A Comedy of Terrors

Drug Busters in Action

Back in 1992, the Daily Times ran a story on a botched drug bust at the home of an elderly couple, Mary and Joe Warren, 68 and 73 years old, of 1805 Harrisonville Ave., in Portsmouth. Reporter Jennifer Moorhead did so good a job of reporting telling details that we can relive the experience fifteen years later. Perhaps that’s because the more things change in Portsmouth, the more they stay the same. What happened fifteen years ago, could have happened yesterday or could happen tomorrow. Austin Leedom has done a public service by reproducing that story in the online Shawnee Sentinel.

If Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife, Inspector Clouzot, Inspector Lastrade, and Maxwell Smart had been involved in the botched bust, it could not have been more half-assed. First of all, the Warrens were not only elderly, they were god-fearing, patriotic Americans living in a small neat house behind a white picket fence. They had just returned from a meeting at their church – there were and still are two churches almost directly across the street. Mrs. Warren was perhaps a little apprehensive when she locked the front door when they came home from church, because earlier that evening, around 8 PM, she had noticed a man in a car across the street looking through binoculars. Who was that in the car? Barney Fife, Inspector Clouzot, or perhaps Sergeant Horner himself?

Mrs. Warren later learned that Horner and others had been staking out the house for several days. Which house? Hers or the real drug house a couple of doors down? Who knows? I’m not even sure the Emergency Response Team knew. I don’t know if there were miniature American flags flying on the fence in front of the Warrens’ neat, small house, but there are now. It is not likely flags would have stopped the Emergency Response Team from mistaking the Warrens’ house for a drug house anyway. Horner and his team had already obtained a search warrant for 1721 Harrisonville Ave., but the address of the Warrens’ house is 1805. Those numbers, 1805, are displayed prominently above the mail box, just next to the front door of the Warrens’ house. If Horner and his men had a warrant for 1721 Harrisonville Ave., and the prominently displayed 1805 numbers on the Warrens’ house did not stop them from breaking in the door, it is not likely flags on the fence would have given them pause.

Sergeant Horner didn't sleep here

The arthritic Joe Warren, who walked with a cane, was in the bedroom. His wife Mary had come out to get his medication. It was while she was in the living room that she heard someone on the other side of the door shout, “We’re coming in!” Whoever he was, he began breaking the door in. Mary rushed to the phone. She knew she would not have time to call the seven numbers of the police department, never dreaming that it was the police who were breaking in her door. She dialed the operator instead, but before she could complete the call, the three members of the ERT were inside and demanding that she drop the phone. They were in plain clothes, or so it was reported, so she had no way of knowing who they were. The ERT team continued to act as if they were dealing with some low-life drug-dealing couple when what they were doing was frightening to death a couple who had a combined age of 141 years. In an effort to protect his wife from the intruders, Joe Warren came out of the bedroom swinging his cane. One of the men twisted Joe’s arm behind his back and forced him face down on the living room sofa. According to the Daily Times story, Mrs. Warren “begged them not to hurt her husband and kept telling them they had the wrong house.” Finally, it dawned on them. It was the wrong house! Maybe somebody went out and looked at the number 1805 next to the door. Mrs. Warren said the commotion ceased only when “they finally realized they had the wrong house.”

Sergeant Horner was supposed to be in charge of this bust. Where was he? His explanation of the mix-up only adds to the Keystone Cops character of the caper. Apologetically, he later explained to Mrs. Warren how the thing got botched. “They were told to go one house past Little Nick’s,” a small eatery on the other side of the street. The Daily Times reported that “Horner had been part of the stake out, which lasted more than two days, and while doing this he was to the north of the house.” Ah, Horner was to the north of the house. Now, we’re getting somewhere. But when the drug raid took place, “they came from the opposite direction,” Sergeant Horner explained. You see, “They” were at fault. They came from the opposite direction. Who told them to come from the opposite direction? Who told them to go one house past Little Nick’s? Who gave them such hare-brained directions in the first place? Was it Maxwell Smart, Inspector Clouzot, or was it the guy in the car, the one with the binoculars? Was it Sergeant Horner?

Obviously worried that the couple would sue the city’s ass off, and that he might lose his job, Sergeant Horner was practically on his knees. As the Daily Times reporter put it, “apologies flooded their household.” The old couple almost drowned in Sergeant Horner’s solicitude. He stayed for at least an hour, sweeping the floor and nailing back the door frame, as if he were auditioning for a spot on This Old House. He even offered to stay the night, as if he were a Rent-A-Cop or a live-in-maid. “What would you like for breakfast, Mrs. Warren? Eggs? Oatmeal? How about breakfast in bed, Joe?” Where would Sergeant Horner have slept if he did stay over? On the floor? Or on the couch they had pinned Mr. Warren down on. Imagine Sergeant Horner’s call to his own house if he did stay over. “Hello, Dear. I won’t be home tonight. I’ll be staying over at the Warrens. Who are they? Well, we just broke into their house by mistake. I just thought I’d sleep over to comfort them.” Mrs. Warren politely declined Sergeant Horner’s kind offer. “No, Sergeant, thank you. It’s been rather a hectic day and Joe and I would like to hit the hay. It’s way past our bedtime.”

As it was, Mrs. Warren didn’t get to sleep until 3 AM “because she kept hearing the sound of the glass and men breaking into her home,” to quote the Daily Times. Would it have comforted Mrs. Warren to know that the man responsible for this trauma was sleeping out on her couch? I don’t think so. However little sleep Horner may have gotten, he was back in the morning. Mrs. Warren told the Daily Times, he “returned again Thursday morning to ask forgiveness.” The Warrens were good Christians, but they were also human. They explained to the Daily Times that they could forgive, but they could never forget.

Horner told the Daily Times that he took “sole responsibility” for the mix-up, but he took responsibility the way Attorney General Gonzales is taking sole responsibility in Washington for firing those regional attorney generals, by implying it was somebody else’s fault. Yes, mistakes were made, but Sergeant Horner implied it was somebody else who made the mistakes, somebody who couldn’t follow directions. “One house past Little Nick’s!” What could be simpler than that, even if Little Nick’s is on the other side of the street and even if he failed to point out which direction on the other side of Little Nick’s the drug house was. Those were the days before MapQuest, so Sergeant Horner and the Emergency Response Team were operating under the technological limitations of the time. Sure, anyone now can easily print out directions so clear that even present Mayor Kalb would be able to get from the Portsmouth Police Station, or wherever the team started out from, to 1721 Harrisonville Ave. With MapQuest, Sergeant Horner would not have had to use Little Nick’s as a landmark, or to be concerned about which way was north and which south.

