Cleveland City Councilmen Jeff Johnson and Zack Reed; restaurateur Brandon Chrostowski; former East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer; businessman Robert Kilo; grandpa Bill Patmon; and Dyrone “Who is You?” Smith appeared before the packed room of energized (and vocal) voters. Patmon and Smith did not appear at last month’s forum. Tony Madalone, who appeared last month, was absent Monday — he’d informed the CCPC that he had a prior engagement. Mayor Frank Jackson, for the second time, was a no-show.
The primaries are September 12, and the summer campaign season is clearly in full swing. Candidates for various council and judicial seats — including Ward 1 City Council candidate Joe Jones — were in attendance, along with supporters in t-shirts passing out cards and info sheets.
The standing-room-only crowd was not easily swayed by catchphrases and campaign promises. Candidates’ trashing of the current administration occasioned swells of applause, but dodges and deflections were met with cries of “he didn’t answer the question!” or, when the crowd didn’t approve of a message, “time’s up!”
Moderators from the CCPC effectively held candidates to the one-minute time limit — a challenge — and, in response to comments from last month’s event, altered the order in which candidates’ answered questions.
These were the issues discussed. (Questions were submitted by audience members):
- The lead paint challenge and environmental concerns
- Effective ways for “honest politicians” to make change
- The militarization of the police; the consent decree
- Administrative priorities (“First five things”)
- Neighborhood development vs. downtown development;
- Job growth and training;
- Grocery stores and food deserts
- The Opportunity Corridor and public transportation.
Overall, it cannot be overstressed that this was an enormously entertaining event. Seeing the candidates up close, witnessing their personalities alongside their policies, was immensely valuable. And the sometimes combative nature of the campaign trail, not to mention the enthusiastic engagement of the crowd last night, made for great fun. Here were the winners and losers, so to speak:
The evening’s big winner was Chrostowski, chiefly because he knocked Eric Brewer down a peg.
After Brewer spent the first few questions attacking the competency of current leaders — and specifically citing Bill Patmon and Jeff Johnson in Johnson’s felony extortion case — Chrostowski turned the tables on him, saying he’d gone too far. Chrostowski invited Brewer to look at his own track record, and even called him “Mister,” an incredible moment. He suggested that Brewer bore some of the blame for East Cleveland’s demise.
I was in the front row, but it was difficult to hear Chrostowski’s full statement because the crowd was on fire when he turned on Brewer. It was like being in the crowd for a UFC cage match. Both Brewer and Chrostowski had sizable contingents of supporters there, but the balance of the audience seemed to enjoy a bully (Brewer) getting a taste of his own medicine. The substance of Chrostowski’s answer was almost irrelevant — it was the fact that he confronted him that impressed the crowd.
Like last time, Chrostowski had a loosely prepared opening statement. (Side note: Why don’t these guys prepare opening statements? It’s unbelievable to me that so many of them just try to riff and end up totally surprised when their time’s up and they’re cut off mid-sentence. It’s the one thing they can prepare! Here’s some free campaign consulting: Prepare a statement! Practice it! Be aware of the value of first impressions.)
In general, Chrostowski appeared genuinely bothered by the ills of the current administration and capable of turning the sinking ship around. He remained short on concrete suggestions for solutions, but his answer on the job training question was strong. He referenced the curricula he’d prepared not only at EDWIN’s but for demolition work and for manufacturing jobs in Tennessee, and he suggested that it’s not enough to throw money at a problem — you’ve got to be able to implement policies that work.
Brewer’s schtick was a hit last month: the way he cited specific ordinances within the City Charter and the Ohio Revised Code as solutions for solving complex problems. But Monday, folks weren’t buying it. The recitations came off as a kind of parlor trick.
Couple that with his attack-dog stance last night, and the picture was one of a bully and megalomaniac. At one point, he said that current leaders don’t use the power accorded to them. “I will use all the power,” he said, suggesting that he would fire Police Union President Steve Loomis (and anyone who stood up to him). It was frankly frightening.
Jeb Bush famously (and ultimately, incorrectly) told Donald Trump in 2015 that he wouldn’t be able to insult his way to the presidency. But given Trump’s success, Brewer seems to be trying the method on for size. Not that it’s foreign territory for a man known for his sailor’s language on social media. As he’s said before, Brewer finds the current city council to be peopled by illiterates and morons who are unfamiliar with municipal law (which may be largely true). But Brewer’s solution sounded deranged: He said he’d use the Mayor’s seat to purge the city of low-IQ employees and suburbanites.
