You couldn’t miss him. One of the first Internet blow ups of 2011. A homeless man from Columbus, Ohio who gained national exposure for his radio DJ sounding voice. Ted Williams was homeless because of drugs and alcohol abuse that crashed his life and his family relationships. So his sudden fame was one of those great “American dream” stories? Ted was thrust into the media whirlpool and it looks like he will be spit out after the leeches get their fill.
It started out with good intentions. A Columbus Dispatch reporter takes a video of Ted hustling for money at an Interstate exit. He has a “golden voice” and the video proves it as he does a professional sounding radio air check. Next the right people see the video at the right time and Ted is plucked out of the make shift tent home in the bushes near the interchange and into the lime light. National print, radio, and TV appearances follow as does tons of job offers from companies that see a feel good story any first year marketing major could see.
In the first week of Ted’s new fame no one talked about him getting help for his addictions. He claimed he had been sober for two years but it is very rare that an addict can just go cold turkey like that. When other people have lived in such conditions, like if they were abducted, there usually are mental health professionals who help them transistion back into normal society. Here was a guy who lived a rough life on the streets for more than few years and people took him at his word that he was sober and okay. They didn’t seem to be getting him all the help he needed to acclimate back into regular society.
After the umpteenth article in the Columbus Dispatch about Ted, I tweeted the editor, on January 6th, and asked if Ted would be getting some mental health help.
Me: Do you know if there is any mental health help for Ted Williams – I worry he might slip back to bad habits
Ben Marrison: Apparently #TedWilliams, the #GoldenVoice was offered some type of counseling support today.
So it seems no one addressed his mental health needs for four days. Of course the media got all they needed from Ted with all the appearances and interviews.
Ted next showed up on the Dr. Phil show and I guess people might say he was getting help then but Dr. Phil McGraw gave up his licence to practice psychology in 2005 and the State of California considers his show entertainment. After the third full show, Ted agreed to go to rehab since he had relapsed due to the stress of his new found fame.
Williams left after two weeks because his manager said he had work in Los Angeles.
All ends well, right? Nope. The Hollywood ending is just that – found only in a movie – especially when it involves a drug and alcohol abuser.
Ted Williams really needs professional help if he is going to really control his addictions
Areport released by the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute of Applied Politics maps out the Republican sweep of Ohio statewide offices and the open US Senate seat in 2010. The report, which includes maps, show the percentages of votes and turn out compared to the results in 2006. The numbers show that the turn out by Democrats was much lower in 2010 and that helped the GOP with their sweep.
“The pendulum has swung, this time in favor of Ohio Republicans,” John Green, Bliss Institute director, said in a press release. “Low voter turnout across the board and a poorly performing state economy contributed significantly to the 2010 Ohio Republican sweep.”
It is clear that there was less voter turnout in 2010 than 2006 in almost every county. The East-West pattern emerges again in this map. There was, in general, less of a drop in voter turnout in the Republican-leaning western regions of the state as opposed to the Democratic-leaning eastern regions of the state. This indicates that Democratic-leaning counties had less-enthused voters compared to those counties that tend to lean Republican. It helps to explain why Democrats did so well in the 2006 state-wide contests and fared so poorly in the 2010 election.
The report doesn’t look at why people voted the way they did but it showed that when a particular party doesn’t turn out their candidate loses. It seems that’s election 101.
My hometown is building two new middle school buildings to replace the two current ones that were built in 1923. It is time for new buildings and has taken probably 10 or 15 years to finally get it started. However one casualty in the process is the school board is retiring the mascots in the name of district unity. Here is my tribute to the Glenwood Junior High Eagles.
Here is a short video of the Glenwood fight song which happens to go to the tune of the Northwestern University fight song. I recreated the lyrics from memory – yes I still remember them some 28 years later – so any errors are mine. Enjoy!
The 2010 election is not official but it looks like a bad night for Democrats both nationally and here in Ohio. The economy was part of the reason – people out of work – blame the party in power. I have some other thoughts on it.
It looks like the GOP will be sweeping all the offices in Ohio but at this hour Governor is still too close to call.
MSNBC had some exit poll info that showed the main reason for turning out the Democrats was JOBS JOBS JOBS. Anger at the government (the Tea party argument) was only 24%.
Genius Chris Matthews asks maybe if the Democrats had forced the GOP to fight for their ideas instead of letting them obstruct real economy recovery solutions and financial reform the results might have been different.
You think Chris??? Duh! Where have been for two years?
Lawrence O’Donnell was upset that the dirty hippies hurt Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas in the end.
No Larry, Blanche hurt herself being a blue dog Democrat and throwing labor under the bus.
The only good thing is now the GOP has their chance to try to govern. Good luck to them and may heaven help us all. They have been saying “No!” for so long they don’t have any real idea what they will do to “give us jobs”.
A good spin I would put on it is like a close football game. It is 21 to 20 with 3 minutes left in the game.
Your team is behind and is driving down the field. You end up scoring a field goal to move ahead 23-21 but there is 2 minutes left in the game.
Commentators usually ask “Did you score too soon?”
What then sometimes happens is the other team drives down close enough to kick a field goal and ends up winning 24-23.
In my world the GOP is the team that scored too soon since the 2012 election counts more than 2010.
We will see.
One note is that the GOP is not winning as many seats as they did in 1994 when the economy was not as bad as now.
Former US Senator Mike DeWine was defeated in 2006 for reelection and pretty much disappeared from the political scene. This election season he decided he wanted to be the Ohio Attorney General. He is running against the current holder Richard Cordray. Looking at the first campaign ad DeWine has put out proves he has no idea what the Attorney General really does and he hopes voters won’t know either.
