Do some political parties age better than others?

Former Gov. Ted Strickland's decision to challenge Sen. Rob Portman, Republican "commonsense conservative," as he sees it, has drawn mostly yawns from Ohio's media stallions who  argue it is a dramatic  sign of the Democratic Party's pathetic  lack of youth and energy. (Strickland is 73).

I would agree that the party needs a younger profile.  But for the articles and editorial pages to fret over the Democrats' creaking bones is a rare sign of  Ohio's Republican-leaning newspapers to fret over the general welfare  of the  "other party".

Young or old, it usually doesn't make that much difference who shows up on the state ballot as a Democrat.    Don't take my word for it.  If age is a factor, here are some engaging figures from the 2014 vote:

Of the five state offices on the ballot, only one posted a Republican younger than his opponent , Treasurer Josh Mandel, 37, big deal(!),  who was younger than his opponent Connie Pillich, a lively and competent 54.

In the other four, Republicans were the greybeards - none  more pronounced than the attorney  general contest that pitted Republican incumbent Mike DeWine, at 68  against Democrat David Pepper, 43!

As long as these many years that I've followed DeWine's career, I've never figured out how he maintains his Rasputin-like grip on editorial writers leading them to such contradictory endorsements.   The Plain Dealer produced not a single negative word about Pepper, a Cincinnati lawyer who had ably served as a county commissioner and city councilman.  The PD however, did go on distressfully about the lengthy downside of DeWine's tenure as the state's top lawyer, from questionable awards of state contracts to other matters that led him "astray'' by "insulting Ohio's voters for refusing"   to debate Pepper.

So what will it be?  Sayeth the lords of the Cleveland newspaper world:

"DeWine is a work in progress.  But his flaws and blind spots are more than outweighed by his energetic and effective advocacy on behalf of all Ohioans on a range of issue" thus earning him a approval for a second term.  

A work in progress at 68? Better hurry.

The PD lined up six of its opinion writers to record the  event.    Elizabeth Sullivan, the opinion director of the Northeast Ohio Media Group,  expressed her sorrow over the old folks party thusly:  Strickland's  return is "another sorry statement about the dearth of  viable Democratic candidates for a statewide run..."

Then, my old paper, the Beacon Journal, concluded that although DeWine "has stumbled at times"  the record also showed that he ''has been a much better attorney general than  Pepper allows" and deserves a second term.

Jarring, too, is DeWine's active  agenda that has been at odds with the paper's position on several major  issues dominating everyone's lives, from the Affordable Care Act to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

With the yawners, I guess, it depends what party is creakily on the ballot.

So for the Dems,  would it improve their chances  if they sent in a teenage  candidate for an endorsement interview?   You might grow old waiting for a reply.

In Suarez case, two Ohio GOP politicians are an uneasy crowd

 A funny thing happened to Treasurer Josh Mandel and U.S. Rep.Jim Renacci  on their way to November's elections.  The two Ohio Republicans find themselves mired in a messy case involving  indicted  Canton businessman  Benjamin Suarez,  who will stand trial in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, beginning Monday, on money laundering charges.

The basic scheme, as revealed by Suarez's convicted treasurer Michael Giorgio, who blabbed in a a plea deal,  turned on having a couple of dozen company employees  drop  in $5,000 each to fill the political pot,  with assurances from Suarez that their "gifts" would be reimbursed.  Nothing very imaginative, really.

Although Mandel and Renacci have not been charged and claim they eventually returned the money to the employes, they have been subpoenaed to appear as key figures in the case.  Moreover, it can't help either candidate to have their dealings with Suarez  taking up so much inglorious space in the media.

 Each received $100,000  from Suarez to intervene in a California civil suit against Suarez  Corp. Industries (SCI) that accused the company of violating  consumer protection laws.

Mandel is up against a tough Democratic opponent, state Rep. Connie Pillich.  Among other things, she's a former Air Force captain who served during Desert Storm  which, for this campaign, could put a dent in Mandel's conceits about his own military service that turned up so often  during his loss to Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, in 2012.

