OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: What do Ohioans facing home foreclosure and Shakespeare’s legendary Prince of Denmark have in common? Both hope a dream can help them escape “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

For the growing tide of Ohioans facing home foreclosure “to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub” could be one way to keep their American Dream of owning a home alive long enough for circumstances to change sufficiently to allow them to tell the wolf of foreclosure that prowls outside their door today to go away.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: After one year in office, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland used his State of the State speech Wednesday to readjust the state’s sails, hoping to generate enough wind power through a new jobs program, increased investment in infrastructure and the reorganization of primary and secondary education that will give high school seniors a leg up on college to steer the ship of state to calmer seas and more prosperous shores.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: People involved with Ohio’s workforce development programs are puzzled by the sudden, mysterious turn of the year disappearance of a high-placed, high-profile, high-paid deputy director for the Department of Jobs and Family Services (ODJFS).

She was touted as one of Governor Strickland’s big hires. Someone who would establish an effective state workforce development operation.

Where in the world is Linda O'Connor? She’s definitely not with Carmen San Diego. But where is she?

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: News report Friday suggest that Indiana is ready to join a regional, eight-state compact designed to prevent water-challenged states like Georgia or Alabama or others from siphoning off fresh water from the Great Lakes, which waterphiles say hold about 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water.

Ohio Treasury Cordray Launches SaveNOW to Change Citizens’ Savings Habits

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: With winter winds blowing a chill across Ohio, and the prospect by many reputable economists that the next recession is waiting in the wings to make its cameo appearance, bringing with it more financial heartache to a state that has yet to recover the last recession of 2001, the timely announcement by Ohio Treasurer Richard Cordray that he’ll plunk down $25 million in state investment dollars to help Ohioans save more and earn higher interests rates on their savings, is a warm breeze in an otherwise frosty environment.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Wind and snow are cooling off Ohio, as is the specter of an oncoming recession, that could further chill the state’s already ailing economy.

With light snow flakes falling as if they were blown off the canvass of a Norman Rockwell painting, the message Ohio Governor Ted Strickland offered today as a strategy to bolster the budget from the hungry jaws of economic recession probably didn’t warm the cockles of the hearts of state employees, many of whom could be offered early retirement buyouts to get them off the payroll.

OhioNews Bureau

UPATED

ONB COLUMBUS: On the same day Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner convened a gathering of reporters to further defend her decision from mid-December to force a costly wholesale change in equipment, process and locations for all voters come the November elections, the OhioNews Bureau learned a key staffer central to her controversial EVEREST study was no longer in his position, and also failed to respond to offers of help from voting system, rights experts.

Seeing the opposition starting to mobilizing against her calls for big, radical voting changes, Brunner is counter punching by launching a PR listening tour in the form of a series of town-hall meetings around Ohio, where citizens can make their voice heard on her decisions to change voting in Cuyahoga County as early as March and for everyone else by November, when record-setting voter turnout is expected as America decides which presidential candidate will bring the kind of change the country is crying for.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson is striking back at lenders he says have “enabled the subprime lending and foreclosure crisis here” by using nuisance laws to sue 21 lenders, including big ones like Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo.

In a published report from The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Jackson accused the formidable bankers of irresponsibility in lending practices that are leaving “entire neighborhoods in ruins” and depleting the city’s tax base.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Paper or plastic? We’ve all been given this choice by our local grocery store cashier. But when it comes to voting in person on or before Election Day as some state laws, including those in Ohio, now allow, the choice will be between casting your vote by using a digital ballot, the hallmark of touch-screen machines, or marking a paper ballot, which Ohio election officials have ordered to be available as soon as March, when Ohio holds its primary.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: After the record-setting turnout in the Iowa caucuses tonight, made possible by legions of new energized voters, throngs of independents and even some Republicans converting to Democratic Blue, and with fewer than 382 days remaining until the birth of a new nation starts with the sudden death of the George W. Bush presidency, the prospect of Ohio children, and those of other states, no longer having to battle the uncompassionate, uncompromising and incomprehensible denial of Medicaid coverage that forces the needy into the jaws of private health insurers will cease being a dream and become a reality.

Coming as it did on the heels of the first step in the real race to the White House that played out in the frozen frost of Corn Husker country, this report by The New York Times about the imposition of restrictions by the Bush administration on the ability of states to expand eligibility for Medicaid, as Ohio and other states have proposed, is another example of why America needs a Democratic president who will put Mr. Bush’s harmful policies on the moving van along with his furniture and ship them both back to Crawford, Texas.