How Ohio’s budget helps children, Jim Jordan’s FBI circus sideshow, and Barbie! Today in Ohio

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a $191 billion, two-year state budget into law that gives him much of what he asked for regarding children.

We’re talking about how it helps, as well as Rep. Jim Jordan’s fight with the FBI and whether Barbie can be a feminist on Today in Ohio.

Listen online here.

Editor Chris Quinn hosts our daily half-hour news podcast, with impact editor Leila Atassi, editorial board member Lisa Garvin and content director Laura Johnston.

You’ve been sending Chris lots of thoughts and suggestions on our from-the-newsroom text account, in which he shares what we’re thinking about at cleveland.com. You can sign up here: https://joinsubtext.com/chrisquinn.

Here’s what we’re asking about today:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has said from the start of his first term that he wants his legacy to be about children. He made that clear with the budget he proposed earlier this year, but that budget went through a lot of twists and turns. So, what does the budget do, and not do, for Ohio’s children?

We talked Wednesday about Jim Jordan’s silly proposal to relocate the FBI headquarters to Alabama. Later in the day, Jordan and the head of the FBI mixed it up. What did the dustup involve?

What’s the potentially explosive crisis been in Columbiana County?

Some people thought that by shortening baseball games with time clocks would reduce the amount of time people spend betting on baseball games. Did that happen?

Homicides in Cleveland are on pace to top last year. Cleveland has been criticized in the past for not having enough officers to investigate them. What is the status today? Do we have enough to get the job done and get justice today?

What do we know about the man charged in the mass shooting of nine people in Cleveland on Sunday?

This one slipped through the cracks last month. We should talk about it. The non-profit Jumpstart was created almost two decades ago to inject some capital into new business ventures and give life to Cleveland’s economy. It has had the same leader from day 1, but now he’s leaving. Where to? Who will replace him?

Is it too early to talk about the summer-ending Cleveland Air Show? Can you buy tickets yet? Do we have a headliner for it? What do we know?

We had a slow news day, which resulted in a spirited discussion in the newsroom about Barbie. And believe it or not, that discussion involved two people on this podcast. I grew up in the beginning of the women’s movement, which was big in my house, and Barbie was scorned at the time. But here we are 50 years ago, and Barbie is going strong. How can that be?

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Read the automated transcript below. Because it’s a computer-generated transcript, it contains many errors and misspellings.

[00:00:00] Chris: It is today in Ohio, the news podcast discussion from cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. And this may be the first time that this week that we have our cast of regulars, maybe we had ‘em on Monday. I’m Chris Quinn here with Lisa Garvin, Leila Tassi, and Laura Johnston. We have a very interesting mix of topics to talk about, but we got a pretty good, hard-edged one to begin.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has said from the start of his first term as governor, that he wants his legacy to be about children. He made that clear with the budget he proposed earlier this year, but that budget went through quite a few twists and turns. So, Lisa, what does the budget do and not do for Ohio’s children?

[00:00:42] Lisa: Yeah, actually Mike DeWine, who mentioned children 44 times in his state of the state peach speech back in January, got much, but not all of what he asked for. Uh, first up free school meals, 8.4 million dedicated over the next two years for free breakfast and lunch for [00:01:00] students who will already qualify for reduced.

Price lunches in the National School Lunch Program, they were paying 30 to 40 cents a meal now will be free. There’s gonna be a sales tax ex exemption starting October 1st on baby supplies. That 5.75% tax will be waived for things like diapers, creams, and wipes, car seats, strollers and cribs. That’s gonna cost, uh, 26.7 million over the next two years in childcare.

They in. Increase the eligibility for government funded childcare for families making up to $43,500 a year. A family of four. Um, that’ll be 33.7 million. But that’s coming from covid relief money that the state received. DeWine wanted that expansion to cover families making up to. $48,000 a year, but the, the Senate cut that, that would’ve cost a lot more money, but it would’ve affected 15,000 more kids, 30 million in childcare, going to underserved areas, 7 [00:02:00] million in early childhood mental health consultation programs.