(Author’s note: The above is imprecise. Brewer did not say directly that he would “purge” the city of low-IQ employees and suburbanites. In general, he displayed antipathy for the incompetence of City Council, and his comments on suburbanites, in response to a question about workforce development, were as follows:
“One of the things that I would do is make sure that we realign the government’s resources to do what we’re supposed to do. There’s 7,800 jobs in the City of Cleveland. We’ve had a residency law since 1982. It has not been enforced today to the extent that we’ve got 82 percent of our workforce non-residents. I’m hiring an HR director, and I’m telling him to put the suburbanites aside.”
In my notes, I had written: “Hiring HR. Purge suburbanites,” which is what led to the language above.)
Brewer paid due homage to the Herculean Civil Rights work of Carl and Louis Stokes, and lamented the lack of progress since the 70s. But his vision for the future (while ambitious) was undercut by its unhinged articulation.
I’ll be damned if this corny son of a musket isn’t winning your correspondent’s heart. Last month, Kilo cited MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” a ludicrous move. And last night, he cited — with perfect accuracy — the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence!
If it hadn’t been clear before, it was certainly clear last night: Robert Kilo does hold these truths to be self-evident, dammit. He has embraced the Christian ideals of Servant Leadership and is amped to the gills by the rhetoric of both the Holy Bible and American founding texts.
Do these values a Rust Belt Metropolitan Mayor make?
Probably not, if we’re being honest. But Kilo, once again, was forceful in his answers to questions. He spoke with a conviction that didn’t require excessive volume to communicate.
He had one of the evening’s more memorable answers. In a question about the “first five things” he’d do in office, he referenced his personal history in athletics — he has been both a quarterback and a point guard, he said — and vowed to install a “shot clock” at City Hall to make sure deadlines for key projects were being met. It was an original image that communicated an important message. (Incidentally, only Jeff Johnson, who answered the question first, managed to name five things he’d do within the one-minute answer time. And while his fifth action — “work hard every day” — was a bit of a cheat, at least he got to five.)
Kilo managed to name four things. In addition to his shot clock, he also suggested “getting the voice of the people back on the school board,” i.e. having elected seats in addition to the appointed ones — a specific and good suggestion the crowd appreciated.
Kilo is kind of a joke candidate, but his performances at both of the forums indicate that he takes this stuff very seriously. And his intensity — while sometimes, indeed, a little corny — is impressive in its earnestness. Like other candidates without political experience, Kilo often speaks in the abstract. But in his principled diagnoses, one does find oneself warmly yearning for the nobility and purity of things like “excellence” and “equality” and “democracy” and “citizenship,” whatever those might mean.
(In his final answer, though, Kilo adopted a “Make Cleveland Win Again” slogan, which threatened, by association, to derail the totality of the good vibes accrued. “Winning” is such a silly, macho thing to be passionate about.)
With all due respect, these men aren’t worth talking about. By the second question, the crowd was openly laughing at Patmon, who is 71 years old and talks like a man much older. He’s got nothing but love for his wife and anecdotes about his days on the City Council finance committee, but he’s a distraction. He was utterly unprepared and had a hard time providing relevant or even related answers to the questions at hand.
“One minute, sixty seconds in it!” Patmon averred, in reference to his allotted speaking time, in response to the opening question about lead. He concluded with: “If that lake [Erie] goes, everybody goes.”
Dyrone Smith was far worse, a fringe candidate with nothing, at this juncture, to recommend him. His introduction consisted of a harrowing story about how he’d been racially profiled by the police and the concluding statement: “And now I’m running for Mayor.” He spent the rest of the evening decrying unions and railing against both “socialists and capitalists.”
In response to the final question, which asked what each candidate was personally passionate about, Smith said his daughter’s fifth grade teacher couldn’t add fractions. His solution: End collective bargaining.
Blessedly, the crowd didn’t brook his nonsense. Every time Smith picked up the microphone, members of the audience would cry, “Who is you!?”
