Taking flight
Today's ramblings are as grim as ever
Welcome back to another edition of the newsletter that won't seem to throw in the towel. Thanks for the overwhelming support of our last episode, which completely unknown to me coincided with National Intern Day. I guess I have to pay attention to the world around me and those super fake holidays.
Of course this has been written over the course of several weeks, so the news may be a little old. It’s still important, probably. More regular writing is anticipated in the future, after all I have to put my weekly Einstein’s Bagels retreats to good use.
Fly me to the corporate shill tax cuts
Frank Sinatra or some old dude once sang that song, “Fly Me to the Moon,” and nothing touched me more this month than Larry Householder’s rendition. The man has some pipes.
Larry’s song though, in his wisdom, replaced the moon with Columbus. His ode to aviation was trying to fly state legislators* (*only the ones on his side) back to Columbus from a conference in Chicago.
They apparently had to come back immediately because it was the last voting session day of the year and Larry couldn’t leave his favorite legislation to stew over the summer.
Except- that wasn't the real reason. Good ole Larry wanted to pass the abomination that was HB-6 as soon as possible and it couldn't wait.
In case you can’t remember that piece of shit, I covered it here way back in May.
Now, when normal people need to get back from a conference to do their jobs they have a bunch of options. Driving, flying, a bus?, you get the idea. All very reasonable and expected for a state legislator to go vote.
For Larry’s special crew of corruption he arranged and booked the official state plane to fly to Chicago and pick them up. The same state plane that’s operated by the Ohio Highway Patrol which for the flight was going to be at the low cost of only about $6,000.
Surely the taxpayers should be on the hook for fiscal conservative Larry’s whims. He does represent the party of small government and savings!
Last-day prices for Chicago-Columbus aren't more than $300 a piece, but of course Larry and his taxpayer money do not care.
Now thanks to the great work of local journalism the Dayton Daily News publicized this absolute injustice and good Larry all of a sudden cancelled the trip. Crazy thought, if you’re doing something so bad you’ll have to cancel it if the public finds out you probably shouldn’t do it in the first place.
The legislators unfortunately made it back in regular ways and still voted in one of the most despicable and corrupt laws of this decade. At least the taxpayers weren't burdened with another additional ridiculous charge from it.
This is Ohio under Larry.
Why am I even writing this
There’s absolutely no need for me to sit here and write about guns because it won’t do anything and everyone reading this probably agrees with me. Despite that I’ll still do it because it’s absolutely insane.
There is absolutely no valid argument against banning assault rifles, there just isn't. No one needs them to hunt, you can target shoot with something else, and they aren’t necessary for a well-regulated militia.
Let alone the fact that a well-regulated militia is a stupid excuse for supporting the second amendment and doesn’t make any sense in today’s context.
The depths that some will go to protect their favorite murder devices is mesmerizing. I’ve shot guns and I can’t see why so many people like them more than, say, their children. Your right to destroy a paper target isn’t worth the causality that results in hundreds of dead kids.
You can’t even argue with these people, because every single time you get to hear about how a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.
What if, neither were needed.
Our country, and of course specifically Ohio, are so gun crazy that all bets are off. In some excellent news it turns out the Ohio Department of Public Safety hasn’t even been checking to see if concealed carry permit holders have been mentally disqualified from having guns.
This is brilliant! The department in charge of keeping us safe is too lazy to check if people who have been ruled mentally incompetent by the courts get to pack heat with no one seeing. Of course, if you try to stop that and object all of the sudden you’re infringing on everyone’s god-given right to shoot someone.
There’s been so many genius solutions that Ohio Republicans have had to the gun epidemic to fix all this and of course they’ve all been working great. Arming teachers and administrators in schools is brilliant!
Let’s bring guns exactly to where kids are, to stop guns from being where kids are. Logic like that is absolutely undefeated. Especially when a dumbass administrator leaves her gun unlocked in a room with two curious first-graders. Thank god it didn’t turn out as terrible as it easily could have.
This doesn’t surprise me at all, just thought it would’ve happened sooner. I could keep ranting about guns and throwing in links to how terrible they are but I might as well move on. Let’s not talk about figuring out how to solve this, we all know how to. It just takes this country not being a colossal policy failure.
Recession time
Apparently some economic index thing last week said that it’s recession time so of course it’s time to party. Let’s party because all the middle class and recent college graduates are about to get absolutely skull-fucked by terrible government fiscal decisions while the rich get to once again be unaffected.
