Quinnipiac poll shows growing lead for Obama
The third poll of Ohio voters this week shows a widening lead for President Obama here.

This morning’s Quinnipiac  Poll shows the president with a 10-point lead over challenger Mitt Romney in the Buckeye state, and also shows him with a significant edge in Pennsylvania and a growing lead in Florida.

All three states have been considered swing states, though most polls showed Pennsylvania moving toward Obama months ago.

Both Gov.  Romney and Mr. Obama are in Northeast Ohio today. Romney is holding a manufacturing roundtable with Ford pitchman and “Dirty Job” host Mike Rowe and with business men and women at American Spring Wire in Bedford Heights. At the same time, President Obama is scheduled to speak at Bowling Green university, then head here for a speech at Kent State at 5:30 tonight.

The Quinnipiac poll shows more Ohioans view Romney unfavorably than favorably, but they’re still pretty evenly divided when it comes to the president’s job performance.

American Greetings offers to go private
The family that founded American Greetings is offering to buy back the greeting-card company’s stock and take it private.

In a letter to shareholders, Chief Executive Zev Weiss says American Greetings should “return to its roots.”  Weiss is offering a little over $17 a share, which is about 20 percent more than the stock has been trading.

The company is based in the Cleveland suburb of Brooklyn, and went public in 1958. It’s building a new headquarters at an estimated cost of $150 million in Westlake, and is getting as much as $93.5 million in tax credits, low-interest loans, grants and other incentives over 15 years

Weiss’ stock offer says the company anticipates “maintaining intact American Greetings employee base.”

Ohio Supreme Court weighs in on visitation case
The Ohio Supreme Court says juvenile courts can grant temporary visitation to a nonparent in cases where the court thinks that’s in the best interest of the child.

The 5-2 decision overturned an appeals court decision in a Franklin County case involving two women who had been partners.

A juvenile judge had awarded temporary visitation with the daughter of Julie Smith to Smith’s former partner, Julie Rowell.  Rowell is seeking permanent shared custody of the child.

Smith conceived by artificial insemination and gave birth to the girl in 2003 while she and Rowell lived together. Five years later, the relationship ended, and Smith had refused to comply with the visitation order.

Report cards released, but not rankings
Ohio is releasing its school report cards today, a month later and in a much pared-down fashion from previous years. The data includes the results of state tests and a few other measures for the thousands of traditional and charter schools throughout Ohio.

But the Ohio Department of Education underscores that the information is preliminary.  And it is not releasing the final rankings for each school building and districts that shows where they fall on a range from excellent to academic emergency. That’s because the state is still investigating whether some schools fudged attendance data to keep the test scores of poor performers from showing up.