The paper trail in the Suarez case tells us Mandel came on strong for Suarez, threatening to sue the state of Calilfornia and urging Renacci to support new federal law that would soften  damages  awarded in deceptive advertising. (Suarez's company operated on a global scale as a marketer.)

Renacci appeared safe enough in a bizarrely drawn  house district created as his own plantation.  His Democratic opponent  is Pete Crossland, former state lawmaker, county councilman and  political science professor who threw his body into the race when nobody else dared challenge Renacci.

When we saw him  week or so ago,  he was smiling.




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Maybe we should follow the path of Noah

Don't want to ruin your day with scary news  - and probably won't anyway.  But you ought to set aside a s little time to read National Geographic's terrific cover story  on climate change in the September issue. Without spoiling the plot about a planet in serious  trouble from climate change, we are once again reminded that there is genuine scientific agreement by the experts that we can expect a different world by the year 2100.

Coastal cities will be under water as seas rise more than three feet;  massive glaciers will have melted;  thermal expansion will drive up sea levels.   As the article notes:

"A profoundly altered planet is what our fossil-fuel-driven civilization is creating, a planet where Sandy-scale flooding will be more common and more destructive for the world's coastal cities...We have irreversibly  committed future generations to a hotter world and rising seas."

The Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration adopted 6.6 feet (two meters)  sea rise as its highest of four scenarios for 2100.  The U.S. Corps of Engineers  says planners should be prepared for a rise of five feet.

I know.  Many of us will be gone by 2100, so why worry?   Well, Hurricane Sandy, described as the "second costliest" in U.S. history,  claimed more than 100 lives.  Sandy proved that there is already plenty to worry about.

Meantime, I wish there were a way to flood the  mailboxes  of such climate change deniers  as Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel and California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher with this issue of National Geographic.   During his failed campaign against  Sen. Sherrod  Brown, Mandel hissed that climate change research was "riddled with errors" - as if he were on the highest ground to  know about such things.  And Rohrabach, as well as many of those wingnuts who agree,  continue to sneer that the notion of climate change is a "fraud".

Oh?

When news becomes news, sort of...

Now  it has been nobly decided that Democrats as well as Republicans will have House Speaker John Boehner to kick around for  still one more term, let's  take a breath and catch up on some real news:

The  term "fiscal cliff" was repeated 2,390,864 times in the media in the weeks leading up to the vote, thereby narrowly  topping the number of shoes that Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel said he wore out campaigning for one political job or another.

If you  felt slightly less significant  from the report that there are 100 billion moons swirling around in the Milky Way, how about the research reported by the New York Times that human beings have a lot in common with jellyfish, chickens, roundworms and fruit flies.  That's the word from the laboratories that humans have no  more than 21,000 protein-coding genes, which isn't  much different from the jellyfish you disrespectfully squish at the seashore.

You may soon add another pill bottle to your medicine cabinet,  the one labeled "effective against bedbugs".   People who ingest the pill, it says here, will exhale an odorous carbon dioxide that will encourage the vermin to bite you - and die.  So your choice will be between bedbugs and red welts from the bites. That's as far as I want to go with this.

As the year ended, we learned of a fresh supply of terms to describe America's folly, among them the insistence by the right-wing loonies that Hillary Clinton had faked a concussion.    Talk of  faked orgasms has  beome so boringly ancient that in Hillary's case, it became something else called the 'Immaculate Concussion".  Former UN ambassador John Bolton, never at a loss to reveal his madness,  started the rant against Clinton with "diplomatic illness" - the term he used to describe her  tactic  to avoid testifying on Benghazi. This much we know: Bolton is not feigning his loopy view of the world.

It wouldn't be surprising if the nation's TV networks had no sense of a recession last year.  The latest round of reports on political advertising in 2012  said TV revenue was as high as $6 billion, an increase over 2008 of 68 pct., according to, the New America Foundation,  thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling to let the money gush.