No candidate should be written off immediately — they should be given the opportunity to present their platforms and visions like anybody else — but it’s safe to say that neither Patmon nor Smith could capably serve as Mayor and deserve no further attention or seriousness.
NEUTRAL: Jeff Johnson / Zack Reed
Neither Johnson nor Reed made much of a splash.
The conventional wisdom holds that Frank Jackson and one of either Johnson or Reed will take the top two spots in the September primary. Name recognition is on their side. On Harvard Road, en route to the Community Services Center, the prominent yard signage showed support for Jackson and Reed. (Reed is councilman in Mt. Pleasant, on the city’s southeast side; Johnson’s in Glenville and St. Clair-Superior on the northeast side.)
Both councilmen hammered their messages hard: Reed on safety, Johnson on neighborhoods. Neither had particularly memorable answers or slam-dunk moments. Johnson was able to speak about his new proposed lead legislation early on and got a rousing response when, in a question about grocery stores, he rebuked Reed’s claims about crime. He said that crime “is a symptom, not the cause,” and ended with a stirring declaration of hope. His night was sabotaged, though, by Brewer’s references to his extortion.
Neither Johnson nor Reed stooped to direct name-calling. Their biggest feud centered, hilariously, on who between them had first said that they would fire Marty Flask and Michael McGrath, the city’s snoozing safety leaders.
Reed, in one of the funnier comments of the evening, said that Flask and McGrath had been at City Hall since “horse and buggies” were doing police work. One of the first things he’d do in office, Reed said, was fire them. He rejected Johnson’s claim that Johnson had espoused firing these guys earlier than Reed on his website. But Reed used his “first five things” answer to directly rebuke Johnson’s claim.
Reed and Johnson seem to have internalized that the battle is for second place.
LOSER: Tony Madalone
Madalone’s probably fighting for fourth place in the crowded field and can’t afford missed opportunities for publicity.
LOSER: Frank Jackson
More disappointment from our somnambulant incumbent. Jackson may indeed waltz or trip or sleep-walk into a fourth term, but his campaign has been a discouraging case study in opportunism and moral lassitude.
In a Channel 5 report yesterday, Jackson denied being invited to the forum, a claim immediately rebuked in the report with email documentation. (Those emails were distributed to the media last night to prove that Jackson had indeed been invited.) When caught in his lie, Jackson indirectly hinted that CCPC was lying — “people say a lot of things,” Jackson said.
The Mayor will appear at an official City Club mayoral debate at CSU on August 25. That event will feature (now that Eric Brewer has accepted the invitation) all nine candidates.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2017.
Meanwhile, Frank Jackson’s re-election team gets him a soft spot for softball questions on WCPN. The internal polling must be showing amazing numbers where sleepwalking will be a landslide winner.
Chrostowski can do it!
Your comments on Winners and Losers truly suck. Who are you tp judge? #Loser
Who is you, Yolanda? Was you even there? If not, you da loser.
Will there be anymore forums on the West Side this summer?
If so, where and when? City Club is not easy to get into.
There’s a candidate with Southeast Side support (Reed) and one with Northeast Side support (Johnson)…who, if anyone, speaks for the Far West Side?
. Many voters out here, on the edge of the prairie, are not all that happy with city services and hearing “It is what it is…”
Not anymore…
Chuckles the Clown
Sam. We’re going to try this again. You or someone from Scene deleted my response to the factual inaccuracies in this piece. I’m print-screening what I wrote this time and sharing all on my page. I’m also sending a copy of all the comments to Scene’s corporate counsel. I corrected your wrong information and you chose not to make the corrections inside your story but to delete my corrections. We’ll see what Scene’s corporate counsel says about it.
As I stated in the response you deleted, I did not ever suggest or state that I was firing Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association president Steve Loomis or anyone who stood up to me. That’s fake news.
What I said is that Steve Loomis will learn the difference between a mayor and a patrol officer about running his mouth to the media. By rank Loomis is a patrol officer. The CPPA president is not an administrative officer of the police department. Any government leader is empowered to be the sole voice of the government he or she manages under law. Loomis as union president is authorized to speak on contractual matters, not matters of policy. This authority of government leaders is supported by Garcetti v. Ceballos, a 2006 Supreme Court of the United States ruling you’ve obviously not read. If you wanted me to expound, you should have asked instead of creating your own fake news view of the comment.
