It ain't Somalis scamming everyday Ohioans

Ohioans only need to look up the socioeconomic ladder to see the brazen public corruption happening before our eyes. Not that they'll ever hear that message from unemployed right-wing grifters.

Mehek Cooke, an alleged attorney, spent her New Year’s Eve “asking questions” at Columbus daycares.

Ohio’s most perverted Republicans have been at war for the last week over fabricated claims of widespread fraud among Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis and Columbus.

My old texting buddy, Governor Mike DeWine, surgically disassembled those claims on New Year’s Eve, even refuting one viral allegation that a non-existent daycare was actually a smoke shop:

Unfortunately for the governor, the worst elements of his beloved party react similarly to slugs splashed with salt when hit with pesky things like facts, reality, or reason.

Look at Mehek Cooke, perhaps the only licensed attorney in Ohio without a job, who is so desperate to be somebody that she spent her New Year’s Eve not filing job applications but stalking daycare centers.

One humble business owner made a simple request that she stop filming because children were present on the grounds. Mehek refused despite trespassing on private property in search of a confrontation to stir racist hysteria among her social media followers.

The owner knocked the phone out of her hand, which is about the most polite response possible given the stakes.

Mehek went running back to social media, crying about being “assaulted” and “filing a police report” that got thrown in the trash almost as soon as she hit “submit.”

When I pointed out that these grifters were flying dangerously close to Ohio’s beautiful Stand Your Ground laws, Cooke started mewling in bad faith about how I was “inciting violence” against her.

But not before uncorking the funniest mispronunciation of my name while showcasing her legendary charisma:

Whenever right-wing social media vermin like Mehek cite you as the source of their problems, it sends a torrent of anonymous, subliterate knuckle-draggers into your mentions, usually hurling insults that might sting if you had the mental capacity of a soft-minded third grader.

To me, it’s little more than batting practice.

The most offensive insult wasn’t about my Hollywood jawline, my Adonis physique, or even my impeccable hairline. It was the accusation that, despite the past seven years of peddling sentences about public corruption, I don’t care about “struggling Americans” being defrauded:

It’s worth noting that there hasn’t been a single case of “scumbag Somali fraudsters” uncovered by any of this hysteria. I could put a million dollars on the table and ask for the name of one “Somali scumbag fraudster,” and it would go untouched.

If Mehek were taken seriously, she’d be working for our Republican State Auditor or Attorney General. But even now, she can’t muster any stone-cold evidence to take to either office, which is why she’s shaking ass outside daycare centers for pudding-brained incels.

But even putting the putrid race-baiting from an Indian-born woman aside, what offends me most is that Mehek is misdirecting anger about public fraud down the economic ladder.

If their claims were true—which they’re not—her ecosystem should be angry at the public officials tasked with preventing widespread fraud.

People wailing about “Somali fraudsters” lack the critical thinking skills to understand the plunderbund arranged against them.

We could deport every Somali immigrant, fraudster or not, and these people would have the same problems in their lives. And they would probably shift their ire to the next group of undesirables as a way to feel a modicum of superiority within their bleak, unfulfilled lives.

My claim isn’t that there is no fraud. It’s just that there’s not a small immigrant population committing mass fraud in broad daylight.

Ohio Republican Auditor “Sleepy Keith” Faber must agree, because on New Year’s Eve, his office unveiled the “Top 5 Fraud Convictions of 2025,” and they were all white Republicans:

You can learn more about these convictions via the State Auditor.

I welcome anyone with hate in their heart for public corruption or the negligent waste of tax money that could go toward things like schools, hospitals, or infrastructure to ease the burden of everyday life for Ohioans.

Sleepy Keith has fed us peanuts over the past eight years. And I would argue that the lack of whale meat on our plate can be traced to an infamous $1 billion swindle in which Faber, then-Senate President, played an influential role before Ohio’s hot voters promoted him to his current position.

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow Scandal ($800 million)

[In the end, there was no “may” about it. Via WOSU]

I hold public education dear to my heart, because my history of alcoholism and drug abuse would have ruined my life hadn’t a cabal of primary, middle and high school teachers in Marion, Ohio, taken my education more seriously than I did.

And that’s why I still viscerally shake when thinking about the ECOT scandal, which I talked about incessantly during my tilt-at-windmills Statehouse run in 2018. It’s one of the biggest rip-offs in state history

In short, Ohio gave a billion dollars to a scam charter school run by Bill Lager, a con artist who had lavishly donated to every key Republican in the state:

From Laura Bischoff of dispatch.com:

Campaign finance records turned over in response to a federal grand jury subpoena issued in February 2019 show that Lager and his associates contributed $1.66 million to candidate committees and another $300,000 to political parties from 2000 to 2019.

