Rooster: Tantrum-Throwing Baby Gets Dumped
Rooster: Tantrum-Throwing Baby Gets Dumped
Lancaster rallies around veteran couple on brink of eviction, evicted William McKinley statue arrives in Ohio, and more.
I sent roughly 50 tweets in the first 30 seconds of leaving the theatre last night, but hot damn “Us” was so good.
I don’t do horror flicks because there’s enough scary shit in the world for me without having to pursue the genre elsewhere, yet I wouldn’t classify “Us” as a horror movie.
The guy behind me declared it “big fucked up” when the credits rolled. I agree. I will support Jordan Peele flicks for as long as I live.
HOUSEHOLDER PUTS A BINKIE IN THE MOUTH OF A CRYING TODDLER
Ohio State Senate President Larry Obhof really thought he wanted to pick a fight with House Speaker Larry Householder. Obhof threw a two-week tantrum over a proposed 11-cent gas tax hike when Governor Mike DeWine had proposed an 18-cent hike to start.
The chips were put on the table Tuesday after the state legislature missed the transportation budget’s Sunday deadline on Sunday, which must not have been much of a deadline considering the legislature treated it with as much respect as a stop sign in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
And yet, Householder steamrolled Obhof.
From Jim Siegel of dispatch.com:
Ohio drivers will pay an extra 10.5 cents per gallon in gas tax and, starting next summer, will no longer need a front license plate under a two-year transportation budget that is expected to get final legislative approval later Tuesday.
A more than week-long stalemate between House and Senate Republicans was broken Tuesday, when the two sides agreed to increase Ohio’s 28-cent gas tax to 38.5 cents. For diesel fuel, the tax will increase by 19 cents, to a total of 47 cents.
For a driver that travels 13,500 miles per year with a vehicle getting 25 mpg, the new tax would cost $57 more, or about $1.10 per week. The tax will take effect on July 1.
The final amount is less than Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposed 18 cent tax increase on gas and diesel, but is higher than the original 6-cent increase passed by the Senate last month. Within the past five days, DeWine and legislative Democrats got behind a House proposal that called for an 11-cent gas tax and 20 cents for diesel fuel, while the Senate countered with 9 cents for gas and 16 for diesel.
DeWine and his transportation director have argued for weeks that the state was more than $500 million a year short in what was needed to maintain roads and bridges, complete safety upgrades and continue work on major road projects such as the I-70/71 interchange in Columbus.
The sad part, obviously, is the final amount falls well short of the needed $500 million to maintain Ohio’s shitty roads.
You might not think that’s a big deal. After all, bureaucrats are always whining in a petty attempt to justify their existence, right?
Well, here’s how similar negligence paid off for Tennessee on a bridge I drove over five days ago:
Fun times ahead for the Buckeye State. If I do die via a collapsed bridge, please use my blog posts as the basis for a class-action lawsuit.
YOUR BOSS IS NOT YOUR FRIEND
Here’s the latest example — courtesy of the human disaster that is the closing of the Lordstown GM plant — as to why you should never, under any circumstance, consider your boss to be your friend.
From David Welch of bloomberg.com:
Three weeks after employees at the town’s General Motors Co. compact car plant assembled their last Chevrolet Cruze, employees are filing into the United Auto Workers Local 1112 hall to sign up for unemployment benefits and try to figure out if they should take a transfer to another GM plant, or wait it out in the one factory most have ever worked and see if it survives.
Union workers are livid that they agreed to make $118 million a year in annual concessions to save the plant in mid 2017, only to have GM effectively threaten to close it down a year and a half later. Unless GM reverses its course, Lordstown will fall victim to the harsh reality that fewer consumers are buying small cars and that Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra is hyper focused on doing business only where GM can earn big returns.
“Everything they asked us to do, we did,” said Dan Morgan, the shop chairman of Local 1112 and chief negotiator of the agreement, the details of which haven’t previously been reported. “And still, we don’t have a product to build.”
The price America pays for cheap consumer goods is corporate vampires are allowed to suck workers dry before moving onto more profitable pastures.
That’s a feature, not a bug to Republicans. If Democrats can’t counter disaster capitalism, we deserve to lose.
COMMUNITY RALLIES AROUND COUPLE FACING EVICTION (1 DOWN, MILLIONS MORE TO GO)
On Monday, I covered a heart-warming story about Lancaster’s zoning codes pushing a couple of veterans to the brink of eviction from the house they shared for the last 35 years.
I expected the community would rally around the cause. Once again, I underestimated humanity.
From Sheridan Hendrix of dispatch.com:
When they didn’t get the house painted in the city’s 30-day time frame, Anna and Bill were charged with first-degree misdemeanors, which is punishable by up to six months in jail or a $1,000 fine. Then, when Anna Crawford accidentally missed her court date in February, she was arrested for failing to appear and spent a night in the Fairfield County Jail.
The Crawfords have been trying to get as much of the work done themselves since then.
So when Anna Crawford got a knock at her door early Saturday morning to find Logan Matos, a local contractor, offering to do the work for free, she was overwhelmed.
