Joe GuillenReporter, Plain Dealer statehouse bureau
Joe Guillen is a reporter in The Plain Dealer's statehouse bureau. He joined The Plain Dealer in 2005 and was a general assignment reporter and covered Cuyahoga County government before moving to the paper's Columbus bureau in February 2010.
The latest Truth-O-Meter items from Joe Guillen
Says Ohio law gives tax breaks "to rich people who own private jets."
"Tourism accounts for 439,000 jobs in the state of Ohio, and visitors spend $36 billion annually."
An effort to repeal voting-reform legislation would be "the first time in Ohio history where a bill has been passed to stop a referendum."
"The total (state) payroll has gone down. The total amount of the number of workers in the state has gone down. I like the fact that the bulk of that is just by retirements."
"Every time we put a ballot issue on, it costs a million dollars."
"Statistics bear out that any time a country, a state, makes more restrictive abortion laws ... fatalities go up and abortions actually increase."
"Ohio’s Planned Parenthood operations received millions of taxpayer dollars via federal grants in 2010 and 2011."
Dem-controlled Ohio House voted "to change the process, to create objective criteria, to modify the Constitution" ... to "take politics out of the efforts to draw legislative boundaries."
"They talk about this problem with binding arbitration. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to have somebody from Los Angeles fly into Zanesville and impose a wage settlement on you ... and then they’re on the plane back to Los Angeles."
The STAR Ohio fund "just received the highest possible credit rating one of these funds can receive."
Recent stories from Joe Guillen
Was Ohio runner up in the Sears derby?Ohio and several other states all were in the bidding to try to coax Sears to move its headquarters. But when PolitiFact Ohio tried to nail down a claim that the Buckeye State was runner up to Illinois, we found the answers elusive.
Governor's health benefits claim a favorite from 2011No issue dominated Ohio headlines in 2011 more than the efforts to rein in collective bargaining rights for public employees. A claim by Gov. John Kasich put focus on a key point in the debate. We picked it as one of our favorites of the year.
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