and the wonder of workers’ unions while ignoring their own low-level employees. Think of the hypocrisy you get when a socially conservative Republican is caught in an affair, except with taxpayers as the saps getting screwed.

O’Shaughnessy’s campaign site lists sixty-nine endorsements as of earlier this evening (PDF screen cap; Excel spreadsheet). Thirty-five of those endorsements are from union groups. Of the 50% of O’Shaughnessy’s endorsements not from union groups, one is from the far-left Secretary of State Project, a PAC that hearts ACORN and Secretary of State Brunner and hates anything in the same neighborhood as responsible voter identification. Keep the union endorsements in mind while we take another look at salary data from the Franklin County Auditor (2007-2010 spreadsheet; March – June 2010 spreadsheet).

Clerk of Courts staff compensation, March 26, 2008 to March 17, 2009:

Clerk of Courts staff compensation, March 17, 2009 to March 16, 2010:

* Update, 07/21/10: Mary Austin-Palmer was hired 04/20/09 at $40.87 an hour, which means her first raise was $5 / hour, or 12.2%

March 17, 2009 to March 16, 2010, the first 1-year period when O’Shaughnessy was Clerk from beginning to end, was marked by a smaller increase in the average salaries of low-level employees and a sharp increase in the Chief Deputy’s salary. This doesn’t even account for the enormous additional 10.9% raise Chief Deputy Mary Austin-Palmer received at some point between 03/16/2010 and 06/09/2010, or the $140,000 in new Admin positions created since O’Shaughnessy took office.

The Franklin County Clerk of Courts , one of the largest County government offices, is not currently unionized. Based on a simple search (view Excel source) at the Ohio Secretary of State’s website, “O’Shaughnessy for Ohio” has received more than $87,000 from various arms of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and their parent, the AFL-CIO, since January 1. Why such generosity from the unions to a candidate who, in her capacity as a public official, follows plainly inequitable compensation practices? Refer to the first sentence of this paragraph.

Politicians like Maryellen O’Shaughnessy are deeply concerned about the working class when the working class is represented by a union with a deep campaign fund. It’s a great racket, when you think about it: unions indoctrinate the uninformed among their members in the importance of voting Democrat, while steering members’ dues to Democrats who make it easier for unions to slip their feet in more doors. Democrats get to pose as heroes of the little guy, happily running hand-in-hand with unions as budgets tumble over a cliff… and private investors get the blame when everything hits the ground.

Unions – especially public unions – add an extra layer of bureaucracy that hampers productive activity, while siphoning their constituents of dues that mostly benefit union bosses and politicians. Maryellen O’Shaughnessy’s union associations and flagrant disinterest in the workers they claim to represent are two additional reasons to oppose any attempt she makes to move up Ohio’s political ladder.

[Update: Increased precision of percent changes so they're all as accurate as the Chief Deputy figures; tweaked clunky phrasing of the opening sentence after the tables-o-numbers.]

Back in April, I submitted a public records request to the Franklin County Auditor and looked at recent raises given to County administrators. Most of what I saw was only remarkable in that it revealed bureaucratic restraint during a recession. But, as a past employee of the Clerk of Courts, I was disappointed to find that Clerk O’Shaughnessy had made some transparently bad decisions: hiring additional staff in her Administration office while giving hefty raises to the Chief Deputy.

Now that two months have passed, I thought I’d follow up with the Auditor for any recent Clerk of Courts staffing changes. Check out the Excel file from the Auditor, if you’d like. Even given what I saw in April (view Excel source), I was a little disgusted.

The “Dealer Services Liaison” is a second new Admin position created since Maryellen O’Shaughnessy took office roughly 18 months ago. Combined with the “Director of Business Operations” role added earlier this year, that’s $140,000 annually in new administrative salaries. During the same period, the salary of the Clerk’s top administrator has skyrocketed: it’s 20.63% higher than it was last March.

The current Chief Deputy has worked for the Clerk since April 20, 2009. What’s the biggest pay increase you’ve ever received after one year at a job? When was the last time you got a ten percent raise? This, in an industry where there is no competition… unless you count the more than 100 front counter, file room, and data-entry clerks paid less than $30,000 a year whose raises (or lack of raises) come out of the same pot. Strange behavior for a Secretary of State candidate endorsed by every union in the book.

From late 2005 to late 2007, I was an employee in the Clerk’s IT department. I got along with nearly everyone (as far as I know). I have no desire to drag the office through the mud, but one of the awful things about creeping bureaucracy is that it’s tough for outsiders to know what elected officials and the big-shots who follow them around actually do. How can you criticize administrator salaries when you don’t know who’s pulling the weight in an agency?

I know who’s pulling the weight at the Clerk of Courts, and it’s not the Clerk. This is generally acceptable, with an understanding that the Chief Deputy oversees day-to-day operations and coordinates inter-agency projects. Really, elected officials need only achieve a few things: hire competent administrators, make a handful of important decisions, and speak clearly to the public about what they’re up to. If an elected official bumps an unelected administrator to a six-figure salary while creating new positions which insulate said administrator from anything resembling $100,000 worth of work, the elected official has failed.

