Rooster: Vanity Plate People Still the Worst
Rooster: Vanity Plate People Still the Worst
Fulton County sheriff deputies accused of "weed trap," UAW sues GM over Lordstown closing, and more.
Twitter is an amazing app that makes you aware that no matter how terminal your case of brain worms becomes there are still people much, much further down the line of degradation.
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz is betting his career on being the No. 1 lackey of President Business Deals. History might not treat him well, though he will always have a cult following despite not being smart enough to tweet a crime.
Michael Cohen, the president’s fixer — always good when the chief law enforcement official of your country employs someone for the sole purpose of making crimes go away—testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday behind closed doors. He’ll testify today, publicly in front of Alexandria Occasio-Cortez and the House Oversight Committee.
NBC says Cohen will describe the president’s lies, racism and cheating as a private businessman. A source told Axios that Cohen “stumbled upon” supporting documentation “in the last 48 hours” and will provide the trove to Congress.
Should be another banner day for the great experiment that is America.
OHIO MAN WITH SMALL PENIS ATTEMPTS TO BUY VANITY PLATE “XLPEN1S”
Few bigger red flags in life than someone rocking a vanity plate on their car. Yes, yes, I’m sorry. Even your Nana with the beloved “GMAOF5” plate is immediately on my radar as a scumbag.
My theory only gets stronger by the year when Ohio releases rejected vanity plates.
Here, via Kaylyn Hlavaty and Ian Cross of news5cleveland.com, are some of the ideas that scare me most:
QANON 45
REDRUM
F THE IRS
RAM 69
D33ZNUT
THOTROD
XLPEN1S
KILL4ME
A22HOLE
CLTARUS
FAT BISH
83 FARTS
Anybody advertising themselves as QANON acolyte establishes themselves as one of the most gullible people on Earth. If I were a moral grifter, I would be profiting upon these people.
“F THE IRS” is a boldly stupid play. The nearest IRS branch probably opened an investigation in that man’s finances 12 hours after the state rejected his idea.
The person behind “83 FARTS” intimidates me more than the aspiring(!?) cult leader behind “KILL4ME.” Hopefully both creators are behind bars right now.
BRAVE BORDER COPS ACCUSED OF HARASSING PATIENTS FOR TRANSPORTING MEDICINE ACROSS STATE LINES
Ohio sells medical weed to sick people at the staggering rate of $500 an ounce. A lot of Ohioans with medical marijuana cards flock to Morenci, Michigan, a quiet village with a population of 2,000 people and three weed dispensaries. Somehow the state up north legalized recreational cannabis and didn’t fall into a lake of fire.
Columbus local news chose to investigate this economic migration for some reason and found Ohio license plates in abundance outside such noted establishments as “Sticky Greenz.”
However, residents of Fulton County (on the board of Michigan, west of Toledo), accuse sheriff’s deputies of harassing them over a non-lethal plant.
From 10TV Investigates:
Two other medical marijuana patients, Kathy Seagraves and her sister, Brenda Williams, both drove to Michigan in December.
Both were cited for marijuana possession and both allege that police pulled them over as part of a “weed trap” aimed at snaring medical marijuana patients caught crossing the border.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Department denies that those who were cited were part of a sting operation. Instead, the department says those cited in December were caught during a traffic blitz.
During one of those traffic stops, 10 Investigates uncovered dash camera where a Fulton County Sheriff’s Deputy references working with a person from the state’s board of pharmacy, who the deputy says has been “coinciding with us.”
Ah, here we are again. That old familiar scenario of wondering whom to trust: the cops or my lying eyes? It’s always so hard to say.
Everything in that story seems like a waste of time and resources. But hey, I’ve never suffered the trauma of being mugged by a grandma looking to score cash to finance her next medical marijuana deal in Michigan.
GM’S LATEST INNOVATION: ENGAGING IN BANNED BEHAVIOR BY CALLING IT SOMETHING ELSE
The UAW will likely forced absorb the loss of membership next month when GM idles its longtime Lordstown plant in a move that will forever transform Trumbull County and the Mahoning Valley.
