Your December Mailbag

Answering burning questions from subscribers and followers about alcoholism, the Statehouse, what you want in a State Representative, and more.

Welcome to the December Mailbag, the monthly installment where I try to answer readers’ most burning questions about various topics.

Two subscribers, however, reached out with advice they wanted to pass along in place of a question:

• From Dave on advice for living under tariffs imposed by Trump: “Please advise people to stock up on tubes and tires immediately. Chains if they’ve got the spare scratch and they run 10-speed or more.”

• From Josh, who recently suffered the passing of Meg, a stray cat he adopted from my old landlord’s spare porch in The Bottoms: “If you are looking for a pet, get a street cat. You can't go wrong with the relationship you develop. You have to work for it, not just, ‘Hey, here's a cat that loves everyone.” But it's very fulfilling when you make that connection.”

I might have to include reader advice in these columns since I’m only the Wisest Man in History within these pages.

As always, readers' questions are in bold, and my responses are in plain text.

If I didn’t get to your question, I apologize. As of this writing, it’s 1:35 a.m. on Tuesday, and I have a long day at the Statehouse ahead.

DJ, this is a personal question... How did you quit drinking?

The easiest thing to say is that I didn’t “quit” drinking. That word has a finality that I don’t like when discussing the kind of sobriety you mean.

The 875 days I’ve gone without drinking don’t mean anything when it comes to staying off the sauce today.

My goal is never to partake in alcohol for the rest of my life. But it’s less daunting, as cliché as it is, to focus on that journey one step at a time rather than the totality of the project.

I’d advise anyone looking to get off the sauce: Don’t focus on the destination. When I began, I was happy going hours without drinking, and that has since turned into years.

But beyond that, I got tired of hurting the people closest to me. I got tired of being the selfish prick familiar to anyone who has ever loved a terminal alcoholic. It wasn’t fair to them to make them watch me kill myself one double Tito’s and soda at a time.

Lastly, if you want to quit, you should. It’s the second-best decision I ever made aside from marrying Hilltop Husband, and that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t put down the bottle.

Whatever bullshit excuse you’re giving yourself as to why you can’t quit is just that. Bullshit. If you can’t do an activity without drinking, then you don’t actually like that activity. If you can’t hang out with someone without drinking, then they’re not somebody you need in your life.

Just take it minute-by-minute if you must. The benefits will start stacking on themselves, and it will get easier. I rarely even think about drinking anymore.

In my time as a left-leaning Statehouse staffer, I used to prefer to deal with true-believing wingnuts like Mean Jean over ostensibly intelligent sycophants like Brian Stewart and Frank LaRose, who should know better but gradually learned to shamelessly lie and obfuscate like they're speaking their native language.

Are you more disgusted by a person with legit terrible beliefs or someone who has adopted them for personal political gain?

I agree.

But the thing with the religious hardliners is a problem originally laid out by U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater in a quote I’ve cited a couple of times in this publication:

Prophetic words from a man who would have brought nuclear war upon America as president.

There needs to be some way to get actual information and facts to Hog Nation. People hate The Dispatch, not realizing it's a corporate husk of a paper designed to squeeze out any last clicks they can garner. Local news and more so Fox/Newsmax is a complete farce. Facebook and Twitter are insane asylums. Are we cooked?

It’s a problem, for sure. I have a lot of respect for many of the reporters. But the liquidation of the newspaper industry and the corporate consolidation of television news, along with the right-wing spending 40 years building its own media ecosphere, have been terrible for our country.

We might be cooked, honestly. Because pointing out the problem is nowhere close to solving it. And even if we got “good facts” in front of them, a majority of the other side’s voters would gleefully continue down the path we’re on.

Does Senate President Matt Huffman really think his podcast is popular? I've never met anyone who doesn't work in Ohio politics who's ever heard of this guy. Although, if more people knew who he was, there might be more pushback to his insane patronage politics and destructive policies.

Yes! Huffman knows it’s popular because many people, including his daughters in Pensacola and Bethesda, tell him they watch it “all the time.”

He said as much in his farewell speech to the Senate last week:

It was also hilarious that he called the President’s Podcast the “Death Star” of Senate Majority Communications Director John Fortney when you consider that the Death Star exploded in the most embarrassing way possible.

But yes, you are right in that guys like Huffman prefer not to be known by the populace at large.

Dayton Daily News reported last Friday that a bill is being pushed that would give the Ohio Attorney General the power to reject citizen ballot initiatives based on their title. What's the Rooster Read (tm) on this? It seems like a big deal that would essentially allow the AG to veto ballot initiatives.

Long story short, Statehouse Republicans inserted the language into HB-74, a bill originally co-sponsored by State Rep. Mary Lightbody, who left the lower chamber in January.

And it will be passed through a conference committee between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. Thursday morning.

The Republican junta has realized that the only course of action we have against them is through the citizen’s initiative ballot process. And they’re doing whatever it takes to hamstring that process. And they have the corrupted Supreme Court ready to rubber-stamp any of their naked power grabs.

Unfortunately, this kind of corruption is baked into the political process of this state.

Is John Fortney going to follow Matt Huffman to the House?

No. The most divorced man in the Statehouse is staying on the Senate side, according to Huffman.

I’m Generation Z. There's obviously so much wrong with our current Gen-X/Boomer Statehouse. But at least these old folks acknowledge the Holocaust happened. Do you know which offices (or all of them at this point) are particularly infested with young Groyper types?

From my experience, legislative staffers, in general, are much more extreme than their bosses. But I don’t think the Ohio Legislature is unique in that case; it’s a problem with the Republican Party going all the way to the federal level, too.

Has the OSU flag-planting nonsense going national helped or hurt the lawmaker who proposed that dead-end bill?

It’s generally a bad thing for a lowly State Representative to be told to eat shit by millions of people in both political parties.

Unfortunately, State Rep. Josh Williams (R-Sylvania) won re-election in November. When he runs again in 2025, the bill to make flag-planting a felony will be ancient history.

And even if it wasn’t, Republican leadership redrew his district from a legit toss-up to something safely Republican.

What's the whole set of services you connect to or record bike rides with? I'm aware you do Wandrer and Strava, but was curious if you're connected to anything else or what additional gear you may use besides bike and phone.

I used to record on an Apple Watch as a backup to any Strava mishap, but I stopped wearing one earlier this year.

Will Ohio be the last state to pass a “Right to Repair” law, given the stranglehold the auto dealer lobby has on our state legislature?

SB-73, sponsored by Senator William Blessing (R-Colerain Twp.) hasn’t even made it out of committee. So, yes, we’re probably at the mercy of the next Democratic trifecta having the common sense to pass that legislation nationally.

And it won’t be happening any time soon for our farmer, per a conversation I had with Agriculture Committee Chairman Don Jones last week:

With opponents like the Auto Dealers and the Farm Bureau, you start to understand our situation with right-to-repair.

Besides helping get Shelley Meyer off Twitter, what is your most proud accomplishment since starting the Rooster?