Isn't it just like nutritionists to rain on the parade of the power-seekers?  Now we are told that all  of those power drinks that give people a kick  have no more punch than a cup of strong coffee. They're caffeine-based and cost more.  Starbucks will be pleased to hear that.

Finally, for the purest  confirmation that the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The cumulative records of the 2012 Cleveland Indians (68-94),  Browns (5-11)  and, currently, Cavaliers (7-26), is  80 wins, 131 losses.  Did you see this first in Grumpy Abe ?

Christie: High praise for Obama's efforts in critical times

While New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was praising President Obama's intense engagement  in  the post-Sandy devastation of Christie's state,  Mitt was doing photo-ops in Ohio on a day when he said he wouldn't be campaigning at all.  Christie emphatically described Obama's  quick action  to expedite FEMA's assistance as ''outstanding" and said he didn't care  if such  praise violated party loyalties in the presidential race.

Meantime, Romney was more circumspect about  FEMA, the agency that he has long dismissed as a drag on the federal budget,  having once said that critical disaster work could best be handled by the private sector!   He didn't say  how that would be fail-safe but it is a clue to his secret plan to end the deficit.   Does that make you feel more secure these days if your town is hit by another disaster with him in the Oval Office?

On Tuesday,  trapped by his past feeble notions, he ignored  all questions from reporters on  whether he  now felt that FEMA was necessary for the nation's domestic emergencies.  It was just Mitt being Mitt when he faces an unpleasant situation that can't be solved by metrics and IPOs.

Having watched this guy since the start of the primaries, I've concluded that his campaign is much like the Seinfeld series:  It's a campaign about nothing.

That being the case, the narrative must find a way to gain traction with lies.  Not that he nor his supporting cast worry much  that it all reflects on Romney's incurable waffling and dishonesty.   Indeed, any challenge to his plot devices is merely cause to repeat them.  When top Chrysler executives criticized his fictional  Jeeps-to-China  TV ads,  the trash talk continued to turn up on TV and radio, especially in the Toledo area where the auto industry has heavy impact  on the economy.

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Poor John McCain.  He grows more erratic by the hour.  There he was in Ohio with Josh Mandel at his side - ya know, the old soldier and his young aide-de-camp -  asserting on TV that Obama was  "unqualified" to be America's commander-in-chief.  The only thing I  can figure is that McCain  is bored and needs to hug up to Romney for a possible appointment to Team Romney if Mitt lands  in the White House. I think he might be holding a pair of sixes against a full house.

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The Columbus Dispatch today endorsed Sherrod Brown over Josh - the second conservative Republican paper forced to concede  the wide gulf that separates the two candidates.The other paper: The Cincinnati Enquirer.

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My column on the Romney campaign's lies about Obama and the auto industry is posted on Plunderbund.

Cohen: A divisive conflict among Jews in Cuyahoga County

 There's an online piece by New York  Times Columnist Roger Cohen that reports the fierce  mano- a-mano  dispute among Cuyahoga County Jews  that has ripened during the current presidential election campaign.  It has been long seeded by the distrust by some Jews that President Obama, of all things, is anti-Israel.

Cohen sets the stage for his report in the first paragraph, writing in the paper's Global Edition:

Things are getting ugly among the Jews of Cuyahoga County, with family splits and dinner   invitations declined.  "I have never seen the divisions this acute," said James Ratner, an executive of the Forest City real estate group.

Normally, the family argument would be just that:  a purely inside event with little more than passing attention from beyond its sphere.  However, in this case the implications are broader because any fallout from the traditionally progressive Jews  could determine the outcome of the Ohio election and therfore,  the U.S. election.  Not that Mitt Romney hasn't noticed its electoral possibilities with his constant pandering to Israeli interests on this side of the ocean.  (Obama has thrown Israel under the bus!, Mitt has quacked, as though all blessings of foreign policy, even such myths as these,  flow from his Bain cornucopia.)  