MapQuest to the Rescue

Sergeant Horner defended himself by saying it was the result of “plain human error.” Plain human error? A cynic might protest, “Nay, nay, Sergeant Horner! This was no plain human error. These were errors worthy of a Shakespeare comedy, like The Comedy of Errors.”If one of the Warrens had died of a heart attack, it would have been a tragedy. As it was, they suffered from post-traumatic stress for a time but they got relief from the crack staff at Scioto Memorial Hospital.

The story, as is true of comedies generally, has a happy ending. I’ve been told that the Warrens got more than just $350 to replace their door, and while Sergeant Horner got a letter of reprimand placed in his file, he went on the become Chief of Police and Mayor Kalb’s brain. There was a trying period before that, however, when it was rumored that Mayor Bauer was about to fire Chief Horner for incompetence, but the Chief blew the whistle on Bauer’s alleged violations of the law in the Marting’s deal and Bauer was history.

With all the high tech equipment and expensive fleet of high powered vehicles acquired by the police department in the wake of 9/11, Chief Horner is focusing on a group of “domestic terrorists,” posing as senior citizens with poor vision and hearing, carrying canes and portable oxygen supplies, and who are resorting to a weapon of mass distraction, the computer, to write blogs that are slandering the upright leaders of the community. “They are trying to pull a Warren on me,” the Chief is rumored to have said, meaning these alleged senior citizens are trying to act as if they are the victims of his incompetence and crazy ambition, as the Warrens of Harrisonville Ave. were on that December night in 1992. Chief Horner has already blown the whistle on the one member of the city council who stands in his way, Bob Mollette, aiming to get rid of him as he got rid of Mayor Bauer.

Writing of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, a critic pointed out that before the comic resolution of the end can occur, “violence and disorder . . . rise to a pitch that is both funny and frightening.” The sound of breaking glass and police breaking into homes. Both funny and frightening. That is something to keep in mind as our local comedy of terrors continues to unfold.

Long Live the Blogosphere!

By working for responsible, open government, by being the public’s watchdog, Third Ward councilman Bob Mollette has made himself a target for some city officials. He is as about as welcome in city government as a nun would be in a whorehouse. The campaign against Mollette was ratcheted up at the 3-12-07 council meeting when our imperious chief of police Charles Horner urged the City Council to “investigate Mollette’s conduct in and out of office,” according to the Daily Times. The source of Horner’s anger are the websites that the Mollettes, yours truly, and other local citizens maintain. Displaying the growing dictatorial tendencies that should give everyone cause for concern, Horner has in the past denounced websites as destructive and called those involved in the reform movement, “domestic terrorists.” The alleged “terrorists” are supposedly concentrated in the Concerned Citizens Group, a non-partisan group of mostly older citizens devoted to improving government in Portsmouth. The CCG has a website and a forum. Those sites too are on Horner’s hit list. And Moe’s Forum is probably near the top of Horner’s list.

Horner is trying to smear bloggers like the Mollettes and the CCG as a menace to the community. Like certain unscrupulous politicians in Washington, Horner is playing the terrorist card for everything it’s worth. Just as the Chinese government wants to crack down on dissent by controlling the blogosphere, Horner wants local courts to investigate and prosecute local bloggers. In an informative report by Jeff Barron in the Portsmouth Daily Times (3-14-07), Horner is quoted as saying “it’s up to the municipal court or the Scioto County Common Pleas Court to bring charges against anyone affiliated with the [web]sites.” If Horner was half as determined to shut down drug dealers as he is to shut down bloggers, Portsmouth would be a lot better off.

Bob Mollette’s website for the Third Ward could serve as a model for city and town council members throughout the state. The $50 a month the city pays Mollette for serving on city council has got to be one of the best bargains in Ohio. His wife Teresa’s website is an extraordinarily thorough and revealing repository of documents, reports and letters. When it comes to making local government transparent and opening up city council meetings to citizen scrutiny, as provided for under the provisions of Ohio’s Sunshine laws, the Mollettes are the Mr. and Mrs. Sunshine of Scioto County. One of the risks of living in a corrupt political environment like Portsmouth is losing faith in democracy. The Mollettes help me to maintain that faith.

I have before on River Vices expressed my opinion on why Horner is enraged and now appears to have a screw loose on the subject of local websites. It is because Doug Deepe (John Welton) revealed on his website a few years back that Horner’s son was arrested for drug activities and that any trace of that arrest was later expunged from court records. Horner has complained about his family being “crucified” by local websites, which I assume is a reference to Welton’s outing of his son’s drug history. In addition to that, Horner is infuriated by local websites criticizing him for exploiting the legitimate concern over crime and terrorism for his own political purposes.

Has he gone over the edge on Websites?

Even when one website links to another one, Horner takes this as proof of unethical, if not terrorist, activity. Of course our computer savvy chief of police and our MySpace disk jockey Steve Hayes know that anyone can put a link to another website, but they claim this is unethical internet behavior. What they are basically after, what all this website brouhaha is about can be stated simply: it is to remove Bob Mollette from the city council and replace him with a lapdawg, as is the custom in Portsmouth. Three council members were removed back in 1980, when the press and the local radio stations tightly controlled local news. Those days are over. Bloggers have broken up that monopoly. As long as the government doesn’t control the blogosphere, it can not control the news. As long as there are blogging watchdogs, the lapdawgs will whine. As long as there are websites that don't follow the SOGP party line, the sunshine can get through those clouds of lies. Long live the blogosphere!

Remembering Scooter

Scooter, Germ Man, forgetful fellow, fall guy—
You are on my mind, always and always.
Try to remember, Scooter, try to remember
The things a veep’s creep contemplates
At 3 AM in the dark night of the jail.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Shock and Awe,
Flowers blooming in the hands of children.
You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now,
And the aspen leaves are turning, turning.
You have lies to disseminate, asses to cover for,
More novels to write, of bestiality and pedophilia,
Of children choking on genitalia.
You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now,
And the aspen leaves are turning, turning.
In Najaf, where pilgrims congregate, the cluster bombs
Bursting in air, gave proof to the night
That WMDs still were not there.
They gather in clusters, the children of Iraq,
Their thin stems disconnected from the tree of life.
You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now,
And the aspen leaves are turning, turning.
You still have stories to cover, cover stories to create,
The Iranian nuclear threat to authenticate –
Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats –
And the aspen leaves will be turning, turning.
Remember always those leaves that are turning.
Try to remember them when you
Get up in the middle of the night to defecate,
Straining to remember what it was you ate,
Remember that we have not forgotten you.
You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now,
And the aspen leaves are turning, turning.
Try to remember the kind of September
When Libby was a likable fellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was, oh, so yellow-cake mellow.
Come back to work, Scooter, and to life.
Until then, and please don’t forget,
You will remain in our thoughts and prayers.
You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now,
And the aspen leaves are turning, turning,
And holy cities are burning, burning, burning.

