BuckeyeBlog

Proving that she will continue Marc Dann’s legacy of using the Attorney General’s office to interfere in your personal decisions, Nancy Rogers has joined 24 other Attorneys General in protesting Miller’s new Sparks Red drink. Their problem — it is an energy drink that is 8% alcohol. The horror!

The hysteria over a drink that combines “stimulants and alcohol,” as the Attorneys General letter repeatedly says, is ridiculous. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which never met a fun activity it didn’t want to ban, claims that this drink “encourages binge drinking, underage drinking, drunken driving and sexual assaults.” The same thing can be said about regular alcohol, though. Just because you feel a little more energetic doesn’t increase the chance of bad stuff happening. Plus, it’s not as if the drink is causing these things — have we forgotten about the personal responsibility of those who consume them? 

A trendy drink from a few years ago (maybe it’s even still trendy, I don’t know) was Red Bull and vodka. I’ll bet there was more alcohol and caffeine in one of those drinks than in one Sparks Red. Did the amount of binge drinking, underage drinking, drunken driving, and sexual assaults increase when that drink became popular? I doubt it.

Nancy Rogers and her fellow Attorneys General are trying to coerce a company from selling a perfectly legal drink because they don’t like the fact that some of you may consume it. Perhaps someone should remind Nancy Rogers that she was appointed Attorney General, not Ohio’s Mom.

Just when it looked like the Ohio Republicans were determined to become the Ohio Democrats of the 1990’s, they’ve pulled together a serious candidate for attorney general. The Buckeye Institute crowd walked over to listen to former U.S. Attorney Michael Crites (not pictured to the left) say he expects to raise $2 million and more to campaign.

There wasn’t much in the way of ideology discussed, but that’s fine in the context of the attorney general’s office. In fact, it’s good. The late, great communicator Marc “Culture of Corruption” Dann pushed his ideology to the max, wanting to become the Michael Moore/Eliot Spitzer wielder of the big government club (you get your mind out of the gutter) to push his political policies. The AG’s office could do with someone who has the more modest ambition of enforcing the law.

What is most heartening is that it’s a sign that finally, and perhaps only for a moment, that the Republicans pulled together a message. Governor Strickland and Richard Cordray are excellent communicators of their ideas, and the state will benefit if both its major parties are at least competent in doing so. Elections will still be decided on nitty gritty and nonsense–anybody know who Mark Foley is?–but at least there’s a hint of substance out there that will give voters a chance, if they choose to take it.