Rooster: Cleveland Browns = America's Team

Fuyao documentary wins awards, infamous iguana survives assault, and more.

The NFL released its 2019 schedules yesterday, and as usual, all I see is 16 wins for my Cleveland Brownies:

The Browns will play a franchise record four primetime games, which gives Cleveland ample opportunity to claim the mantle of America’s Team.

America will love everything about the Browns, except maybe our jerseys which are objectively bad.

That will all change when the Browns go 19-0 and our fans instantly morph into an army of insufferable pricks. We are in no way built to handle any sort of success.

This season is going to be so much fun.

HORNY DOCTORS HELP UNLEASH OPOIOD EPIDEMIC

You don’t have to travel far in Ohio to find someone either personally or second-handily affected by the opioid epidemic, which started when the demon Sackler Family decided to turn addiction into a multi-billion dollar business. (Don’t click that link if you don’t want to spend five minutes getting mad.)

Perhaps for the first time in American history, wealth actually trickled down to workers in the industry. Unfortunately it came in the form of horny medical professionals who simply passed crippling addiction to their patients.

From cleveland.com:

Dozens of medical professionals in five states were charged Wednesday with participating in the illegal prescribing of more than 32 million pain pills, including doctors who prosecutors said traded sex for prescriptions and a dentist who unnecessarily pulled teeth from patients to justify giving them opioids.

The 60 people indicted include 31 doctors, seven pharmacists, eight nurse practitioners and seven other licensed medical professionals. The charges involve more than 350,000 illegal prescriptions written in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama and West Virginia, according to indictments unsealed in federal court in Cincinnati.

"That is the equivalent of one opioid dose for every man, woman and child in the five states in the region that we've been targeting," Brian Benczkowski, an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division, said in an interview. "If these medical professionals behave like drug dealers, you can rest assured that the Justice Department is going to treat them like drug dealers."

Love to see the Justice Department talk tough in media interviews, as if they’re in the business of punishing rich people. Prediction: These white collar crooks will lawyer up and avoid half the sentences usually reserved for black heroin traffickers in Baltimore.

FUYAO DOCUMENTARY REAPING AWARDS

General Motors closed a plant in Dayton where unionized workers made $35+ an hour. A Chinese billionaire in the glass business bought the plant and trimmed wages to $14 an hour.

Such is the life of 21st century American manufacturing, which will be displayed in a documentary that I will 100% be watching.

From Thomas Gnau of daytondailynews.com:

The locally made documentary about Fuyao Glass America, “American Factory,” continues to reap honors even as Netflix continues to negotiate with distributor Participant Media about buying and showing the film, perhaps later this year.

“American Factory” follows Chinese and American workers as auto glass producer Fuyao transforms a closed General Motors plant off West Stroop Road into the world’s largest factory for the making of automotive glass.

The film climaxes in the United Auto Workers’ failed election to form a bargaining unit at the plant in November 2017.

The work recently won best documentary feature at the Sarasota Film Festival, the Ashland Independent Film Festival and the RiverRun Film Festival.

I’ve said for years there is a Pulitizer for any industrious journalist that digs into ruthless union-busting tactics in which Fuyao engaged during the UAW drive. I had no idea somebody made a documentary about it.

If half the stories I heard are true, American Factory will be the most harrowing documentary of 2019.

FACTORY FARM MANURE: WORSE FOR WATERWAYS THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT

During my failed campaign for the Statehouse, I got a chance to tour family farms in Darke County, which as you might imagine was quite the experience for a guy whose primary skills are posting on the internet.

I remember hearing the phrase “manure lagoon” for the first time and thinking, surely this is a euphemism and not a small lake of shit. Friends… that’s exactly what it was.

And while family farms aren’t an environmental hazard, manure produced on factory farms apparently is.

From Amy Eddings of wosu.org:

One of the conundrums in the effort to halt toxic algal blooms in western Lake Erie, near Toledo, is why phosphorus levels continue to rise, even though farmers in the Maumee River watershed have been using less fertilizer. Two environmental groups think manure is playing a larger role than researchers have previously thought. 

The Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C. and the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago say they found factory farms have grown by 40 percent since 2005, and more than half the manure they generate is coming from operations that don’t require permits or manure management plans.

Sarah Porter, a senior geospatial analyst with the Environmental Working Group, addressed some of the criticisms of the study including agriculture groups that questioned the data.

Lake Erie is screwed, because farmers are organized from top down, and it’s a political death sentence for any politician outside Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton or Cincinnati to cross the Ohio Farm Bureau.

OHIO STILL CAN’T MURDER A MAN IN RETALATION FOR MURDERING A CHILD

Ohio planned to execute Jeffrey Wogenstahl yesterday.

A jury convicted Wogenstahl in 1991 for beating and stabbing a 10-year-old girl to death.

Wogenstahl, who was 31 at the time of the crime, has long maintained his innocence.

The state couldn’t execute him yesterday because it still can’t find a proper death cocktail from non-shady sources.

From Jessie Balmert and Cameron Knight of cincinnati.com:

After 27 years of lawsuits and appeals with three cases pending at the county, state and federal level, Wogenstahl was granted an indefinite stay of execution by the Ohio Supreme Court last fall due to open questions about his case.

Since then, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has suspended all executions in a continuing struggle for the state to find a painless way to kill death row inmates.

With drug suppliers refusing to allow their products to be used to kill people and botched executions making headlines, Ohio's death penalty is on life support.

You can tell all the Republicans who just signed the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion bill truly believe in “life from conception to natural death” by their advocacy for the abolishment of the death penalty.

Oh wait...

ONE TOUGH IGUANA

As mentioned yesterday, Arnold Teeter had to have been the drunkest dude in the state at 11 a.m. Monday morning when a fracas in Perkins ended with him pulling an iguana(!) from his shirt and swinging it above his head like a helicopter.

The iguana (pictured above), which the police dubbed “Copper,” is doing much better than him.

From wqad.com:

Painesville police said Arnold Teeter, 49, laid down in a booth and threw a menu at a waitress. When he was approached by the manager, Teeter allegedly pulled an iguana out from under his sweatshirt and starting swinging the lizard over his head. He threw the animal, which missed the manager, and landed on the floor, according to police.

…

According to Painesville police, an exam at the Animal Center of Euclid revealed it suffered a leg bone fracture, which will required surgery. It has metabolic bone disease, is missing part of its tail and is in poor condition.

…

During the hearing, Teeter was disruptive and repeatedly swore at Judge Michael Cicconetti. The humane society requested he surrender to the iguana, but he refused.

“I want my f****** lizard back,” Teeter yelled.

Lizard!? Nah, this guy can go straight to jail without collecting his regal iguana, which is obviously in a much better place.

THOSE WMDs. It’s the Barr Report, not the Mueller Report… Best-before dates create a mountain of waste… I can’t believe Elizabeth Warren is losing to these guys… White nationalist Coast Guard officer isn’t facing terrorism charges… New York lawmakers tee up tax bill that takes swing at golf courses… Tennessee advances bill that could make it harder to register new voters.