So, you want to move to Ohio?

Tell Mike DeWine to send me that $50 million instead.

Ohio governor Mike DeWine announced his biannual budget yesterday. This freakish elf decided to headline the event with a request for $50 million for an advertising campaign to highlight Ohio’s low cost of living in a bid to convince coastal young people to move to the Buckeye State and raise expenses on the rest of us.

Instead of blowing $50 million in a pandemic on a glitzy advertising campaign that will not work, I simply wouldn’t have spent a 40-year career in state and federal politics working to strangle opportunity for young people while bending over backwards to reward the religious fanatics and Big Business interests that financed my campaign.

But hey, what do I know? I’m simply a 34-year-old man that has watched a majority of my talented friends move out of state and lived to see not one of them ever regret the move.

So, in a bid for bipartisanship — that famous buzz word in which Republicans are interested because Democrats control a trifecta in the federal government — I have highlighted all the reasons why life in Ohio should entice any young person that thinks $1,800 for a “luxury” two-bedroom apartment in the Short North is a deal of the lifetime.

• Ohio is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country with Republicans having supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature.

• Donald Trump won this state by eight points in both election cycles.

• We have one of the worst coronavirus vaccine rollout programs in the state.

• Ohio actually led the country in response to coronavirus in March 2020. Then Governor DeWine capitulated to the demands of militias and Facebook zealots and allowed Dr. Amy Acton to resign as the director of the Public Health Department and everything promptly went off a cliff.

• Coronavirus has killed 11,233 Ohioans. (For comparison, Cuba, a country of similar population, has lost 216.)

• Half our state still can’t be troubled to wear a mask while shopping for groceries.

• Our state has a $3 billion Rainy Day Fund that has yet to be tapped in the middle of a global pandemic, which is fine because as everyone knows we pay taxes for our money to sit in hedge funds, not for services.

• U.S. News & World Report ranks Ohio 35th in the country in healthcare.

• U.S. News & World Report ranks Ohio 27th in infrastructure.

• Lake Erie is the most polluted of the Great Lakes, which is due to our inability to rein in the Farm Bureau and allowing farmers to dump whatever they want into our water supply.

• There are no statewide nondiscrimination protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people in Ohio. The Ohio Fairness Act, which would grant those protections, has stalled in the Statehouse for over two years. As such, you can be fired from your job or refused a rental property because of your sexual orientation.

• Ohio is one of 30 states that allows debunked gay conversion therapy.

• If you have an abortion, Ohio forces you to either cremate or have a funeral for the fetal remains.

• Ohio is currently in court trying to ban abortions after six weeks, which is before most women even know they’re pregnant. If the law is allowed to stand, teenagers would be forced to have their rapist’s baby as there is no exception for rape or incest as we consider that “God’s will.” We will do nothing to help you once that baby is born, either. Sorry about that!

• The gun lobby is so powerful we couldn’t even pass tepid gun safety laws in the wake of the Dayton Massacre, in which an insane man used a murder machine to kill nine people and injure 17 others in 29 seconds.

• Governor DeWine recently signed a “Stand Your Ground” law, which removes the duty to retreat in a life-threatening situation. The Urban Institute concluded these laws in other states gave a white person a 350% better chance to have their shooting ruled “justified” if the victim is black.

• Speaking of DeWine’s love of black people, yesterday he marked Black History Month by reposting a decree he had signed in February 2020. I wish I were making that up. As of this writing, it has been up for 18 hours.

• The black infant mortality rate is almost three times that of white infants, and it’s getting worse.

• We are vaccinating black people for coronavirus at a third of the rate of white people.

• Ohio is ranked 45 out of 50 states in racial economic equality.

• The Chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Dr. Steve Huffman, suggested “the colored population” has higher coronavirus mortality rates because “they don’t wash their hands as much.”

• The Chairman of the Health House Committee, Rep. Scott Lipps, is an anti-vaxxer who runs a business selling mattresses to the nursing homes that he regulates.

• The Cleveland Warriors, an amateur football team composed of cops and first responders, welcomed Timothy Loehmann, the murderer of Tamir Rice, into their ranks. When black teammates objected, they booted them from the squad.

• Ohio is the largest state in the country without state-supported passenger rail service. Columbus, its capital, is the largest city in the country without light-rail service.

• The lack of trains is fine considering we have the ninth-worst drivers in America.

• Last year, Governor DeWine signed HB-6, which vox.com called the worst energy law of the 21st century because not only did it bail out decrepit nuclear power plants (and a coal plant in Indiana!), it also stripped the state of renewable energy standards.

• The architect of the law, former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, was indicted last year for the largest bribery scheme in state history that successfully pushed HB-6 through both chambers of the legislature and onto the governor’s desk. He was re-elected in a landslide last fall by voters in Perry County and continues to serve as a state representative to this day.

• The FBI is investigating former PUCO Chairman Sam Randazzo for accepting a $4 million bribe from the energy companies he was supposed to be regulating.

• We are ranked 8th in federal corruption convictions per 10,000 inhabitants. And that’s not included the recent slew filed by outgoing Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe DeVillers.

• Ohio had record liquor sales last year, and all those profits went into JobsOhio, an unaccountable slush fund that does nothing to retain jobs and is used as a piggybank by politicians for free international trips.

• The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that our school funding formula, which inherently punishes poor districts, was unconstitutional in 1997. It’s still on the books to this day.

• Our public schools rank No. 22 in preparing students for college.

• The minimum wage is $8.55 an hour, or $2.33 less than what’s considered a living wage in Ohio.

• Local municipalities are not allowed to ban plastic grocery bags.

• Our state legislatures are pushing for “Donald Trump Day,” to commemorate the first president in United States history to lead an insurrection on the nation’s capitol building that resulted in five deaths and killed three cops.

• The only time we make national news is when one of our state legislatures posts something psychotic on Facebook, like that time former Rep. Candice Keller blamed mass shootings on gay NFL players who smoke weed.

• The biggest benefactor of the biggest public university in the state, Les Wexner of Ohio State, is a disgraced children’s lingerie salesman who is eyeballs deep in connections to dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

• The mayors of our three biggest cities are completely beholden to local barons and incapable of taking on the Republican machine in statewide elections.

And these are just off the top of my head of reasons I love to live in this bastion of democracy!

When you consider our disdain for public transportation, our underfunded public school systems and local governments, our corrupt government that thinks Climate Change and Coronavirus are a Chinese hoax, the rampant racial inequality and fervent belief that abortion is murder… it’s easy to see why Governor DeWine said yesterday that we are a “progressive state” and why Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted said, “We need to quit being humble about it!”

When you look at the big picture, it’s perplexing why young people have fled our state our state for decades or why we would need to spend $50 million to try to convince people to come die in Ohio in the first place. It seems to me like the Republican vision for Ohio is proceeding accordingly.

THOSE WMDs. Lunatics, idiots and bad weather are wasting vaccine doses… QAnon and the cultification of the American Right… Great Migration transformed Toledo as Blacks from South sought better lives… Questions remain about Big Food’s influence on dietary standards… Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the entrenching vaccine apartheid.