Here's stuff to brighten your day...

In my querulous quest to bring light to the planet's endless darkness, I offer today  some vignettes  that you may have missed  in the numbing front-page  media coverage of LeBron's return:

Dollar Tree has converted its dollars $8.5 billion times for its purchase price for Family Dollar. Don't know where that leaves discounter Dollar General, whose latest flier told us of scads of items well above a buck (The only stuff  that sustained the $1  tag were Animal Crackers and a few other Back to School "Snacks and Treats" .)  As a wag once  said of Starbucks in New York City, they should call it "FiveBucks".

* * * * *

All writers, including me, should mightily thank  New York Times columnist Gail Collins for liberating us from the cumbersome burden of politically correct references to his/her...When she began a sentence "Look, everybody has their own way of demonstrating..."  it was a wicked dismissal of a singular subject and plural pronoun that has tormented me since I was still  figuring out how to replace a typewriter ribbon. Now,  everybody and their  have been reconciled in the Times by a leading national columnist.   Will she now move on with who and whom?  Gail, I'm waiting.  Desperately.

* * * * *


After years in my line of work, I learned that you can't  tell  politicians from their covers. No better example of that is Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine, a
Republican,  who seems so meek and mild but is a first-tier religious zealot.  On Tuesday,Team DeWine was in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati, again arguing against what he considers sinful, lawbreaking same-sex marriage.   No one has  been keeping score on how much all of this costing Ohioans - a personal crusade that extended  for DeWine in earnest when he ran for the office in 2011 promising to fashion an AG  career on family values and opposition to ObamaCare. (Summit County Republican Chairman was a paid DeWine liaison in northern Ohio, which paid adequately and required no heavy lifting). Although Outlook Ohio Magazine pointed out that 29 consecutive court decisions support marriage equality, DeWine is Ohio's King Sisyphus, who was  forced  to repeatedly roll a huge boulder up the hill and then see it roll back.

* * * * *

Finally: It's getting harder every day for a baseball writer to cover the sport.  When Pirates star outfielder Andrew McCutchen was forced out of the lineup with a fractured rib, the medical report  called it an "avulsion fracture involving the costochondral cartilage of the left 11th rib."

Anybody?

What's in a name? A plugged bridge!

 OK, gang.  Was there an ominous forewarning that was encoded in the name of the woman responsible for Bridgegate? (See Gail Collins)  Why did it take weeks after Gov. Christie's loyal team had plugged  the George Washington Bridge to connect the dots with Christie's deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly?   Who knew?

As one who has never been confused with Abe Lincoln or Abe Vigoda I have not  been  overly sensitive about name association and for the large part gotten away with it.

But in this instance, do you think Bridget was trying to tell us something all along for weeks?

Gail Collins wrapped up the mess this way:

"This is very big.  Voters have been known to overlook financial chicanery or stuffed ballot boxes.  They might continue to love a guy who screwed up the local bond rating  or got evicted from the governor's mansion by an irate wife.  But could you ever trust a politician who was implicated in a deliberate  effort to ruin rush hour?"

Well said.  But even Collins overlooked the portent in Bridget's name.

Nicknames in the nick of time?

IT WAS GOOD to see Gail Collins, the delightful New York Times columnist, promoting Butch Otter as a Republican presidential candidate. Among her reasons for supporting the Idaho governor was that he would be the first president to be a member of Ducks Unlimited. Besides she notes happily, his candidacy would give her the opportunity to visit Idaho for the first time.

She has made a good choice. Otter would restore to the American culture the use of nicknames that disappeared from the days when mobsters were best remembered by such colorful references as "Machine Gun Kelly" or, more recently, "Vinnie Carwash", to give you some idea of their line of work.

(Butch means "wisdom" in early German - but good luck on that one in these fluttery days.)

Maybe Butch Otter could do something to bring back nicknames to other fields in the public eye. There was something compelling about calling a pool shark "Minnesota Fats", or crowd-stirring wrestler "Man Mountain Dean".

Ah, baseball was all the more interesting with characters named Catfish Metkovich, Peanuts Lowrey, Hammerin' Hank, the Splendid Splinter, the Yankee Clipper and PeeWee Reese. And how could anybody ignore Ernie Lombardi, whose nose reached first base long before the rest of his body. He was, as everyone lovingly knows, "The Schnozz".

Finally, there were Dizzy and Daffy, and even a "Butch,'" Wynegar, in this case. And if you don't remember it, I know a guy who has his baseball card.

So, on to Idaho, Ms. Collins. Butch Otter does have something to offer and should be rewarded for it. Sorry, Mitt, but that is really your middle name. Between Willard and Romney.

