The week's wash , with a surprise or two

Imagine my mild surprise when I read in my hometown paper this morning that a fellow who is the executive vice president of FreedomWorks, a national Tea Party enterprise, was the campaign manager of Bryan Willams' futile effort  to unseat Mayor Don Plusquellic in 2003. The name Adam Brandon was a faint memory, although I did recall that Plusquellic swamped Williams with 71 pct. of the vote.

Brandon, bred in the Akron area and now living in Washington, was  slated to speak at the Portage County Tea Party dinner on Thursday and told the Beacon Journal that the national group's priority was to take over the Republican Party!   That's hardly a stretch because the Teeps have already lassoed  much of the GOP today, scaring the hell out of people like John Boehner that if he's naughty and not nice, they will challenge him and other similarly situated Republicans in next year's primaries.

Williams has already made a name for himself, if not as a wannabe mayor, then as a Ohio Education Board member  influencing public education policy while lobbying for a non-union construction group operating a private charter school.

But in  promising a takeover by the Tea Party, Brandon is a tad late in Summit County, where all signs of the GOP under Chairfman Alex Arshinkoff have been shifting rightward beyond the margins of the page. If you need  confirmation, check the list of the Summit "Republican" party's dinner speakers...Well???

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Now this one is sort of a surprise:  E. Gordon Gee heading to the Mountaineer state to serve as interim president of West Virginia University. Frankly, with his golden parachute upon leaving Ohio State University, he can afford to buy the entire state.  The real challenge for him is whether he can convert his new campus into the bow tie capital of America!    From the experience of growing up in a coal town just north of the WVA line, I don't remember the area  as being that fashion conscious.

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There's not much more I dare add to the soaring global tributes to Nelson Mandela other than to yearn for somebody in the upper class of the Republican Party on Capital Hill to be as thoughtful in healing the problems of the less privileged in America.  The contrast, say, to John Boehner,  who defines leadership as being an obstructionist, is vividly merciless.

For Gee, a rainbow at the end of the pot

Talk about golden parachutes!  The word I'm hearing from unofficial sources - OK cynical gossipers - is that the OSU Board of Trustees had no choice but to give Gordon Gee a princely entitlement worth millions (and with his own private secretary!)  on his way out the door in September.

Even in a day of cash-strapped campuses, a trustee was alleged to have expressd his concern that without the Midas package, Gee might have bought the university and cracked jokes about the Icelandic army and a monastery in South Bend to his heart's content.  "You can see," the trustee said, "that if we didn't satisfy his demands, he would have replaced the entire board with his personal accountants  from Bank of America  and appointed his friend, Gov. Kasich, to set up a metrically-correct hedge fund for each of the school's  new football recruits. What could we do?"

From Woody Hayes... to Gordon Gee's woodshed..

When OSU icon Woody Hayes nastily slugged a Clemson linebacker  who had intercepted a pass in the 1978 Gator Bowl (in full view of a national TV audience),  he was fired.   When OSU president Gordon Gee verbally slugged Notre Dame and Catholics - only jesting, he said  - the school's Board of Trustees, decided it was time to send him  to class for...eh... remedial behavior sessions.

For Gee, whose annual pay with compensation is nearly $2 million, it could get worse.  The board has warned him that it doesn't expect to be ambarrassed by his childish humor again and quite likely will fire him if he doesn't shape up.   Meantime,  the Board has set a regimen for him that is weirdly not fashionable for the modern  breed of university officials .

 For example, it's not every day that a board of trustees orders  the campus president to work with professionals to clean up his act with a "more targeted selection of the most  appropriate speaking engagements and appearances."

It also wants him to enlist professionals in "revisiting your personal communications and speechwriting processes..."

Those and other behavioral conditions just don't seem the sort of  things you have to tell a multimillion-dollar president of a mammoth university. Even if they have to be told to him.

As long as the trustees are at it, they should also remind him to never run with scissors.

 

Gordon, Catholic and Polish jokes ain't funny

Hasn't the time come for Gordon Gee, the OSU president, to grow up? Shouldn't he decide whether he wants to sit atop a mega-university or be a standup comedian who slammed (ha, ha) the priests at Notre Dame University as "those damn Catholics"   and declared that Catholics couldn't be trusted.  The remarks were contained in a recording of his remarks to a meeting of the school's Athletic Council (ha, ha) in which  he disparaged the Notre Dame football presence, saying: "The fathers are holy on Sunday and holy hell on the rest of the week." (ha, ha)

Gee, a Mormon, had run  into earlier image problems by complaining that coordinating OSU's many divisions was similar to trying to organize the Polish army.

Gee, who is richly paid for his tenure at OSU, has apologized for his remarks, saying they were intended to be funny.  So why are a lot of people not laughing?

