On Akron General, a federal judge and Ohio's great record of laying eggs...

It looks like the public reaction to Fox News' Laura Ingraham's  keynoter at Akron General isn't going away without a struggle.  Letters to the Beacon Journal  continue to debate the propriety  of having a right-wing speaker for  an invitation-only audience at its centennial event in which she attacked Obamacare and the president.  It was a major public relations gaffe with Democratic leaders in the audience.

Those who are accusing liberals (The Left!) of being soreheads about her appearance aren't even close to the point.  The snag in this is that the gathering was to have been a celebratory occasion to honor a long respected hospital.  It was hardly smart to subject a captive audience to a political speech, left or right.

My problem  with all of this is,  why didn't the hospital's front office,  including CEO and President Dr. Tim Stover,  sense the land mine before the program was set?  Were there no professional voices from the PR department to alert them  of the risks?  Or were they simply ignored?

I'm  told that Stover called County Executive Russ Pry and Mayor Don Plusquellic, both well-situated Democratic leaders, in an effort of damage control. Maybe it was a start for the 150th anniversary.

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That was a well-deserved blistering rebuke by editorial page editor Mike Douglas of Federal Judge John Adams in Sunday's Beacon Journal. It represented still one more  voice to the Sixth Circuit U.S.Court of Appeals reversal of a decision by Adams in a case involving a Stow firefighter and the city of Stow.  The appellate court severely ruled that  Adams  mishandled  the case and called for it to be retried with a different judge.  Adams, you may recall, also was recently rebuffed by the appellate court in the Akron sewer case.

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From the pages of the New York Times comes word that Ohio is among the leaders in egg production, 7.7 billion in 2012!  It didn't mention whether that number  included the  eggs laid by the clucks in the legislature  in Columbus....And from an excellent profile of Vladimir Putin in  New Yorker magazine,  we learned that his latest girlfriend can dribble a soccer ball with her head with a deep backward bend!

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Finally, after hearing of America's decline for three days by the  CPAC fringe, we decided to go with James Wolcott's version that America's decline began when Guy Lombardo died and his program ended.





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