Rooster: It's Still Browns Time, Baby
The KKK looks to get dumped in Dayton, Lake Erie wins legal rights, and more.
Yesterday was a good day.
Former presidential fixer Michael Cohen cried while reflecting on how his decade of crimes impacted his daughter, and Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC), the guy who once said he’d send Barack Obama back to “Kenya, or whatever,” conjured real tears while denying he’s a racist after using a silent black woman as a prop in a pitiful attempt to prove President Business Deals couldn’t possibly be racist because he hired a black woman.
No Republican dared defend Dear Leader on merits because, well…
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a clinic to several of her Democratic colleagues on how to spend five minutes with a career criminal under oath. (Spoiler: Cross-examination is not a place for speechifying and grandstanding.)
As former New Jersey governor Chris Christie noted, the most troubling revelation for President Deals was Cohen admitting he’s in constant contact with federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York while assisting them with active investigations.
The second most troubling thought for the president’s defenders would be remembering long-time Trump Organization financial executive, Allen Weisselberg, whom Cohen testified could corroborate a litany of fraud and other high crimes, already earned immunity from SDNY investigators eight months ago.
Cohen also warned the president wouldn’t engage in a peaceful transition of power if he loses in 2020. That’s a more likely than most Americans would want to admit.
Anyway, enough with idle talk over Civil War. Let’s talk about how this time next year the Cleveland Browns will be Super Bowl champs.
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FREDDIE KITCHENS AIN’T SCARED OF EXPECTATIONS OR HIS QB LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA
Ohio winters break me every year. Yesterday it finally happened when I read a report of snow slated for three days early next week.
I don’t have to live in Ohio just because all my friends and family do. I alienated them long ago.
But then I remembered: Oh yeah, the Browns are building a war machine on the banks of Lake Erie.
Browns coach Freddie Kitchens arrived in Indianapolis yesterday for a weekend at the NFL Combine, a three-day event of drills that I’m thankful to no longer cover.
Freddie, unlike his predecessor, doesn’t hide behind bland coach-speak.
From Doug Lesmeries of cleveland.com:
I asked Kitchens about the confidence level in the building.
“It’s very much confidence,” Kitchens said. “And we’re not scared to talk about it. I’m not, and hopefully nobody else in the organization is either. There’s a lot of expectations right now.”
At this point, I nearly cut Kitchens off to say I have the Browns pegged for 12-4. But I figured I care what he thinks a whole lot more than he cares what I think.
“But we want to thrive on those expectations,” Kitchens continued, unimpeded. “Because we are putting those expectations on ourselves. And we’re not scared to talk about those expectations. We only have one goal here at Cleveland. And that’s to win the Super Bowl. That’s the only goal.
Freddie sets Super Bowl expectations without being a dick like Bill Belichick wannabes.
Freddie refuses to micromanage players he knows will be ready for business when the time comes. Take Baker Mayfield, who is doing anything other than football in the offseason.
From Mary Kay Cabot of cleveland.com:
INDIANAPOLIS - Baker Mayfield is currently vacationing in Turks and Caicos with Giants stars Saquon Barkley and Sterling Shepard, has nuzzled an emu on The Late, Late Show with James Corden, taped an NFL 100 commercial, has dined with Odell Beckham Jr. and Von Miller, and attended Super Bowl festivities — but Browns coach Freddie Kitchens has no problem with him Livin’ la Vida Loca.
“The one thing I told him when he left the building was I wanted him to get away from football,’’ said Kitchens. “This time last year he had been training already for two months and then we leave here, he continues to train for the draft and then we get into OTAs, minicamps, training camp, so it was like a year and a half process for him almost.
“So he needed to get away from football and he certainly has. You know, on our team, it’s just like I tell our coaches all the time, I want them to have balance in their life, all right? If you don’t have balance, if you’re all this, you’re going to take away from this. Well, what did your family do to deserve to be shortcutted?
The thing about expectations is they can set you up for heartbreak. And folks, I’ll be concerned about my mental state if the bromance of Freddie and Baker doesn’t end in Cleveland’s first Super Bowl.
