John Kasich can't keep getting away with it
MSNow defrauds their audience every time they let Kasich pretend he's the last sane Republican in America just because Donald Trump threw him in a trashcan once upon a time.
There’s a famous and correct tweet that if you assume that demon Ronald Reagan is the cause of any bad thing you encounter in America, you’ll be right way more often than wrong.
Replacing Reagan with former governor John “No. 1 Asshole” Kasich and “Ohio” with America maintains the veracity of the tweet, albeit on a smaller scale.
We got another example, as if one were needed, from Anna Staver of cleveland.com on Tuesday:
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio lawmakers are trying to reduce a controversial tax break for data centers, but contracts signed during the Kasich administration leave the state’s largest tech companies largely untouched.
Amazon, Meta and Google all signed statewide agreements between 2014 and 2018 that granted 100% sales tax exemptions for up to 40 years on any facility built in Ohio if the companies met certain investment targets.
[…]
Huffman said he, too, was surprised by the scope of the agreements.
“I don’t think the Department of Development should be signing 30-year contracts without the legislature knowing about it,” he said.
Speaker Matt Huffman’s has dedicated his entire political career to rewarding corporations at the expense of working people, so it’s no surprise he views Kasich’s chief sin as being that he kept the State Legislature in the dark about a 30-year contract that will siphon billions of dollars from schools and other public works.
A forecasting chart obtained by cleveland.com said the tax breaks would cost Ohio $600 million annually (or $2.3 billion since inception), though a footnote warned that the numbers could be “significantly higher” given the “uncapped” nature of the exemptions.
The forecasting chart also doesn’t include the other costs to the environment and the electrical grid.
This is why a well-connected State Representative told The Rooster on May 28 that Governor Mike DeWine's pausing sales tax breaks for data centers would be “functionally meaningless.” It’s also why any movement from the Statehouse junta later today on “tax incentives” will also be functionally meaningless.
The No. 1 Asshole sold us out in the dead of night. But hey, at least that creepy thong magnate Leslie Wexner, whom Kasich once tapped to “improve” Ohio’s image, made a couple more billion dollars in the speculative bubble of artificial intelligence.
From Jemima McEvoy of Forbes in July 2025:
Instead, the fashion mogul has more than doubled his fortune thanks in large part to some savvy bets in a different industry: technology. Over just the past three months, the mogul’s net worth–which includes assets held in his children’s and wife Abigail’s names–has soared to $10.1 billion from $7.9 billion, according to Forbes’ estimates.
The biggest driver of this increase: a 4% stake in CoreWeave, one of the buzziest artificial intelligence companies around. On Monday, CoreWeave announced it is buying crypto miner Core Scientific in a roughly $9 billion all-stock deal. Coreweave’s market capitalization has almost tripled since its March IPO to nearly $73 billion today, and Wexner’s stake is now worth $2.8 billion.
Sure, it’s true that CoreWeave didn’t receive any tax breaks for its Cleveland data center under the deal Kasich signed. But in April, CoreWeave expanded its deal with Meta from $14 to $21 billion.
You don’t need to be a political pervert like me to understand how this issue condemns the Republican junta on data centers, the most salient political issue of our times.
It’s the type of scandal that Dr. Amy Acton could center an entire media blitz around, if that were something she were interested in doing. But unfortunately, as The Rooster reported in April, she’s not shown an interest in bludgeoning the Republicans on Wexner or data centers, let alone an issue that ties them together.