DeWine here wanted 22 million, but didn’t get it. Um, 26 million is going to the step up to quality rating system. That’s the star rating system that’s 14 million less than DeWine wanted. Um, he vetoed a provision that would’ve exempted these facilities from ratings that raised their th threshold from 25 to 50% of funding from public if they’d.

Hit that threshold, they would not have to be in the rating system. Um, also there’s a new, uh, cabinet agency, the Ohio Department of Children and Youth. It will oversee childcare, early education, foster care, adoption, child welfare, and pre-k special education. So this is consolidating several programs into one agency, 286 million for early childhood education.

That’s. Actually 18 million more than DeWine asked for. So he got a little bit more than he asked for. State employees will get [00:03:00] 12 weeks of parental leave at 70% of their pay. That’s three times more than they were getting currently, and there’s no more two week unpaid waiting period before going on family leave.

A couple things. He did not get no Medicaid expansion to cover up to families making up to $90,000 a year. The Senate removed that from the budget also. No. To 150 million from Covid A to pay for childcare for critical care critical care

[00:03:27] Chris: workers. There are a couple things I wanted to chew on with this.

The, we’ve talked fairly regularly about how the people of prime child rearing age are not having kids in anywhere near the numbers of the previous generations. And some of the thought is it’s expensive and it’s really hard to raise kids these days under a mountain of debt and people are just not.

Ready to do it. Do any of these things change that? Or, or is or no? Is this just going to make it easier for the people that are [00:04:00] having them?

[00:04:01] Lisa: I don’t know if it’s gonna encourage people to have kids. I mean, there, and I just read a story yesterday about how the national trend is really going downward, you know, for, for kids and it, you know, it’s, and it’s a crisis in Japan.

[00:04:15] Chris: Wouldn’t it be interesting if. Uh, the, the legislature had hearings and they brought in people who might wanna have kids and aren’t having them to talk about what would change that. And look, there’s a future economical factor here. If we don’t have children, we don’t have a workforce. And like you said, this is a pretty serious trend.

Why not explore that? These are all great things. I mean, I, I, I’m impressed that Mike DeWine got most of what he wanted. I’m surprised the legislature did it. But if the idea is to make it easier to raise a family, why aren’t we talking to the people who aren’t raising family that might want to, to, to find out what would make that job?

Easier.

[00:04:59] Lisa: Go

[00:04:59] Laura: ahead. [00:05:00] I would say that I think Mike DeWine is interested in that. I don’t know that the state legislature is interested in that. We haven’t seen a whole lot of care coming from the state legislature on, on making this a lot easier for people, and I feel like they did reconcile this, but the Senate wanted to take away more.

Then they did, and they, you know, DeWine didn’t get the 160% of the poverty line that he wanted to, to make it easy, you know, to send those 15,000 kids to childcare. I mean, sure, it’s great that nobody’s gonna have to pay tax on diapers, but you know, that’s like, what, 8%? By the time it’s, it’s not a huge amount of money.

But

[00:05:37] Chris: that’s what I’m getting at. Yeah, so, so why not find out, look, this, the other thing is this department that they’ve created that’s interesting because if you have a department that is focused on things like childcare and pre-K, you gotta think they’re gonna get into some advocacy and mm-hmm. You know, Laura, you’ve talked often about how we’re at this rigid wall of not really helping childcare in [00:06:00] this state, but if you have experts in a newly created department mm-hmm.

Maybe they start bringing. Forth information that says, Hey, there’s major economic benefits to doing this. That’s, I didn’t know that was in there until I read this story. I had missed that earlier. That’s a pretty big development.

[00:06:15] Laura: Mm-hmm. And this idea that they keep saying they wanna bring people to Ohio, right?

We spend millions of dollars to get a company like Intel to come to Columbus. If you wanna bring people to Ohio, make it easier to raise your family here, that that’s how to grow population, to have kids.

[00:06:31] Chris: Uh, it’s good stuff that they did. I, I, mm-hmm. I mean, I, I think we ought to applaud what they did. I agree.