The union isn’t going quietly in the night. It filed a lawsuit yesterday for breach of contract.
From vindy.com:
LORDSTOWN — The United Auto Workers union filed a federal lawsuit today against General Motors accusing the automaker of breaching a labor contract for its plans to shutdown three plants, including the one in Lordstown.
In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern Ohio, the UAW contends GM violated the parties’ “plant closing and sale moratorium” letter agreement which prohibits the company from “closing or idling any plant during the terms of the collective bargaining agreement.”
GM unallocated plants in Lordstown as well as Warren, Mich., and White Marsh, Md.
The Lordstown plant is to close March 8. The 53-year-old facility employs about 1,500 workers and produces the Chevrolet Cruze.
The lawsuit states “unallocated” is “a synonym for ‘closed’ or ‘idled,’ which would be a violation of its collective bargaining agreement. That agreement runs from Oct. 25, 2015, until Sept. 14 of this year.
Seems like there would be no point of a contract if a forbidden action can be undertaken by one party unilaterally deciding to call that action something else.
Sadly, GM lawyers probably have already plotted how to stall the case for as long as they can. The UAW is still proving the benefit of having a union at your back when an employer goes tits up and tries to throw you on your ass. You may still lose your job, but the severance package will be much heftier.
COLUMBUS: BOOM CITY FOR EMPLOYED CAR-OWNERS
Columbus’ rapid growth has it on the precipice of becoming a nationally recognized Midwestern oasis that has things like New York-style bagels and reliable internet.
Despite the growth, Columbus remains a city with a number of pressing inequality issues that traditional Democratic machine politics won’t solve. One example is the plight of unemployed people who don’t live in thriving neighborhoods.
From Paige Pflegler of wosu.org:
In nearly 40 percent of zip codes in the Columbus area, there are significantly more job seekers than there are jobs. Many of those zip codes are north of the city.
South of the city, the inverse is true: Job opportunities exist, but there aren’t many job seekers close by. The concept is called “spatial mismatch.”
That information comes from a new data analysis from the Urban Institute, a DC-based think tank and research group, which studied geographical mismatches in 16 metro areas in the U.S.
“What we found is that quite often in a number of cities across the country, job seekers live pretty far from available jobs and this affects both them and employers who have a hard time filling those positions,” says researcher Tina Stacy.
I’d like to see Columbus invest in more mass transit. It won’t happen though if trends like this continue.
SERIAL KILLERS SOUGHT IN NATIONAL RAMPAGE AGAINST MOM & POP NEWSPAPERS
We used to live in a world where teams of`well-read racists professionally edited and reported on issues of the day in the form of a paper with words on it delivered to your doorstep by an entrepreneurial teenager who made $18 an hour in 2019 dollars.
We got rid of that world in favor of digital hellscapes where any idiot can curate a symphony of idiotic cacophony to reinforce whatever insane conspiracy theory they choose to believe that day.
Venture capital gremlins pounced on declining papers and promptly liquidated every asset that could be pawned for parts.
From Anna Nicolaou, James Fontanella-Khan and Lindsay Fortado of ft.com:
More than 1,800 US newspapers, including century-old titles that made it through the Great Depression, have closed over the past 15 years, while many of those still printed are shells of their former selves, thin papers filled with wire copy and adverts — which observers have labelled “ghost newspapers.”
The Denver Post now qualifies for ghost paper status, says Penny Abernathy, chair of the University of North Carolina’s school of journalism. She estimates that between 1,000 and 1,500 of the remaining US newspapers meet that definition — many of them owned by private equity and hedge fund investors.
While Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other billionaires have bought newspapers under grandiose notions of supporting democracy, Alden’s strategy has been simple and blatant: once it takes over a company it strips out assets and in the process extracts as much value as possible. It also charges its portfolio companies, such as DFM, fees for managing the business.
That Ohio graph is brutal. In related news, it’s a grand time to be a corrupt politician in Ohio.
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