Robert Forrey (3-9-07)

Born to Rise

Christine Jennings

As reported in national news media last November, a female candidate came within less than 400 votes of winning the contest for the 13^th Congressional seat vacated by disgraced pedophile congressman Mark Foley. The candidate who nearly won was Christine Jennings, a native of New Boston. Jennings is not just a local girl who made good. She is an all-American success story. She went to work as a bank teller in Portsmouth immediately after graduating from high school. She spent fourteen years with Ohio’s Huntington National Bank, and in 1984 she became vice president of commercial real estate for Southeast Bank of Sarasota. In 1987, she was chief lending officer at the Liberty National Bank, in Bradenton, a bank she helped charter. Then she was a key figure in the founding of Sarasota Bank, where she made a concerted effort to attract women customers. Knowing that women did not feel comfortable at many banks, she made sure they felt at home at Sarasota Bank. “They just need to feel they are wanted, and welcomed, and appreciated,” she told a reporter. As President, CEO, Chairwoman of the Board, and Director of the Sarasota Bank, she made her mark in Florida banking. “Her determination built Sarasota into a success that sold for $40.5 million in 2003 and made Jennings a millionaire,” the Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in a feature story on her.

How many millionaire bankers are Democrats? Very few, and yet Christine Jennings, though she may have flirted with Republicanism, is a New Boston-born-and-bred Democrat. She has not forgotten her New Boston roots or her parents, who were deeply involved in the Democratic Party of New Boston. Her father was a steel worker and union leader and her mother was president of the New Boston Democratic Club. “I think you have to pattern the traits and qualities, the things that you see in people you admire,” she once said. Presumably, her parents were her first role models.

Still going strong after all these years, Richard Noel, a candidate for Portsmouth City Council, worked with Jennings’ father and uncle in the steel mill, and knew them well. Noel told me he thinks Christine would have taken after her mother and father no matter where she was. Her father, who is listed as the Rev. Kenneth Jennings on his death certificate, was a man of conviction and her mother, who is still living, was deeply involved in activities to better the community. No daughter of the Jennings would have sold out, Noel claims.

Jennings homestead in New Boston

The New Boston house where she grew up still stands, humbly but proudly, on Gallia St. I talked to relatives and neighbors, who are proud of her success. Instead of retiring and counting her money, as we expect some of our Portsmouth millionaires to do when they retire to Hilton Head, Jennings jumped into politics, running in 2004 for the 13^th House seat and again in 2006. Sarasota has not had a Democrat in Congress for thirty years, so it was something for her to have come as close to winning the disputed contest as she did. Her opponent outspent her by a three to one margin in the campaign but won by less than 400 votes. In yet another botched-up Florida election, 18,000 ballots in the 13 District were not counted. Jennings charged the voting machines were at fault, but they were never examined.

I suppose those votes would not have mattered if Jennings had outspent her opponent by three to one, instead of the other way around. Ironically, Jennings attributed her success in business in part to being very frugal. “Through it all,” the Herald Tribune reported, “Jennings followed a penny-pinching, conservative style that has been her trademark since starting as a teller four decades ago in Ohio.” She told a reporter, “If my staff wanted Post-it notes, they had to buy them. . . . If a napkin was under a glass or cup of coffee, we collected those, turned them over and used them again.”

How times have changed! I recall going into a recently renovated Portsmouth bank about ten years ago to open an account. Which bank? Who can keep straight which bank is which anymore, or what its name was ten years ago? Anyway, I looked at the lavish interior and the preening personnel, who were obviously proud to be working in such a plush place, especially since the rest of downtown Chillicothe St. was so grungy. I asked myself, “Why should I subsidize such airs?” I suppose all the fancy appointments were supposed to overawe the locals into thinking they were lucky to have their money in such an imposing bank, just as some locals will probably drink coffee in the new Starbucks even if they can’t afford to. Was it the same bank that not too long ago was reportedly trying to get out of Portsmouth, providing it could unload the building off on the public as a new city hall? Who knows?

I doubt any of them are reusing napkins. Republicans were once the frugal ones. Now they run up budgets as high as the Aspen mountains they go skiing on and with ethics as low as the Hilton Head sea-bottom they scuba-dive down to. What would have happened to Jennings if she had not ventured out into the competitive world beyond our pork-fed, government-subsidized, abatement-batty, eminent-domained-to-death Portsmouth, engaging not just in the customary back-scratching but in the kind of financial mutual grooming our non-competitive local primate plutocrats engage in? Would she have maintained her frugal values? Would she have risen higher than a bank teller? If she had become the president of one of Portsmouth’s banks, would she have become one of the corrupt crowd who play an important role in helping the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership keeping the pork in Porksmouth and keeping real competition out? Would she have become skilled at the art of sponging off local, state, and federal treasuries, and profitably unloading worthless properties off on the public? These are not people who recycle napkins; these are people who recycle useless department stores as city halls and visitor centers, at great profit to themselves, and who unload at scandalously high prices white elephant residences like the Thatcher house on Franklin Boulevard and Dr. Rooney’s house on Camelot Drive as houses for the president of SSU, however unsuited and poorly located they may be for the purpose. What does that matter, as long as the over-privileged of Portsmouth are bailed out at public expense?

http://www.christinejenningsforcongress.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jennings

Letter to the Auditor (2)

Auditor Trent Williams asks for another raise

Mr. Williams:

Because I did not receive an answer to my previous email of 2/21/07, I visited your office yesterday and you assured me a reply would be coming soon, which I am sure it will. But a story in the Daily Times today about your request for a $994 raise, in addition to the $10,000 you received recently, prompts me to add questions to those I posed in my last email.

1. Is it true that you do not have any education beyond high school, and specifically you have no degree, 2-year or 4-year, in accounting?
2. Since graduating from high school, have you had any job experience outside of employment in local government, on the public payroll?

I ask these questions because I find it hard to understand why you believe you deserve more than the $50,700 salary I am told you now receive. To say that other department heads in the city building earn more than you hardly seems enough justification for giving you another raise.