If this arrangement doesn’t work out, our only option as Browns fans will be to sacrifice Jimmy Haslam to the football gods by burning him alive in a Muni Lot trashcan.
In other Browns news, an alleged Ohio State fan set Cleveland Twitter on fire with a rumor Jabrill Peppers killed a man:
The Draft can’t come soon enough.
KU KLUX KLAN BUMS FROM INDIANA REALLY TRYING GET WHOOPED IN THE GEM CITY
The U.S. Constitution was written for and by white enslavers, so it should come as no surprise to find racist assholes still using it to their advantage in 2019.
Such is the case for a KKK chapter from Indiana, whom the city of Dayton approved for a downtown rally after citing rights enshrined by the First Amendment.
From Chris Stewart of daytondailynews.com:
The Honorable Sacred Knights of Indiana plan to gather May 25 with an estimated 10 to 20-plus individuals in downtown Dayton, according to the group’s permit application.
Out of Madison, Ind., the group first applied for a permit using fictitious names, local law enforcement agencies and the FBI determined, according to the county.
Montgomery County had the group resubmit the application with a legitimate name. After a review and consultation with law enforcement and legal counsel, the county approved the permit by the applicant Robert Morgan, who gives a Madison, Ind., post office box address.
The drive from Madison, Indiana, to Dayton is a little over two hours… which is a long journey for an ass-whooping.
I’ll be shocked if these Neo-Confederates find ten souls to claim their brand of racism in public. I think they filed for a demonstration they won’t attend as a recruitment tactic to create a flurry of local media reports advertising their existence to any fellow lizard person who may happen upon them.
None of that will stop me from being in downtown Dayton on May 25.
Ohio Senate Leader Looks for Fight He Won’t Win
Governor Mike DeWine wants an 18-cent increase on the gas tax, which is regressive and hurts working people more than the wealthy.
Senate president Larry Obhof wants to offset the new tax by trimming the income tax in a way that will undoubtedly benefit the wealthy more than working people.
None of these ideas can be implemented without the consent of Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder.
From Jim Siegel of dispatch.com:
Householder did not commit to what changes the House plans to make to DeWine’s proposal, but he has indicated a willingness to raise more revenue.
Obhof, R-Medina, has been more resistant, questioning whether a revenue problem exists and suggesting that he might want to kick the gas-tax discussions out of the transportation budget into a separate bill or into the upcoming operating budget so it can be part of a broader tax package that uses income-tax cuts to offset a gas-tax increase.
But Householder said the House has not talked about passing offsetting tax cuts.
And regarding road funding, he said: “I think you have to recognize that we have had a long-term problem for a number of years in the state of Ohio, and you cannot solve the problem with a short-term fix. If so, you are just kicking the can down the road.”
It’s a harrowing experience to realize a Swamp Captain like Householder is the most responsible adult in the room. He’ll whip Obhof if it comes to that.
Still, I’m not confident the Republican braintrust settle the dispute in a timely manner. But hey, at least the only consequences in the meantime are crumbling roads and bridges.
LAKE ERIE IS REAL, AND IT HAS RIGHTS NOW
It’s tough times for Ohio farmers. Profit margins are down. A trade war with China remains unsettled. Family farms are going bankrupt across the Midwest at a faster clip than during the 2008 Recession.
Being that Ohio farmers are one of the most organized minority communities in the state, they’re not in the mood for new regulation on the chemicals they use, no matter how much runoff damages Lake Erie. And their organization gives them the clout to enforce their will.
To fight toxic algae blooms, Toledo voters granted Lake Erie legal rights as part of a new legal defense promoted by environmental activists.
From Sigal Samuel of vox.com:
“There’s a lot of nervous energy,” Tish O’Dell, who was at the pub that fateful night, told me while traveling between different polling places in Toledo on Tuesday morning. She was on tenterhooks as she waited for the election results. “It’s like torture.”
