Welcome.  I've ignored my civic duties all too long, and it's past time to start taking them seriously, so I'm going to start by putting up a resource site for candidates I consider worthy of my (and your) vote(s).  Note that this is NOT going to be a party vote cheerleader site.  I don't believe in voting for parties, I believe in voting for able and sensible candidates, no matter what party they're supposedly representing.  
       In 2006, I'm happy to say a wave of reform swept Ohio, ushering out Bob Ney, Bob Taft, Mike DeWine and Ken Blackwell.  We now have Governor Ted Strickland, Senator Sherrod Brown, and Treasurer Marc Dann.  Sadly, the candidate running against John Boehner was strictly a protest vote, and didn't even campaign, so we still have him. 
 

Register to Vote!
 If you don't register, you can't vote, so register EARLY and verify that you're registered before the deadline!
 
 Many, many thousands of voters were unable to vote in the 2004 elections because their registrations were declared invalid or simply not processed despite having been turned in before the deadline.  Others were summarily struck from the rolls because they hadn't voted in the prior two elections.  Even if you THINK you're registered, make sure you still are.  The Butler county website allows you verify your registration status online, so it's a good idea to do so...and probably to do so again a week or so before the registration deadline in early October.  
 

Know the Candidates!
 Most people vote knowing only party affiliation or talking points hung on their door by people working for a given candidate.
 
 Would you buy a house or a car from someone if all you knew about them was from a brochure THEY hung on your door proclaiming how honest and trustworthy they were?  The people being voted into state and federal office have HUGE influence on your life, and should be carefully scrutinized.  Many candidates win office simply by playing on people's fears that somewhere, somehow some minority group is threatening the social fabric of the country, or that political protests that involve burning a flag are devastating to the morale of our country.  At the very same time, these men are for offshoring jobs, for allowing corporations to lavish them with gifts and money, for letting corporations skip out on 95% of their taxes (thus shifting the burden to the very people voting them into office), for paying themselves ever greater amounts, and against paying normal people in normal jobs enough to get their families above the poverty line.  Strangely, these points never seem to appear on their brochures.  One thing I've noticed is that the fear-mongers love the magic incantations '9/11' and 'terrorism'.  A quick rule of thumb seems to be to trust politicians to actually be looking out for your interests in an inverse ratio to the frequency with which '9/11' or 'terrorism' pops up in their discourse.  It's the perfect smokescreen for whatever piece of pork-laden corporate-lobbyist-written legislation they have voted for of late to keep money flowing from regular Americans into the pockets of corporate executives.
       Find out who they are!  There are wonderful resources online these days to document what every current legislative member has ever voted for or against, and many more to rate them on their stances in particular fields, such as government reform, environmental record, or gun control.  Below are two nonpartisan examples of just many such sites, plus a bonus link to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks the flow of donations to candidates and officeholders. 
 

Hot Current Issues!
  So what's going on now?
 
       Net Neutrality  A term which has been hijacked a time or two by different groups to mean different things, net neutrality is the concept of not charging different rates for bandwidth depending on its site of origination.  Currently, ISP's and telcos have set tiers of pricing for everyone.  No matter who a net content producer is, if they use between a certain lower limit of bandwidth a month, and a certain upper limit, they pay a set price.  Likewise, every consumer of net bandwidth pays a set amount to move a certain amount of bandwidth up or down.  The bandwidth providers have noticed, though, that certain companies and organizations make far more money off of this than others, and think they deserve some way to cut themselves a piece of the action.   So, magically, they come up with the concept of routing net traffic in ways such that the speed isn't the same for downloading searches from Google or auctions from eBay or politcal rants from DailyKOS.  Groups that pay them these brand new fees will be allowed to send 'fast traffic', while groups that don't, will get 'slow traffic'.  Now, I haven't seen a single telco promising to charge me less for providing me with slower downloads of content from sites that were previously fast but didn't cough up the extra fees to the telco.  I as the consumer will still pay the same money, but will potentially get much worse service, depending on whose sites I like to visit.  In a cynical aside, assuming that Net Neutrality is defeated and the telcos given the nod to line their pockets, I expect that soon after, residential customers will be given the 'opportunity' to pay extra fees to sidestep the slow downloads artificially created by the telcos - allowing them to be paid extra by both producer and consumer for the exact same service they previously had.
Not surprisingly, Rep. Boehner enthusiastically embraced diverting more money into the coffers of the telcos. (Boehner has received over $175000 in political contributions from telephone utilities companies.) 
 

       This book gets two enthusiastic thumbs up.  Hostile Takeover examines the vast amounts of corporate lobbying money that flows into the pockets of our national leaders and notes how often a congressman's votes on a given topic change after receiving such funding.  The book is nonpartisan, insomuch as it skewers both Democrats and Republicans, but given that most of the corporate money is flowing into Republican pockets, Republicans can be expected to vilify it more than Democrats.  
       It also examines and debunks the common falsehoods politicians use to mislead their constituents as to why they continue to vote against the people and for corporate profit.  Specific topics covered include Taxes, Wages, Jobs, Debt, Pensions, Health Care, Prescription Drugs, Energy, Unions, and Legal Rights.  
       Specific politicians are singled out as hacks or heroes, among them Sherrod Brown, who gets a Hero label for his work in fighting free-trade legislation written by corporations.  CAFTA, which Mr Brown opposed, includes very little in the way of labor, human rights, or environmental standards.  This gives corporations free rein to make ever greater profits by exporting American jobs and manufacturies to countries that exploit their workers and destroy the environment.

       So if Sherrod is a hero, who in Ohio gets the Hack label?  Surprise, surprise - John Boehner.  Yes, the Republican House Majority Leader has taken over $4.1 million from corporate lobbyists - around $4500 a week, every week for as long as he's been in Congress.  Voting against workers, against the environment, and for corporations every chance he gets, Boehner is specifically singled out for his efforts to allow pension schemes that would allow corporate America to pay as little as half of what they'd already pledged to workers in pensions.  (Ex-Sen DeWine has taken over $5 million from business, but managed to slide past the hack label simply because there isn't room enough to list every hack out there.)

       This book is like watching a train wreck.  You can't stop looking no matter how horrifying it is to see how your elected representatives are selling you down the river in an endless cycle of them funnelling your money into corporate profits then used to buy more legislation to take more money from the 90% of the country the politicians no longer represent.