I will not authorize a patrol officer, regardless of his union position, to speak publicly on any administrative act as if he’s speaking on behalf of the city or the police department.
You claim without speaking to me that I’m trying to insult my way into the mayor’s office by exposing the contradictions in my opponents words with their public records; which obviously you’ve no knowledge.
When Jeff Johnson was asked with the other candidates about honest politicians, he changed the phrase to honest politics. When I spoke I reiterated that the question was about individual politicians and not the system of politics. I observed that both Jeff, Bill Patmon and a third person were recording on an FBI where the former state senator was seeking cash from a merchant. Patmon was trying to get himself broke off a piece.
I’m paraphrasing but I noted that if either Bill or Jeff were honest Jeff wouldn’t have taken the cash and Bill would have told him not to take it. That’s not an insult. It’s a fact. That’s also the point in which Brandon Chrostowski chimed in to defend Bill. That defense seemed incredible to me since the question was about honest politicians and he was defending a guy I’d pointed out had participated in Jeff’s extortion.
I’ll write it again. Brandon’s defense gives him the appearance of defending dishonesty and corruption, and it supports the shady past he refuses to discuss as nothing more than youthful indiscretions. There are no criminal charges for youthful indiscretions. All of us who’ve been tainted have owned up to our shit but Brandon. Jeff, Zack and me. Why won’t he open up as the other candidates have done about the reason for his conviction? What is he hiding and what are you helping him hide by deleting my previous comment?
You were damn near sitting next to Kareem Abdul Nafi, the Black Lives Matter leader and spokesman for this area. He’s the real deal. Brandon claimed he was endorsed by Black Lives Matter to try and create some cohesiveness with the black residents in the room. Kareem spoke up and said no he was not. The real organization does not endorse.
He made Brandon retract the statement and correct it with his being endorsed by Black Lives Matter of Cuyahoga County. That guy is a Republican who’s using the group’s name for political purposes in support of Republicans like Brandon who do not have a connection to black people but through his exploitation of them at Edwin’s. Black men working for free is not job creation. It’s human trafficking and slavery.
Brandon got off a nice response. You didn’t hear it. He maliciously lied that I had 24 judgment liens against me. I have no recollection of him blaming me for East Cleveland’s demise which would be equally as uninformed and malicious a lie. I don’t have 24 judgment liens against me.
I also responded to his so-called defense of Bill being criticized for being in the room when extortion was taking place. I told him I didn’t give a damn about him or what he wanted. I observed how he’s bragging that owning a resident qualifies him to be the mayor. I’m paraphrasing. I told him I owned a restaurant and didn’t learn a damn thing from it that would help me run a city. Notice. He kept his mouth shut afterwards and kept doing my thing.
I have a real problem with the following malicious lie from you, Sam.
But Brewer’s solution sounded deranged: He said he’d use the Mayor’s seat to purge the the city of low-IQ employees and suburbanites.
You’d better retract this lying piece of garbage with a fucking quickness. I mean that with all seriousness. I never spoke those words and there’s no record of me uttering anything close to those words at any time during the forum.
I discussed how Cleveland residents in 1982 voted for residency laws for city workers. I voted for residency laws in that election before I campaigned for a Cleveland school board seat the following year. I shared that the city’s workforce was 82 percent suburbanite. I committed to hiring Cleveland residents. I said I would put suburban applications aside. What you wrote is an absolute and it had better be corrected.
I have never characterized Cleveland city council members as illiterates and morons. They’re all educated. Some have advanced degrees. These aren’t dumb people by any stretch of the imagination and I would never characterize them in that manner.
My criticism was directed at them having powers they don’t use or even knowing the powers they do have to use. I offered the example of Jeff Johnson’s response to the Noble Road dump. I shared that he served on council’s health and human services committee that oversaw the city’s division of air pollution control. I explained that the city is contracted with the Ohio EPA to perform air and water pollution control testing. I shared that neither Jeff Johnson nor Kevin Conwell knew they had the oversight authority for the city department that allowed the Noble Road dump to open and continue operating.