But if this is a systemic issue about people not having children who wish to, there’s more to be done. You’re listening to today in Ohio. I. We talked Wednesday about Jim Jordan’s silly proposal to relocate the FBI headquarters to Alabama. Later yesterday, Jordan and the head of the FBI mixed it up. Layla, what did that dust up involve?

Yeah. FBI

[00:06:57] Leila: director Christopher Ray, found [00:07:00] himself on on the defensive against Jim Jordan’s attacks during this house Judiciary committee. Meeting, um, which Jordan chairs, among the accusations that Jordan lobbed at Ray was that the f b I improperly used its power to silence opponents of Covid vaccinations and lockdowns.

He also accused the f B I of casting doubt on the authenticity of material taken from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, the president’s son. Jordan criticized the F B I for improperly investigating parents who protested at school board meetings and issuing a memo that linked violent extremism with radical traditionalist Catholic ideology.

In all of these cases, conservatives were the target, Jordan says, and so he wants the judiciary committee to eliminate all F B I funding, except what is absolutely necessary to. Execute the FBI’s mission. Democrats on the committee fought back and said, this is really about Donald Trump and the [00:08:00] fact that the FBI had the nerve to investigate accusations against him of really serious criminal misconduct.

Jerry Nadler went a step further with that and said the whole hearing was nothing but performance art aimed at restoring Trump to the White House and, and probably one of the most important points made at the hearing was the fact that Christopher Ray was Donald Trump’s choice for replacing. James Comey, who Trump ous did for, for also trying to do his job and hold Trump accountable.

It appears that that Ray held his ground during this hearing. He, he said, defunding the F B I would be absolutely devastating for the 38,000 law enforcement officials that it employs, and the local law enforcement agencies that depend on the FBI’s help in their investigations. And he pulled out statistics to showcase that work, getting bad guys off the streets and.

Combating drug cartels and terrorists and, and he really reiterated that his guiding light as director is to pursue the facts wherever they lead, no matter who likes it. [00:09:00]

[00:09:00] Chris: Yeah, I think the most accurate thing said was this was performance art. Jim Jordan, since he got in charge, has done nothing but tried to get attention, provide Fox News with video tidbits.

Uh, I, Ray did get pointed. I mean, at one point somebody accused him of. Covering up the idea that Covid might have come out of a lab in China, and he blew up at him very pointing his fingers saying, what are you talking about? We were the first agency to say that that was a possibility. This is just silly that we are putting people through.

Remember when the Republicans were all about law?

[00:09:34] Leila: Oh yeah. Right now they’re defunded. They wanna defund tens of thousands of of law enforcement officers. It’s, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s all, and

[00:09:43] Chris: look, I, I’ve dealt with a lot of law enforcement in my career and the, one of the most professional outfits I’ve ever dealt with is the fbi.

Mm-hmm. They, they’re well trained. Mm-hmm. They’re very professional. I mean, they make mistakes like anybody, but they are one of the, the best I’ve seen about dealing [00:10:00] with things fairly and with justice. And to attack them politically. It’s just a. It’s pathetic that we’re doing that for

[00:10:07] Lisa: politics. Well, there’s some online speculation that Jordan is doing this to deflect from his apparently central role in the January 6th insurrection.

[00:10:17] Chris: Yeah. Well, dad, I would believe that as well. You’re listening to today in Ohio. Laura, what’s the potentially explosive crisis in Columbia County?

[00:10:28] Laura: I had never heard of. This happening before, but apparently it’s more common than we would like to think. But there’s a bunch of methane gas that’s just belching into the air, basically unknown quantities of it happened for 28 hours after a worker hit a wellhead with his truck and apparently got it stuck there in Columbiana Can county, and this isn’t even that fair.

Far from a 2018 well explosion in Belmont County, which I never heard about 20 days of blowout, which. Pre previous story we [00:11:00] were thinking of that, that has a totally different meaning for me, blowout. But they ex, uh, estimated a total methane escape of more than a quarter of the entire state’s oil and gas methane emissions for the year.

More than most European countries IME annually. Coming out during these 20 day blowout, it’s now considered most of the wor. Sorry. Among the worst methane hit leaks in history and I never heard about it before, so this could be happening all the time.

