Break the wheel
Welcome to a week-long chance to join The Patriots Caucus at a discounted price.
It’s already been another record-breaking year for The Rooster. It turns out good things happen to The Business Line when you stop drinking vodka like an idiot and produce original video content at the Statehouse.
But one thing that our capitalist overlords have drilled into my melon-sized head is that the only good kind of profit is that of eternal growth. As such, I’m running a one-week sale I’ve dubbed The Patriots Caucus Members Drive.
You can join this week for 40 percent off—a discount that will last forever.
It comes with three dispatches a week; four if you include “Friday’s Rooster in Review.”
You gain commenting ability to write things like, “Great post, D.J.!” under every dispatch. You also get full access to the archives, which at this point is illustrious.
In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be adding some hoodies to The RooStore, and I’ll offer those at at-cost prices to those brave enough to join The Patriots Caucus.
If you’d like to make a gift subscription, please respond to this email, and I’ll supply you with a coupon that offers an even steeper discount.
If you don’t want to pay, that’s cool, too. Your readership is still appreciated, and I hope you enjoy the free week of service. And I apologize in advance for spamming this stuff on social media in advance.
Now onto the show!
Much is made by Democrats in Ohio about Republican gerrymandering at the Statehouse. They’re right to be mad; it’s bullshit. And I say that about gerrymandering in Democrat-dominated states, too.
But there are similar electoral hijinks happening in Columbus where only a few Republican judges are left standing.
Columbus is going to a ward system this year as a way to avoid a civil rights lawsuit for our current at-large system. But in typical Franklin County Democratic Party chicanery, it only looks like sweeping change as long as you don’t think about it for more than 30 seconds. Which, honestly, is a fair gambit on FCDP’s part considering that’s longer than most voters think about local politics.
Yes, the council is adding two more seats. And yes, there will be a single council member that you can badger about the ills of your neighborhood.
But ward representatives will still be decided in an at-large vote. That means if your neighborhood decides your council representative sucks ass, it won’t mean anything if voters in the eight other wards don’t have a problem with your representation.
That’s a problem when, sadly, most voters in Columbus don’t seem bothered by a system in which every single current council member earned their seat by appointment—a corrupt practice that has spanned the last two decades.
The job of Council Democrats is to keep the left flank of the party at bay for their corporate masters at The Columbus Partnership, which still lists famous sex pest Les Wexner as a “Chairman Emeritus” if that gives you any idea about how cursed that group is.
And you know what? It’s hard to blame the FCDP when voters keep accepting their slop as long as property values continue to rise. If you listen closely at night, you can probably hear them snickering over free cocktails at one of their hobgoblin soirees.
It allows them to pull tricks like this in advertisements:
If you didn’t know better, you would assume that Nancy Day-Achauer is already on City Council. There she is, standing next to three active city council members in council chambers at City Hall, while Council President Shannon Hardin talks about “the City Council Team.”
Columbus government operates this way because voters allow it. But it doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
Government isn’t supposed to work as some well-oiled, members-only club that rigs the rules every chance it can to maintain its vice grip on power.
That’s the ethos of Statehouse Republicans. And it’s an expressway to corruption, like when former City Council President Andy Ginther was caught red-handed in a bribery scandal before our city’s property value voters promoted him to mayor for some reason only known to God.
Thankfully, however, there is a ray of hope for breaking the local machine’s power in this election. It comes in the form of Adrienne Hood, whose 23-year-old son, Henry Green, was murdered by two Columbus police officers in 2016.
But don’t let that tragedy obscure her impressive résumé.
Hood is running against the most odious member of the council: Emanuel V. Remy.
Remy is a realtor by trade, which is probably helped by the inside knowledge he has about city council activity. He also highlights in his official bio that his wife is a teacher in the Columbus Public Schools District as if that ever stops him from voting against massive tax giveaways to developers that rob our public schools of much-needed resources.
