Gov. John Kasich’s political chutzpah reached new heights recently in Michigan, the next state he’s all-in on and must finish first in to show he’s more than a quirky afterthought in this year’s wild and woolly Republican race for president.

Speaking to a gathering in that “state up north” after finishing next to last yesterday in South Carolina, Ohio’s 63-year old glib governor, whose tax cutting mania is legendary, didn’t blink twice when he voiced how upset he is that local taxes are going up.

“What about the tax increases where we live, the city council, the school board, everybody else? That’s all they do is raise taxes and spend money, right?” Kasich said, according to reports about the event. “I’m aggravated when they raise my taxes where I live. If I told you what my property taxes were, you wouldn’t believe how high they are. It’s ridiculous.”

Where would media find an easy-to-access source of nearly universal information to contrast his rhetoric with his record? The answer it turns out is the Internet. Michiganders at the event obviously had no clue that Kasich rode into Columbus after his narrow win in 2010 and proceeded to shortchange billions from Ohio’s local governments and schools. After five years, Kasich continues to sequester local government funds in the rainy day fund, claiming Ohio’s credit rating is more important the health of local communities. His second handy excuse is that Ohio needs an emergency fund if the nation tanks again, as did at the hands of people in his party whose ideology and policies plunged the nation into the worse recession since the Great Depression.

But John Kasich pretends he didn’t have anything to do with the sad state of affairs in Washington, where a Republican president with a Republican Congress at his beck and call for six of his eight years in the White House spent trillions on the nation’s credit card to fund income tax cuts and war costs that exploded the middle east into religious factions that have been fighting each other for seven-hundred or more years.

Kasich cutting local governments and schools to the tune of billions have forced locals to either do more with less or hike their contributions to fill the gap between what they used to depend on what Kasich told them to live on. For those who follow the governor, it’s well known how anti-union he is, so when he cut local government funds his real goal was to force locals to make choices between paying police, firefighters, teachers and nurses a living wage with decent retirement benefits or cutting their compensation as one way to reduce the role of pubic sector unions in the everyday lives of struggling Ohioans, including their role to support officials who differ with Kasich and his ilk.

So here’s another edition of the way we were before Gov. Kasich injected his creative, innovative solutions compared to the way we are after his flim-flam leadership agenda took a bite out of Buckeyes trying to recoup what they lost from politicians who think and believe just like John Kasich.

The poor, pitiful media pretends to know everything about everything but actually knows so little about anything.