The two candidates you will face in the upcoming election both have college degrees. Russ Doyle, an ordained minister, has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Cincinnati, and Crystal Gifford, the mother of two children, has a B.A. from Shawnee State in accounting, has a Master’s degree in the same area from Ohio U., and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in accounting while she is also teaching accounting part-time at Shawnee State. In spite of being a parent, she has found time to get an extensive education in the field of accounting.

I have to wonder whether someone with a solid education and background in accounting would not be able to run the auditor’s office more efficiently and economically than you have. The award the city recently won for accounting actually cost the city at least $25,000, which was the fee you paid to an outside firm to help you with the annual audit that won the award. Who gave you that award? Another outside trade group to which you belong and the membership fees for which I requested in my last email. I now suspect those awards, which are widely distributed to members of the awarding organization, are useful to members to post on their office wall and to publicize during election campaigns, but I wonder if they are really reliable measures of the quality of work that is being done in-house, by the recipients of the awards.

That you would ask for another raise during an election year suggests you may not be able to run a political campaign any more effectively than you are running the auditor’s office. Are you so confident of being reelected that you think you can ask for another raise without the voters strongly objecting? Enough voters may decide that they want someone as auditor who does not have to rely as much on highly paid outside accounting firms. One way to reduce the projected $300,000 to $600,000 deficit is for the auditor’s office to do more of the accounting work in-house. I can believe that it is the mayor who is primarily responsible for the large city budget deficit, as you told me yesterday, but even without a degree in accounting I think I can figure out that the deficit would be less if the auditor's office was not spending as much money as it is on outside accountants.

Thank you.

Robert Forrey, Ph.D.

[On 2-23-07, I received a prompt three-page reply in a pdf format to my Letter I (see my previous post) from auditor Williams. I have tried to transfer his reply to River Vices, but I have had trouble making a readable copy. So I asked Teresa Mollette to post the auditor's reply on her excellent website, Portsmouthcitizens.info, which deserves an award for excellence. I urge readers to read the auditor's clearly written and well organized reply. I will respond to it in my next posting. For the auditor's reply, click here.

Letter to the Auditor

Award-winning Auditor Trent Williams

Feb. 20, 2007

Dear Mr. Williams:

This is a formal request under Ohio's open records statutes.

What I am requesting are any records and letters relating to the membership of the city of Portsmouth, the Auditor's office, and you individually in the Government Finance Officers Association. I would like to know what membership fees or payments of any kind are made to the GFOA.

I would also like to look at the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) to see if there are pages I would like to have copies of.

The report on the front page of the Daily Times (Feb.15, 2007) began with sentence, “With a projected budget deficit for 2007 ranging between $300,000 and $600,000, it’s hard to find any good news in the city.” I want to better understand how a city in such precarious financial shape is able to win an award for anything, but especially an award “for excellence in accounting and financial reporting.” Have you reported that the city faces a deficit of between $300,000 and $600,000? Is that part of your award winning performance? It is questions like these that as a citizen of Portsmouth I would like the answers to.

When you have copies of the records and letters, and have a copy of the CAFR for me to peruse, please notify by return email. I trust you will do this with the promptness that Ohio’s open records law calls for.

Please be advised that I will make emails available to the public, since I know there are others who are as puzzled as I am by a city in a financial crisis, and facing a deficit of from $300,000 to $600,000, getting an auditing award.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.

Robert Forrey, Ph.D.

Rife with Corruption

Vern Riffe floodwall mural, Portsmouth

As an English professor newly arrived in south-central Ohio in 1989, I thought it was ironic that the name of the most powerful politician in Scioto County, and some might argue the second most powerful politician in the state of Ohio, was named Riffe, Vernal G. Riffe, Jr. (1925-1997), the now deceased long-time speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. The irony is that there is an adjective, rife, pronounced like Riffe, which means very prevalent or abundant, especially in regard to something harmful or bad, such as diseases, crime, or corruption. The word rife is often accompanied by the preposition with, as in “rife with corruption.” Familiar with the East Coast ethnic variety of crime and corruption, it took me a while to recognize just how rife the crime and corruption in an Appalachian river town could be. Pious, self-righteous, and hypocritical, it has a style all its own. Instead of the mob, you have to beware of “foundations”; instead of “goombahs,” you have to watch out for “philanthropists.” When I started this blog several years ago, I had no trouble coming up with a name: River Vices.

But I did not think Vern Riffe was responsible for our river vices. Sure, he cut ethical corners and did not tolerate dissenters, and he had no patience with people who did not follow his wishes, but he was a masterful politician, working effectively with his Democratic colleagues and Republican allies on behalf of his constituents. He brought home the bacon to southern Ohio, and Shawnee State would not have become a university without him. Riffe reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous observation, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Shawnee State University is certainly the lengthened shadow of Vern Riffe, whose friendship with Republican Governor James A. Rhodes (1909-2001), demonstrated how successful and shrewd a politician the New Boston native was. The good that the university has done in making higher education accessible to Appalachian residents would not have been possible without “the Speaker,” as he was often reverently called.

But there was a price to be paid for all the financial and material assistance Riffe funneled into his district. Political pork is bad for the soul of any community that depends on it, and few communities became more dependent on pork than Portsmouth in the Riffe era. Pork doesn’t produce prosperity; it produces dependency, patronage, and corruption. It turned Portsmouth into Porksmouth. I realized this when, as president of the faculty union, I became involved with the chronically poisonous politics of the university. Shawnee State University, to use a Calvinist metaphor, was conceived in sin, in political sin, you might say, and it has not yet transcended its shady origins. SSU was born out of wedlock. Authorities in Ohio higher education did not want it. Taxpayers elsewhere in Ohio, to the extent that they were aware what was happening, did not want it. But Riffe wanted it and given his influence and power, he got it, even if he had to knock up the state of Ohio to get it.

Most of the oldest universities in America were founded by or closely associated with religious denominations. Shawnee State was founded by and closely associated with one Democrat, with a big assist from a Republican, Governor Rhodes, who unfortunately will be remembered not for what he did for the students of Shawnee State but what he did to the students of Kent State when he ordered out the National Guard in May 1970 with accompanying inflammatory remarks that some feel contributed to the killing of four students and the wounding of nine others, some of whom had nothing to do with the demonstrators. When I look at the James A. Rhodes Athletic Center at Shawnee State, I cannot help remembering Kent State, and I cannot help remembering being at the dedication of the Rhodes Center, when Rhodes and Riffe, the controversial father and godfather of the university, shared the same platform. At the end of his career, Riffe was in trouble over campaign ethic violations.

