Couple of things tonight. Got to thinking about the old hometown so I decided to see how Coingate was percolating. And thanks to the Toledo Blade and its incessant coverage of the story, it continues to bubble away. If only they looked into Toledo's generally corrupt city government (run by their Demo buddies) the same way. By my count, it's up to 119 Coingate articles in the 85 days since they broke the story. The only day they skipped a Coingate story since May 10 was June 6th. I think they desperately want to assure themselves another Pulitzer by bringing down at least the state GOP and possibly even a president.
And then I looked back here, just to see what the D's were whining about now. Seems that Gov. Ehrlich has decided to basically zero out the budget of the agency that enforces some of the wage laws, including the so-called "prevailing wage" (which is a fiction created for the construction unions during the Depression.) As they should, the Associated Building Contractors are all for this, to wit (from the Baltimore Sun Thursday):
Michael Henderson, president of the Baltimore-area chapter of Associated Building Contractors, praised Ehrlich's decision to shut down the prevailing wage office.
Skilled construction workers are in demand, he said, and they don't need the wage protections afforded by the law. But because of the unions' influence in the legislature, the governor could never succeed in getting the law repealed, he said.
Not enforcing the law is the next best thing, Henderson said. "When we first heard about it, it was, 'Wow.' It really took us by surprise. It was brilliant," Henderson said. "If he's able to do this, the state is going to get a lot more bang for its construction dollar and without hurting construction workers in the slightest."
And he's absolutely right. It works with Ohio schools as well (Ohio Revised Code 4115.04 exempts school construction from prevailing wage laws, saving the state millions in what has been nearly $1 billion in school construction over the last decade.)
To play nitpicker, I think Andrew Green (Sun writer and author of the article) needs to get out a basic thesaurus and find synonyms for "said" like stated, remarked, commented, exclaimed, etc. He used the word "said" four times in the quote! I'm just a blogger and I try not to use the same terms over and over again.
But this is what our not-so-loyal opposition (hello, Senator Durbin) is up to.
