Is Wall Street headed to Ohio for a 'New Day' ?

WEEK-END WIDGETS:

Having watched and read about the ceremonial rollout of GM's Chevrolet Cruze from the Lordstown assembly line, it didn't surprise me that John Kasich was absent from the lines of applauding workers. You would have thought that when the word got out that his opponent, Gov. Ted Strickland, would be sitting happily on the passenger side with GM President Mark Reuss beaming at the wheel, that Kasich would want a piece of the action. But, alas, the Republican contender was not a cheerleader for the bailout of GM that saved thousands and thousands of jobs and kept the company out of bankruptcy. Is that the "New Day" that he promises on his home page?

Let's face it. That kind of opposition to such expenditures is widely popular for so many GOP candidates today, including the ticket in Ohio that it might easily have been arranged in a board room at the Bank of America.

It would be heretical for Kasich to change his stripes now, particuarly after he spent such a long time at the Wall Street investment firm of Lehman Brothers that wound up in bankruptcy. As

Candidate Kasich makes his rounds, he swears Lehman Brothers is old history for him and besides, he had little to do with its operation. Ouch! I would demur by saying that you can take Kasich out of Wall Street, but you can't take Wall Street out of Kasich.

There's been such a loud noise in the campaigns that blame President Obama for the economic mess - great political fodder, if mindless, considering what he inherited - it might be worthwhile to turn to an appropriate comment by the late Daniel Schorr, offered in a collection of his commentaries, "Come to Think of It." Observed Schorr in 2001, as he took an early inventory of the works of Bush II:

"But perhaps one should not be surprised at this tendency [ by Bush ] to act now and think later. This, after all, was the president who decided how much money he wanted to commit for tax relief before he knew how much he would need for defense, education, and prescription drugs.

It was true then - nearly a decade ago. And it's just as true now as Republicans continue to rehash the beauty of restoring the economic nightmare of the Bush tax cuts.

Finally, when we hear the Three Amigos - Sarah Palin, John Boehner, and Newt Gingrich - link the preacher's threat to burn the Koran to the building of the Islamic Mosque in Manhattan - isn't that a wildly over-the-top quid pro quo that ought to be left to playground toughs? These people are regurgitating a Gothic novel to scare the hell out of Americans and it is working in some quarters, with help from Fox News. So may we now turn to the late Allen Ginsberg, the Beat generation poet, who may have been simply looking at faces in the crowd when he wrote :

"Whoever, controls the media - the images - controls the culture."

Daniel Schorr: A loss the media can ill-afford today

THE DEATH OF DANIEL SCHORR has left a terrible vacuum in the national media, where wisdom, depth and civil discourse now fall under the widely divergent realms of indifference or unrestrained hype.

The 93-year-old journalist, who finished his work at NPR with some of the most lucid commentary to be found anywhere from the ivory towers and antennae, was a breed apart from the pretentious hucksters who command the airwaves simply with circus acts presented with fictional news.

The way things are going with the media, the nation can ill-afford to lose Schorr's voice - one with which you could disagree at times without being outraged. For his efforts, he was proud to admit that he had been honored by his appearance on President Nixon's enemies list for his reporting of some of the CIA's bad habits. Richard Helms, the CIA director, angrily referred to Schorr as a "son of a bitch" and a "killer."

In the uproar over of his leak of a report by the (Rep. Otis) Pike Committee on illegal CIA activities, he resigned from CBS as the nework was preparing to fire him. And later fired by CNN. As his colleague Roger Mudd said at the time, "CBS found that, like other big corporations, it did not like to offend the Congress."

In the wonderful collection of his commentaries , Come to Think of It, Schorr's keen perception of the ills of government and politics are always persuasive. In describing the long delay in calling the winner in the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential race whose outcome landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, he concluded with a lashing of Justice Scalia:

"Not every justice would say, as he did on Saturday, that the issuance of the voting stay suggested that Bush had a substantial probability of success. Not every justice would own up to partisanship by saying the recounted votes threatened irreparable harm to petitioner Governor Bush and to the country. "

For the most part, the national media covered the travesty as though it was the final two minutes of the Super Bowl rather than one of a presidential election's darkest moments. And still do.

In today's world, we have a scam by ESPN to suspensefully entertain us with The Decision, Team LeBron's sequel to Alice in Wonderland, where the young heroine rises and shrinks before our very eyes. But even scams work in TVland, and ESPN walked away with a huge audience. ( ESPN was probably conditioned by the memorable line from the movie The Freshman that was uttered by benevolent mobster Carmine Sabatini. Replying to a skeptic about his work rules, he declared with bruised feelings:

"Scam?...Scam? This is an ugly word - this scam. This is business. If you want to be in business, this is what you do."

And how about the stupid firing of Shirley Sherrod from the Agriculture Department after her boss told her that she would be scorned as a racist (she's African-American) by madman Glenn Beck without checking the validity of the charge. The phony issue was raised by a reckless blogger who seems to enjoy his reign of corruption. To paraphrase the Tea Partyers: I want my country back - from Glenn Beck. Sorry, Mr. President. Isn't it time that you and your aides stand your ground and name names and dare them to outright fistfights? An apology will hardly cover this mess.

Daniel Schorr, who was honored with many coveted journalistic awards, knew a lot about his profession. He distinguished himself as a probing reporter by never tip-toeing from the scene of the crime. As Donald Ritchie, the Senate historian, said of him: "What passes for commentary today is almost all opinion. But Schorr was part of that breed of commentators who dug up information before they pontificated about it."

That's the vacuum that I was talking about.