While he was alive, Riffe kept control of Shawnee State, as he did of the Ohio House, with an iron hand in a kidskin glove. The Wikipedia Encyclopedia says SSU is sometimes known as “Vern Riffe State. U.” Academic standards and academic freedom were not Riffe’s highest priorities. When Ralph Nader was allowed to speak on campus about the shenanigans of the insurance industry, to which Riffe was closely tied, there was hell to pay on campus, and the SSU president who declined to un-invite Nader lost his job as a result. Or so I’d heard. With Riffe’s death, control of the university passed as a matter of course to the local Republicans, who ran SSU, following Riffe’s example, as a political fiefdom. In the first ten years of its existence, from 1986 to 1996, in spite of millions of dollars allocated to it by the Riffe-controlled legislature, the university was annually ranked as one of the worst in the nation by U.S. News. This continued to be the case even after Riffe was gone, for traditions of incompetence and corruption die hard, whether Democrats or Republicans are in control. Unfortunately, the Republicans lacked Riffe’s political adeptness and made things at the university even worse.

Vernal G. Riffe, III

The name Vernal G. Riffe lives on in southern Ohio in the person of Vernal G. “Skip” Riffe, III, the Speaker’s son, who has served as the County Commissioner for a number of terms. He was easily reelected last November. Rumors about the junior Riffe’s personal life have circulated locally for a number of years, as did rumors about his father’s personal life. Rumors like these circulate about politicians whether there is any truth to them or not. But in the last several months, the rumors about the Speaker's son have gained some credence because a woman from northern Ohio, identifying herself only as “Liv,” short for Olivia, began communicating by email and telephone with several people in Portsmouth, claiming to have been Skip Riffe’s mistress for several years, and to be pregnant with his child. The possibility of Olivia making these charges public during a political campaign was not something even a Riffe could ignore, so he reportedly made efforts to pacify her prior to the election. But in the meanwhile it had become evident she was pregnant.

Olivia in Portsmouth, 2004

Emails purporting to be from him to her are appearing on Moe’s Forum, where their affair, though not their names, was first revealed by Lee Scott in a posting headed, “Local politician to become a Dad again . . . Not by wife.” Threads are now running on Moe’s Forum under “Mistress” and “Love Affair,” and those threads can be expected to get longer and longer.

If this was all Olivia claimed, that she was the mistress of and made pregnant by Riffe, I would not be writing about her here, because private consenting relationships by adults, whether married or not, is their business. If all local politicians and public officials who have been guilty of adultery were stoned to death, as women once were, many public meetings and perhaps city and county government would grind to a halt. The Portsmouth City Council could probably not muster a quorum. But it is not adultery or pregnancy but the apparent abuse of power and influence, and the expenditure of public funds by a public official, that is the important issue. Whether or not Olivia is pregnant and whether or not Skip Riffe is the father of her soon-to-be-born-child, and whether or not he abandoned her or treated her shabbily – all this is not the public’s business: but state business is the public’s business and if he was mixing business with pleasure, then that is another matter. Olivia claims, and has posted emails to back up her claims, that in the course of their relationship she usually was his companion on official state-business trips, driving in official vehicles and sharing his state-paid-for motel rooms and meals. She was a part of his public as well as his personal life, and she claims to have been with him when he met other county officials, including law enforcement officers. She was the unofficial first lady of Scioto County.

In a Family Way

Though now seven months pregnant (as shown left on her MySpace blog), Olivia is not an innocent victim. She knew she was getting involved with a married man. I have learned that she bore another child out of wedlock about fifteen years ago, and has had a troubled relationship with the father of that child. History seems to be repeating itself. Because she claims to be carrying the child of a Riffe, she must not give even the appearance of trying to hold Scioto County’s first family up for ransom. If going public was her way of trying to get him to accept responsibility, then she should look for opportunities to settle with him privately, and not continue to raise the stakes higher than she needs to. If she just wants to punish him, she will probably end up punishing herself and her teen-aged child, as well.

We can understand why she is furious with Skip. What was he thinking when he carried on openly with her? Or was he thinking at all? Carrying the name Vernal G. Riffe, in addition to being an advantage, must be a burden. The Riffes are the equivalent of Appalachian royalty. As the sign on Route 23 says, south-central Ohio is Riffe Country. But there are limits to the lattitude residents of Riffe country will allow those bearing the name Riffe. Vernal G. Riffe, III, may be about to find out what those limits are. Even in the middle of this mild winter we are having, this matter, if not resolved soon, is going to snowball, as the posting of this blog should indicate.

Skip Riffe posing with Alice Cooper in photo from MySpace blog of Vern Riffe IV.

The Old & the New

“In its final report, a building committee formed by City Council President Howard Baughman last summer has recommended that the new city building be constructed on the former Adelphia Cable property and adjacent parcels.”

Community Common, Dec. 17, 2006

(The following imaginary dialogue took place between the old and new year)

• Now that I’m about to take over, will you answer some questions for me, Pop?
  
