Inside the most brutal Republican primary in Ohio
The primary between Haraz Ghanbari and some weird British lady is getting nasty in House District 75.
Republican-on-Republican violence is one of my favorite genres of pornography.
One day, I hope to open a consulting business doing attack ads in Republican primaries because I know how to hit these perverts where it hurts, and I talk like a normal person.
That’s what excites me about the next two months.
Republican hegemony, you might be surprised to learn, doesn’t equate to party unity on any issue that doesn’t involve bullying transgender people. Statehouse Republicans hate each other with the intensity of any Democrat. Sure, there are factions, but they’re smaller and cliquish than most legislative votes indicate.
That strife will spill into the public during the primary season.
For the uninitiated, 22 brave and sensible Republicans joined with a united Democratic House Caucus on Jan. 3rd, 2022, to elect State Rep. Jason Stephens (R-Kitts Hill) as the next Speaker of the House.
The Democrats didn’t get anything noteworthy out of the deal other than the pleasure of sending State Rep. Derek Merrin (R-Monclova Twp.), perhaps the most petty and vindictive member of the Ohio House, into a pit of alligators in front of his supporters that traveled from all corners of the state to watch what was supposed to be his coronation.
A particular sewer blogger, who had published an embarrassing photograph of Merrin a mere 72 hours prior, also happened to be on the scene.
Get Dumped Then, Derek Merrin
I rode my bike to the arcane cesspit that is the Ohio Statehouse yesterday. My enemies can say what they want about me, at least when I stick a knife in a man’s back, I do the courtesy of letting the victim get a good look at my melon Irish head as they bleed out on the floor. I want them to know it was me who did them in.
Something that embarrassing could have only happened to Merrin, who spent more time thinking about new office curtains and carpeting and embossed business cards than he did securing his flanks after a Republican-only vote named him Speaker-Elect.
The so-called “Blue 22,” in reality, were the ones with brains and political skills.
Since then, the Ohio House has enacted 99% of the extremist agenda. As proof of that, here’s Aaron Baer, the president of the reactionary Center for Christian Virtue, boasting to me just last week about accomplishing their legislative agenda despite Merrin’s downfall:
But accomplishing their legislative goals isn’t enough for many Republican legislators. They want more power. And also, they want people to kiss their feet and thank them for the privilege of having them as rulers.
State Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima), a domestic terrorist if there ever was one, is one such Republican. He’s also the type of politician that Ohioans thought they made extinct when they voted for legislative term limits by a nearly 70% margin in 1992.
Huffman isn’t content retiring to Lima and being a family man when his Senate term ends at the end of the year. He wants to return to the House for a second time, but only as Speaker.
To accomplish that goal, like Larry Householder before him, he’s scoured Ohio for pawns to put him in power when the time comes.
The margins are already thin, as one well-connected Republican told The Rooster yesterday that three members of the “Blue 22” have already privately flipped to Huffman’s team: Tracy Richardson (Marysville), Kevin Miller (Newark) and Gail Pavliga (Atwater).
All three are facing primaries from their right flank, and any deal with Huffman would be to keep him from tipping the scales to their opponent in a primary that’s all about proving to voters you’re the biggest freak alive.
State Rep. Haraz Ghanbari (R-Perrysburg), a Stephens supporter, is one of the top targets of Huffman’s team.
And while Huffman and his corporate backers haven’t fielded a team of world-beaters, Ghanbari has drawn one of the most formidable challengers in Sally Culling, a weird British lady who loves pretending she grew up poor.
As I have said before, I discriminate against white British people without the sense to cheer for Aston Villa, the perfect English football club. I’ve been honest about that when The Rooster exposed her tax problem as well as the Twitter account for her dog through which she and her husband laundered bizarre racist and classist opinions.
But I also begrudge privileged people who pretend they’re poor as soon as they’re running for office. Culling served on the Nottingham City Council at age 22. She indeed grew up in a house that would have been a stretch to call “middle class,” but in the opposite way she intended in that propaganda piece.
I also love the line about coming to America “with two suitcases” like she was some boot-strapped immigrant arriving on our shores during the time of open borders. It's weird how she didn’t mention how much money was in her bank account then!
But I digress.
Culling has tried to paint Ghanbari as a RINO, or a Republican in Name Only, which is the worst slur imaginable to these types of unserious perverts. Culling’s case against Ghanbari, thus far, has been that he voted in a Democratic presidential primary 20 years ago and that he had the decency not to make Rep. Merrin one of the most powerful people in state government.
She’s also alleged that Ghanbari “hid” from a vote on the cruel HB-68 legislation, when, in fact, he had a well-documented medical emergency in another state while traveling. Ghanbari, who had previously not missed a session, made it to Columbus to vote to override Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of HB-68.
That didn’t stop Culling from taking credit for a vote that would have happened without her.
Because Culling is the type of person who thinks we should thank her for running, she has been deleting comments on her Facebook about her husband’s prestigious criminal record featuring drunk and disorderly charges.
Joshua Culling is a member of the Ohio Republican Central Committee, so he’s not a civilian in this race.
Let the first Ohio Man who hasn’t gotten drunk and disorderly cast the first stone. However, it’s notable Mr. Culling was that bad at getting drunk and disorderly! I speak from first-hand experience as a white man from rural Ohio, he had to do some genuinely wild stuff to get arrested that much! It’s almost impressive.
