In Ohio,Tea Partiers say they are ready to strike

Mid-week wash:

Interesting, don't you think?,  how a politician's self-serving decision  can come back to haunt him three years later. In 2010, Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff bucked the State GOP by endorsing Tea Party favorite and then-State Rep. Seth Morgan in the Republican primary for Ohio auditor.

The news broke something like this:

Arshinkoff: Morgan is a certified public accountant and has a fresh face and bold ideas. (Read: It was really a bowing concession to the Tea Party much like the ones that other Republicans are handing out these days.)

Morgan: "Alex is a longstanding, respected leader with the Republican establishment...and to gain his endorsement is truly  exciting for this campaign."

Short-term excitement, that is.  Morgan lost to the state party's choice, David Yost.

But his right-wing credentials were impeccable enough for the uber-rich Koch
brothers to take him on as the policy director of Americans for Prosperity, the outfit founded by the Kochs.

Joe Hallett of the Columbus Dispatch lately quoted Morgan as saying the Tea Partiers  now have several options to form a new party, create an "insurrection" within the GOP and "everything in between."

Connect the dots:  Arshinkoff, long an Establishment Republican, now finds the  party facing a serious threat from a guy that he endorsed more for personal political reasons than the  relative merits of the two primary candidates.

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Speaking of the Tea Party, how about this notion  from former State Republican Chairman Kevin DeWine when he spoke to the Akron Press Club in  April 2010:  The Republican Party and the Tea Party have much in common and he (DeWine) would welcome them into the party. At the time  Grumpy Abe  wrote: "It may be more accurate to wonder whether the Tea Partiers would ever welcome Republicans into their ranks"  The answer is clear enough.

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Now that former South  Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has won a special election for a  congressional seat,  can we forever erase the idea of a superior moral compass in the hearts of southern Republicans?

Mandel's $$$ buddies: Jot down the Koch Brothers

We happened to catch a TV political attack ad on Sen. Sherrod Brown, not a  rare intrusion into my program viewing these days.   It was sponsored by American Commitment, one of those shadowy players  whose name means so little to so many folks beyond the Potomac.  What made this more interesting than the others, I discovered with a few minutes research, is its president, a guy named Phil Kerpen (pictured).  He's listed on the web  as a columnist on Fox News Opinion, chairman of the Internet Freedom Coalition and a former vice president of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

In other words, he's a lobbyist for generic conservative groups whose names normally promote starry patriotic  themes like freedom, (from taxes) liberty (from taxes)  and...American Commitment (to unseat Democrats who stand in the way of lowering taxes, fatter profits,  and deregulation.)

You could go on and on about the things that keep these folks up at night, but the one group that stands out in Kerpen's resume is Americans for  Prosperity.

That's the mega-funded juggernaut founded by David Koch, a billionaire who wants to rearrange  American life to suit his own rich stake in the land .  He and his brother are doing so by laying up tons of cash in House and Senate races, including Ohio's.  You might wonder what a man of Koch's vast wealth is doing birthing  organizations with prosperity in the title since he already has more dough than he needs to buy his own country.

But the intersection of Kerpen, Americans Commitment, Americans for Prosperity and the Kochs is a sweet deal for Brown's whizzy  Republican opponent, Josh Mandel, who doesn't appear in the ad but you can bet the Statue of Liberty that Josh is well aware of it every waking moment of his day.

So factor into Mandel the name of David Koch, one of seveal of Josh's silent partners.

And so far, it hasn't worked despite the millions that the Mandel campaign is spending on attack ads.  A late Quinnipiac poll  has  Brown about 11 pts. ahead  with Josh settled in at 36.6 pct..

Pick up the phone, Guv. Guess who's on the other end

COLUMNIST GEORGE WILL has been on an odyssey to herald the new generation of conservative governors that could pass a screen test as, say, a presidential candidate. And he is doing it with extraordinary grammar. I know of no other national pundit who would dare begin a column, as he did today, with the word "Hitherto". But that's George Will for you, ramping up the language to charm those who have no clue about the points that he's trying to make. He's lately added Govs. John Kasich and Scott Walker to his honor roll, going so far as to compare Walker to Ronald Reagan. It's a common Republican desparture point in elevating a current prospect to the Reagan legend.

There are instant benefits for guys like Kasich and Walker. As a national columnist,

Will's often inscrutable insights reach readers - at least those who still find their way to an Op-ed page - from coast to coast. With the columnist's endorsement, they might close ranks on a consensus for the next fellow in the White House. He praises Walker for being "serene in the center of this storm" as the governor sits for an interview beneath a portrait of Ronald Reagan. And later he declares being impressed by Walker's "calm comportment" in this crises.

Will's in-and-out visits to crises spots satisfy his pedantic yearnings to create a medieval America in which only the fittest survive. He's attracted to the modern version of Republican governors these days much as hungry sperm whales use echo location to find their fish.

As for Walker's crisis in attempting to dislocate public employe unions, he attempts to create the silly argument that everything in Wisconsin would be fine if those out-of-state union hacks weren't crossing borders to create havoc. As I've previously noted, his own out- of- state sponsors are the billionaire Koch brothers, whose money has been turning up quite often in political campagns. The Koch front group, Americans for Prosperity, has just bought $342,000 worth of TV and radio ads in Wisconsin asking people to "stand with Walker", while bashing unions and President Obama.

But even Walker's crusade, marked by the religious fervency of a man who is a son of a Baptist minister, can run off the highway in times like these.. A New York blogger, BuffaloBeast, tricked him into a 20-minute phone conversation in which the blogger pretended he was David Koch. During the conversation, Walker openly described his plans to crush the union.

To the credit of George Will's brief but studied assessment of the governor, Walker was serene throughout the phone call.