• Shoot, Sonny.
• Why will a new building for city offices be located on the site of the former Adelphia building, on Washington Street?
• To begin with, to call it the Adelphia building is misleading. The building was owned by Dr. Irving Singer, of Los Angeles, an absentee landlord who rented it to Adelphia Cable.
• Why is that important?
• Because it was Dr. Singer who hired Neal Hatcher to try to find another tenant or a buyer for the so-called Adelphia building.
• And Hatcher was not able to find another tenant or buyer?
• Obviously not.
• Why not?
• Because the building was old and in poor shape. Before Adelphia rented it, the building was the site of a car dealer. A few old timers claim that before the car dealer, a restaurant occupied the building. So the building was old, had no architectural value, had serious leaks, and as we now know, had a very serious mold problem. If there weren’t serious problems, why would Adelphia have moved out?
• So Hatcher couldn’t find another buyer or renter for the building. Then what?
• Then Singer did not pay taxes on the property. Those began to pile up, and they would continue to pile up for as long as Singer owned the property.
• He had a problem?
• He had the same problem any businessman or landlord has when a property loses its value.
• They can’t give it away?
• They can’t give it away because it is no use to any business, which would still have to pay the taxes on it.
• So what then?
• Well, in Portsmouth what you do is unload otherwise worthless property off upon the public by selling it to the city, county, or state.
• But the city, county, and state were not buying?
• That’s right.
• But didn’t the city buy the Marting’s building, for almost two million dollars, even though it was much older than Dr. Singer’s building, even though it had been empty for a longer period of time, and even though it had leaks and asbestos and who knows what else?
• That’s true, but Clayton Johnson turned the Marting Company into the Marting Foundation, and in the name of philanthropy and in the name of the sacred cause of reviving downtown Portsmouth, he was able to unload the Marting building and its many problems off on the city and get almost two million dollars in the bargain.
• But wasn’t the Marting building as worthless commercially as Dr. Singer’s building, the so-called Adelphia building?
• Yes it was. But the Marting Foundation wasn’t selling the Marting building as a commercial property. It was selling it as the future home for the Portsmouth city government. No business in its right mind would have bought the Marting building in the condition that it was in and at the location that it occupies, and at anywhere near the price the city of Portsmouth paid for it.
• No business would buy it but the city of Portsmouth would?
• The city of Portsmouth would buy the Brooklyn Bridge if Clayton Johnson and Neal Hatcher were doing the selling.
• Even though we already have a bridge?
• Even though we already have a bridge. We already have a football stadium, but Johnson and Hatcher are selling the city the land on which the superintendent of schools wants to build a new football stadium.
• What did Dr. Singer do when he couldn’t sell his property to the city?
• He did the next best thing. He donated it to the city with the stipulation that the city had to use it for some public purpose.
• Like a city hall?
• Or a police station.
• Why did he stipulate that?
• Because then he could get a tax write-off from the U.S. government.
• But only if it was used for some public purpose?
• Right.
• Wasn’t that pretty clever of him?
• It was probably pretty clever of Neal Hatcher and Mike Mearan, who was Singer’s lawyer.
• So the city took ownership of Singer’s building and his land?
• Yes, but the city later learned from the Building Committee that the building was in poor condition and that the mold made it unsalvageable.
• So, then the city had a worthless building that had to be torn down, but it was still obligated to use the site for a public purpose?
• Right.
• How did it become the site for a new municipal building? What about Marting’s?
• The Marting building is almost as useless as Dr. Singer’s building. If the Marting building had been torn down, the new municipal building could have been built there. That site makes more sense than the site up on Washington St.
• Then why wasn’t the Marting building torn down?
• It would be expensive to tear that monstrosity down, and more importantly, the Marting Foundation and its tools in the city government were committed to the lie that the Marting building was valuable and worth saving.
• So they got trapped in the web of lies that they wove about the Marting building?
• Yes. But the mayor is so dense he may not know they are lies.
• What would be the best site for a new municipal building?
• The best site would be where the Municipal Building now sits.
• Then why not tear the Municipal Building down and build there?
• Because some developer wants that site.
• Why?
• Allegedly to build a new hotel and conference center.
• Conference Center? Who the hell is going to want to come to a conference in Portsmouth?
• The real reason is probably that the site would be very valuable if gambling comes to Portsmouth.
• And is Neal Hatcher the developer who wants that site?
• That’s the rumor.
• So whoever the developer is, he doesn’t really want to build a hotel?
• No businessman with any sense would want to build a hotel in downtown Portsmouth.
• Why not?
• Because the Ramada Inn, known as the Queen of the Rust Belt, is located right across from the Municipal Building and has been living on scraps of pork the city and university have been throwing it for years.
• So a hotel makes no sense unless gambling comes?
• That’s right.
• I guess last year was a hell of a year in Portsmouth, Pop?
• Sonny, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Merry Marting's To All

T’was the night before Christmas and all through the store,
Not a councilman was stirring, not even a Mohr;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that some payoffs soon would be there.
The Johnsons were nestled all snug in their beds;
Visions of Hilton Head danced in their heads.
And Jim in his longjohns and Allison in her cap
Had just settled down for a long council nap,
When out on the street there arose such a clatter,
He sprang from his bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the display window, he flew like a flash,
Tripping over decorations as if they were trash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave a ghostly look to the scene below,
When what to Jim’s sleepy eyes should appear
But thousands of women, from far and from near,
Gals from the past, from the nineteen-forties,
Slim ones, plump ones, tall ones, shorties,
So many gals he knew he had to act quick,
So he opened the doors with his lottery pick.
More rabid than bobbysoxers, inside they came,
And he smiled and laughed and called them by name:
“Hi, Denise, Hi, Doris, Hi, Trixie, you vixens,
You luscious dishes with all the fixin’s!
Come in to Marting’s, the heart of the Mall,
And Shop away! Shop away! Shop away, all!”

Waving their charge cards and eager to buy,
They went straight to menswear for their favorite guy,
And then up the escalator, like doves they flew,
Buying pill hats and furs and lingerie too.
And then in a tinkling, Jim heard on the roof,
The sound of leaks leaking, and then, poof!
They were gone forever, those gals, with a bound,
Gone without a trace, gone without a sound,
Like Christmas stockings without the loot,
Like New Year’s horns without the toot.
Weren’t they real and would they never be back,
For a shopping feast or even a snack?

He’d tried his dangdest to make Marting’s merry,
He’d decorated her with holly and berry,
He’d repeatedly said, “Hell, no!
She shouldn’t have been torn down ages ago!
She’s not like a mummy with bad teeth,
She’s not hiding behind a Christmas wreath,
She’s not an Old Maid, so damp and so smelly,
She’s a gorgeous lady, like Grace Kelly,
She’s old but well-preserved, like Liz Taylor herself,
She won’t be 125 till January 12th.
She’s just rusting – I mean resting. She’not dead.
And I don’t give a frig what the voters said.
So what if I’m only a grocery clerk?
The average voter is a stupid jerk.
We need shoes, we need socks, we need clothes,
And Marting’s is where the smart shopper goes.”

Behind the façade, behind the faux-brick bustle,
There’s a typical Portsmouth two-million dollar hustle.
And I heard Jim exclaim, as he turned out the light,
“Merry Marting’s to all and to all a good night!”

Legacies

Boola-Moola

In spite of its reputation for academic excellence, Yale has produced a trio of politicians whose incompetence and poll numbers have reached bathyspheric depths. I am referring to George W. Bush (B.A. 1968), John Kerry (B.A.1966), and Bob Taft (B.A. 1963). Bush has made it to 31% in a Newsweek post-election poll, but he’s not done yet. And Kerry would probably be even lower after his recent gaffe, in which he couldn’t get straight the punch line of a joke about how stupid Bush is. Kerry ended up instead appearing – at least to people of limited intelligence – to insult the intelligence of troops in Iraq. Kerry, who was a D student in his freshman year at Yale, is no one to be making jokes about anyone else’s intelligence. What these three Yale graduates – Bush, Kerry, and Taft – have in common, in addition to their by now legendary incompetence, is that they are what the Yale Office of Admissions calls “legacies.”

