What's extreme?

Mike DeWine's melatonin vibes have no power here!

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After all, there’s a reason why City Hall loathes me, and the State Legislature wants me hanged for treason.

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Governor Grandpa Sleepy Tea and his omnipresent wife, Fran, recently cut an ad against Issue 1 that reminds me I’m nowhere close to the median voter in Ohio.

Contents of the ad aside for the moment, it’s DeWine at the height of his political ability. The soothing Melatonin tones let him turn the one month Ohio took the coronavirus pandemic seriously into higher approval ratings among Democrats than his party.

From Tyler Buchanan of ohiocapitaljournal.com in June 2020:

DeWine continues to enjoy high approval ratings owing to his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. In total, three-fourths of Ohio voters say they approve of the job DeWine is doing as governor.

That includes an 81% approval rating among Democrats, compared to 76% among Republicans and 74% among independents. 

Sure, March 2020 was a scary time as “the novel coronavirus” shifted from something affecting faraway places to loved ones in our lives.

But by June, Dr. Amy Acton was already out of her job after DeWine failed to do anything after Neo-Nazis protested outside her home. By then, he had caved to the business interests and political extremists within his party.

But that’s how effective “Wine with DeWine” became. And all he did was stand at a podium, read some medical numbers, and answer questions from the press—including from that pint-sized troll Jack Windsor until he got barred.

And 80%(!) of Democrats approved of a lifelong Republican who came from generational wealth that spent his entire political career screwing over people that had to work for a living.

It’s times like this that I have to remember that I’m the weird one for attempting to erect a consistent political ideology. Most Ohioans don’t have that kind of time.

It’s something that DeWine knows. Someone who has been busting their tail for the Issue 1 side told me that the DeWine-Fran ad tests well with voters, and not in a good way!

“Ohioans are confused about Issue 1,” Grandpa Sleepy Tea coos. He knows that a lot of Ohioans will watch this ad during a football game or after work and won’t immediately be able to cite that he’s part of the reason for the confusion by willfully inserting disinformation into the discussion.

From July Carr Smyth of The Associated Press earlier this week:

“It would allow a partial-birth abortion,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine told reporters recently as he explained his opposition to the constitutional amendment, known as Issue 1.

[…]

DeWine was serving in the U.S. Senate when the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was passed in 2003. He voted for the prohibition, which declared a “moral, medical, and ethical consensus” that the procedure was “gruesome and inhumane.” President George W. Bush signed the measure into law with DeWine at his side.

The ban was largely on hold while a constitutional challenge played out. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 rejected arguments against the law, upholding its application across all 50 states.

DeWine is smart enough to know that federal law supersedes the Ohio Constitution. But he also knows that the anti-abortion side can’t fight this battle on the facts because their position is wildly unpopular.

So they’re trying to make it seem that Issue 1 will allow juvenile sex changes and infanticide. In the ad, DeWine presents himself as a moderate… somebody interested in good-faith negotiations with the “pro-choice” side.

The most galling line is DeWine saying that Issue 1, a one-page amendment that would restore Roe vs. Wade standards while protecting things like birth control, “goes too far” even for pro-choice people.

DeWine is again relying on the ignorance of most voters. He’s counting on his patronly aura to lull voters to sleep. We have his entire career that shows that, but we only need the last five years in which he served as Ohio’s Attorney General and Governor.

From Jessie Balmert of cincinnati.com in December 2018:

On Friday, Kasich signed Senate Bill 145, which would ban a common second-trimester abortion procedure called dilation and evacuation and penalize doctors who perform them. Physicians could face a fourth-degree felony, punishable by up to 18 months in prison, for the procedure. 

The proposal, which would ban most abortions as early as 12 weeks gestation, has no exception for rape or incest but does allow for an abortion to save a woman's life.  

"I'm pro-life," Kasich told a crowd at the Columbus Metropolitan Club Wednesday. "I think the issue, whether you're pro-life or you're pro-choice, is moving in the direction of the earliest the better and not the latest."

