BuckeyeBlog

So, who are the biggest earners working for the City of Columbus?  Employees protecting the public come out on top.  Eight of the top ten salaries belong to people working in the Department of Public Safety.

Police Chief James Garfield Jackson holds the top spot earning more than $200,000 a year.  Almost a quarter of that comes from “other” earnings. What constitutes “other” earnings?  According to The City Auditor’s Office “YTD Other includes, but is not limited to:  Terminal leave pay, Shift pay, Police Parade duty, etc.  The list of “other” pay codes is too lengthy to be broken down into individual columns.”

Holding the number two spot is 2008’s City Health Commissioner, Teresa C. Long.  Long makes just under $186,000 a year, $11,000 of which comes from “other” earnings.  Fire Chief Ned Pettus, Jr. takes the number three spot earning almost $183,000 a year.  Police Sergeant Michael Robison steals the number four spot thanks to over $10,500 in overtime pay and over $103,000 in “other” pay.  Rounding out the top five is Fire Assistant Chief Warren R. Cox earning over $158,500.

Mayor Michael Coleman holds the sixth spot, earning $158,302 a year.  Mayor Coleman does not receive any overtime pay and is the only top city earner of 2008 who does not receive “other” pay.  The number seven, eight, and nine spots belong to Fire Battalion Chief Douglas J. Smith, Fire Assistant Chief Jerry L. Mason, and Fire Assistant Chief Gregory A. Paxton respectively.  Coming in at number ten is Emergency Medical Service Coordinator David P. Keseg earning over $153,000 a year.

The Stowers case in Lorain, Ohio has raised concerns and worries for gardeners throughout the country. Why? One of the reasons involves “The Food Modernization Act of 2009.”:

I wanted to throw together a post describing some of the things going on for CPAC, because I’m covering the event wearing many hats (my Shots on the House hat, College Republican hat, Buckeye Institute hat). Today I met with Newt Gingrich and we discussed his policy proposals to rejuvenate the American economy. I also met Stephen Baldwin, once at CVS not knowing it was him and a second time at a book-signing booth. Embarrassing. On the docket tonight is an event about card check (which does anything except give employees free choice, as the bill’s official name suggests), and perhaps some events about how to rebuild the conservative movement.

I was at the Americans for Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream Summit this weekend, attending workshops and meeting with activists who want to shrink the size of government and give Americans back more of their liberty. One of the highlights of the conference was a presentation to Ohio’s own Maggie Thurber with the award of “Blogger of the Year.”

Maggie runs a great blog and it’s great that a national organization has recognized that. Congratulations, Maggie, and keep up the good work of advocating for limited government and transparent policy making. Ohioans need all the help they can get in reining in state and local policymakers.

The Leadership Institute is bringing a “Grassroots Campaign School” to Westerville, Ohio on August 23, 2008.   The cost of the course is $20 per participant which includes course materials and lunch. (more…)

“To save, you must spend some time analyzing spending”

Some excerpts:

Saving money is a mindset, a way of life. It takes a plan, a budget, discipline and a look toward the future. Instead of instant satisfaction, it’s about delayed gratification.

“Debt for mere consumption used to be a taboo,”

But behavior can be changed. The first thing to do is look deep within and ask a simple question: Do I have a spending problem?

This is not an easy concept to teach adults, let alone children. [ed. - how about legislators?]

“How do you compete with all that Hannah Montana marketing when you have a 7-year-old daughter?” Fox said. [Ugh. It's the corporations' fault.]

One way is to try to explain the concept of tradeoffs. Tell your child she can have the Hannah Montana outfit she wants, but not the second item on her wish list if there isn’t money for both.

Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

Rest in peace.

The Columbus Dispatch reports:

State regulators have failed to eliminate by today, as promised, the backlog of requests from Medicaid patients for wheelchairs and other medical supplies. 

But the problem isn’t as bad as it was.

There were fewer cases pending yesterday than on July 20 when The Dispatch detailed the 16,000-case backlog and hardship it had created for a teenager with cerebral palsy who had been waiting two years for a new wheelchair.

Keep this backlog in mind when you hear Governor Strickland pushing to expand eligibility in the program. Medicaid can’t serve those who are already enrolled in it. Is it really a good idea to stretch its resources (i.e., your tax money) even further?

A reader doesn’t like Matt Carr’s point that “teaching to the test” is a non-argument. If we can’t test what we’re teaching, what are we teaching?

Carr writes: So long as the state’s standardized exams are designed to capture student knowledge of basic subjects, then teaching to the test and teaching students basic skills are essentially one and the same.

Our reader responds:

But the test also has attendance requirements, and population and subgroup requirements (minimums). These requirements must be met to make AYP, and they are out of the hands of school personell. I have no way, as a teacher, of making sure Johnny comes to school, especially on test day, especially if his parents opted out of the test, which is their right.

So, your quote above is either disingenuous or uninformed. I’m going with disingenuous! (more…)

Some stories are treated as a joke, and this is a common one: “Exercise in a pill“.

It’s a serious enough scientific study, and it’s easy enough to see why an editor would find such a story appealing. And of course there’s the obligatory ending: “For the majority of people, it would be better to do exercise than to take a pill.”

That last seems an unsupported assertion. If the issue is a given condition of a physical body, let’s say percentage body fat, but it could be anything, then what difference does it make how it’s achieved, all things equal? It’d be a question of cost, including opportunity cost, and that could go several directions.

What is really underlying all of this is mankind’s increasing ability to control the cellular and molecular world. We’re having a lot of debates about a lot of important things, including health care, health care costs, insurance and welfare to pay those costs, but the reality is that the assumptions and knowledge necessary to those debates is changing all the time.

I’m thinking that it won’t be all that far into the future when we’ll be looking at today’s chemistry and pharmacology with the same eye that today we look at Civil War medical instruments.