There are in any given class at Yale, and other prestigious universities, a percentage of not-too-bright and not-too-talented students who probably would not have been admitted if they had not come from wealthy and influential families with close ties to that institution. Yale could not afford to exclude George W. Bush from the class of 1968, however embarrassing a Yale grad he might promise to be, because as a private university, Yale is heavily dependent on wealthy alumni for financial support. There can’t be boola-boola without moola-moola, and the Bushes, partly because of their business ties to anti-democratic governments, such as those in Nazi Germany and Saudi Arabia, have never been short of moola.

In a perfect academic world, all applicants would be judged on merit; but in the real world money is usually more important than merit, and who you know more important than what you know. Bush’s father George H. W. “Poppy” Bush (B.A. 1948) and his grandfather Prescott Sheldon Bush (B.A. 1917) were Yale graduates of wealth and influence. They were also, to a degree, well-rounded. If they weren’t brilliant, they were smart enough, and they had a degree of social grace. Father and grandfather also had some athletic ability, usually a redeeming feature in even the worst putz in a class. Poppy was possibly a legacy, but maybe he was good enough at first base to have gotten into Yale even if Prescott Bush had not been his father. Maybe.

Prescott Bush and George H. W. Bush had also served in the military in theaters of war, the grandfather in Europe in the First and the father in the Pacific in the Second World War, but anyone familiar with their military service knows there are questions on that score. But the legacy of legacies of the Bush line, George W. “Dubya” Bush, would not serve in any theater of war. He would serve instead in the Texas Air National Guard, in a sweetheart deal designed to keep the draft-aged cut-up from having to fight for his country. He got no closer to Vietnam than Alabama, where he lived it up as an AWOL pilot in a unit that had no airplanes. He was not so much Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back as he was John Belushi in Animal House. Except for his family connections, George W. had nothing going for him. He was smart-alecky, not smart; he was a cheerleader, not an athlete, he was Hung-Over, not Dink Stover.

Skull and Boneheads

There was a grade at Yale known as the “gentleman C.” Dubya’s grades at Yale were frat brat C’s, which are worth even less than Gentleman C’s. Grade inflation began in the 1960s, when not only A’s but also C’s became easier to get. Instead of letting a smile be his umbrella, the heller developed a smirk as a sign of his defiance to everyone whose grades were higher than his, which was just about everybody. That both Bush and Kerry were members of Skull and Bones suggests that a more appropriate name for that secret Yale group might be the Skull and Bonehead Society. And if that death cult has degrees of membership based on the number of skulls and bones a member has created, then Dubya has to be some kind of Grand Dragon.

As Peter Dreier wrote in American Prospect, “Bush, a mediocre student, got into Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School and the Texas National Guard’s pilot-training program because he was rich and well-connected. His subsequent business career – including his early efforts to start an oil company, the financial favoritism that allowed him to buy part of the Texas Rangers baseball team with hardly any of his own money, the political favoritism that allowed him to persuade the city of Arlington, Texas, to subsidize a new stadium – was due in large part to his family and social connections. These connections laid the groundwork for Bush to enter politics and helped catapult him to the presidency.”

To Bush’s credit, he was not completely oblivious to his egregious inadequacies. He was aware, when he wasn’t abusing substances, that the dice had been loaded against him in the genetic crap shoot, especially in the I.Q. department. When Dubya was about to be admitted as a legacy at Yale, “Things Go Better with Coke” was the slogan of the day, and he found that to be the case. He needed something to deal with the shame of being a legacy, with knowing he never would have gotten into Yale, would never have gotten to first base in life, without Poppy.

Yale aided and abetted Bush’s undergraduate career as a legacy, but Harvard was his finishing school. Of Dubya’s performance at the Harvard School of Business, we have the recollection of a Japanese visiting professor who said of him, “He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that.” Yes, over 30 years ago, Bush was already famous for saying one thing and then denying he had said any such thing, just as he has recently stayed the course right up until the time he denied he had been staying the course. We aren’t talking about character flaws here. How can there be character flaws when there is no character?

Bush’s Brain

According to Bush’s Brain, in Bush’s first try for public office, for a congressional seat in Texas, Bush’s opponent accused him of having been born in New Haven and of having been “educated in the pointy-headed environs of Harvard and Yale.” After a radio debate, Bush was furious at the moderator for having raised the same issue, and when the microphones were off called him an “asshole.” That was the first and last election Bush would lose. Dubya or more accurately Karl Rove was smart enough to realize that any sign of Bush’s elite East Coast education was the kiss of death politically, especially in Texas, so he transformed himself from a Yalie into a tough talking if stuttering and self-consciously strutting cowboy. And it worked like an electoral charm until Tikrit hit the fan. It worked like a charm until the recent midterm Republican debacle, after which a reporter reminded him that Nancy Pelosi had said he was naked (an emperor without clothes), incompetent, and dangerous. Bush responded by saying people say things in campaigns they don’t mean. Hadn’t he vowed just a few days before the election that Rumsfeld was going to remain the Secretary of Defense come hell or high water? And wasn’t Rumsfeld history a day after the election? Wasn’t this the kind of behavior that Bush got away with as a legacy at Yale and Harvard? Wasn’t he the same pathological liar he had been in that Business School class when he would deny saying something he had said 30 seconds earlier? He wasn’t just dumbing down during an election: he was simply living up to Yale’s low expectations of a legacy: he was not making the grade, in spades.

Yale must bear some of the responsibility for the long-range consequences of admitting students who do not meet even the minimum standards of intellect and character that their classmates were required to meet. Granted the cost of running a large university is enormous and that bills must be paid, the admissions people at Yale must recognize that even the most well-heeled legacy might not be worth it, and that someday, drawing on the prestige of the university and its privileged political networks, including its Skull and Bones skullduggery, he might stumble forward to become Commander in Chief and president of the United States. In that case, not just the country but the whole world could end up having to pay the piper. The full price in lives and treasure the world will eventually have to pay for George W. Bush being president, not to mention the years lost in combating terrorism and global warming is, at this time and perhaps for many years to come, beyond calculation. But we can already attribute hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars to his incompetence, close-mindedness, and psychopathic lying. And now we have to wait and see if Poppy’s pals can bail Dubya – and us – out yet again from what is clearly the mother of all his messes. Heaven help us!