Then-Ohio Auditor Dave Yost gave ECOT an award for its sterling accounting, months before a state audit discovered rampant fraud by school administrators.

The price tag on the scandal was obvious.

But a lesser-discussed fallout was that thousands of ECOT students were kicked out in the middle of the school year when the school shuttered its operations to shield its operators from legal consequences.

We know those students weren’t receiving a quality education at ECOT, and to this day, there’s never been an accounting of where they landed or how many went on to earn a high school diploma.

Lager, meanwhile, is living in a mansion in Florida and has never been charged with a crime despite ECOT still owing the state $117 million.

Ohio’s hog voters promoted Faber, Yost, and then-Attorney General Mike DeWine at the next opportunity in the 2018 election.

HB-6

Two years after every enabler of ECOT went unpunished, the FBI arrested then-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder for what they claimed was the “largest bribery scheme in state history.”

As I commonly say, it’s the largest bribery scheme in state history… that we know about. Because Householder and his co-conspirators didn’t randomly decide to do the RICO on a random Tuesday, they came to power in a culture where a $1 billion fraud was just another day at the office.

And they would have been right if the FBI hadn’t fallen ass-backward into its investigation, or if Householder hadn’t taken $300,000 of his $60 million bribery pot to pay down credit card bills or put a new deck on his dumpy Florida vacation home.

I believe HB-6 went much higher than Householder, who only controlled one of several levers needed to pass the corrupt legislation into law. Obviously, the Trump Administration (and the Biden Administration) disagreed with me.

A corporation suborning every lever of state government to pass crooked legislation is a problem that every voter can understand. But again, Ohio re-elected Governor DeWine, Attorney General Dave Yost and Auditor Keith Faber in a landslide 2022 election in which Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nan Whaley campaigned almost exclusively through Facebook ads.

The other part of the scandal is that the Ohio Legislature hasn’t taken any steps to ensure HB-6 couldn’t happen again tomorrow, if that were something the Republican junta’s leadership were interested in doing.

Former State Rep. Derek Merrin (R-Monclova Twp.), a former Householder henchman and voter for HB-6, proposed a package of sweeping ethics reforms in 2023, but that was little more than a campaign tactic to smear Speaker Jason Stephens, a former Householder appointee, who had dumped Merrin into the river on what was supposed to be the boy king’s coronation day.

Current House Speaker Matt Huffman, who voted for HB-6 as a State Senator in 2019, has never mentioned any ethics reforms.

Neither has Senate President Rob McColley, a Huffman protégé who, to his credit, voted against HB-6 as a Senator in 2019.

The Intel Swindle ($600 million and counting)

[via the Athens Messenger]

In January 2022, Governor DeWine, JobsOhio and Intel announced an eye-popping agreement to bring the company’s “most advanced semiconductor manufacturing facilities” to Central Ohio.

The deal was so sweet that then-Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, who has a frozen Uncrustable where his brain is supposed to be, undoubtedly thought it would be a cornerstone of his 2026 gubernatorial campaign.

Intel plans to invest more than $20 billion to build two state-of-the-art factories by 2025, designed for what the company calls the “Angstrom era” — with materials processed on the atomic level — and with support for Intel’s most advanced process technologies, resulting in an increased American share of the global semiconductor supply chain.

The megaproject, which will be the largest single private sector company investment in Ohio’s history, will generate more than 20,000 jobs in the state, including 3,000 direct Intel jobs earning an average of $135,000 per year (plus benefits), 7,000 construction jobs over the course of the build, and tens of thousands of additional indirect and support jobs including contracted positions, electricians, engineers, and jobs in restaurants, healthcare, housing, entertainment and more. The project is expected to add $2.8 billion to Ohio’s annual gross state product.

It’s easy to get lost in numbers like $20 billion in investment, $2.8 billion added to the state’s gross annual product, and more than 20,000 jobs.

But, in retrospect, it’s telling that the governor’s release didn’t mention anything about the $600 million in “onshoring grants” as part of a $2 billion package the state gave to Intel to seal the deal.

Most Ohioans probably would have thought that was still a deal worth doing, given the bonanza of investment that would flood the state in a little over three years.

Well, it’s 2026, and we don’t have anything close to resembling the “most advanced semiconductor manufacturing facilities” in the world. We have some holes in the ground with Intel stalling plans at every turn, much to the chagrin of local public officials and residents.