P.S. Problem quickly solved.  Gee reportedly is undergoing something the University described as  a "remediation" plan in lieu of sending him off to the hungry I for his next gig. (I.e., fuhgeddaboudit)

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The Chicago Sun-Times added a new dark chapter to the inexorable decline of newspapers by firing its entire photography staff of 20, plus a group of free-lancers.   The paper's front office, like many front offices today, groped for an explanation by saying: "Our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news" and the S-T was working to meet that demand "to restructure the way we manage multimedia including photography, across the network."

Do you think the paper's next desperate step will be to offer free popcorn for everyone who prefers the videos?   Forbes contributor Michelin Maynard said the paper will rely on reporters to snap photographs with smart phones."

We liked the epitaph from former Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, who tersely summed up the paper's shrinkage:  "The front page yielded to the bottom line".

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Talk about chutzpah!  When a political party can openly deny an audit of how public money is spent on a private company set up by that party, that's big-time chutzpah.

Trouble is,  there's no counter-force in Columbus to prevent the schemers on the Republican side from letting us see how the money channeled to JobsOhio (RobsOhio, says Plunderbund) is being pocketed.  Both houses of the Republican-controlled General Assembly, which have left the minority Democrats impotent, blocked  an attempt to audit the JobsOhio books by the state auditor.  It becomes clearer each day why Gov. Kasich promoted the creation of JobsOhio as a private development company free of public oversight.

Jeez!  What will the Rustics  at the Statehouse think of next to screw the public?

OSU speaker not a Dispatch favorite

The announcement that President Obama will be Ohio State University's commencement speaker on   May 5 could hardly  have uplifted the editors of the Columbus Dispatch to a state of chest-pounding hometown pride.  No paper in Ohio worked harder to defeat Obama in last November's election with its editorial endorsement of Mitt Romney, a candidate it credited with  possessing "real-world experience to lead nation out of economic malaise".

As for Obama, the paper complained that he had traveled in the "left  lane" all of his life, had no real-world experience and was an absolute failure in correcting the national economy's dismal course during his first term.   The president's health care plan, it declared, was nothing more than a " ham-fisted power play".  When it comes to attacking Democrats, the paper always adds a lot of etc. etc. etc's.

Well, as history will show, the paper's home county of Franklin was hardly persuaded by the Dispatch's  eternal struggle against Democrats and voted for Obama anyway.

So now, with the kindly attention of OSU President Gordon Gee, who invited him, Obama will arrive as the national five million vote victor over the wealthy what's-his name opponent in the last campaign.

I don't mean to be churlish or anything about the Dispatch, but I did want to point out that the Obama visit will present itself more as a Mayday for the paper's deep thinkers.
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OSU's goal line stand backfired

PLANET SCARLET AND GRAY is becoming mostly gray these days as the collegiate sports world is sparing few acts of reprisal against the Ohio State Buckeyes. The reaction to the scandalous goal line stand offered by OSU's big shots to escape further punishment for their sins records another ugly chapter in the modern excesses of intercollegiate athletics. For the almighty Buckeye gridiron powerhouse in Columbus, it is now simply the case of the bigger you are, the harder you fall.

The epic began modestly enough by today's porous standards. Some first teamers, including the team's ballyhooed quarterback, were outed for selling off some of their collectibles to a tattoo parlor owner in returned for tattoos. What followed was a frantic goal line stand by the team's iconic freshly-groomed coach, Jim Tressel - a prayerful Mr. Clean - who had been respectfully esteemed as a Michigan beater as well as the way his teams clobbered a lot of other opponents.

It's a messy departure from the standard press box image that has led to player suspensions, reports of Tressel's use of ineligible players and a lot of seesawing by OSU President G. Gordon Gee, who couldn't quite find the proper words to make the issue go away. To make matters worse, OSU agreed to convert the $3.5 million coach's resignation into a normal retirement and drop Gee's avowed plan for a $250,000 fine while setting up a $50,000-plus retirement "bonus" for the besieged coach - the last month of his base pay. .

The current fallout will leave lengthy scars. Last season's winning season, including its Sugar Bowl victory, will be purged from the record books. There there will be other penalties when the NCAA issues its verdict in August. But that may be a good thing. It would be a healthy improvement, not only for Big Daddy OSU, which dominates all of Ohio's collegiate sports, but for other schools where sports have taken over the campus brand, by hook or crook.

That's probably wishing too much. But it's a thought that a few schools may try to live by to avoid the disgrace that attends Scarlet and Gray. How easy it would have been for the OSU front office to escape the worst consequences if Gee, Tressel and their enablers would have honestly taken charge of the situation at the outset instead of trying to run out the clock. After all, real pros don't panic.