Rooster in Review: A week in phenomenal content
Tying some loose ends from a brisk albeit short working week.
Well, what a week that was! It’s like Vladamir Lenin used to say, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen."
I want to thank State Rep. Bill Seitz (R-Green Township) for breaking the fourth wall and name-dropping The Rooster during committee testimony earlier this week:
The quote comes from a bill that would allow townships to post legal notices to their websites and not the area paper of record as currently required. Apparently, a Cincinnati Enquirer editor called Seitz to complain about the change.
You can see how much the Holy Roller wing of the Ohio Republican Party enjoys my work by the reaction of chairwoman Marilyn John (R-Shelby) who mockingly thanked Seitz for summoning the name of a deranged sewer blog on government time. She earned herself a ticket to the Bust Up List for that hate!
Seitz then went on to destroy State Rep. Joshua Williams (R-Sylvania) while testifying in favor of a proposed bipartisan pilot program to pay kindergarteners and ninth graders for going to school as a way to combat the state’s troubling trend of chronic absenteeism in its schools.
Rep. Williams, who routinely defends past rape jokes he made on social media, bizarrely asked Seitz if this would lead to paying “rapists not to rape.”
I’ll see Seitz in Hell with the rest of the Ohio House Majority Caucus, but at least the man is ideologically consistent, intelligent, and capable of genuine hilarity, which is more than you can say about a sizable majority of his Republican colleagues.
My only regret is not getting off Tito’s Handmade Vodka sooner. If I had known these would be the results in only one year of playing hardball with this cabal, then I would have done it years ago.
Some other stories around the state that caught my interest:
A pastor in Bryan, Ohio, got criminally charged for turning his church into a 24/7 warming center for the area’s homeless population. Small-town Republicans love to ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?” until it’s time to do things that Jesus would have done. [WSAZ.com]
Police in Elyria, Ohio, raided the wrong home in a hunt for what must have been the most dangerous 14-year-old in the world, judging from their tactical response. Despite being told by neighbors they had never seen the 14-year-old in question, police promptly broke some windows, flash-banged a baby on a ventilator, and refused to render timely aid while handcuffing the mother. [CNN]
State Rep. Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester), the No. 1 kook in the Ohio Legislature, said that he son won’t have sexual relations with “loose” or “vaxxed” women—in that order. The response came to a tweet from a self-described “genius” doctor who equated his unvaxxed sperm to the new Bitcoin. [Twitter]
A new internal poll featured in a meeting for the National Republican Senate Committee says Secretary of State Frank LaRose is in last place with 11 percent of the vote. LaRose’s Senate campaign, which I declared dead on arrival a month before he even declared, is going in a way that makes me theorize he has a humiliation fetish. [Twitter]
If you enjoy my work, then please consider joining the Patriots Caucus and ensuring that independent political journalism can continue in our polluted backwater outpost of a state.
This week in Ohio Man…
I did a weekend in jail for property damage after an Ohio State game once upon a time. The root cause was my raging alcoholism, if you can believe that.
But I’ll never forget being in jail and learning that “the Workhouse,” as it’s colloquially known, didn’t release weekend prisoners until Tuesday morning, sometime between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.
If you didn’t have somebody willing to make that sacrifice to pick you up, the good news was that you could be re-arrested for walking alongside Jackson Pike.
I say that to inform you that I’m sympathetic to the plight of getting home safe from a stint in jail! However, I can’t, in good faith, recommend that you still use a paratransit bus as one Cleveland-area man did.
From Molly Walsh of cleveland.com:
CLEVELAND, Ohio – A Garfield Heights man stole an RTA paratransit bus on Christmas Eve because he did not have a ride home after being released from Solon’s jail, according to a police report.
A Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted Vito Ecolano, 29, this week on charges of grand theft of a motor vehicle. He will appear for his first hearing later this month.
The incident began when Solon police responded to D&M Convenience Food Mart, 33630 Aurora Road, at about 11:30 a.m. Dec. 24. A Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority bus driver called 911 to report that his bus had been stolen.
The driver, 53, told police that he went into the store and left the white 2017 Chevy paratransit bus unlocked and running.
Officers obtained security footage from the convenience store that showed a man wearing a black hoodie and blue jeans enter the RTA bus and leave the area traveling eastbound on Aurora Road.
The sad part is that Mr. Ecolano probably thought he was stealing a regular bus! Instead, he was hampering the travel of some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens.
I doubt the judge will look sympathetically upon him when his day of judgment comes. But hopefully, he’ll have arranged a ride the next time he gets out of jail.
This week in The Rooster…
Only two dispatches this week thanks to Monday being Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But they were two quality dispatches if I do say so myself:
Inside the most brutal Republican primary in Ohio. State Rep. Haraz Ghanbari (R-Perrysburg) vs. a weird British lady is producing amazing content with a little under two months left to go in the fight.
Get a load of this carpetbagging fake farmer running for Ohio House. Daniel Kalmbach is campaigning as a salt-of-the-earth yeoman when nothing could be further from the truth. Thanks to his social media history, we have receipts!
As always, be sure to follow The Rooster on Twitter, TikTok, Bluesky and YouTube for all of Ohio’s depravity, all the time.
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