When we discussed job creation, I shared that Cleveland’s workforce and community benefits committee hadn’t met for 18 to 24 months. I’ve described council as lazy and unambitious. I’ve shared how they never investigate anything. I shared how Zack chaired council’s safety committee and failed to schedule a single meeting to discuss the first U.S. DOJ report. I shared how a black president had to send a black attorney general to a predominantly black city to tell a black mayor and police chief that cops were terrorizing their citizens. I did not at any time call a member of council illiterate and moronic. That’s more of your malicious fake news.
I cited one state law, R.C 749.01, and explained how I’d use it to provide free hospital care with physicians on EMS squads and mobile clinics for $1 a year per $1000 in property taxes. I shared one city ordinance, a local civil rights law, that we were left in 1974 by councilmen who cared about civil rights that’s not been used by the people sitting at the table with me ever. You can call each law a parlor trick if you want, but I could give a shit about what you think about something you’re too ignorant and malicious to understand.
Here’s your problem. You sat in the front and all you saw was the candidates. I watched the people behind you. You left to promote your own opinions instead of talking to the audience. You assumed all were supporters of the candidates. They weren’t. I was approached afterwards by Ward 1 resident’s who’s minds had been made up in another direction and who saw me more favorably than your description. I didn’t lose a single vote to Brandon or any of the others. Instead of talking to black people all you could see was entertainment while losing and now distorting the substance of the discussion to fit your grossly inaccurate writing.
Like I wrote. I’ve print-screened this post. Go ahead and remove it. It’s not going away. You were noticed about inaccurate information in your story you should have changed. Instead you deleted more accurate information that exposed your lies. Limit public figure or not. You can’t lie on me.
The only thing unhinged about my forum presentation is your fake news interpretation of it. How’s that for a Trumpism? This is why I leave Cleveland Scene magazine alone. You folk are malicious.
Well, that diatribe by whoever this guy is proved to me that your assessment is right. Blowhard.
Do you really think I care about you calling me a blowhard because I’m challenging the malicious lies Sam Allard wrote about me in this piece? I did not at any time suggest or imply that I’d fire Steve Loomis during the forum. I did not say I was firing “low IQ employees and suburbanites” and I have no idea why he put that malicious lie in print. These lies are insane and have to be removed.
@EricJonathanBrewer — thanks for response. Been reporting most of the afternoon and evening so I haven’t gotten a chance to read your lengthy critique. I should have some time later this evening, but just for the record:
I did not delete any of your comments. I’m not sure if there was a lag in the system or what, but unless you included a url in your original comment (which automatically flags it in our system) it should’ve posted . I can take a look at the back end to see if something went wrong, but I certainly didn’t delete anything, and I I don’t intend to delete your note above, which you’re perfectly entitled to make.
Looks like Cleveland has a mayoral candidate who is as thin-skinned…or more so…that even Jason Kipnis, who responded to repeated negativity online with a resounding “FUCK OFF!”
If this is how Mister Brewer is going to react from now on, how will he even have time to campaign…let alone to govern–if he somehow manages to win?
A vote for Brewer is a vote for Trump Lite. …and endless diatribes in response to every negative remark at SCENE, a malicious publication and website which he supposedly “leaves alone’…yeah, right. Like hell!
I don’t want to live in the next East Cleveland or New Detroit. I’m too old to have to carry every time I take out the trash. If this man somehow survives into the primary, I will be working for his opponent…no matter who it is. Even if it is what it is. And I will be volunteering the next day. That’s not a threat, That’s a promise. And if you don’t like reading it, tough shit.
You had better do well on your own turf. You will not carry the Far West Side. Better the devil we’ve known for 12 years than a pontificating bully who destroyed his city while trying to save it. You will not destroy this one. Not on my watch…nor that of my neighbors. Count on it.
Chuckles the Clown
only one man in the first picture above has the eye of the tiger and you can see who that is…
Things have to change in this city. I am dissapointed in our police and the bullying that is going on. To run a large city, you can not pick and choose who you serve. You have to serve the entire city. Not just downtown. Love GOD first, then yourself. After that GOD will show you how to love and serve others. I pray that this city will be served by the man that God choose. Peace and Blessings.
You have to question the priorities of a man who writes a 1500-word diatribe railing against a local alt-weekly reporter for an editorial of a mayoral forum. Eric Brewer, your response to coverage you dont like is to melt down, photoshop Lying Sam Allard on facebook, and get into a debate in the comments section of Cleveland Scene? Is there a more accurate word for this behavior than deranged?