The massive tax cuts to corporations and the rich in 2017, as it turns out, has not contributed to a trickle down economy. This is yet another shocking development in conservative land since we’ve been told trickle down works since the ‘80s.
Here’s an amazing quote on this from The Brookings Institute who has people way smarter than me who have studied this.
TCJA will, under the most plausible scenarios, end up making most households worse off than if it had not been enacted.
Obviously giving rich people more money just leads to them hoarding it and spending lavishly on things that everyone else will never in the slightest benefit from.
This is yet another example of The Belldumber’s official stance against rich people. They suck. After interacting with countless rich children in the Columbus Jewish community I have never met a single one that doesn’t just suck.
Obviously this is entirely anecdotal but getting spoon-fed from diamond spoons just makes people, who are already inherently trash, more trash.
All of this is why I cannot wait to go to the ballot box, in Wisconsin where I’m now officially a registered voter, and push the button for Elizabeth Warren. I want to see a president that actually will take it to the rich and the freeloading corporations and protect consumers.
Who better to do it than one of the top economic intellectuals in the country who is one of the foremost expert on bankruptcy protection and the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
So far she’s the only one who I feel very comfortable will actually do that, while being one of the smartest people in this country. Sorry Bernie.
Veterans
Laying it out straight, this take is probably controversial and you might not agree. That’s fine, it’s my newsletter not yours.
One of the most common themes in politics these days is people running for office based off of their military service. We see this all the time, in 2018 there were 173 veterans running for Congress which is a big number considering there’s only 535 spots.
Here’s the kicker- being a veteran doesn’t automatically mean you’d be a good politician and are inherently better. It’s great that you joined the military, good for you, but it doesn’t mean you should be in charge of the country solely on account of that. It just doesn’t.
People like notorious shithead Josh Mandel based their entire political careers on their service and I don't think that’s a good thing. Yes, it’s good that they served but that doesn’t make them more worthy of office than everyone.
We should sit down and put a lot of thought into our primary votes, they really really matter and maybe a veteran with bad policies shouldn’t be thought more highly of than a non veteran with good policies.
That’s not to say that veterans that have good policies should be penalized, absolutely not, and I commend any veteran running for office with a good solid plan to fix this country. But you can’t be running based only on your service.
So many campaign ads are chock-full of hoorah military imagery and that just doesn’t do it for me. It might work, and it has, but we keep seeing supposedly strong Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath and MJ Hegar run with just that and lose potentially winnable races. Maybe I’m not the only one who thinks that way.
I don’t know the reasons they lost, and maybe it isn’t that, but I’m just tired of seeing races run on almost solely military experience.
I appreciate their service but I want more, and this country certainly needs good concrete ideas right now.
A different path
That’s all the political news I can stand for the day, but I have way more content that will be out this week. Look forward to it. For now I have some food talk for you.
To switch it up a bit I' thought I’d go back to my roots and write some food stuff to relive my glory days. In middle school my first writing project was columbuskidcritic.blogspot.com where I was a wannabe young food critic. I greatly enjoyed it and it might still be up online I have no idea.
In honor of that for my good loyal readers here I went to Burger King after work one day this week and tried my best to review their new Impossible Burger. I’m a noted Impossible Burger lover, the stuff is just damn good.
As I opened the wrapper of my probably overpriced fast food burger I looked at the thing and it looked like a fast food burger. Then I took a bite and it still tasted like a fast food burger. Once I’d eaten the whole thing nothing changed, yep it still tasted exactly what I thought a fast food burger would taste like.
Those glowing words are another way of saying it just wasn't that great. Call me a Burger King hater, but their Impossible Burger did a great job of blending in naturally, and BK did a bad job of preparing it.
I really don't know why I expected anything different, but I left the King unsatisfied and thinking about how much better White Castle’s Impossible Slider is. White Castle please open in southern Wisconsin cowards.
The official food reviewer here will give the BK Impossible Burger a 1.5/5 star review and tell you to save your money and just not go there. Spend your money on good journalism or something (subscribe to my personal favorite the Rooster.)
Trivia
I haven’t been to trivia since the last time I told you all about here in Wisconsin, and of course it’s because I can’t just go willy nilly. I can’t run the risk of ruining my stellar reputation with a bad trivia outing, and I’ll be back in Columbus for a one-night only encore of trivia domination in a few weeks so look out for that.
In the works here we are also looking into potential merchandise and other branding opportunities, so if you’re interested, cool I’ll figure that out. Also potentially a podcast if I ever get the time and enough dumb things to say.
Have a great weekend.