The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which employed Sherrod Brown’s wife Connie Schultz from 2007 until she was caught filming Josh Mandel in 2011 at a Tea Party rally and subsequently resigned from the paper, has, shockingly enough, endorsed Brown in his Senate race. Schultz was ostensibly at the 2011 rally to report on it, but strangely enough, failed to mention in her column that Mandel spoke. It looked as though she used her job to snoop for her husband. After she was caught, she resigned.
It gets worse. The Plain Dealer has an outlet called PolitiFact Ohio which purports to fact-check candidates. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans on the staff of PolitiFact Ohio by a 4:1 ratio, twelve of the Cleveland Plain Dealer “fact checking” outlet’s employees are Democrats (including the two editors) and only three are Republicans.
PolitiFact Ohio employs a leftist named Tom Feran, an Obama supporter who has disparaged conservatives as “wingnuts” and “yahoos”, to rate the level of truth of candidates’ statements. Of the 44 statements Politifact Ohio has rated, (22 for each candidate), Feran has rated 9 by Brown and 6 by Mandel.
Now what do you think Feran decided? Here’s what: Brown’s statements are completely true 44% of the time, and at least half-true another 44% of the time. Mandel, on the other hand, tells complete falsehoods 50% of the time! In total, Feran says, Brown tells the truth two-thirds of the time while Mandel lies two-thirds of the time.
And when they refer to Democrats versus Republicans generally, the Plain Dealer is just as bad; PolitiFact Ohio rules that Democrats are honest 26 percent more often than they are dishonest, and Republicans are dishonest 6 percent more often than they are honest, a 32 point bulge for the Democrats.
Now we can’t just let the Plain Dealer get away with that kind of garbage. Let’s take an honest look at Brown.
Brown recently said, “I think I’ve worked with business better than any senator in recent memory.”
Really? Try these on for size, Mr. Pro-Business:
Brown voted for Obamacare, which imposes new taxes and regulations on businesses. Brown has consistently voted in line with the extreme environmental lobby, including joining Obama in his war on coal, but Ohio gets 86% of its electricity from coal. Brown championed “card check” at the behest of the unions, which raise costs for businesses, and Brown fervently supported Occupy Wall Street, which is virulently opposed to businesses. And the bottom line is this: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce gave Brown a lifetime rating of 32, the 4th lowest among the current 100 Senators.
Brown compared GOP governors to Hitler and Stalin on the Senate floor, then, incredibly, went on MSNBC and denied it, even though you can see it on C-Span.
Brown bleated, “Everybody knows that government creates jobs”, echoing his 2009 prediction in his newsletter that after the government invested more than $8 billion, Ohio would have as many as 133,000 more jobs.
He was slightly off; two years later in 2011, Ohio had actually lost 109,000 jobs.
Brown is so far left that the Plain Dealer didn’t even attempt to hide the fact in its endorsement:
“When Brown, 59, does go rogue, it is usually because he wants to push the president or his party further left on issues such as health care or taxes … His often gleeful partisanship has earned Brown the ire of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth and other conservative groups.”
No one should be surprised that the Plain Dealer endorsed Brown, they’re clearly in the tank for him. But Ohioans should ask themselves this question: if they reelect Brown, who blindly supports the failed economic policies of Barack Obama, do they really want to face four more years of the country’s deficit spiraling out of control and imperiling their children’s futures?
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