Emmy Award-winning Feagler & Friends is a lively, weekly half-hour television discussion of local and national issues impacting lives in Northeast Ohio. Hosted by award-winning journalist and former Plain Dealer columnist, Dick Feagler, Feagler & Friends explores the various issues behind today's news. With a changing ensemble of "friends" ranging from journalists to community and political leaders, Feagler & Friends takes on issues from many different perspectives. Always entertaining and never boring, Feagler & Friends is the program for people "in the know" in Northeast Ohio.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Topics: Education, Politics, Other
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Roundtable: Joan Mazzolini, reporter, The Plain Dealer; Mark Naymik, politics reporter, The Plain Dealer; Richard Osborne, editor, Ohio Magazine.

Parsing the Numbers: Pollsters are vitally interested in how Ohioans are leaning in the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign. Some new polling shows Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani running virtually even in a head-to-head comparison. Voters are sure they don’t want Governor Ted Strickland, who endorsed Clinton recently, to be the vice-presidential candidate on a Democratic ticket. We can expect a new round of polls next month.

Gun Buyback: Department of Justice statistics prove it: firearms are used to commit most of the homicides in the United States. That’s a key reason behind a gun buyback program in Cleveland last weekend that brought in more than 400 weapons. They were exchanged for gift certificates for gasoline or food. Civic groups also staged a buyback program for toy guns.

Stir Crazy -- Prisons Packed: State prisons are home to more than 50,000 people for the first time. And prison officials are afraid the crowding problem is going to worsen. More crimes are being punished with prison time and mandatory sentencing is leaving judges with less leeway. Prison leaders say they don’t see convict unrest as a threat, but they are looking at possibly reopening the shuttered Lima Correctional Facility.

College President Pay: Figures from the Chronicle of Higher Education show Ohio college presidents are hauling down six-figure incomes. The Chronicle put total compensation for KSU’s Lester Lefton at close to $500-thousand; $434-thousand for Luis Proenza at University of Akron and $700-thousand for Karen Holbrook at Ohio State. However, those figures pale in comparison to Division I college football coaches where compensation rises as high as $4-million.

Mortgage Fraud: Somewhere in Cleveland local, state and federal law enforcement officers have teamed up to track and prosecute mortgage fraud. Officials revealed the existence of a mortgage fraud task force this week, but haven’t said where the office is located nor why the location is a secret. Cleveland should not be a hard place to find violators. Mortgage fraud is blamed for a substantial chunk of local foreclosures, now totaling more than a thousand each month.

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