Fourteen men, including that stone-cold bum Frank LaRose, sponsored that Senate bill with only one white woman joining them.

If DeWine was genuinely interested in what the pro-choice crowd found extreme, he could have challenged the law in court.

Instead, DeWine sat on his hands while Kasich attacked abortion clinics in whatever new way Republican hobgoblin lawyers conjured in their reactionary fever dreams.

By January 2022, six months before the Supreme Court threw 50 years of precedent in the trash to overturn Roe vs. Wade, Ohio had only five abortion clinics left standing.

That wasn’t good enough for Ohio Right to Life president Michael Gonidakis, who said, “Women don’t need abortion.”

From Kaitlin Schroeder of daytondailynews.com in January 2022:

Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis said only five of the state’s 88 counties have surgical abortion clinics so there’s large parts of the state already with no clinic.

“So it wouldn’t be some cultural shock if another abortion clinic closed, which we hope happens, of course. We don’t believe women need abortion and we don’t believe abortions are health care,” Gonidakis said.

Gonidakis is another man making the media rounds talking about how Issue 1 goes “too far.” But he’s never confronted with his extreme views in which women are forced to have their abuser’s baby or how a 10-year-old would be expected to birth a child and raise it and have a normal life in a state that thinks poor people are that way due to their personal choices.

State Rep. Bird (R-New Richmond) told me last week that he supports the Heartbeat Bill, which the legislature passed before he joined, despite not knowing that it has no exceptions for rape or incest, which he said he supports:

And even if the Heartbeat Bill allowed rape victims to seek safe medical care, would it not be extreme to make crime victims prove their worthiness and re-live their horrible experiences until doctors were satisfied that they wouldn't go to jail? I doubt most people would want to see their daughters go through that trauma.

This is in a country where, according to the Central MN Sexual Assault Center, only six percent of rapists ever get convicted in the first place.

State Rep. Josh Williams (R-Sylvania), who still defends rape jokes he made as a 30-something college student, tells voters that “current” Ohio law allows abortions until 22 weeks of pregnancy.

That probably sounds reasonable to many folks who get queasy when they hear the word “abortion.” But it relies on their ignorance of not knowing that the Heartbeat Bill, which bans abortion after six weeks—before most women know they’re pregnant—could become the active law as soon as the Republican-juiced Ohio Supreme Court rules on its Constitutionality.

Williams is another Republican legislator who sees no problem with rape victims raising their attacker’s babies.

If Issue 1 fails, which I don’t think it will, then guys like Rep. Williams will still control personal medical decisions.

The anti-abortion zealots are in this position because they’re the extremists. They weren’t satisfied with a 22-week abortion ban or whittling a state of nearly 12 million people to five abortion clinics. They had to have the Heartbeat Bill—with no exceptions for rape or incest.

After Roe went away, that side won’t be satisfied until there is a total Idaho-style abortion ban. And then they will start coming after birth control, as they’ve already tried to do.

From Seth A. Richardson in July 2022, just a month after the overturn of Roe vs. Wade:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- State Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Clermont County Republican, said during a radio interview this week that she would entertain a debate about outlawing birth control in the wake of the United States Supreme Court overturning constitutional protections for abortion.

Schmidt made the comments during a Wednesday interview with 700WLW’s Bill Cunningham in which she also said companies that provide travel expenses for employees to get abortion care could face legal consequences. Schmidt is the sponsor of a bill in the state legislature that would eliminate abortion from the time of conception, effectively outlawing it in the state.

You can’t negotiate with these people! They can’t be trusted for any reason at all.

Ohio must remember they won’t be satisfied until we’re all living under their draconian theocratic laws—and that, my friends, is the most extreme position of them all.

THOSE WMDs. Rush Limbaugh did his best to ruin America… The botched hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer… How a solar eclipse threw a remote Utah town (and its Navajo workforce) into crisis… The crimes behind the seafood you eat… Is this the end of the Mediterranean beach holiday?