This waa such a digusting article to write. You obviously Allard was brain dead sitting in that room. #RetractTheLies
I want to thank Sam Allard and Cleveland Scene for this coverage. It may not be perfect, but it does give a window to the responses in the room. I am personally supporting Eric J. Brewer. He is frustrated. I am frustrated. I pay taxes in the City of Cleveland. I write about my frustrations at Realneo (google it). Residents who don’t go along with the machine politics in Cleveland are chewed up and spit out. Frank Jackson is an empty cipher controlled by the Greater Cleveland Partnership business-types, who don’t live in the actual City of Cleveland. Notably, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other media outlets are not covering campaign issues that upset the status quo. All 17 City of Cleveland council representatives are being challenged. The City Club will be holding the Mayoral Debate on August 25th, which will be audio recorded and video recorded.
Thinly veiled threat to sue a journalist + Ranting on social media about fake news + Coming up with a catchy nickname for a vocal critic (Lying Sam Allard). Does this remind us of anyone? Bizarre how out of touch Eric Jonathan Brewer seems to be.
I too attended the mayoral forum held on Monday, July 24 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM although it didn’t really begin until 6:50 PM with all the mixing and mingling happening among candidates, elected officials and various supporters. Another engagement required me to depart at 8:05 PM but by then I’d heard and seen enough. Pun intended.
First of all, the event could hardly be described as “a raucous barroom brawl” as there was no one hiding under tables or tossing chairs. No fisticuffs were exchanged either. In fact the entire civil event was viewed by me in the last row. Except for a very few people {who just wanted to hear themselves shout} the volume level generally coincided with one’s support or opposition for this candidate or that issue. The article so far appears to be everything short of substance and nothing short of hype. Second, it was not a “standing-room-only crowd.” There were plenty of chairs for those who chose to sit down. Perhaps standing during an event like this is used to elevate {or perhaps expose} one’s personal level of self importance.
As for singling out Eric Brewer for “name-calling and brash tactics” along with “bare-knuckle exchanges” this was simply not the case unless the article is referring to the references {made by Mr. Brewer} to the public performances of other elected officials {both within the law and outside the law}. Most voters would be contended to see this as “fair game” when it comes to local politics all the way up to the national level. The “elevated tension” exhibited by some of the other candidates mentioned appears to be stemming from being intimidated by the truth emanating from Mr. Brewer.
Finally, I take exception with Mr. Allard and Scene Magazine placing themselves above journalistic protocol when it comes to listing “winners” and “losers” of an event that was billed as a “forum” and not a “debate.” It’s understood that Scene is an alternative weekly but that does not give it license to present such a serious event as a carnival of errors. How about covering the next forum with complete objectivity and then let the voters decide which candidate they support based on the facts presented. I’ll be there next time too.
Joe Bialek
Cleveland, OH
PS: I could comment on the so-called winners/losers section of the article but by now most readers pretty much get the general idea.
I think the reporter was probably just confused by all the echoes of “Who is you?”.
This mayoral election will help decide the future of Cleveland. Either someone will advance the city ‘for all’ residents, employees and visitors, or we follow the path of Detroit, Ferguson, East Cleveland, Chicago, etc., or we make the so called ‘come back’.
There is a lot of racial hatred stemming from Miss Brewer’s facebook page. Lots of refetences to we (black folk), slaves, etc. We need a person to help advance all people and not just further enabling the black people- setting them back decades- with racial devide. I would like to see some fresh faces, not faces of those who are living in the past. I hope voters feel the same way. Johnson and Reed haven’t done much except collect a paycheck for years. Glad their council seats will go to new people with hopefully fresh ideas. Brewer = East Cleveland- enough said. She does not have the mentality to help people by living, and dragging others, down with her. Is BLM financially supporting her campaign?
wow:
“Is there a more accurate word for this behavior than deranged?”
Chuckles:
Yes, there are many to choose from, and most of them describe Agent Orange, the Current Occupant of the Oval Orifice. You can begin with “Trumpian”…if that’s actually a word. But the shoe fits.
Chuckles the Clown
Dicktator / Eric Brewer. Aka Dicktrator.
Ah, yes…the answer to that old riddle…
“What do you get when you cross a potato with a penis?”
Chuckles the Clown