If the stakes felt almost unbearably high for the activists who pushed for the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, it’s because this was the first rights-based legislation aimed at protecting a whole US ecosystem: the lake, its tributaries, and the many species that live off it.
The law isn’t without precedent, though. It’s part of the nascent rights of nature movement, which has notched several victories in the past dozen years. Rivers and forests have already won legal rights in countries like Ecuador, Colombia, India, and New Zealand.
Activists in the movement often argue that the environment is the next frontier in humanity’s expanding moral circle: over the centuries, we’ve extended rights to more and more beings, so why shouldn’t nature itself be next?
I travel Lake Erie on my annual hajj to Put-in-Bay, the Ibiza of Ohio. The only people who have more love for that lake than me are the fishermen who make a livelihood off it.
I wish I were more confident in our state leaders finding a fix before Erie turns into a puddle of ancient green ooze.
Senate Committee Findings Fret About Chinese Influence at Four Universities in Ohio
Most Americans believe in the brain poison that is American Exceptionalism. The truth is we’re a young, sparsely populated country whose primary skill in 2019 is spending a psychotic amount our money on the military.
While America squabbles over which demented baby boomer gets to be president, China has been expanding their reach across the globe and biding their time for the inevitable day it passes America as the world’s most powerful economy.
A Senate committee chaired by Ohio’s Rob Portman recently recommended the termination of Chinese cultural exchange programs on U.S. campuses for lack of transparency and reciprocation.
From Jessica Wehrman of dispatch.com:
WASHINGTON — China is investing in and overseeing more than 100 institutes on U.S. college and university campuses in an effort to soften the impression of China as an economic and security threat to the United States, a Senate investigative committee has found.
Over an eight-month period, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, found that “Confucius Institutes” installed in colleges around the country — including at the University of Akron, Cleveland State, Miami University and the University of Toledo — are expanding even as China has sought to restrict a similar initiative aimed at spreading U.S. diplomacy in U.S. schools.
Investigators found no crimes, nor did they accuse any of the institutes of anything criminal. Still, they said while they “recognize and value cultural exchange,” they worry that the Chinese programs lack transparency and that U.S. schools aren’t afforded the same access in China.
…
Senate investigators recommended that without “full transparency” and “full reciprocity for U.S. cultural outreach efforts on college campuses in China,” the Confucius Institutes “should not continue” in the United States.
You can thank former governor John Kasich for slashing funds to higher education. The squeeze opens universities to looking to recoup that lost money in unorthodox ways, thus creating a void for the Chinese government to exploit.
THE ARNOLD IS COMING TO COLUMBUS, BUT IT COULD BE WORSE… YOU COULD BE GOING TO LITERAL PRISON
The Arnold Fitness Expo arrives in Columbus tomorrow. I’ll have some criticisms in tomorrow’s dispatch.
For now, I want to laugh at the couple of grifters who tried to defraud cops and firefighters (among others) with bogus pain cream.
From Lucas Sullivan of dispatch.com:
A central Ohio couple has pleaded guilty to federal health-care fraud charges for conspiring with others to sell a bogus pain cream to those seeking pain relief, including attendees at The Arnold Sports Festival and Columbus first responders.
Officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the southern district of Ohio said Amy M. Kirk, a nurse practitioner in Columbus, and Ryan D. Edney of Plain City, each signed plea deals for conspiracy to commit health-care fraud, according to court records.
Each of them faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The plea deals are part of an ongoing federal investigation into a bogus prescription drug ring, said Ken Affedlt, an assistant U.S. district attorney for the southern district.
Kirk, who worked at Pain Management Consortium in Columbus, and Edney were part of a bigger scheme that pushed a compound drug lotion they described as a “pain cream.” The pitch they gave was that the cream was “free” and delivered pain relief and skin rejuvenation, among other remedies, federal prosecutors and a city police officer and firefighter told The Dispatch.
Cool, federal authorities should now audit the rest of the potions and lotions sold at the Arnold. These two yokels wouldn’t be the only ones going to prison.
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