This article in today's Toledo Blade provides a great jumping off point to introduce you to the man who is leading the fight for truth and accountibility in the BWC/Coingate scandals in Ohio.
His name is Marc Dann, and this clip from the Blade says it better than I can:
With less than three years in the Ohio Senate, Mr. Dann, 42, has become the self-appointed Greek chorus for Democrats everywhere. He has filed lawsuits, demanded public records, and dashed off a series of pithy one-liners that have expressed his outrage with the scandals at the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation and throughout the top echelon of state government.
Oh, and did I mention that he blogs?
For those of you that may be confused or haven't heard about the Coingate scandal,
this and
this addendum are the best summary I've found so far (written by, of all people, Evan Bayh's PAC).
Now, back to Marc Dann. Dann represnts the 32nd State Senate District in and around Youngstown in Northeast Ohio. He began his political career by helping Lee Fisher get elected to the Ohio House of Representatives (while stillin High School!). In 2002, he succeeded Tim Ryan as the Senator from Ohio's 32nd District.
You see, Dann has not just recently jumped on the bandwagon of the BWC scandal. Dann took a huge political risk in pushing the story-and he kept on coming it until the story became frontpage news. Now his work has the entire GOP running for their political lives:
Denny White, chairman of the state party, said Democrats were fortunate to have Mr. Dann when the scandal broke. "It really caught everybody off guard," Mr. White said. "Marc was one of the first to pick up on it."
It was a risky move, getting out in front of the story so aggressively, Mr. White concedes. In the early days, just after The Blade first reported the existence of the state's $50 million investment with former Toledo-area coin dealer Tom Noe, it was unclear how it would play out. Mr. Dann could have ended up as Chicken Little.
In this case, the sky really was falling.
"Who knew where this was going to go?" Mr. White said. "When George Voinovich was calling Tom Noe a great American, [Mr. Dann] was calling him a thief."
Now, that's the kind of gutsy we need in Columbus and across the nation. Dann ain't letting up either:
Now, Mr. Dann is a one-man legislative hammer. He has twice taken public records cases to the Ohio Supreme Court and has dropped numerous public records requests on the governor's office, the bureau of workers' compensation, and the office of Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro.
What Patrick Fitzgerald is to the Plame/Rove Story, Dann is to Ohio's Coingate BWC scandal. He deserves to be thanked and lifted up by all of us for his hard work exposing Republican corruption.