The Rooster's February Mailbag
Cognitive dissonance on Capitol Square, the downfall of Young Mussolini, punching tickets to Titty Island for someone else... and more!
Welcome to the February Mailbag.
These are always fun to write because it’s nice to take a break by letting the readers do my job for me. They also tend to offer a comical reprieve to the illuminating coverage of Ohio’s political sewers.
I apologize if your question got left on the cutting room floor. I’ll try to answer two or three more in this week’s Rooster in Review, which should land in your inbox by early Friday afternoon.
If you find today’s dispatch informative, entertaining, or informatively entertaining, we’d be honored if you shared The Rooster with your friends, families or sworn enemies.
The questions are in bold, and my responses are in standard text.
Some questions have been lightly edited for clarity, syntax or grammar.
Who’s got the biggest gap at the Statehouse between being personally pleasant and politically insane?
There are more than I would have thought before I started haunting the Statehouse in person.
The cognitive dissonance is jarring. I’ve built personal relationships by proximity and a god-given ability to be annoying, only to see those same people turn around and stomp on anyone who isn’t a straight cisgender automobile dealer making more than $300,000 a year.
The name off the top of my head is State Rep. “Mean Jean” Schmidt (R-Loveland).
She was the subject of some of my earliest bust-ups in the Statehouse. But when her husband passed, I lost the desire to make content out of a widow.
When I relayed that to Rep. Schmidt, it was as if the iron curtain between us fell to the ground. I instantly recognized what made her a successful politician: she is engaging, well-traveled, and low-key hilarious.
She would also turn America into a theocracy tomorrow if she could.
Dr. Acton has a tough road to win the election, but even if she does, there is not enough democratic talent in Ohio to fill all of the positions that need to be filled by an administration. Where do you see her finding those high and mid-level appointees and bureaucrats?
This is a high-level question, my friend. You know ball.
There are two big lessons that Dr. Acton (and her team) can draw from Ted Strickland, the last Democratic governor of Ohio.
She’ll owe a potential victory to Republican incompetence. If you talk to old-timers familiar with Strickland’s tenure, they rolled into Columbus believing they were political savants.
Strickland appointed many county-level Democratic officials who weren’t qualified, due to the aforementioned problem of depth.
Dr. Acton would have to pick her battles and identify competent Republican managers in non-political positions.
If she goes the mass-firing route, she’ll have to lead a nationwide search for replacements. The problem is she’ll owe a lot of favors to Democratic politicos who will believe they played a much bigger role in her election than they did.
What nickname are you most proud of? Mayor Suburbs might be the most apt, but Young Mussolini might have caused the most psychic damage.
Young Mussolini. I said on July 25 that Italian cosplayers were too hot-blooded to lead Ohio’s most beautiful retirement home, and his actions made me look like an Oracle.
He claimed he only talked to “real journalists” after I dropped the quip, but in my defense, I would have thought he had a Mussolini portrait in his living room. And it’s a shame, if he had read The Rooster, I could have saved him from his humiliating downfall.
Most people wouldn’t believe that Senator Jerry Cirino continued his dead-end campaign for the Senate presidency for two months because a blogger said he’d quit “in the coming days” in early December.
But it’s true.
And sure, Cirino got what he wanted with SB-1, but knowing how he’s wired, that will seem like small potatoes for the next three years when he hears me chuckling at him.
That’s the final indignity. The final stop before irrelevance.
What do you do for fun?
If building out The Rooster doesn’t qualify as fun, I enjoy riding my bike and playing Wandrer.
Are you actually 6’2”? That feels like a “team website” measurement as opposed to an “NFL Combine” measurement.
That’s funny because “You’re a lot taller than I expected” is a common refrain in my life.
But I’m 6’2” with shoes on. A little over 6’1.75 without shoes. Feel free to bring the tape measure to Capital Square.
Is your footage from the Nutty Professor attack going to result in the victim living on Titty Island?
I’ll tell you this much: It was hard seeing another man living my dreams right in front of my face.
But I’m thankful that I turned the camera back on seconds before Assistant Professor Perez launched his attack. Mike Newman’s first-person footage doesn’t clearly show him carrying a camera in each hand, Perez stepping into his path, or Newman stepping backward.
Newman’s footage also didn’t capture Perez hilariously trying to convince himself that Newman had “put his hands on him” in the immediate aftermath.
Frankly, the lesson convinced me to bring a cameraman into the fold.
Since your exile from Twitter, why hasn’t your embracing of Instagram led to a presence on threads?
I am on Threads, which, coincidentally, passed Twitter for daily mobile users a month after the kettamine-addicted Elon Musk dropped the hammer on my brand.
I happen to prefer BlueSky.
But I’ll be moving my microblogging efforts to an SMS messaging service via Subtext, debuting in the coming weeks.
Why no coverage on Casey Putsch’s valiant effort to undermine Vivek?
I’m only one man, and the primary is months away. Plus, I’ve been busy carrying a one-sided vendetta against the richest pervert in Ohio.
I kind of think Ohio voters, the Hogs they are, will vote to abolish property taxes. Am I crazy for thinking this will likely pass?
We are definitely stupid enough to do it. And we have leaders dumb enough to push it for their own political gain.
Hilltop Husband received a messaging poll from notorious conman Vivek Ramaswamy the other day that asked her opinion on him possibly endorsing the effort to abolish property taxes for anyone who owned their home for more than 10 years.
But there’s part of me that would laugh at the Republican-loving rural areas committing seppuku because their leaders exploded property taxes by refusing to tax corporations or top-earning individuals properly.
Oh, no! Ashland had to fire 90 percent of its police force.
Oh well, not my problem!
