Mayor from Ohio. (Getty image file photo.)
Each morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio, the country and the world that catches our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye and have published it here.
Sign up for our free daily newsletter to get all the Ohio news you need to know delivered straight to your inbox every weekday morning.
If you already subscribe, please share the Ohio Capital Journal with your family and friends: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/subscribe/
Catching our eyes
• Ohio poll. USA Today reports “Acton narrowly leads Ramaswamy in novel Ohio governor poll“
Democrat Amy Acton has a narrow lead over Republican Vivek Ramaswamy (47% to 44%), and the difference is within the poll’s margin of error.
Acton leads among voters under 50 and independents, while Ramaswamy leads among voters 50 and older.
Affordability and cost of living are top issues for voters 50 and older.
• 250. Brent Larkin of Cleveland.com writes: “Trump’s grotesque distortion of what would otherwise have been the 250th gala.“
The 250-year-old United States has little in common with the nation that celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976. Americans then had reason to believe that their government was acting exactly as the Founders intended, that Congress and the Supreme Court would not tolerate the crimes of the Watergate era, forcing the removal from office of a president whose offenses now seem like third-degree misdemeanors compared to what is happening today.
Nevertheless, in the 2024 election, an astonishing 77,302,580 Americans, according to official results, voted to return to the presidency a man who had not long before been found guilty by two other jury members of 34 crimes related to his business and, a year earlier, was ordered to pay $88 million to a woman a civil court found was a victim of sexual assault in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. About two dozen women have credibly accused Trump of sexual abuse, a habit he has bragged about at least once.
In return for all those votes, Trump returned the favor by assembling and presiding over a government that is today one of the most reviled in the world, where everything he touches, from the failed war with Iran to the lies about how he disfigured our treasured national monuments, becomes a national embarrassment.
• Free food. Ben Dannemiller of the Dayton Daily News reports: “Federal Court: Dayton ordinance banning food distribution downtown is unconstitutional.“
A federal judge has sided with a Dayton nonprofit that sued the city after one of its members was arrested in 2024 for handing out food to the homeless downtown.
Southern District of Ohio Judge Thomas Rose ruled on Tuesday, June 24, that a city ordinance requiring a permit for the public distribution of food, clothing and toiletries in downtown Dayton is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
