January 21st, 2019: Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Basketbucks don't tip bartenders, OHSAA tells parents to STFU, Larry Householder loves prison labor, and more.

First order of business: I hope Tom Brady falls into a wood chipper while trying to kiss his gangly teen son on the mouth.

Second order of business: Let’s see how President Dementia will celebrate one of the 20th century’s most transcendent figures on his federally-mandated holiday.

Anyway, MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is always worth the read. Our country is worse without his voice, and America has a long way to go before our country realizes his dream.

The Basketbucks apparently have lost four straight in the Big Ten. And it’s deserved, according to a tweet from a guy named “Geno” that I refuse to fact-check.

Basketball players, like most college students, are broke unless they have rich parents or are willing to sell themselves into 20 years of debt slavery.

This is an opinion I held in college, so it’s not me dunking on students: If you can’t afford to tip at least $1 a drink… take your ass to the corner store, buy two FourLokos for $5, and keep your ass at home.

I stand in solidarity with the workers at Midway, despite their bosses disrespecting my college memories by gentrifying Bento Go Go.

The latest example of Ohio’s robust mental health: The state’s high school athletics association pleading for angry parents to shut the fuck up so they can hire refs to call their shitty kids’ even shittier games.

From 10tv.com:

There has been a shortage of Ohio high school officials recently, and the OHSAA says fans berating the officials is a big reason why.

The letter basically tells fans to “cool it.”

“Make no mistake about it. Your passion is admired, and your support of the hometown team is needed. But so is your self-control. Yelling, screaming and berating the officials humiliates your child, annoys those sitting around you, embarrasses your child’s school and is the primary reason Ohio has an alarming shortage of high school officials,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to say “According to a recent survey by the National Association of Sports Officials, more than 75 percent of all high school officials say “adult behavior” is the primary reason they quit. And 80 percent of all young officials hang up their stripes after just two years of whistleblowing. Why? They don’t need your abuse.”

Angry dads in my day used to keep their insanity confined to JJHuddle message boards. (No better thrill than drinking ten Busch Lights and cussing out your kid’s coach online.)

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to referee. If I’m going to suffer middle-aged man screaming at me for three hours, I’m going to need at least $250. If we’re talking a revenue-producing event like football, I’d need at least $500.

Larry Householder lasted exactly five days as Speaker of the Ohio House before getting ensnared in another ethically-questionable situation.

From Randy Ludlow of dispatch.com:

Even after corruption-tainted Ohio Penal Industries was under investigation in 2017, now-House Speaker Larry Householder called Ohio’s prisons director to inquire about the cancellation of a project calling for prisoners to fabricate and install a cut-rate steel fire escape at a funeral home in his district.

About two weeks earlier, the legislative aide to Householder — who was elected speaker earlier this month — emailed the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s lobbyist objecting to the cancellation as unfair. He appeared to ask prison officials to reconsider the scuttling of the work at Roberts-Winegardner Funeral Home in New Lexington.

Ultimately accused of wrongdoing in a state investigation, former Ohio Penal Industries manager Dan Kinsel arranged to provide a cost estimate of $8,810 on April 24, 2017 for vocational-training inmates to build and install a fire escape at the funeral home in his hometown.

While interviewing now-retired prisons director Gary Mohr, a deputy state inspector general said that Kinsel “threw an off-the-cuff quote ... without doing any research” to the funeral home, with prison officials later determining it would cost $15,000 for the steel alone. The cost estimate was signed by one of Kinsel’s subordinates.

The best part is the owner of the funeral appears to have let Householder know about his need for a fire escape at an agreeable rate while preparing Householder’s mother for burial.

Householder’s legislative aide sent an email to the prison system lobbyist on Sept. 19, 2017, with Householder, R-Glenford, then calling Mohr at home during the evening of Oct. 4 or 5, 2017, according to records underlying Inspector General Randall J. Meyer’s investigation. His office’s report did not discuss the funeral home project.

The lawmaker’s call came a few days after the Roberts-Winegardner Funeral Home had handled services for his mother, Bobbie Householder, 91, on Sept. 30, 2017.

Householder is no stranger to using prison labor, which is a 21st-century euphemism for slave labor. This is the second time in 30 days he has been caught using prisoners’ products for his own personal game.