[00:11:28] Chris: Can you imagine being the guy in the truck that you know, which is, has a, an engine running right with sparks and you hit.

An explosive gas thing, and all of a sudden gas is surrounding your sparking engine. It must have been one of the scariest moments ever just run like hell to get away from it. Yeah. Uh, but, but, but it, but it, they were trying to cap it, but it was going for hours and hours and hours and all while it’s going.

It’s a serious explosion threat. They had to zone off [00:12:00] a pretty big geographic

[00:12:01] Laura: area to make sure. Yeah, like I’m. A mile around there, they evacuated. This well is more than 8,000 feet underground, but you know, methane is, is highly flammable gas. It’s a health hazard. It traps heat in the atmosphere. It’s a, it’s a greenhouse gas.

And, you know, we talk all the time about East Palestine and how awful that was and the disaster and the gases and the, the liquids that escaped there. Like this was an ongoing thing. This wasn’t just like some tankers, like this was a gas. Well, that’s just, Erupting and apparently it’s not that. Uncommon that the leaks, the EPA saying estimates there’s one of every 300 gas wells drilled experiences, a blowout, and we’re just gonna let these into our state parks and be like, no, nothing to see here.

It’ll be totally

[00:12:45] Chris: fine. Well, an easy way to deal with the environmental damage is just to have Mike DeWine declare methane green energy. You’re listening to today in Ohio, we know that sports betting is one of the big stories in Ohio this year. It is [00:13:00] raking in the Bucks. People love Tibet. Some people thought that by shortening baseball games with time clocks, which is effectively.

Brought a lot more people to pay attention to the games would reduce the amount of time people could spend betting on baseball games. Lisa, did that happen?

[00:13:15] Lisa: No, it was actually kind of the opposite effect. We know that the pitch clock that’s been instituted this season has shortened games to an average of two hours and 40 minutes.

That’s down from over three hours. So data from Typical, which is a sports betting app that operates in Ohio and three other states, they say that they’re actually seeing. Baseball betting is up overall, and they’re seeing more bets during the game. So last year, 61% of the bets were made before a baseball game.

That’s now down to 53%. Live betting during the game is 47% of all bets. That’s up from 39% last year, and what they call rapid betting. That’s about 17% of bets. So that’s like betting on whether the guy’s gonna get a strike or he is [00:14:00] gonna get on base or get a home run or whatever. So a typical marketing vp, Brian Becker says shorter games are actually more engaging for fans and it’s encouraging active bets.

Like, you know, betting, you know, these quick, rapid bets. He said there’s, you know, 15 to 20 seconds between pitches is plenty of time to bet on the next. Pitch or the next play, and he said their apps are connected to the live game. So you don’t get that broadcast delay, which is usually about six or seven seconds.

I say, that’s not a problem. So they’re able to, you know, make these bets. Is he gonna strike out? Is he gonna make a

[00:14:33] Chris: hit? I haven’t been to the ballpark this year, but a couple of you have. Have you noticed that people are sitting in the stands bedding.

[00:14:43] Lisa: I, it’s hard to tell people are on their phones anyway.

Oh, it’s kinda hard to

[00:14:47] Chris: tell. So if they’re on their phones, they could be betting, but they could be checking. Right.

[00:14:51] Laura: I, I mean, I haven’t noticed anything. And I went to the game on July 4th and I was like, I thought these games were supposed to. To be shorter and it was like 10 [00:15:00] o’clock. And yes, there was one extra inning, but I was like, I feel like the first couple innings went really fast and then it was like, yep, this is the baseball game.

This is still slow. Layla, did you

[00:15:09] Leila: notice any bitting? No. I think like Lisa, it’s, it’s impossible to tell what people are doing on their phones.

[00:15:15] Chris: Yeah. You didn’t see people like talking to each other? No, I didn’t. Interesting that It hasn’t, it hasn’t gotten in the way of people wanting to bet. You’re listening to today in Ohio, homicides in Cleveland are on pace.