It starts off with a woman named Alice in a courtroom in front of an easel and poster board. Alice’s title says Assistant Prosecutor Greene County. She says Mike DeWine started in the same courtroom as a “Tough on Crime Prosecutor” and that he put rapists, pedophiles, and murders in prison.
He may have had quite a few cases that involved rapists, pedophiles, and murders as he worked in the Prosecutors office from 1972 to 1980. He was elected County Prosecutor in 1976. Greene County Ohio is in the Dayton Metro area and has Wright Patterson AFB and Wright State University but it also has some rural areas. Xenia, the county seat only has 24,000 residents now and back in the 1970’s the county had approximately 125,000 people. By comparison the city of Columbus Ohio – the state capital had approximately 550,000 people in the 1970’s. Even today Greene County only has two court rooms so I doubt DeWine had a heavy case load and if he did he probably had more thefts and domestic disputes to settle than murders and rapes. Not to mention that DeWine hasn’t been in a court room since at least 1980 when he moved to the Ohio State Senate.
In the next segment, Alice points out on the easel that DeWine would stop corruption. Yes, an attorney general is tasked in prosecuting corruption. Okay so he knows part of the job. Or maybe he doesn’t.
In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, DeWine indicated that Cordray should have gotten involved in the corruption probe of Cuyahoga County officials including former county Auditor Frank Russo and Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora.
“We had public corruption, which strikes at the core of the integrity of government, and for almost 10 months you sat on the sidelines,” DeWine told Cordray. “That is not my vision of how this office ought to be run.”
“There is nothing, Mike, you can identify that you would have done. . . that would have furthered the game or advanced the ball,” Cordray shot back, noting that the federal investigation was underway long before he took office. “They didn’t really want state or locals involved because they really weren’t sure where all of this led. I’ve conducted myself so as to be useful to these investigations, not to grandstand or score political points.”
Cordray could have convened the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission to establish a task force to investigate county corruption — perhaps bringing charges under state ethics laws, DeWine suggested. “This is organized crime, he could have convened a task force, he could have said that we need to be involved in this,” he said.
So Mike DeWine would want the state to stick it’s nose into a Federal corruption probe and possibly mess up federal charges just so you can say “we did something”.
Next in the campaign ad, Alice says DeWine will fix the state crime lab. The Attorney General is responsible for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI) that includes the main state criminal lab. DeWine is upset over an issue with delays in DNA testing.
DeWine called the state-run crime lab “the poster child for what is wrong with state government,” saying that there are “huge delays” in processing DNA evidence. He spotlighted a Marietta rape case in which it took 11 months for DNA evidence to be processed.
The problems “didn’t start with Richard Cordray, but they have not been fixed by Richard Cordray,” DeWine said, adding that he would call for an audit and bring in experts to troubleshoot how to improve the crime lab’s efficiency.
The Ohio edition of PolitiFact checked DeWine’s statement on BCI and said it was half true:
We find that DeWine’s statement is accurate when he states that the processing of DNA evidence is currently taking “up to six months,” as at least the Marietta example far exceeds that window. Even Cordray’s own statistics show that processing of DNA evidence stretches beyond six months in about 7 percent of cases, including at least three cases not shipped to an outside lab.
But the BCI statistics Cordray’s office provided show that more than 90 times in 100 the processing time falls somewhat short of “up to” six month mark cited by DeWine. Cordray’s staff also cites records that show that the turnaround time has dropped by about one-third. That’s clearly additional contextual information not given by DeWine that tends to undercut the clear inference of his statement — that DNA cases are dragging on for long stretches of time under Cordray.
Maybe DeWine thinks that the crime lab should operate as fast as the ones on TV. Also an issue with DNA testing doesn’t seem enough to complain that the whole lab needs to be fixed. The lab does a lot more than DNA testing.
Back to Alice.
Next she points out DeWine will “enforce the law” which is what an Attorney General does except in Ohio the AG is focused more on state wide civil crime, state wide commercial fraud, and state appellate cases not violent crimes. Local jurisdictions deal with violent crime. The video shows DeWine standing among police officers as if he is directing them. I would be shocked if any sitting Attorney General would show up at an active crime scene and direct law enforcement personnel unless they have been called in by a local prosecutor or a court and even if that happened the AG wouldn’t show up in person.
The Special Prosecutions Unit is composed of career prosecutors who, at the request of county prosecutors, prosecute serious felony crimes throughout Ohio. The unit may be appointed by the court to serve as a special prosecutor when the county prosecutor has a conflict of interest or may assist a county prosecutor when he requests additional resources. Areas of focus include homicides, child sex offenses, white collar crime, and alleged wrongdoing by public officials.
The day to day job of the state AG is not like a local prosecutor and what cases the office works on is limited.
Of course since DeWine is a Republican he throws in a bone about “protecting jobs”. Alice tells us he won’t “kill jobs or hurt small business with endless lawsuits…”
So let me get this straight. DeWine will enforce the law except if it kills jobs or hurts small business?
Yep he is a Republican – protecting the business interests over the interests of the state.
The commercial is a great example of a GOP candidate making his or her quest for an office more important than the actual day to day operation of the position. My guess is DeWine is hoping the low information voter will assume wrongly that the Ohio Attorney General is suppose to be a tough crime fighter putting away the criminal riffraff – unless that might hurt jobs or small businesses.
By the way, the woman named Alice in the ad is Mike DeWine’s daughter so of course she has no bias at all.
You couldn’t miss him. One of the first Internet blow ups of 2011. A homeless man from Columbus, Ohio who gained national exposure for his radio DJ sounding voice. Ted Williams was homeless because of drugs and alcohol abuse that crashed his life and his family relationships. So his sudden fame was one of those great “American dream” stories? Ted was thrust into the media whirlpool and it looks like he will be spit out after the leeches get their fill. 