Mr. Culling hasn’t done much to quell the substance abuse accusations during the campaign, either. While celebrating Michigan’s first football championship in nearly 100 years, he posted a picture of his son holding a Coors Light can at the championship parade in Ann Arbor.
If you look at the original photo, there are at least two more cans between Mr. Culling and his son. While the photo is probably a case of his father handing the son his beer to take a photograph—why not simply set it on the ground?
There’s also the problem of who drove the car home that day. Driving drunk with your kids in the back of the car would probably be frowned upon by Republican voters for anyone who isn’t Donald Trump, in which case it would be funny and cool.
The Cullings are also the subject of gossip among the parents of their children’s sports teams.
Two Wood County sources told The Rooster that the Cullings are known to host parties for their children’s sports teams where they offered marijuana gummies, purchased in Michigan and illegally brought back into Ohio, to dumbfounded parents who had to drive home.
But don’t weep for Mrs. Culling too hard. She has found a sympathetic ear with The Toledo Blade, owned by the evil Block family.
I am open about my biases, and readers know that beforehand. This primary is a win-win for me in that the worst-case scenario is I get to bust up some insecure British lady at the Statehouse for the next two years, at least.
But legacy media still chases the myth of objectivity. I call it a myth because every writer brings their own biases to their work.
For example, on December 15th, The Toledo Blade published a piece about a push poll against Culling. Push polls are standard political practice in that they’re polls acting biased questions to influence voters.
The Blade has not covered ensuing push polls against Ghanbari or the one in favor of Merrin’s ongoing Congressional candidacy.
But they saw the one against Culling as newsworthy.
The call from FTS Research asked a couple of questions about presidential and senate candidates but then asked numerous questions about Ms. Culling and Mr. Ghanbari, said Ms. Culling, who provided a transcript of some of the questions.
“Would you be more or less likely to vote for Sally Culling knowing that she is a foreigner, born and raised in England, who even served on city council in Nottingham and is out of touch with American values,” the pollster asked.
FTS Research, it must be said, doesn’t exist! There is no record of it. Why isn’t that part mentioned to readers of The Blade? I have no idea. But the only record The Blade cites is a transcript coincidentally compiled by the Culling campaign.
The piece ends with a quote from an ostensibly unbiased Angelica Shapiro of Perrysburg.
Perrysburg resident Angelica Shapiro received a call Wednesday night that surprised her. It started out as a normal political poll, asking questions about national and state candidates, but it quickly turned to questions to compare and contrast Ms. Culling and Mr. Ghanbari, portraying him as a hero and her as evil, she said.
“There is no way that some group unaffiliated with Haraz put together those questions,” she said, although the pollster denied being affiliated with a candidate or party.
Quite the damning kicker! However, there is no “Angelica Shapiro” on the Wood County Voter Rolls.
The favorable coverage didn’t end there. On January 12th, The Toledo Blade published a piece highlighting Americans for Progress endorsing Culling’s candidacy.
The problems start early (emphasis mine):
Perrysburg resident Sally Culling was endorsed by the Ohio chapter of American for Prosperity, a national, grassroots organization with representatives in all 50 states.
Calling the Americans for Prosperity a “national grassroots” group is first and foremost an oxymoron.
Americans for Prosperity is one of the most influential lobbyist groups in the Statehouse. They’re an astroturf organization almost exclusively funded by the one living Koch brother.
But don’t take my word for it! Here’s President Business Deals last night:
The Blade’s article covers the endorsement as if it were competitive in nature. It wasn’t!
AFP, as they’re colloquially known in Statehouse circles, has been attacking Ghanbari since August of last year:
Americans for Prosperity attacking anyone for raising energy costs is rich, considering it single-handily gutted a bipartisan energy efficiency bill in October.
None of that is mentioned in the article, though. Instead, Culling gets a platform to tee off on her opponent, including a part where she says, without any evidence or pushback, that Ghanbari not voting for a petulant baby-man as Speaker of the House cost Northwest Ohio “money and resources.”
Emphasis mine:
“He is a former Democrat, and he showed his true colors when he voted to block a real conservative speaker in the House,” she said, referring to Mr. Ghanbari’s vote with Democrats to deny state Rep. Derek Merrin (R., Monclova Township), election to be the Ohio House speaker. “He is far more comfortable standing with Democrats than he is standing up to them.”
Denying Mr. Merrin the role of speaker cost the region state money and resources that a speaker could have directed to northwest Ohio, she said.
“It betrayed our local area,” Ms. Culling said.
According to documents obtained by The Blade from the Portage County Board of Elections, Mr. Ghanbari pulled a Democrat ballot in the 2004 presidential primary.
Under Ohio law, a voter affiliates for voter registration purposes with a political party by voting in that party’s primary election. That party remains until the next primary election where a voter can select a different party.
According to Wood County voter registration records, Mr. Ghanbari, now 42, is currently registered as a Republican.
The “Democrat ballot” is a not-so-subtle tell about the writer’s political views in that the correct syntax would be a “Democratic” ballot. Refusing to give the Democratic Party that much is an old Republican hobgoblin trick.
It’s no big thing, but it goes back to every writer bringing their biases into the job. Some do a better job at owning it than others.
Imagine voting for someone who is from England, a Michigan fan and pretends to be poor
That pic with the hat is basically what every white R lady in this state thinks of herself, and I'm here to tell any that are reading... it's not a good look sister.