A system, by the way, that will likely be exacerbated when its levy fails at the ballot box in November. (I’ll be voting yes, and I encourage anyone reading to do the same.)
There is nothing remarkable about Remy on a council of rather unremarkable people. But at least he recognizes there is a chance he can lose because the other day he posted the first picture of a City Council member knocking on a stranger’s door that I’ve ever seen:
And hell, he may not even have knocked! He’s lazy and hates interacting with everyday people, so it’s entirely possible that he just had a staffer take a picture of him leaving literature in a voter’s door.
I also love how he campaigns in a shirt with his name on it. Because he’s been on council since 2018 and nobody knows who the hell he is!!!!!
But Remy isn’t the only City Hall gremlin sweating this cycle!
Two unrelated tipsters recently informed me that Mayor Suburbs is sweating his polling numbers against perennial challenger Joe Motil.
The word is that Ginther plans to unload $2 million in an ad blitz promoting himself and painting Motil as a Clintonville cracker. Well, it’s not like he can run for any other office in Ohio, but a couple of days later, this mailer appeared in mailboxes across Columbus.
What I love about this mailer is that it’s obviously written by consultants who live in wealthy neighborhoods where the drone of police helicopters isn’t known. You won’t believe it, but one is hovering over my Franklinton apartment as I write this at 12:08 a.m. Monday morning. It sucks!
The flyer also highlights Motil criticizing the city’s recent gun buyback. Well, here is Brian Steel, Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #9, also criticizing gun buybacks:
And you know something? Steel is right! But in Mayor Suburbs’ world, buybacks are part of “standing up to the extremist Ohio Legislature.”
Mayor Suburbs, by all appearances, is going to run a pro-cop campaign while the local police union is effectively calling for his public execution on Twitter for not personally stopping every violent crime in this city.
Mayor Suburbs, removed from the FCDP’s endorsement, is just some juiceless dude who schmoozed his way through the city cocktail circuit to somewhat remarkably become mayor of a city with nearly one million residents.
He hates campaigning and actively does as much as he can to avoid interacting with everyday citizens who can’t donate $10,000 to his campaign coffers.
I have criticisms of Motil as I do of every politician who isn’t me. Electing him won’t turn Columbus into a communist utopia, though it’d be cool if it did. But at least Motil cares enough about ending this charade to run a campaign with no corporate support that has Mayor Suburbs about to drop $2 million on his ass.
That alone is impressive and is worthy of my vote. As of today, Motil, along with Ms. Hood, has earned the complete and total endorsement of The Rooster.
If you’re satisfied with Columbus’ direction, that’s fine. But please consider voting for these two candidates. The local machine will still have a majority of votes on council and thus control its agenda, but it’s time we have some politicians in this city who weren’t groomed for their obsequiousness to the corporate powers that truly run our city.
I’m voting for Joe and Adrienne. Have met them both and both are great. Joe isn’t polished but he truly cares, and he knows more of how the sausage is made than I think most people assume.
Ginther’s ads are a total embarrassment. His videos claim he’s been tirelessly fighting crime… I literally lol’d. Then this flyer… the best two items he can come up with are a gun buyback and an example of making the Short North a police state because the Partnership probably told him to.
The guy is such a fucking amateur. But it’s the way he looks at people (calls them his “subordinates”), the way he avoids any responsibility whatsoever, and the manufactured personality where he uses a phony “this deeper, slower voice is my super serious voice now guys, you really need to take this serious for reals” that gets me every time. He’s like the villain in a B horror movie that’s in plain sight in a priest’s costume.
I’ve not heard a single person say they are voting for Andy and I hope to god it’s true. Otherwise we need to plaster the city with crucifixes to get this development vampire the fuck out of town.
Great piece. It’s telling that “Gunther” and his highly paid consultants need to spend so much Upper Arlington and New Albany money to keep his chair at city hall. It’s also cringy to see him promote the doomed public school levy while he sends his kid to private school (Wellington). Feckless clown!