Friday, May 31, 2013

Gordon, Catholic and Polish jokes ain't funny

Hasn't the time come for Gordon Gee, the OSU president, to grow up? Shouldn't he decide whether he wants to sit atop a mega-university or be a standup comedian who slammed (ha, ha) the priests at Notre Dame University as "those damn Catholics"   and declared that Catholics couldn't be trusted.  The remarks were contained in a recording of his remarks to a meeting of the school's Athletic Council (ha, ha) in which  he disparaged the Notre Dame football presence, saying: "The fathers are holy on Sunday and holy hell on the rest of the week." (ha, ha)

Gee, a Mormon, had run  into earlier image problems by complaining that coordinating OSU's many divisions was similar to trying to organize the Polish army.

Gee, who is richly paid for his tenure at OSU, has apologized for his remarks, saying they were intended to be funny.  So why are a lot of people not laughing?

P.S. Problem quickly solved.  Gee reportedly is undergoing something the University described as  a "remediation" plan in lieu of sending him off to the hungry I for his next gig. (I.e., fuhgeddaboudit)

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The Chicago Sun-Times added a new dark chapter to the inexorable decline of newspapers by firing its entire photography staff of 20, plus a group of free-lancers.   The paper's front office, like many front offices today, groped for an explanation by saying: "Our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news" and the S-T was working to meet that demand "to restructure the way we manage multimedia including photography, across the network."

Do you think the paper's next desperate step will be to offer free popcorn for everyone who prefers the videos?   Forbes contributor Michelin Maynard said the paper will rely on reporters to snap photographs with smart phones."

We liked the epitaph from former Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, who tersely summed up the paper's shrinkage:  "The front page yielded to the bottom line".

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Talk about chutzpah!  When a political party can openly deny an audit of how public money is spent on a private company set up by that party, that's big-time chutzpah.

Trouble is,  there's no counter-force in Columbus to prevent the schemers on the Republican side from letting us see how the money channeled to JobsOhio (RobsOhio, says Plunderbund) is being pocketed.  Both houses of the Republican-controlled General Assembly, which have left the minority Democrats impotent, blocked  an attempt to audit the JobsOhio books by the state auditor.  It becomes clearer each day why Gov. Kasich promoted the creation of JobsOhio as a private development company free of public oversight.

Jeez!  What will the Rustics  at the Statehouse think of next to screw the public?

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