From the Desk of…
Every day I wake up and I sit in approximately 5 to 6 hours of back-to-back meetings, and every night I engage in the backbreaking manual work of cleaning the house until I finally get so fed up with it that I lie down in bed and rot until I have to wake up again to go to more meetings. I haven’t even been able to get a good night’s sleep in the past week because of the mysterious ruckus and the pound of carrots I ate. The ruckus, I think, was a squirrel digging out some nuts buried near the foundation of the house. In searching for the ruckus, I could not find anything in the basement resembling vermin egress or evidence of rat or bat infestation. I haven’t heard the ruckus for a few days now, so I’m just going to quietly hope that it’s over. Boy, it did do a number on the mental health to fall asleep thinking “what if a rat just like burst out of the wall and had like a huge when I was sleeping lmao,” but based on the time of day of the ruckus, I still think it was a squirrel. The carrots, well, I just shouldn’t eat so many carrots at once… but they’re so tasty, despite the difficulty my stomach has had in processing a pound of raw carrots in bulk.
Anyway, it’s the day after Election Day again, wouldn’t you know? After some horseracing at the eleventh hour, Bernie Moreno will be the Republican candidate going head-to-head with Senator Sherrod Brown in the fall. I’m not rosy on Brown’s chances, I’ll leave it at that. Lisa Forbes beat out Terri Jamison (62-38) for the one competitive Democratic slot in the Ohio Supreme Court race. [Ed. Note: I decided in revision to replace the very clunky references to Meowlot endorsements with just bolding the names of candidates who received one.] Locally, State Representative Adam Miller soundly defeated grassroots activist Zerqa Abid (64-36) to face off against Rep. Mike Carey for a seat in Congress. In Ohio House races, incumbent state rep Ismail Mohamed swung back from some early returns to beat Diini and Trabold (55-33-12) to represent the 3rd District. In the 5th, Reynoldsburg City Councilor Meredith Lawson-Rowe pulled similar numbers, taking Miller and Almeida 52-30-17. In the 6th, despite a commendable performance by Kawther Musa, former campaign staffer Christine Cockley made it to the top of the seven-way dogpile with 32% of the vote. In the 10th… 24 votes separate Grove City Council member Mark Sigrist from Senior Assistant City Attorney Sarah Pomeroy. That race is frankly too close to call at the time of this writing. Judge Richard Brown managed to win out over Stephanie Hanna 55-45 to preside over the Court of Common Pleas. I know that comes as a heartbreaker to some progressives who were pulling for Hanna on key personal and political points. To their credit, maybe I should believe that people can change. Maybe.
Of course, the big ticket item of the night was the prosecutor’s race. Shayla Favor, riding off the name recognition and some key abstentions from high-powered endorsers, will be on the November ballot. Anthony Pierson, the most-qualified to some and the least-acceptable to many, placed second, and Natalia Harris ended up in third. Ain’t that just the way. We’ll see if Shayla sticks to any of those starry-eyed promises after she wins in November!
For Central Committee, it did look like a number of candidates withdrew from consideration, but Mellissia Fuhrmann and Jennifer Stack won 76-24 in Ward 63 and 58-42 in Ward 64, respectively. Further, I wish to extend hearty congratulations to those FCDPCC members-elect whose races turned out to be less of a competition, folks like David Neubauer, Deborah Steele, Millie Vaughn, Debera Diggs, Will Petrik, Adrienne Hood, Mary Mynatt, Cynthia Vermillion, Doug Garrison, Lucretia Pollard, and everyone else who has signed up for four years of meetings and Robert’s Rules arguments. If you’re reading this and wondering how you could get a hearty congratulations from me in 2028, well, it’s never too early to start making those connections in your ward. After all, it’s only through that kind of slow boring of hard boards that prevents the county party from endorsing Anthony Pierson instead of rubberstamping the suggestions out of the Screening Committee.
Speaking of the Franklin County Democratic Party Screening Committee, Anthony Pierson made a stir yesterday by equipping his pollstanders with technically-accurate slate cards. See below:
Now, if you aren’t familiar, here’s what the Franklin County Democratic Party sample ballot looks like:
Now, I may not be an expert in graphic design (even if it is my passion), but I would wager that Pierson’s campaign designed its Election Day literature to evoke the Franklin County Democratic Party sample ballot. They know they didn’t get the endorsement, and they’re very clear to never say that. What they also know is that the voters of Franklin County won’t read it enough to notice. A whole rug of wigs were flipped over this because the Franklin County Democratic Party has done its damnedest to drive critical thought and debate out of the voters, expecting its constituents to simply click the names that some jagoff standing around in a parking lot wearing a blue shirt shoved into their hand minutes before. After all, isn’t that the point of democracy, to vote for the Democrats that the Democrats tell you to vote for? I hear them though. When you’re used to people just doing what you tell them to do, you don’t want them getting confused. Might cause them to have a question, and that could lead to a thought. This is the exact kind of underhanded political skullduggery that someone who wants to win an election would engage in, a devious act of chicanery I must begrudgingly admire for its audacity. To my lay knowledge, there’s nothing illegal about what the Pierson campaign did, and if you train voters to show up on Election Day and press the buttons the Columbian Order tells them to press without any other reasons or guidance, well… maybe think about giving them other reasons to vote for you.
I’ve been too busy to read much news, except of course about the devastating tornadoes that swept across the state last Thursday night. I will always read the tornado news. Oh, and Dennis Kucinich news. Oh, and that personal enemy Niraj Antani lost his race for Congress. 1.87%, 9th place in an 11-way race. So much for your flamethrowers and weird sex rules now, creep!
Christ, I just looked at my work calendar and I’m double-booked for meetings as soon as I start. Let’s wrap this up.
The Brain Dump
they should make a lower back that doesn't hurt
working on a new fusion cuisine (drizzling Cane's sauce into butter curry)
praying for a swift end to King Charles' suffering 🙏
I have eight meetings in 5.5 hours today... ready 2 die
░E░L░E░C░T░I░O░N░ ░I░S░ ░T░O░M░O░R░R░O░W░
At the Movies
Shockingly? Not a lot of time at the movies.
The Exterminating Angel (1962), dir. Luis Buñuel ⭐⭐⭐⭐
[trying to explain this movie to an American] okay, so imagine The Menu without burgers
The Fugitive Kind (1960), dir. Sidney Lumet ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ❤️
guy at the club getting more and more worked up about how his jacket is not a Wild at Heart reference
Nostalghia (1983), dir. Andrei Tarkovsky ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
As one of the eminent American poets, John Francis Bongiovi Jr., put it:
I went as far as I could, I tried to find a new face
There isn't one of these lines that I would erase
Lived a million miles of memories on that road
Every step I take, I know that I'm not alone
You take the home from the boy, but not the boy from his home
These are my streets, the only life I've ever known
Who says you can't go home?
It was admittedly very weird when Eugenia turned to the camera and started addressing me personally.
One Picture
Oh, you already had three pictures. Move past it.
In closing,
Fine, here’s your picture.
Until next time… stay warm, I guess.