First, congratulations to dear friends Sean Hannity and Ainsley Earhardt who got married Saturday in Palm Beach Florida. Aside from being trusted colleagues at Fox News, for over 20 years Sean has been one of the generous benefactors of Life’s WORC, the wonderful charity founded by publisher Vicki Schneps in the wake of our expose of Willowbrook State School and similar institutions worldwide. Sean was a fixture at our annual Golf outings.
The big news story this week is the national election, and the edge-of-your-seat drama about which party will control the next Congress. As often happened before the second coming of Donald Trump and the 2024 MAGA red wave, all rivers run through Ohio. The winner in the Senate race here could determine which party controls Congress.
The seat is the one held by J.D. Vance before he ascended to the Vice Presidency, and it is one of the hottest races in the country. For the Democrats, veteran campaigner Sherrod Brown is running to reclaim the seat he held since 2007, before being swept from office by the Trump Red Wave in 2024. He is a classic liberal supported by the usual minorities, trade unions, Democrat Socialists and the college educated. His opponent John Husted is a MAGA Republican appointed to fill Vance’s term by Governor Mike Dewine. Husted was favored in the race until the AI Data Centers he once supported turned toxic.
Especially vicious, the race attracting even more attention is the knife fight over who will be Ohio’s next governor. The Republican running, Vivek Ramaswamy, is a self-made techy billionaire who was losing to Democrat Dr. Amy Acton, a public health expert who steered Governor DeWine and the state through the Covid pandemic.
In obvious desperation, Ramaswamy dragged politics to a slimy new low when he dredged up Dr. Acton’s mother and aired a campaign commercial in which the mom repeatedly calls her daughter a liar. What the Ramaswamy camp either did not know or care to know was that the mom had not seen Amy since she was 12 years old. That was when the mom lost custody of Amy and her brother because her husband, Amy’s stepdad had for years been sexually abusing Amy. He was indicted for rape, but fled the jurisdiction, ultimately dying a fugitive. The mom stayed with her rapist husband until the end.
Confronted with the catastrophe of Amy’s childhood both President Trump and Mr. Ramaswamy insisted nevertheless that the salient fact was not that Amy lived a childhood of horror and sexual assault, but that her mother called her a liar on TV.
The two largest newspapers in Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch and the Cleveland Plain Dealer both strongly endorsed Dr. Acton, expressing their sympathy for her travails. The papers condemned in the strongest terms the exploitation of her mother by the Ramaswamy campaign. The endorsement of the Plain Dealer was especially noteworthy because the paper had announced earlier this year that it was no longer endorsing candidates for high office.
After being cruelly used by the Ramaswamy campaign Amy Acton’s clearly distressed mother has reportedly been living with her cats in her car in a church parking lot in Pennsylvania. Did the shameless Ramaswamy campaign make any effort to improve the plight of this elderly woman they so ruthlessly exploited?