With Bryan Williams, you can go home again

Should anybody be surprised that Bryan Williams has found his way back to the Summit County Board of Elections? All that remains for him to add $18,000 per annum to his lifestyle is the pro forma appointment to the board by Secretary of State Jon Husted.    Nice work if you can get it.  And Williams usually does.  He owes Republican county chairman Alex Arshinkoff, the bell cow of the county party for decades, big time.

You may recall that Williams resigned from the State Board of Education in December after the media started printing the nasty word that he was multitasking as a lobbyist for the non-union Associated Builders and Contractors of Ohio.  That group has a private charter school and there was more than a little notice that he was  aggressively  trying to persuade the board to support the school with your tax money and mine. That, after all, is what lobbyists  do.

There was some heartfelt disappointment about  Williams' departure from the state board.  
The panel's president.  Debe Terhar, a certified Tea Party member, sent her regrets and told him she would keep in touch.

His return to  the Summit board on March 1 will be a reunion  with his old stable where he once served as the board's director via the  good graces of Arshinkoff . Williams also  ran against Mayor Plusquellic  in 2003, losing mightily.  He highlighted his campaign by accusing the Democratic mayor of  corruption (another Arshinkoff theme).  He hissed   declaring that his opponent had generously given a tax break to a friendly company  that filed for  bankrupcy.

There was a problem.  The charge was not only untrue, the company, Qualilty Mold,  was quite healthy and doing business.  Under fire for an egregious error,   Williams ultimately withdrew the charge from his website and apologized.

Now Williams and Arshinkoff will be united again, working in tandem on the board in the interest of the people, or at least some them.   That will more than please the chairman who returned to the board himself under Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted after the previous secretary, Democrat  Jennifer Brunner,   ousted him for being so damn disruptive.

He's back?  $18,000 per annum?    No, we're not surprised.

Terhar and Smith: Driving education off the page

If you're looking for troublesome  evidence of the right-wing zealots who are attempting to take control of how we educate our kids, look no farther than the Ohio Board of Education.  As the standard-setting camp for public education, it has  two Kasich appointees who wouldn't mind casting  it  into the inglorious dark past of book burning and Red baiting.

In short order,  the board's president, Debe Terhar, called for the removal of Toni Morrison's  The Bluest Eye, from the reading list of high school students.  She said the  Nobelist's book contained a rape scene that she wouldn't want her, or anybody else's, grandchildren to read.

Earlier, Terhar, a devout Tea Party member from Cincinnati, stirred up her Facebook audience by referencing Hitler to President Obama's support of background gun checks.    (Terhar later apologized for spewing such garbage.  But she had already made her point to her fans.)

Meantime, fellow-board member  Mark Smith, president of Ohio Christian University in Circleville, said such books are "divisive" (Its heroine is a black girl who wishes she had blue eyes in order to have a more comfortable fit in a white society.)

Smith referred to the book's genre as having an "underlying socialist-communist agenda...that is  anti what this nation is about."

Talk about divisiveness!

The fear of books by politically or religiously inspired critics  has long created odorous  baggage for society, from Savonarola's bonfires of the vanities, to Hitler's pyres to the red scare of the 50s and 60s when J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and Joe McCarthy's inquisition  tried to twist the public mind into their distorted vision of a free society.  Among the prime targets was Albert Einstein's scientific papers and pacifist letters in defense of others. Hoover passionately but cautiously wanted to deport the world famous  German Jew but worried about backlash.

(As a personal note about the witch hunts of those times:  As a college student in a philosophy class at the University of Illinois, I  and the other students were frequently reminded by the fearful prof that as we discussed the chapter on Karl Marx, we should be aware that they were  Marx 's ideas, not his. He didn't offer the same disclaimers when we turned the pages to John Locke or David Hume.)

Thousands of teachers and others  lost their jobs as questionable patriots from the horrific attacks by Hoover (an obsessive  cross-dresser, and quirky on some other matters) ,  McCarthy ( a blustering  alcoholic)  and various House Un-American Activities committees throughout  the land. The Birch Society even referred to President Eisenhower as a communist sympathizer while others, including Einstein were dumped into the same crowd.   Many of the targets were Jewish immigrants who had found a way out of Hitler's Nazi embrace. And,of course, Martin Luther King, a perfect fit for  Hoover's racist degradation.