The top last year. Cleveland has been criticized in the past for not having enough officers to investigate them. Le what’s the status today? Do we have enough detectives to get the job done and get justice? I think

it’s,

[00:15:37] Leila: um, Hard to tell. You know, the homicide unit has 16 detectives, three sergeants and a crime analyst.

They get help from an f, FBI analyst, a state crime analyst, and an agent from the atf. But importantly, you know, the homicide unit solve rate is pretty good. It sits at about 73% right now, and that’s better than it is in a lot of cities. The national average is 63%. But the [00:16:00] unit is budgeted for 23 detectives and the US Department of Justice recommended that the city needs at least 38 detectives to investigate this growing number of homicides that came out of A D D O J initiative designed to help cities like Cleveland fight violent crime.

Meanwhile, Cleveland is, you know, on pace to exceed last year’s homicide rate through June. 92 people were killed in the city. That’s a lot for being only halfway through the year. Last year’s total was 168. By the end of the year we’re we’re likely going to hit 2020 numbers, which was the highest in decades.

And and more cases means a heavier caseload per detective. The recommendation has been that staffing be adequate enough to. Allow each detective to handle no more than six cases a year. But last year, each of the units, 17 detectives at the time were assigned 13 cases. So the solve rate is good, but the caseload is bad.

And that could, you know, with a year like what we’re expecting, that could be a really detrimental. Definitely,

[00:16:59] Chris: and it’s a tough [00:17:00] call because as we’ve reported, the police department is losing officers in big numbers. And so if you take people off the street to put ‘em into the detective bureau, you have fewer people on patrol.

Very tough time to coordinate policing. Olivia Mitchell, right? About this. You can find her story on cleveland.com and you’re listening to today in Ohio, we could have had nine more homicides from Sunday if uh, things had gone worse. We had a mass shooting where nine people were shot, none of them died.

What do we know Lara, about the guy who was charged with those shootings?

[00:17:33] Laura: Well, he’s from, he’s from Lorraine. Um, his name is Jaylen Jennings and he’s 25 years old, charged with attempted murder, and that was in Cleveland Municipal Court. We don’t know a whole lot. Um, Molly Walsh was working on the story yesterday, trying to get to the bottom of it, really trying to talk to victims.

Trying to talk to police, trying to talk to Metro Health where the victims were taken. Really got very little information from anyone, unfortunately. But prosecutors say early Sunday morning, Jennings observed [00:18:00] several people inside the rumor bar and lounge on West Sixth in downtown, in the warehouse district.

About 2:30 AM they say he retrieved a Glock. Gun from his car with an extended magazine, and it was in the trunk. It was in a parking lot across the street. He, they fired at nine people and the prosecutor say he was attempting to kill them, so they got a search warrant for his house. Gathered evidence there on Tuesday, they say it was too early to comment on a motive.

I know things are swirling out there, but they haven’t said anything officially.

[00:18:28] Chris: Yeah, we’re so lucky that that didn’t result in a whole bunch more homicides. It’d be interesting to see what drove him to, to spray bullets into a crowd. Hopefully, we’ll get those details today. You’re listening to today in Ohio.

This one slipped through the cracks last month, and we should talk about it. The nonprofit Jumpstart was created almost two decades ago to inject capital into new business ventures and give life the Cleveland’s economy. It has had the same leader from day one, but he’s left. Where to and who replaces them?

[00:18:59] Lisa: Lisa? [00:19:00] Yeah. Jumpstart, jumpstart founder and c e o Ray Leach is stepping down in September after 19 years at the helm of these economic development nonprofit that serve as small business startups in the state. Um, those help by Jumpstart have reportedly, you know, given 10 billion in economic impact to our regional economy since 2010.

Leach, along with Mark Kava announced plans for the Ohio Fund. It’s a 500 million private venture or capital fund. With the goal of raising that money to invest in startups across Ohio, leach will run the daily operations once that 500 million goal is reached. There’s a national search underway for Leach’s replacement.

Uh, they may have to name an interim c e o when he leaves at the end of September, but he says he will stay on in a consulting role if needed. And this is really his baby. I mean, he founded it, he started it, so I’m sure he wants. To see it continue to succeed?