To heighten the intensity of the Jewish  combat in Cuyahoga County, the Ohio  Senate race has  devolved into the spectacle of Josh Mandel, a conservative Jewish Republican who has been on message since grade school.  He married into the influential Ratner family but today enjoys no more  than partial support from his in-laws.

Cohen  writes that Mandel's  anti-abortion stance included "calling the indiana Senate nominee Richard Mourdock a  'class act' [!] after Mourdock said pregnancy resulting from rape was 'something God intended to happen' and was 'always a gift from God.'"

Back to James Ratner:  Cohens reports that Ratner  emailed him with word that a Jewish womens' group, with 60 members attending a meeting  at Park Synagogue, unanimously supported  Obama.

"Those Jewish women," Cohen writes, "know exactly what Romney and Mandel represent: an obcurantist and invasive threat to their rights in the name of God whose wishes these men presume to know'.

Youngstown Vindicator offers words to Mandel

Today's recommended viewing of another Josh Mandel gem:

It's the film clip of Mandel's interview by the Youngstown Vindicator that is posted on-line by Daily Kos.    During a testy discussion of the auto bailout, which Mandel opposes, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate snapped at the paper's editorialists, "Please, sir, don't put words in my mouth." To which the editor replied:  "Somebody's gotta put words in your mouth because all you do is talk in circles."

It's also newsworthy that when a conservative newspaper like the Cincinnati Enquirer endorses  a liberal Democrat like U.S.Sen. Sherrod Brown over Mandel, the enthusaism for Mandel's candidacy continues to take a beating -  if ever there were any enthusiasm in the first place other than the right-wing high rollers who have put nearly $20 million into the Whiz Kid's campaign.

Brown-Mandel debate: Josh just being Josh

Having just watched the final debate  between Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Josh Mandel,   there are a  few points that I want to get off my chest:

Mandel's repeated pledges (including the one he signed for mega-lobbyist Grover-Norquist)  that he would never raise taxes cherry-picked the old Republican theme that there are other ways to pay for the things that  Americans want, eliminate the deficit and sustain a healthy society. (On this score, we learned more about his grandparents and parents than we did on how he would replace the tax loss).
 
His cadence and mechanical gestures were stylistically perfect, indicating that he was still young enough at 35 to remember his lines for a class play without a flaw. My notes asked, Is this fellow the young Mitt Romney?

He stressed his opposition to the auto bailout without once acknowledging the huge number of jobs that it saved.

He also added a new spin, that polls show him to be one percentage point ahead (The latest average of several polls show Brown more than 4 points ahead.)

Finally, he enthusiastically talked of his future as a "bipartisan" problem solver in the Senate.

On that point, history is not on his side.    Most of his talking points are  clearly on the hard Right, as are the super-rich wealthy right-wing contributors who have dumped upward of $20 million into his campaign.  An important condition that he has yet to learn if he ever reaches the Senate floor is in the book of Ancient Political Realities :

                            You must dance with the  people who brung you there

The Koch way of doing anti-environmental business brothers

The billionaire Koch Brothers have decided to flood  the   narrative of the  hysterical  campaign  against Sen. Sherrod Brown with a burst of anti-environmental crap onto the streets and into voters homes.  This  photo from a reader  shows three separate arrivals into a single home.  While walking in the neighborhood this afternoon I found another piece tossing about in the grass.  All of the pieces were paid for by Americans for Prosperity,  the royally financed propaganda machine founded by the Kochs.

The Kochs sit at the top of Koch Industries, a mammoth multi-purpose enterprise, which explains their  fierce animosity toward the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change and anything else that threatens to cost them a buck or two from liberal politicians like Sherrod Brown. On the other hand, they are friendly to Brown's Republican opponent Josh Mandel, who also believes, among other nonsensical things, that climate change is a hoax.  And that greater coal production is the wave of the energy future for a healthy economy.

There are times when I hear Mandel's utterances that I have to believe they came directly from the Koch's office suite.

