Average JoeOhio Tour cont:   We went to Conneaut in the Northeast tip of Ohio.   I gave a talk at St. Francis Cabrini Church after mass, exhorting the congregation to get more involved with Pro-life work.   “Evil flourishes when good people do nothing,” I quoted… I then took the boys to watch part of a Conneaut High School football practice on a quite muggy morning…   From here we went to WOWW Radio where Marty Landon not only remembered me from the last stop here some three years ago, but he still had our button!   “I wrote you in (Campaign 2004),” he said.   We assured him we were going to get on the ballot this time… From here, we did a whistle stop event on the corner of Broad St. and Rte. 20.   Reporter Mark Todd of the Ashtabula Star Beacon asked me what our plans were for Ohio.   I said we wanted to win Ohio.   “Wouldn’t that be the feel good story of Campaign 2008,” he smiled.   A reporter (“Pastor Trudy”) for Conneaut’s The Courrier newsaper   was also at the event.   I told her our campaign hinged on common sense and gospel values…   After the event, I took the staff (our family) to the nearby State Street Diner.   Great food and even better stuff  on the wall.   Between all kinds of ’50s memorabilia, was a plaque that said:   “Teenagers!   Tired of being hassled by your stupid parents?   Act Now!   Move out.   Get a job. Pay your own bills.   While you still know everything.”      The diner’s owner, Mark,  said he’d put a bumper sticker on his car “…as long as you are Pro-Life.”   I told him I was and he immediately went to the parking lot…   I then talked to Mike Morgan, who owns a pizza place in town.      He said he is concerned about  mounting home heating costs and wondered if there wasn’t a way to harvest some of the  thousands of tons of fallen material on forest floors across  America.   His ideas is to compost this and  turn it into slow burning pellets for home heating.   (While I wouldn’t agree with this for old growth forests, because the composting of this material rejuvinates the soil; I wouldn’t be opposed to a  pilot project to harvest some (let’s say one-third) of this material from tree farms.   Tree farms that our administration would promote nationwide to provide domestic lumber and more foilage to help curb global warming…   Heading out of Conneaut, we stopped to  talk to an older couple  from New Hampshire who were on a tandem.   They had just finished a 270 mile bicycle tour of an  Underground Railroad route as part of an Adventure Cycle Tour.   On our last campaign tour, we had followed an Underground Railroad Route from Georgia to Ohio…   We then headed into Cleveland where we stood in solidarity with the “Missionaries to the  Pre-Born.”   They were in the middle of a tour of Ohio and stand at street corners holding tremendously graphic (and big) signs  of close-up pictures of dismembered, aborted babies.   Their literature says that because modern media won’t show this horrific truth, there has to be some way for the American people to see, graphically, what abortion really is.   One woman brushed by me as I tried to hand her some literature.   She said:   “It’s more complex than this.”   What’s more complex, I believe,  is the set of sophisticated rationalizations we’ve developed to justify what is simply barbaric.   ‘A picture(s) is worth a thousand words’ on this one.   The event wound down about 6 p.m. after rush hour.   Our Sarah went on with the group to protest at another site, and I took the rest of the family back to our apartment in Cleveland to update this site and take care of some household stuff…   And another day in the life of an independent presidential candidate from Cleveland came to an end about 9:30.   Note:   I had joked (sort of) earlier in the day, that running for president was taking, oh, a little more time than we thought it would.