[00:19:56] Chris: Well, and it started at a time when the economy in Cleveland was pretty more [00:20:00] abundant and it has invested in quite a few winning startups.

It’s recovered a lot of money, and as a result, if you ever walk into their lobby or haven’t been there a little while, but. But their lobby had been filled with, uh, signs about the companies. They, they had funded. One of the biggest is the what ultimately became the ring camera, which is a huge business on Amazon that was started in Cleveland with some of JumpStart’s startup cash.

So,

[00:20:28] Lisa: I remember meeting him when we were still meeting, you know, editorial board was still meeting live before the pandemic. I remember he came to one of our meetings and I, his passion stuck out to me that he was really impassioned about wanting our state to

succeed.

[00:20:42] Chris: Yeah. He’s made a big difference. It’s why I, I wanted to make sure we mentioned it.

For the past 20 years, he’s been a difference maker in Ohio and he’ll probably continue to be with his new venture you’re listening to today in Ohio. Laura, you get mad at me. If I talk about the end of summer, is it [00:21:00] too early to talk about the Cleveland Air Show, which comes at the end of summer? Can you buy tickets yet?

Do we have a headliner for it? What do you

[00:21:06] Laura: know? It is not too early to buy tickets for Labor Day, and I I really do appreciate you not rushing my summer through for me, cuz I did figure out what the halfway point of summer is, and I can’t believe I actually think about this, but it is July 15th, so it’s this weekend.

This is your high point of high summer, so enjoy it. And it’s never too early to make your Labor Day plans. So this has been a tradition since 1964. The show will take place September 2nd through the fourth at Burke Lakefront Airport, highlighted by the US Air Force. Thunderbirds, US Air Force F 22 Raptor and u, US Marine Corps, AV eight b Harrier for the first time, you’ve gotta buy your tickets in advance online@clevelandairshow.com.

That’s parking and tickets because they’re not gonna be taking those, I guess, cash or paper tickets at the event. And they expect 60,000 to a hundred thousand people. So when you start to [00:22:00] hear those, you know, roaring overhead and you look up and you’re like, oh, it’s the end of summer. Like, it’s, it’s kind of nice that we have this very.

Specific tradition that marks it every year in

[00:22:08] Leila: Cleveland.

[00:22:09] Chris: And we’ve had a few years where we didn’t have the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds, but generally because of the, his historic nature of this air show, we do get them. Yep. People love him. You’re listening to today in Ohio. Well, I’m still Rankled that Chris Ronne tried to criticize our reporting as exaggerated on what is happening at the Jane Edna Hunter Center where children are sleeping and bad things are happening.

We, we completely reject his criticism that, that we did that to. Sell newspapers mm-hmm. Or get clicks and that we exaggerated what’s going on there. Caitlin Urban published another story yesterday showing just how bad this problem is, really throwing cold water on Chris Ronan’s attempt to reduce the importance of this story.

What did that video show? Yes. It’s

[00:22:54] Leila: impossible to, to, to argue with the details in this video. She, she obtained this from [00:23:00] sources of this, uh, this videos of, of a recent incident that occurred at the Jane Edna Hunter Social Services Building, which is an office building where kids in the county’s care often are forced to spend the night or multiple nights because the county can’t place them right away in a suitable.

Foster arrangement. Caitlyn has been talking to sources for well over a year now and has been bringing readers the stories of what goes on inside the building. It, it includes children leaving the building to prostitute themselves and other younger, more vulnerable kids and, and also the violent outbursts that put kids and staff at risk.

And the county has said they’re not sure how to control these problems. Well, this video really brings it home. It shows an altercation between a 17 year old girl and a 14 year old boy in the room where the kids are housed. This childcare room, there’s a staffer in the room As this argument begins and you know, goes on for about five minutes, then the girl lashes out against the boy.

She throws something at his head, he crawls under the table. She [00:24:00] begins then assaulting him with a computer monitor that she pulls out of the wall. She throws it down on him at least a couple times, and then the staffer hits the panic button, runs from the room while this is going on, and eventually a protective services worker.

