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Comment by Nazda Pokmov on August 9, 2018 at 7:52pm

I can definitely vouch for the nutbags of Ohio where college idiots wear flip flops during snow storms in the winter with their visiting parents dressing the same way...... nothing surprises me anymore about this state!!!

Comment by Boris on August 9, 2018 at 4:57pm

Avi Selk, the Washington Post

The Drudge Report had a fun take on the special election drama in Ohio this week:

“Green Party Space Alien Thwarts Dems”

The headline in Wednesday’s Daily Mail went into a bit more detail: “Green party spoiler candidate in Ohio election whose 1,100 votes could tilt outcome says his ancestors were from another planet and can’t remember his own campaign website address.”

See also Fox News, the New York Post, former “Who’s the Boss?” star Alyssa Milano and certain thousands of her peers on Twitter. All sound concerned that Joe Manchik - a Green Party candidate who once wrote that he descends “from a planet orbiting a star in the Pleiades star cluster” - may have won enough votes in Tuesday’s razor-thin special election to block Democrats from taking Ohio’s deep-red 12th congressional district from the Republican Party.

The claim has a certain allure. What could be more 2018 than the American democratic system degrading to the point that it might be susceptible to the whims of 1,129 Ohioans who voted for a man claiming alien ancestors?

But there’s more to the story than those headlines. Even if it’s not necessarily any less weird.

Let’s start with the alien stuff. It derives from Manchik’s personal Facebook page, where - along with his 2014 treatise on “how the United States of America became a Fascist Plutocracy” - you can find this passage in the “about me” section:

“My distant relatives originally came to planet Earth from a planet orbiting a star in the Pleiades star cluster located in the constellation of Taurus.”

That seems clear enough. However, after international media outlets began to write headlines around Manchik’s Pleiadian family tree this week, a local TV reporter with ABC 6 tracked the candidate down and asked him what exactly he was talking about.

https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/nation-and-world/green-part...