“It’s just astounding,” she said.
The good news for anybody who offered help only to find out a more agile contractor had beaten them to the repair is that there are literally millions of people across America in a similar predicament. If we could maintain this energy across the board, we might be able to eliminate the scourge of homelessness in the richest country in human history.
CLEVELAND MUSLIMS SHOW HOW THE U.S. HEALTHCARE SYSTEM SHOULD WORK
I worry my diseased brain pulls me into pushing negative stories about our great state. Earlier today, I committed myself to pushing positive stories as well. No idea how long this burst of dopamine will last, but here is a story that makes me hope Ohio isn’t on the path to becoming Alabama.
From Homa Bash of news5cleveland.com:
PARMA, Ohio — Muslim doctors across Northeast Ohio are pooling their skills to bring free healthcare to those who cannot afford it with the opening of a free health clinic.
The Cleveland Ibn Sina Clinic in Parma has only been open for a few weekends and already, more than 30 patients have come through the doors.
There is no co-pay, no bill in the mail later and no cost whatsoever.
Just a few months ago, it served as storage space in the Islamic Center of Cleveland. But through renovation and donations, the free health clinic now houses two exam rooms, a reception area and a waiting room.
Imagine what these doctors could accomplish if a bag of racist bologna didn’t occupy the Oval Office? Shit, there I go slipping back into my negative neurosis again.
“INDIANS” FANS STILL REFUSE TO LOOK RACISM IN THE MIRROR
The plague of baseball has returned to our shores, which means another year of white Clevelanders swearing they respect and honor the culture they use as a mascot for their shitty stickball team which hasn’t won a World Series in over 50 fucking years.
From Peter Pattakos of clevescene.com:
The annual Native American protests at yesterday’s home opener for the Cleveland “Indians” MLB team were quiet, if otherwise typical. Most typical being the constant sneering and shouting at the protesters by the (mostly Caucasian) fans of the team who were upset that anyone would question their right to make a mascot out of a largely exterminated race of people.
“You already won! Chief Wahoo is gone! Why are you still out here complaining?”Of course, Chief Wahoo having finally been removed from the team’s uniforms at MLB’s insistence didn’t stop thousands of its fans from displaying the plainly racist symbol at the ballpark yesterday, many of whom reacted to the protesters’ presence by performatively displaying their attachment to the caricature. Nor, of course, has it stopped the organization from selling Wahoo merchandise.
But more to the point, the protesters’ demand has always been two-fold: Not just “change the logo” but “change the name,” too. Until the organization changes its name—which was adopted in 1915 when white supremacy was simply pop-culture in America, and was not intended to “honor” anything about Native Americans apart from then-popular notions that they were fearsome and anachronistic savages—the protests will persist.
Thank God I learned my lesson in 2007 when I attended Montana (one of many lessons I learned that year, by the way) when a group of Natives accosted me in the middle of campus for wearing a Wahoo hat during Cleveland’s appearance in the American League Championship Series.
“What’s that about?”
“It’s a hat,” I tried to explain.
“Have you ever looked at it?”
I took it off my hat and looked over the obviously racist caricature my peanut brain was unable to fully process. “I mean, yeah?”
“Have you ever thought about it?”
Talk about getting smacked in the face with a bag of hot nickels. I threw the Wahoo hat in the trash shortly thereafter. From there, it was an easy bridge to understanding America shouldn’t make mascots out of the indigenous people it pushed to the brink of extinction while pursuing capitalism from coast to coast.
Maybe next year White baseball fans in Cleveland will come to the same realization.
ONE CITY’S DISGRACED STATUE IS ANOTHER CITY’S TREASURE
Residents of Arcata, California, decided to scrap the city’s statue of William McKinley, due to imperialist lust and fervent belief in Manifest Destiny.
One resident threw acid over the statue, which seems like a waste of a good bucket of acid.
Arcata, however, didn’t melt the statue and sell the remains for scrap metal. It shipped the disgraced statue to Canton, Ohio.
From Kelly Byar of cantonrepository.com:
CANTON — The bronze statue of President William McKinley has arrived in Ohio.
After being removed from a plaza in Arcata, Calif., the statue was shipped across country in mid-March, according to reports from the Mad River Union community newspaper.
Canton Mayor Thomas Bernabei said the Timken Foundation handled the paperwork and logistics of the statue’s relocation. With the assistance of private individuals and organizations, he proposed Canton as the statue’s new home. Arcata City Council voted to remove it because residents objected to McKinley’s legacy.
Canton should figure out a way to permanently incorporate that tire around McKinley’s head. Sure, it was used as a cushion for a cross-country transport. But it also gives off a halo effect, which is ironic considering if Hell is real McKinley is definitely kicking it there.
THOSE WMDs. Barbara Bush on Dick Nixon… What liberals get wrong about conservative state dominance — and why it matters… Rick Reilly is woke now… The women who nod at death… Trump’s aides fear he’s overselling his “exoneration.”