Kind of saunters in to the room with sort of a goofy look on his face. He’s almost got this mocking expression pretending to look surprised with his mouth hanging open. And in that video that was shot by another kid in the room, you can hear the kid laughing at the officer’s expression. The the boy then crawls.

Out of the room, the boy who was assaulted. We don’t know what happened to the girl. We don’t know what happened to the boy or if he needed medical attention, but, but this video really brings home the fact that staffers are ill-equipped and untrained to handle the issues that arise in that building.

They need help. The union that represents the social workers has wanted a sheriff’s deputy be to be posted in that childcare room, and they haven’t gotten, uh, they haven’t gotten that, that assistance.

[00:24:59] Chris: Yeah, and what, [00:25:00] what Ronna tried to do in his criticism was to make it sound like we had criticized, oh, the workers, when what we were reporting was about how the county policies were putting them in danger.

This clearly shows that so that the everything he said was just not true. He really does. Oh, caitlin durbin cleveland.com, the plain dealer of apology, he took what we reported about this problem last year and used it as part of his campaign and to. When he didn’t think we were listening, he didn’t know we were in the meeting and he says things to, to attack that reporting, especially after he used it.

His campaign is wrong, and this just continues to prove this is a massive problem. He’s got to solve it. They have not fixed it. He said he would fix it. They need to fix it. You’re listening to today in Ohio. I can’t believe I’m going here, but we had a slow news day on Wednesday and that resulted in time for a spirited discussion in the newsroom.

[00:26:00] About Barbie. And believe it or not, that discussion involved two people on this podcast. And look, my frame of reference from this is I grew up at the beginning of the women’s movement and it was a big deal in my house. So for my frame of reference, my mom, my sisters, they hated Barbie. It represented all the wrong things about how women were treated in this country.

But here we are. 50 years later, Barbie’s still going strong. How can that be Layla with an assist from Laura? Well, all right. This

[00:26:27] Leila: came up yesterday when, when I think Laura mentioned the Barbie movie, which appears to be this hilarious mockery of the cultural phenomenon of Barbie through the decades and, and you mentioned that Barbie has been largely scorned by feminists through the years, and and indeed, I agree with you that Barbie hit a really rough patch.

I think the eighties might have been. The height of that, or at least that’s my point of reference for it, because during that time, Barbie’s body was w still wildly out of proportion compared to real women. The arms were too short, the legs too long, waist too tiny, boobs too big, [00:27:00] and and 99% of Barbies were, were white and blonde.

You could occasionally find a black Barbie doll, but generally if they weren’t blonde, they were named something else. The redhead with freckles was Midge. The Polynesian Barbie was miko, you know, so, They, they did try to align Barbie with the women’s movement. I think by making Barbie a woman of the world who apparently has degrees in every discipline.

She became an astronaut and a doctor and president of the United States or whatever. But I think there was a real evolution of Barbie. That finally won back my affections for this toy, which was when they dramatically diversified the line of dolls. They, they’ve introduced Barbie dolls of every ray, skin tone, many body shapes.

They have Asian dolls and black dolls with braids, with afros, with Mohawks. They have full figured Barbies and tall Barbies and petite Barbies who are shorter than than the others. And they have, they have a Barbie with. Vitiligo, they have a Barbie with alopecia. There’s a Barbie who has, uh, who [00:28:00] uses a wheelchair, and there’s one with a, a prosthetic leg.

Who, who is a gorgeous doll, by the way. My kids own that one. They, they just released a Barbie who has Down Syndrome. They’re all beautiful dolls and they’re all named Barbie. And they have, in my opinion, done a really wonderful job of normalizing and embracing diversity of all kind, all kinds. And I love that my kids play with these dolls.

[00:28:23] Chris: So are your kids going to the movie? I,

[00:28:24] Leila: I, I don’t know. I, I don’t know enough about this movie.

[00:28:27] Laura: Yeah. I don’t even know if it’s a kids movie. Like it’s fascinating. And, and Layla, so that all those big changes came in 2015, which I was not even aware of because I tried to pawn my old Barbies off, which they were all blonde and.