For a modest $50, you get the Arshinkoff-Huckabee tandem

IF YOU WANT TO spend an evening with a fellow who suspects that President Obama is a Mau Mau, Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff has created an opportunity for you. He's scheduled Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas preacher and governor, to be the guest at the party's Lincoln Day Dinner on April 9 at Quaker Station. It's $50 a plate, and my guardian angel has sternly warned me against going to the event. Besides, what do Arshinkoff and Huckabee have to do with Lincoln?

Huckabee will be in town to sign his new book - whose title is A Simple Government - and help Alex advance his boast of a bountiful Republican spirit hereabouts.

In a review, New York Times Columnist Gail Collins described the book as "one long howl about the Obama White House," where the author finds an A student who is an arrogant nerd, who "can't hit, he can't throw and he can't run." Nice.

By the way, did I mention that Huckabee is running for president if the crick don't rise ,even if George Will dissed him as "implausible"? Still, sitting through a dinner with a Razorback guitar player who autographs books is worth something, I guess, at least for Arshinkoff, whose political skills reside in inviting Southern politicians to his bashes. The vintage list includes Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and now Huckabee.

One Republican who won't be there is indicted auto dealer Tom Ganley, who was enthusiastically endorsed as a leader when Ganley, as a congressional candidate last year, appeared as a guest on Huckabee's Fox TV show. Indeed, Ganley returned the favor by hiring Huckabee's midwest presidential campaign coordinator to be his own campaign manager. Not that it did any good.

Trust me. Alex will be his usual effusive self with Huckabee. For fifty bucks, the steak had better be tender.

Risch:Stolen Humvees for nuclear arms treaty

SEASON'S GREETINGS to New York Times columnist Gail Collins for telling us of one conservative's unique foreign policy gambit. Her op-ed piece today was all about Sen. James Risch of Idaho. Until deep thinking Republicans come along, we don't hear much about Idaho other than reports that it has a lot of wolves roaming around, potatoes and a very good college football team that plays its home games in Boise on the world's only dark blue astroturf . It is supposed to be an imaginative color coordinated scheme to match the team's uniforms. (I confess to having a bit of trouble singling out the players on TV as they blend and vanish into the dark field.)

But back to Risch. He obviously has no use for the Russians. "They cheat. They are serial cheaters," he declared in his failed effort to amend the START nuclear arms treaty. It was all down hill for him after that. His amendment would block the pact until the Putin gang returned four Humvees to the U.S. that were grabbed by Russian soldiers during the Russia-Georgia war.

• Displaying photos of the monstrous vehicles being driven away, Risch snorted, "You can watch your property right here being towed away by the Russians! Back to Moscow!"

His indignant remarks were not a simple case of apples and oranges. They compared nuclear weapons with gas hogs as a reasonable trade. He might have at least sweetened the pot by demanding that the oil-rich Russians also give every American driver a gift card for 10 free gallons at the pump. Now, senator, about that blue astroturf...

What? Poor Mitt's health plan could sink him?

THERE WAS a brief moment back in the last presidential campaign when I gave Mitt Romeny a decent chance of winning his party's nomination. He had good posture, spoke clearly enough without a cowboy's twang, and his hair revived the World War II he-man image of Ronald Reagan - an attribute that neither John McCain nor Rudy Giuliani could ever hope to assume. On the negative side, he was from Massachusetts, which was much too hospitable to Harvard for anybody from South Carolina or Idaho to embrace. And seldom a day passed when a radio preacher didn't inspire angry Bible-quoting callers to accuse Romney of being a Mormon cultist - a zillionaire or not.

But the tie breaker appeared to be that Romney had figured out a solution to America's health care challenges with his plan for Massachusetts. He spoke about it often in polite political circles (there were no Tea Parties then). For a photogenic politician who always impressed me as preparing for a place in an altarpiece, how could anybody not give him the edge against, say, Fred Thompson , who growled a lot, and Mike Huckabee, who could have once had a walk-on role in an old Andy Griffith show.

Ironically, Romney, who appears to be one of those guys who has no luck, is being forced to defend himself against the very thing that he boastfully helped create: his state's health plan. That's because President Obama and other Democrats keep reminding everybody that their health care plan is very much like Romney's. You can see the problem. As Gail Collins of the New York Times pointed out, Romney has yet to come up with an appropriate game-changer. When a couple of reporters from Think Progress rudely inquired, Mitt could say nothing more than it was a "big topic" and "ducked into an elevator."

I still like his chances of being cast as a presidential candidate in the next Hollywood movie. Which is more than I can say about McCain or Giuliani.