When Intel officially pulls the plug, Ohio will have no recourse to recover that $600 million.

Did we learn a lesson about grants? No. We gave Anduril, an “AI-defense contractor” intent on building a fascist panopticon, $310 million in grants last year, too.

And as for the other tax credits we throw around, Ohio essentially wrote the check on the pinky promise of corporate actors who had every reason to oversell what they could deliver.

It’s not just Intel and Anduril getting away with it, either.

From Jake Zuckerman and Andrew Tobias of Ohio Signal:

Of 60 companies that closed out an economic development loan or tax credit in 2024, 39 fell short of their promised jobs numbers. And in nearly half those cases, the state has failed to claw back money from those companies or take other corrective action, according to a new report released Thursday by Ohio Auditor Keith Faber’s office.

Take Truepill Inc., an online pharmacy, which won a state job creation tax credit in 2021. The company was eligible to receive as a credit the value of 1.483% of a new $6.2 million in payroll spread over 120 new jobs in Hamilton County.

But the company has created no new jobs and no new payroll, according to the state audit.

Will we ever see right-wing influencers “asking questions” in the corporate offices of Intel or Truepill? Or even JobsOhio, the state’s do-nothing sinecure racket that the Ohio Legislature extended into 2053 last year?

I’m doubtful.

Stealing $1.2 billion in private property for billionaire sports stadiums

One of the greatest tricks billionaires have pulled in the past 30 years is brainwashing the average citizen into believing that government subsidies for private sporting arenas are justified by the “economic boom” they bring.

This notion has been dispelled by every serious academic who has studied the issue. (There are four links there, by the way.)

But billionaires, with their pockets unburdened by America’s broken tax code and Citizens United, can leverage their sports teams against various cities, suburbs and townships to extract the sweetest deal possible since most politicians don’t want to deal with the blowback of “losing” a beloved sports team.

We saw this play out last summer, when Cleveland Browns owner (and Republican superdonor) Jimmy Haslam bullied our State Legislature for $600 million to build a garrishly bland domed stadium in the suburban wasteland known as Brook Park.

Because the Browns aren’t the only professional sports team in Ohio, the State Legislature eventually settled on the State Senate’s plan to transfer $1.9 billion to the sports owner barony by stealing the money from the Unclaimed Property Fund.

Franklin County Judge Bill Sperlazza has thankfully stalled that embezzlement, which was set to begin on Jan. 1.

But this is Ohio, where it’s hard to envision a way in which our illegitimate Supreme Court won’t bend backward to bless the state government stealing $1.9 billion of the citizenry’s private property to subsidize billionaire pet projects.

Will Ohio’s hog voters punish the legislators who stuffed this bullshit into the $60 billion biennial budget, rather than through the normal legislative process as a single item?

I’m about as skeptical of that as I am of ever seeing any right-wing influencer “asking questions” outside the offices of any Ohio professional sports team with its hand in the public cookie jar.

The common thread? This is your state on Republican leadership.

These scandals only cover the past seven years.

And it’s without any government audit into darling right-wing social programs, like $1 billion in school vouchers or the roughly $50 million that Ohio has spent on fake crisis pregnancy centers since the Dobbs decision.

Nor does this article explore the gaping holes in our tax code that amount to giveaways to the ultrawealthy at the expense of social services and infrastructure used by everyday Ohioans.

But the common thread through all these scandals is Republican leadership in a state that’s suffered one-party rule for the past 15 years.

That isn’t to say that Democratic-controlled states don’t misuse public money or fail to stop massive fraud.

But The Rooster is not a blog focused on California or Illinois politics. The Rooster is condemned to a much narrower worldview in Ohio, where Republicans have run the show almost unchecked for my entire adult life.

And in Ohio, if this newfound right-wing zeal against government waste is real, there are much bigger beasts to hunt than Somali daycare owners, even if every one of them were stealing from the till, which they’re not.

But we will never see right-wing grifters cover those scandals, because the sugar daddies only pay their bills to turn that anger down the socioeconomic ladder—never up.

Which is why, as soon as Monday, they’ll turn their manic hivemind onto a new, equally fabricated outrage against the poor, minorities, or preferably for them: poor minorities.

That will never be The Rooster thanks to the everyday Americans who sustain the operation.

THOSE WMDs. She tried to kill the president, and he loved her anyway… What extreme cold feels like in prison… The Quiet American captures the hubris of the American empire… The miraculous case of Sumit Nagal… How did this California family end up back in a toxic house?