Free Republic

Your tax dollars paid the salaries of Cuyahoga County officials who prosecutors say swapped government contracts for a free gambling junket to Las Vegas. Your tax dollars paid for government leaders to lounge at a secret Flats condo and rake in tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts from contractors looking to land county business, according to prosecutors. And that tax levy you passed last year for the poor, elderly and sick? Prosecutors say one of your leaders suggested using some of it to reward a halfway house that flew him first-class to Las Vegas. The first major...

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The expose came not in a rush but in slow, infuriating revelations. For more than two years, Cuyahoga County residents absorbed reports of cronyism and corruption on a scale no one imagined possible. A community that paid little attention to the mundane chores of county government learned of cash bribes, a sham election, gambling junkets to Las Vegas and Canada, sketchy tax assessments and outright thievery. On Thursday, we learned that the sordid charade is finally nearing its end. That long, loud scrape echoing across Ohio's largest county was a political machine grinding to a halt. The...

With the past few days given over to Democratic triumphalism, the reality is that the big picture remains roughly the same for Democrats. In Ohio, it's getting so bad for Democrats that the Democratic Governors Association, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are actively weighing their level of commitment.Public and private polling from the state suggests that Democrats will lose the governor's mansion, currently held by Ted Strickland, the Senate race (for an open seat that was held by a Republican), and at least four House races (OH 01, OH 15, OH 13, OH 16)....

It is a shocking and emblematic photograph that could be of New York City's Boss Tweed, 140 years later: Jimmy Dimora, the most powerful man in Cuyahoga County politics, led away in manacles to FBI headquarters, to federal court, and into infamy. But the picture painted by the 177 pages in indictments made public Wednesday against eight suspects -- including Cuyahoga County commissioner Dimora and two county judges -- is even more shocking, alleging what could be one of the biggest local political-machine corruption cases in recent U.S. history.It also, for the first time, implicates a second commissioner, Peter Lawson...