If Bush and Kerry appeared to be neck-in-neck the last ten years to see who can screw up more, they are tortoises to Bob Taft’s hare. In one survey, Gov. Taft’s poll numbers sank to 6.5, the lowest ever recorded for any politician. Time Magazine rated him as one of the three worst governors in the country, but the rumor was he was considered the worst of the worst. And how much can we read into the fact that Bob Taft was not tapped for Skull and Bones, in spite of the fact that his father, Senator Robert A. Taft, and his grandfather, President William Howard Taft (B.A. 1878), were members, along with seven other Tafts, including Alphonso Taft (B.A. 1833), who was one of the founders of Skull and Bones? Was Bob Taft that bad, or that good, that he did not qualify?

Duck Run

Whatever the limitations of the current Governor-elect of Ohio may prove to be, being a “legacy” is not one of them. One of nine children, son of a steelworker, a graduate of Bible-oriented Asbury College (B.A. 1963), in Kentucky, Ted Strickland is not a child of privilege. There is no boola-boola in his background and not much moola. He has made a career of helping the underprivileged and the troubled. An ordained minister and a trained psychologist, he has worked at the prison in Lucasville, Ohio, the town where he grew up, in a rural area named Duck Run. He also taught evenings as an adjunct at Shawnee State University, in Portsmouth, Ohio, where many of the students were the first in their Appalachian families to attend college, which was also the case with him. His grandfather and father were in no position to see that doors were opened for him. In fact, there were those who tried to shut doors on him. When he ran for and was elected to Congress, a member of the Republican dominated Board of Trustees reportedly vowed that Strickland would never teach at Shawnee State again. Shawnee State’s loss has been the state of Ohio’s gain. Let’s hope that Strickland as governor leaves a lasting legacy to the Buckeye state.

Ohio Halloween Nightmare

Last night, I had an Ohio Halloween nightmare.

I dreamed I lived in Ohio, in Portsmouth, in the First Ward, where Timothy Loper had been elected to the First Ward seat as a reform candidate but then had sold out to the rich white trash who run Portsmouth. I dreamed I filed charges against Loper with the County Board of Elections charging he was not living in the First Ward, as the City Charter required, but was a carpetbagger living in the Fourth Ward. I dreamed Loper had then been removed from office by the County Board of Elections.

I dreamed I was next represented on the city council by lawyer Mike Mearan, who was appointed, not elected, to replace Loper. I dreamed Mearan was involved in prostitution and drugs. I dreamed Mearan’s 24-year-old stenographer was arrested for transporting Oxycontin from Columbus to Portsmouth in an automobile rented to Mearan.

I dreamed Portsmouth’s previous mayor, a failed businessman named Greg Bauer, had conspired with the rich white trash to pay the Marting Foundation $2 million dollars for an empty, virtually worthless former department store. I dreamed Mayor Bauer, because of the Marting scam, was recalled from office by a large margin, as were two other council members.

I dreamed the Marting sale to the city was ruled invalid by the courts after a suit was brought by a crusading couple, Teresa and Bob Mollette.

I dreamed the current mayor of Portsmouth was James Kalb, who had never risen above the level of grocery clerk at the local Kroger’s Supermarket but had made a career for himself in city politics by being the tool of the rich white trash. I dreamed Kalb conspired with other members of the city council to get the rich white trash off the hook by absolving them of any blame in the Marting scam and taking the Marting building off their hands, with them keeping the $2 million, and the city resuming its plans to convert the Marting building into a city hall. I dreamed that an employee of Kroger’s told me Kalb had never amounted to much at Kroger’s because he was lazy and not too bright, and that he was now using his union rights to to keep his Kroger job open in case he wanted to return to it someday, thus keeping someone younger who needed a job from filling it.

I dreamed I was a member of the Concerned Citizens Group, which managed to get the city’s plan to convert the Marting building on the ballot as a referendum, where the voters rejected the city plan by a wide margin.

I dreamed Portsmouth police chief Horner had denounced citizens who conducted recall campaigns of local officials as “domestic terrorists.” I dreamed the police chief refused to account for how he used a private discretionary police fund, consisting of money obtained in drug busts. I dreamed the police chief’s son was dealing drugs at Damon’s Restaurant, directly across the street from the Portsmouth police station. I dreamed the chief’s son was arrested and convicted but that his arrest and conviction were expunged from public records.

I dreamed the Ohio Secretary of State was Ken Blackwell whose own wife does not campaign with or for him. I dreamed he was accused of using his position as head of Ohio elections to help elect George Bush in 2004. I dreamed Blackwell was described in a poem by Cincinnati’s African-American poet Nikki Giovanni as “a political whore.”

I dreamed that one of Ohio’s senators in Washington was Mike DeWine, who had a promiscuously sexual staff assistant who used to tell people, according to the Washington Post, that her job in DeWine’s office consisted of throwing out “ the stacks of letters from earnest voters who believe members of Congress actually care what they think.” I dreamed this promiscuous staffer, shown here exposing her breast in front of the Capitol, was screwing everyone in Washington and that DeWine was screwing everyone in Ohio.

I dreamed my representative in congress was Jean Schmidt, who had denounced Congressman Murtha on the House floor as a cut-and-run coward, even though Murtha was a decorated war hero. I dreamed Schmidt had been voted one of the ten dumbest members of the House, and that in her latest campaign brainstorm she had raised the possibility of making part of her district a nuclear waste site.

I dreamed the governor in Columbus was Bob Taft. I dreamed I read on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, that Taft “is known beyond the state’s boundaries for the recent corruption scandals under his administration, particularly Coingate.” I dreamed that Time Magazine judged him to be one of the three worst governors in America, opining that “The only thing more stunning than the spectacle of a quivering, hangdog Ohio Governor pleading no contest in August to criminal charges is the fact that he is still in office.” I dreamed that Ohio’s slogan, “The Heart of It All,” meant the heart of all the corruption and election tampering.

I dreamed the president in the oval office was George W. Bush, who is considered by some historians to be the stupidest and most incompetent chief executive in the history of the United States, and as the president who has presided over the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States. As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

I dreamed this and much more, and when I awoke I realized, “Oh, my God, the nightmare is true. I live in the First Ward of Portsmouth, in Ohio, in the United States of America, and Mearan is the First Ward councilman, Horner is the chief of police, Kalb is the mayor, Blackwell is the secretary of state, Schmidt is the congresswoman, DeWine is the senator, Taft is the governor, and Bush is the president.

Shit! This is not a Halloween nightmare. This is an everyday reality!