Wow! When Kay Rogers goes off the rails, she plows on through to the next county. Check out the hyperbole and overheated rhetoric in this article published in the Pulse-Journal where among other absurd charges, Kay actually says that Commission Chuck Furmon placed county employees "at risk" (of what???) when he allowed family and friends use his PARKING SPACE. That's right. He let somebody park in his spot. Call out Jack Bauer, we have a security breach!Rather than campaigning for Rawnica Dillingham with her office, maybe Kay Rogers ought to have just turned over her investigation to Prosecutor Robin Piper. If she had done that, she wouldn't have gotten her name in the paper, and I suspect that is what this craziness was really about.
The last thing Butler County needs is yet another politician showboating for the media. We got lucky when Mike Fox quit, but Kay Rogers seems real willing to fill the vacuum...
I'm beginning to think that Josh Sweigart of Cox Newspapers has got a thing for campaigning against Furmon... Does Butler County HAVE to come to WMD for balance? If that's the case, Josh isn't doing his job very well... I smell a rat...
HT: Modern Esquire in the comments
2/12/08 UPDATE: This is not the same story Modern Esquire and I read yesterday. I'll be emailing the reporter and asking just what happened to the original story. Please feel free to do the same by emailing Josh at jsweigart@coxohio.com. That rat smell is getting stronger...
UPDATE 2: The new story includes Prosecutor Robin Piper:
County Prosecutor Robin Piper said he'll look over Rogers' findings, then decide whether to forward it to law enforcement or the Ohio Ethics Commission.Emphasis added...
"If people were on their own time and if there wasn't official business being conducted, I'm not sure there was some crime committed, but it doesn't mean there wasn't some ethics violation," he said.
But, Piper said, he'll take the charges in context — the primary is only three weeks away.
"We're talking about allegations flying back and forth from both candidates about things that supposedly happened three years ago," he said. "What I see is politics."
UPDATE 3: I have heard back from the reporter on the story who says that they had posted a web story yesterday afternoon based on a release from Kay Rogers' office but when he wrote the full story, he thought it was neccessary to include material from other sources and some of the Rogers quotes got trimmed for space.
All of which I get...except, why publish the web story if it wasn't the whole story? And why scrub it from Cox websites after the fact? I can certainly see updating the story because clearly what we saw yesterday afternoon was not an objective or complete story, but removing what was previously published doesn't seem like the right call to me...
I hesitate to call this media bias because I think Josh did an excellent job on the followup story, but I am very puzzled about how the original story got published in the first place.
UPDATE 4: While I'm awaiting a response from Josh on a request for the release if the original story isn't going to be made available, I thought I'd head on over to Kay Rogers' Auditor web site to see if the release was listed... Imagine my surprise, it isn't. It has been stated that this release came from her office, but it isn't available from her office website.
As Modern Esquire said in the comments, Rogers' more crazy rhetoric is important to the story:
To me the issue of the scrubbing is what he cut out. Anyone who read that full press release would have seen how over-the-top Rogers was being. By cutting it down to the more benign quotes, it gives her credibility she doesn't deserve.Amen...and really, that's the whole point.
UPDATE 5: The press release that started it all...
2/25 UPDATE: The story y'all are looking for is KAY ROGERS PLEADS GUILTY ON DYNUS and it can be found by clicking here.