Big Boobed and you know, smell hip and all of that to my daughter, she, I don’t know if, because she’s the younger sister of an older brother, she never wanted to play with Barbie. So like she never got into them. We never bought new Barbies. I had no idea about this new Barbie iteration. But this movie like Subverts [00:29:00] Barbie and celebrates Barbie at the same time, and this idea that they are all Barbie, like everyone is Barbie and they can be all different, is hilarious.

And apparently the. The impetus for this movie is that Barbie gets cellulite and flat feet and she has to go figure out why and go into the real world to figure out that, you know, kind of like the Lego movie where you don’t know that you’re a toy. Um, and Mattel’s like launching this whole like Disney-esque takeover of the world, I guess.

But, But like it, it is such an interesting thing that it could, Barbie could have been considered a feminist because she was a president, but like she always had to look a certain way. And what’s interesting is Barbie’s never been a mom like we always played. Barbie was a mom. Yeah. But like that’s official.

She has no kids. It’s what,

[00:29:44] Chris: what? And meanwhile they make Ken a doofus, right? Oh, Ken

[00:29:47] Leila: completes a total Well, and and I think that they, they intentionally kind of play down, Ken, even in, even in the doll line. You know, I, I posted something on Facebook a couple years ago when I was shopping for Christmas gifts, where I saw this, you [00:30:00] know, all, all the Barbies were lined up.

You had, you know, the astronaut, you had National Geographic photographer Barbie. Next to like barista Ken and like some random long-haired Ken with swim trunks on

[00:30:13] Laura: and it was like, did he have plastic long hair? Was

[00:30:15] Leila: it actually hair? No. Was long hair. Hair. It was beautiful.

[00:30:17] Laura: Ok. Usually Ken is just the plastic hair,

[00:30:21] Leila: but I think you know, my dolls from the eighties, which I thought I would, you know.

Impart onto my kids and they’d love then cherish them. They’re so ratty now that my kids include them in their Barbie play by pretending they’re like the witches who emerge from the haunted woods to steal the babies or something.

[00:30:37] Laura: And the originator of the Barbie doll actually. The idea that Barbie was a, a woman who could do things in the world and wasn’t a baby doll.

That wasn’t encouraging girls to just play being mom. Oh man. That was actually revolutionary at the time. The

[00:30:50] Chris: original Barbie come on. It

[00:30:52] Laura: was what was based on like a sex doll from Germany. Like That’s

[00:30:55] Leila: hilarious. Oh, I didn’t

[00:30:56] Chris: know that. Lisa, are you surprised Barbie’s still

[00:30:58] Lisa: around? Yeah. [00:31:00] Well, let me see. No, I’m not.

Um, and I grew up in maybe what you would call the golden age of Barbies when everybody had a Barbie, but I did not, I did not play with dolls. I played with my briar horses, which I still have by the way, and I think my family. Did buy me some dolls called the little chap family. It was a mother and father and a, and a son and a daughter.

And I just would like put them on my horses. So, but everybody had a Barbie and she was the blonde, you know, tiny wasted, you know, high heeled Barbie. Her, her feet weren’t even flat, right. Her feet were made to, you know, had wear high heels, but, you know, and, and I’m glad to see that they’ve really expanded, but I, you know, they say there’s a full figured Barbie, but I have yet to see a fat Barbie.

I’m sorry. Yeah, they, they cut.

[00:31:45] Leila: There you go. I actually was, Skeptical of the, the, uh, change in the body types because I was like, they’re just trying to sell more Barbie clothes because you can’t, you can’t put the old clothes on the new

[00:31:54] Laura: dolls. Yeah. You can’t put skipper shoes on Barbie they don’t want.

[00:31:58] Chris: All right. All right. We gotta [00:32:00] wrap it up. This is what other news podcast. Do you have a discussion about the evolution? You brought it up Barbie. I know. No, you brought it up. I was just tapping into what you guys

[00:32:09] Laura: were. Pop culture. Just pop culture. Zeitgeist,

[00:32:12] Chris: Uhhuh. Thank you for listening. Thanks, Lisa.

Thanks Leila. Thanks Laura. We’ll be back Friday to wrap up the week.