His office originally got caught with a prisoner-produced $10,000-conference room table for which he paid $0.

From Jim Siegel and Randy Ludlow of dispatch.com back in December:

The table and chairs, priced at $9,313, were placed in Householder’s office in the Riffe Center. The furniture was made by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s Penal Industries program, which teaches inmates vocational skills.

In a Jan. 29, 2017, email from Penal Industries manager Dan Kinsel to John Lyon, a furniture sales manager for the program, Kinsel wrote regarding the table: “Please move forward. I will work on the logo for you. I would like to see the sample when it comes in. We need the support of the Ohio House of Representatives on OPI’s side if you know what I mean!!”

Records obtained by The Dispatch show that prisons Chief Inspector Roger Wilson emailed now-retired prisons director Gary Mohr on July 19, 2017, to report that Kinsel had ordered the custom desk for Householder.

Bold play for Householder to behave this way with the FBI still investigating the fallout from the resignation of disgraced Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger.

Liberty University is a multimillion-dollar diploma mill that fronts as a religious institution. Anybody who touts their Liberty degree is a grifter trying to get one over on you.

Oh, and our tax dollars subsidize this charade.

From Alec MacGillis of nyt.com:

The real driver of growth at Liberty, it turns out, is not the students who attend classes in Lynchburg but the far greater number of students who are paying for credentials and classes that are delivered remotely, as many as 95,000 in a given year. By 2015, Liberty had quietly become the second-largest provider of online education in the United States, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, its student population surpassed only by that of University of Phoenix, as it tapped into the same hunger for self-advancement that Trump had with his own pricey Trump University seminars. Yet there was a crucial distinction: Trump’s university was a for-profit venture. (This month, a judge finalized a $25 million settlement for fraud claims against the defunct operation.) Liberty, in contrast, is classified as a nonprofit, which means it faces less regulatory scrutiny even as it enjoys greater access to various federal handouts.

By 2017, Liberty students were receiving more than $772 million in total aid from the U.S. Department of Education — nearly $100 million of it in the form of Pell grants and the rest in federal student loans. Among universities nationwide, it ranked sixth in federal aid. Liberty students also received Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, some $42 million in 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available. Although some of that money went to textbooks and nontuition expenses, a vast majority of Liberty’s total revenue that year, which was just above $1 billion, came from taxpayer-funded sources.

And it was no secret which part of the university was generating most of that revenue, said Chris Gaumer, a Liberty graduate and former professor of English there. “When I was there, at faculty meetings the commentary was that online was funding the school, while they were trying to just break even on the residential side,” he said. “It was understood that on the online side, they were making a killing.”

Good to know these clowns maintain a pipeline that produces anti-government zealots with assembly line-like efficiency.

Jerry Falwell, you might recall, is the hardcore Christian conservative who, according to a lawsuit, fucked a 21-year-old pool boy with his wife, which presidential fixer Michael Cohen used to blackmail Falwell into endorsing Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries.

Normal times in America.

Here’s a wild story from a former Toledo Walleye manager about NHL player Alex Hicks.

From Mark Monroe of toledoblade.com:

McSorley said he immediately saw the young forward's potential when he was in training camp.

“The only problem was when Hicksy came to town, he had a girlfriend and a dog,” McSorley said. “The player apartments did not allow dogs. We really wanted Hicksy to stay in Toledo. So we convinced the team doctor that his girlfriend was deaf and that she needed a hearing dog. So if someone came to the door or the phone rang, the dog would bark and alert her. So his girlfriend Sarah — who is now his wife — had to walk around all that season acting like she was deaf.

“Ah, the stuff we got away with.”

I want to believe this story is real, because I once had a friend who pretended to be blind at a bar in Chicago and didn’t pay for a drink all night. If the wife went a whole season pretending to be deaf and got away with it, I see why the hockey player wifed her.

The Baby Boomer High Crime of the Day belongs to former Browns GM Michael Lombardi for falling for the comical but crude photoshop you see above.

Thankfully this goof no longer calls the shots in Berea.

THOSE WMDs. Brian Orakpo’s cupcake store went bankrupt… When you’re poor, tiny inconveniences can ruin your life… Please wear sunscreen… CVS paid itself more than major competitors, report says… The unbelievable story of the plot against George Soros… How liberals fell in love with The West Wing.