Rooster in Review: Welcome to Slovakia!

It wasn't a great week for Ohio in national news if you can believe that.

If the primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens—after all, it’s hard to pay taxes if you’re dead—then the state of Ohio is failing miserably, according to a new report from The Washington Post.

Ashtabula’s problems stand out compared with two nearby counties — Erie, Pa., and Chautauqua, N.Y. All three communities, which ring picturesque Lake Erie and are a short drive from each other, have struggled economically in recent decades as industrial jobs withered — conditions that contribute toward rising midlife mortality, research shows. None is a success story when it comes to health. But Ashtabula residents are much more likely to die young, especially from smoking, diabetes-related complications or motor vehicle accidents, than people living in its sister counties in Pennsylvania and New York, states that have adopted more stringent public health measures.

[…]

State lawmakers gained autonomy over how to spend federal safety net dollars following Republican President Ronald Reagan’s push to empower the states in the 1980s. Those investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines, with conservative lawmakers often balking at public health initiatives they said cost too much or overstepped. Today, people in the South and Midwest, regions largely controlled by Republican state legislators, have increasingly higher chances of dying prematurely compared with those in the more Democratic Northeast and West, according to The Post’s analysis of death rates.

[…]

Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.

The report also includes a quote from House Majority Floor Leader Bill Seitz that publicly reveals his recent batter with kidney cancer for the first time.

DeWine has a “nanny state” mentality, said Ohio state Rep. Bill Seitz, the state House majority floor leader and fellow Republican who has helped block tobacco tax increases amid aggressive lobbying by industry interests. The 68-year-old Seitz, who smoked for 50 years before developing kidney cancer and having a kidney removed this summer, said he’s unmoved by his own brush with the health system — even if it led him to finally kick the habit.

“I’m not going to turn into a smoke Nazi just because I used to smoke and I don’t anymore,” Seitz said.

Only in Ohio do you have a God-given right to die by smoking yourself to death, but heaven forbid you seek an abortion for your ectopic pregnancy. Then suddenly, that is the business of the Republican majority in the State Legislature!

Not that the hypocrisy matters to these people. I wish they’d have some shame when they gleefully refer to Ohio as a “pro-life” state. There is nothing pro-life about our existence in our humble, polluted backwater outpost.

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This week in Ohio Man…

Thanks to ambiguous language written by dead enslavers in the Second Amendment of our nation’s Constitution, we’re now subject to almost any insane person on the street carrying a murder machine on their persona if they want to.

Take that gentleman behind the counter at Wendy’s. You probably wouldn’t perceive him as a man who is carrying a murder machine and is only one bad day away from using lethal force on you.

But that’s precisely what happened to a Black man in Toledo who was shot and killed in Toledo over coffee.

From 13abc.com:

“Coffee, coffee they said Sharod comes in there all the time and gets stuff free,” Ramona Wilson said.

The family said police confiscated the surveillance video and shared details with them.  The victim’s sister said Sharod told an employee the coffee was cold.

She said one employee offered to get him more coffee, but the family said employee Cato Hornbeak responded negatively and an argument ensued.

Taylor’s sister said her brother told the employee to come outside. It appears that’s when the shots were fired. Police charged Hornbeak with murder.

“He was working at Wendy’s on the clock with a firearm. How is your life in danger if felt your life was in danger? You are carrying the heat. Sharod doesn’t carry no gun,” Shavontay Wilson said.

Police have not said if Hornbeak had the gun on him or if he went to get it.  The family says TPD recovered the weapon and will run it to see if it’s been used in any other crimes.

Besides the obvious, the most surprising thing about this story is that police immediately charged the Wendy’s worker with murder.

It says a lot about our society, however, that a guy who works in a fast food joint had deluded himself into thinking he needed to carry a murder machine while at work.

Stories like these don’t happen in other developed countries. And they go a long way in explaining Ohio’s dismal life expectancy rate.

This week in The Rooster…

• Introducing the Patriots Project. The Larry Householder trial document dump is public for the first time, and you can earn some free stickers or shirts if you find anything interesting that can be used in these hallowed pages. This dispatch is free for all and comes with the correct link to the document dump: www.slhtrial.com.

• The big problem for big labor. Detailing how far the AFL-CIO and Allied Construction Trades went in passing HB-6 and defending the ensuing repeal effort.

• Dave Yost doesn’t care about human trafficking. Dave Yost is the latest law enforcement official to label prostitution busts as “human trafficking investigations.” If he wants to investigate human trafficking, he could start with the wealthiest man in Ohio.

THOSE WMDs. How one lady tricked countless doulas into delivering a fake baby… The great Zelle pool scam… Alabama finally has a new Congressional map… Website exposes the truth about soaring food prices… What was the first banned book in history?