Poverty Expert Says Cincinnati Is Doing a Good a Job Dealing with the Poors
Poverty is a funny thing. You can even keep yourself from being in poverty by getting a job talking about it. That’s what Robert Doar, described as a “poverty expert” at the American Enterprise Institute, recently did, much to the delight of local community leaders who gathered to hear about how Doar is “energized by Cincinnati and what’s happening here.” Mayor John Cranley and other influential bros gathered at the event hosted by the Child Poverty Collaborative to hear about steps local parents can take to stop being poor and looked down upon by the upper crust of society. Single-parent families and inadequate coordination between state, local and federal agencies created to provide assistance were cited as two of the largest problems the poors face. Suggested strategies to combat these problems include trying to find wealthy people to marry poor people and continuing to move poor people farther and farther from the city’s center until they sort of disappear or become some other municipality’s concern.
Wealthy Influencers Invest Megabucks on Local Politician so He can Serve Their Interests
You might think a New York hedge fund manager, the wife of World Wrestling Entertainment head Vince McMahon and our very own Lindner family might not have all that much in common, but they sure as heck know how to come together to keep Sen. Rob Portman in office so he can help them add to their ridiculously large fortunes. The game in this country is sewn up so tight that they could even make their donations of $100,000, $250,000 and $400,000 under the preposterous guise of a “Fighting for Ohio Fund.” With Democrats, including former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and Cincinnati City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, aiming for their party’s nomination to earn the right to face Portman this fall, Republicans are pulling out all the stops to make sure they can make it do what it do come election season. When Portman was asked about the seemingly odd assortment of folks from Ohio and other states who threw down six figures to help his re-election efforts, he responded that mega-rich campaign funders aren’t like gay people (who Portman only stopped being an asshole toward because he found out his son is gay) and that his love for wealthy people who can help his political career goes back a “very, very long time.”
Ohio House Candidate Points Out that Female Opponent has Kids, Shouldn’t Run for Office
Ohio State Senate Majority Leader Tom Patton took time during a radio interview this week to explain some pretty interesting reasons why a woman named Jennifer Herold shouldn’t be running for office against him. Herold, who is facing Patton in a GOP state House primary, should bow out of the race, Patton says, because “she is a 30-year old, you know, mom, mother of two infants.” Deciding this implication wasn’t insulting enough, Patton developed his point further by noting, “I don’t know if anybody explained to her we’ve got to spend three nights a week in Columbus. So, how does that work out for you?” Patton also referred to Herold as “a young gal” and “sweetie” during his rant but forgot to get to his conclusion, which involved explaining that politicians should only be old, male, sexist scumbags because that’s what he imagined the Founding Fathers were like.
Tea Party Happy to Offer Idiotic Input on Heroin Problem
Despite the much-publicized recent capture of El Chapo, the streets of damn near every state in the union are still awash in cheap heroin, and as a result communities are now awash with addicts who do awful things like overdosing in front of their kids or killing cyclists. Whenever there’s something awful, you can always count on the tea party to have an equally horrible hot take on the issue, like this week when The Northern Kentucky Tea Party came out against a proposed needle exchange program in the region. These fools surprised many by being able to write and send an email, in which they issued stern-sounding headlines like, “Independence Beware!” and “Heroin users to visit your neighborhoods if Health Department gets its way.” The tea party is probably also against the construction of more firehouses out of fear that they will cause more things to go aflame. Supporters of the needle exchange who see its value and aren’t painfully stupid plan to thin out the ranks of the tea party by setting up a program that exchanges needles for Bernie Sanders stickers and tokens for free rides on the streetcar system once it expands across the river to see how many tea partiers’ heads will explode in anger in response.
Gorilla Youngsters Say Fuck Y’all’s Traps
One of the best things about the Internet is that you can watch videos of animals doing really funny things like being terrified of cucumbers or awesome things like knocking drones out of the sky with sticks. Animals are truly amazing, like tiny humans who don’t know they’re definitely going to die someday. Last week, National Geographic told the story of young mountain gorillas working together to take apart traps in a Rwandan forest. Intended for antelopes, hunters’ traps sometimes snare the gorillas, so two youngsters teamed up to break traps — one jumped on the branch holding the noose to break it, while the other freed the noose. Researchers say it’s the first time they’ve ever seen juveniles destroy traps and that it’s likely they learned it from watching conservationists take other traps down, but they stopped short of suggesting the training of adult apes to jump out from behind bushes to squeeze the heads off various hunters and poachers in the region.
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