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Monday, March 29, 2010
Ohio loses out to Tennessee and Delaware
Federal education officials picked Tennessee and Delaware — not Ohio — to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in the first round of Race to the Top funding, officials said Monday, March 29.
Earlier this year, 41 states applied to get a piece of the new $4.35 billion program being established by the Obama administration to encourage innovation in education. Ohio made the first cut as one of 16 semi-finalists but only Tennessee and Delaware were tapped for first-round funding.
Gov. Ted Strickland and State Superintendent Deborah Delisle said in a written statement that they were disappointed but pledged to retool Ohio’s application for round two of funding. “Our students deserve our best efforts to transform education and to build on the tremendous progress that we are making in Ohio,” they said. Ohio requested $409 million in Race to the Top funding.
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Husted, Brunner clash on party switch directive
State Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, a candidate for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, is clashing with Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner over Brunner’s directive on challenges to voters switching parties to vote in primaries.
Husted on Monday, March 29, called on Brunner to rescind the directive. It requires that Democratic and Republican voters switching to the other major party in the May 4 primary be challenged and that they sign a form saying they support the principles of their new party.
“With absentee balloting to start on Tuesday, this last-minute directive will cost boards of elections both time and money and wrongly deny voters of both major political parties the right to have their voice heard in this primary election,” Husted said in a press release.
Husted also said it “adds unnecessary bureaucracy and confusion to voting and undermines our local elections officials.”
Jeff Ortega, spokesman for Brunner, said the directive follows “long-standing state law.”
“This is nothing new,” he said. “….There’s no authority for the secretary of state to waive state law. It’s interesting that Sen. Husted believes you can waive state law.”
The directive does not apply to those switching to the Libertarian, Green, Socialist or Constitutional parties which were certified this year as minor parties for the first time, according to the directive.
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Early voting for May 4 primary starts Tuesday
Early voting for Ohio’s May 4 primary starts on Tuesday, March 30.
Voters may vote by mail or in person at county boards of elections. Voters don’t have to have a special reason to cast ballots early.
For a directory of county boards of elections, click here.
Nancy D. White, a retired school teacher in Harrison Township in Montgomery County, is among those who plan to vote early. She said she’ll cast her ballot by mail.
“It gives you an opportunity to actually read what the issues are,” said White.
In the 2008 presidential election, about 30 percent of the votes were cast by early voting.
The deadline for registering to vote in the primary is April 5.
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Middle class must sacrifice to close deficit - poll
Middle class Americans will have to make financial sacrifices to close the federal budget deficit, according to a national Quinnipiac Poll of registered voters released on Monday, March 29.
In the poll, 84 percent said middle class sacrifices must be made but more than 75 percent oppose raising income taxes on the middle class or limiting the growth of Social Security and Medicare.
As for the correct recipe to reduce the deficit, 49 percent said all budget reductions should come through spending cuts while 4 percent wanted only tax hikes. Forty two percent favored a combination.
If there’s a combination of cuts and tax hikes, 29 percent wanted an equal amount from each while 52 percent supported more spending cuts and 12 percent backed larger amounts in tax increases.
Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, said in a press release that Social Security and Medicare are the two largest domestic items in the budget, make up more than a third of federal spending and in future years will eat up even a larger percentage of federal budgets.
“Given those numbers, it’s clear that those who want serious budget deficit reduction have their work cut out for them in convincing the public, which seems adamantly opposed to cutting the programs with the largest budgets,” said Brown.
There was bipartisan agreement on both the need to sacrifice and opposition to higher taxes on the middle class.
On the need to sacrifice, 92 percent of Republicans, 78 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of independents felt that way. On raising taxes on the middle class, 83 percent of Republicans, 81 percent of independents and 75 percent of Democrats were opposed.
There also was no partisan gap in the opposition to limiting the growth of Social Security and Medicare. On Social Security, 73 percent of Republicans, 84 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independents were opposed.
On Medicare, 80 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of independents said “no.”
The poll was conducted March 16 - March 21 with 1,907 registered voters nationwide and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