This November I’ll almost certainly be voting for Maryellen O’Shaughnessy’s Republican opponent, Jon Husted, for Secretary of State. This would have been the case even if I hadn’t seen the irresponsible way Clerk O’Shaughnessy rewards her administrative staff. But, having never met O’Shaughnessy, the data from the Auditor tell us two things:

1. Clerk O’Shaughnessy doesn’t hold taxpayers in very high esteem.
2. Clerk O’Shaughnessy is not especially conscientious.

I can only assume O’Shaughnessy thought nobody would notice. So much for that.

[Update: It gets worse.]

Friday, April 9^th is Tax Freedom Day, when the average American has earned enough to pay Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam’s various relatives what they demand. Ohio is somehow a day ahead of the average, so in honor of the big day tomorrow I thought I’d dig through some salary info for public administrators here in Franklin County. As boring as I am, I ought to make an effort to avoid any talk of numbers or statistics. As stubborn as I am, I won’t!

With employment and the economy in general down for the past year and a half, I wanted to see how the smallest of government big-shots were rewarding themselves relative to 2007 and 2008. Despite widespread populist railing against private industry salaries and bonuses, I expected to see pay increases for the insulated local bureaucrats our tax dollars keep employed. Given some of the things I’ve read recently, I was pleasantly surprised by the data.

A helpful CPA in the Franklin County Auditor’s office responded to my public records request promptly, with salary data on all Franklin County employees from 2007-2010. Download the Excel file if you’d like to check my numbers or do some analysis of your own. I’ll list hourly rates instead of annual salaries, as 2009 contained 27 pay periods instead of the usual 26. Let’s start with the highest branch on the Franklin County tree, shall we?

Commissioner’s Office

Commendably, the two highest-paid administrators in the Commissioner’s office received no pay raises this year. That makes 2008′s 6% increases in their six-figure salaries a little easier to swallow.

Department of Job and Family Services

Job and Family Services (which you’ll notice is under the Commissioner’s office on the county org chart) is more complicated because of new hires, departures, and title changes. I should also note that David Migliore, who was Chief Deputy in the Clerk of Courts office while I was employed there from 2005-2007, is hardly my favorite person. I spent my last 6 months – as a Programmer Analyst 1 doing Programmer Analyst 2 work – waiting to hear back about a pay raise request that Migliore ignored literally until the day I resigned.

⁽¹⁾ – Drop in Director’s pay from 2008-2009 reflects a change from Douglas E. Lumpkin to David E. Migliore. I don’t know who decided Migliore should be making around $130,000, but it’s nice that he started at a lower salary than the outgoing Director and didn’t get a raise in 2010.

⁽²⁾ – In 2008 the Department of Job & Family Services added a new Assistant Director, Anthony S. Trotman. The 2009 data list Trotman as a second Director, salaried at $62.37 – equivalent to a 27.86% raise. Trotman isn’t listed at all for 2010, but the additional Assistant Director position remains.

As I said, this is more complicated than the Commissioner’s Office, where the two highest-paid employees were the same guys with the same titles from 2007-2010. I won’t pretend to understand why a second Assistant Director was added to the Department of Job and Family Services in 2008, but I’ll assume Trotman served as some sort of Interim Director in 2009.

Clerk of Courts

⁽³⁾ – In 2008, Maryellen O’Shaughnessy was elected Clerk of Courts. When David Migliore departed for the Department of Job and Family Services, O’Shaughnessy brought in Mary Austin Palmer – and immediately gave her a huge raise in a poor economy. Either Mary Austin Palmer is some kind of management wiz, or Maryellen O’Shaughnessy doesn’t think much of the taxpayers’ money. See (4).

⁽⁴⁾ – Yes, I skipped down the list of Clerk’s office employees; this observation is too ridiculous to exclude. In 2007, before he departed for Columbus City Council, Hearcel Craig was paid $25.49 an hour as the Clerk’s Director of Customer Service. The position remained unfilled (to no ill effect, so far as I could tell) until David E. Black was hired. In 2009, Black’s salary as Director of Customer Service was $24.96. In 2010, Black’s title changed to Director of Business Operations and his salary increased by nearly 50%. Why, all of a sudden, is it necessary for the Franklin County Clerk of Courts to employ a Director of Business Operations? Isn’t that what the Chief Deputy is for? How does O’Shaughnessy justify creating a $77,625.60 business operations role while also paying her Chief Deputy $95,409.60?

Skimming through the other Franklin County salary information, it looks like our highly-paid bureaucrats are at least politically intelligent enough not to give themselves raises when unemployment in the Columbus metro area is somewhere between 9 and 10 percent. Except for the Clerk of Courts office, which seems to have suffered from John O’Grady’s move to the Commissioner’s office.

Happy Tax Freedom Day!

[Update: Additional follow-up on the Clerk of Courts available here and here.]