Why is this important now?   Well,it wasn't that long ago that America, including the national media, was paralyzed by fear - not of the Commies but of the menace of Hoover and Co.

If Terhar and Smith want to educate high schoolers in the threat of fascists, no better place to leave grandchildren to the rest of us and begin by adding Fred Jerome's chilling The Einstein File,  written  more than a decade ago.

 I had first decided to fashion my own response to Terhar and Smith in a tongue-in-cheek way, dismantling these would-be emperors' new clothes.  But, folks, the subject is simply too serious to make light of it.

But I do want to thank Gov. Kasich for providing me with the grist for this cautionary column.
                       

Obama really Hitler? Naw, says school board chief

This is how Debe Terhar describes herself on line:   

"I am President of the Hamilton County Republican Women's Club, a member of the Warren County Republican Women's Club, the Hamilton County Republican Club, the Green Township Republican Club and an early participant of the Tea Party Movement.   I am a member of  both the Northwest and Southwest Tea Parties of Hamilton County and the Lebanon Tea Party in Warren County."

Had enough?  Oh, I should tell you that Debe Terhar  was just re-elected president of the State Board of Education by her  associates on the board. I should also add that Terhar posted a picture of Adoph Hitler on her Facebook to protest the Obama administration's moves on gun control.

When asked by a Columbus Dispatch reporter about her posting of the Nazi chief, Terhar insisted it was not a reference to President Obama. (Nor, we assume, were  placards of Hitler and Obama at Tea Party rallies.)

"I'm not comparing the president to Adolph Hitler," Terhar told the Dispatch reporter.  "It's the thought of disarming citizens, and this has happened  throughout history.  What's the true intention of the Second Amendment?  It was to protect us from tyrannical government.  God forbid."

Also disarming  is the thought that Terhar is the head of state school board with majority  support from the other members.

Today's political news: The view from the rear

What a week, huh? The thundering herd was on the move - backward.  The photo will give you a strong sense of it.  We scooped up a few bits of evidence to close out the week.  Here I go  again:

Romney foreign policy advisor  Richard Wiilliamson  was quoted in the Washington Post as saying the  Middle East would be a kinder, gentler place if Mitt were president.   "There's a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you'd be in a different situation,"  he said, explaining that  Muslims would have liked him much more than Obama.  I'm not sure what to make of that so I'll move on.

Paul Ryan, who has referred to Mitt as his running mate,  says that when Obama talks about  pulling together to improve  America, he's dishonest.  Why?   Yep, the president's  pro-choice position that "panders to the most extreme elements of his party."

Ryan, an absolutist who insists there should be no exceptions for abortion, said, "We're all in this together - it has a nice ring. For everyone who loves this country  it is not only true, but obvious. Yet how hollow it  sounds coming from a politician who has never once lifted a hand to defend the most helpless and innocent of all human beings, the child waiting to be born."

Plunderbund noted that Ohio Board of Education president Debe Terhar,   a Tea Party activist, has been named the co-chair of the Educators for Romney coalition, whatever that is.    Terhar was appointed to the board by Gov. Kasich, ostensibly to  bring enthusiasm and fervor to the state's education interests.  If this works out,  she'll doubtless be named as the football coach at one of the state universities.  But first she'll have to finish the laundry

 It could change, but as we write, those  efforts to remove Obama from the Kansas  ballot may have fizzled.  A Kansas man who petitioned the state to to deny him a spot on the ballot has withdrawn his petition within a few days before the Kansas Objections Board was to act on it.  The petitioner is a devout birther and had a friend in Secretary of State Kris Kobach,  likewise a birther who  was prepared to honor the request on grounds that Obama hadn't proved that he  was an American.
By the way, Kobach is  on the  Romney immigration advisory team. (It never ends with Mitt!)

What was that memorable line from the Wizard of Oz?  "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.")

Good.