So the voters will have to decide  whether they consider Kochs' mailers are  from people concerned solely with their welfare, or whether  we should avoid returning to the days of  Elizabethan England when the air could be inhaled with a spoon.

With pants on fire, Mandel cries "Liar"

How do you  define insolence, chutzpah, impudence, effrontery, audacity et al?  The defining moment for Josh Mandel, the Republican senate candidate,  arrived in Columbus Thursday night when he called Sen. Sherrod Brown, his Democratic debate opponent, a "liar".

He said WHAT?  

Given Josh's well-deserved fact-checked reputation of being the GOP's Liar-in-Chief in this Ohio race, wouldn't you think that the Whiz Kid would sort of avoid the liar thing in his assault on Brown?  (He's  burned more pants than any candidate I can recall in a half-century.)  No sense reminding people, me included, of the shamefully superficial way he has evolved in this campaign.

The facts are simply this:  he is a commodity on the open market for big-time contributors who have spent $19 million  to oust the incumbent, whether they are laying up the cash for Mandel or, if it so served their  main objective,  Honey Boo Boo.

His ad hoc financiers include the usual suspects on the Dollared Right:  The American Petroleum Institute, U.S.Chamber  of Commerce, Ohio Right to Life, Karl Rove, Koch Brothers,  Sheldon Adelson, Republican Jewish Coalition.  The consequences are scary. But without these groups adding a pre-paid vote to the Senate, Josh Mandel and his lean-and-hungry look would be a mere blip on the radar screen.

Or as Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post's former executive editor, liked to say about inconsequential people,  "When the history of this day is written, you won't be in it."  And that's no lie.

Mandel tells it like it ain't at City Club debate

As I watched and listened (via electronic media)  to the Cleveland City Club debate between Sen. Sherrod Brown and his Republican challenger, Josh Mandel, I could only sigh that Josh was doing it again.  His  self-burnishing  moment arrived when he, as occurs  so often when he speaks,  wanted the audience  to know that he so loved the country that he volunteered to join the Marines to protect his homeland.  Or, as he put it, to say "thank you" for what America has done for his family.

He hasn't yet given us specific details of what he did while working in the protected Green Zone, and there is no reason to bring it up except he has cast himself as Sgt. York.  Or maybe Col. John Glenn.

His grandiose view of his patriotism didn't occur overnight. I would suggest that back in his teens (he's now 35) he realized that he had to radiate toughness in his anticipated political career,  given his boyish looks and schoolyard high-pitched sound. The Marines served his personal needs.

On Monday, he offered nothing new, but the speech was so constructed that I believe  he has been prepping for it since high school. After all, he is still a  whiz kid of a young man who has held four different political jobs in his quest to be well prepared for his next brattish leap into greatness.

Although I find nothing corrosive about being a liberal, particularly  after a "compassionate conservative"    like George Bush left behind such a mess when he went back to his vast acreage in Texas,   Josh accused Brown of being a do-nothing ultra liberal senator  who wants to blame everyone else.   No sense, I believe, in going over much of his  debate terrain from promising  to lower taxes "across the board"to opposing the auto bailout.  He even signed Grover Norquist's pledge not to raise taxes - Norquist, for God's sake, the  Gulliver lobbyist who rules over the Republican Party.  At times, his remarks were downright foolish.   I mean, here was Josh calling Brown a liar for reneging on his past promise to limit his political career.

Josh, indeed.  He hardly locates his new office's bathroom before he prepares for another job - including the current one in which he had promised  to serve for a full term.

But as he was asked by a Muslim in the audience why he chose to negatively characterize a former opponent as a Muslim,  (which, by the way he wasn't except  that he was dark-skinned) Josh could cnly ramble about why he wanted to stop radical Muslims from brutally harming their women.

Folks, the  Republicans allowed with open arms this foolish candidate to happen, so it's their problem now.  There was a time when they could boast of senators  Bill Saxbe, George Voinovich, and two Tafts who were family to the latest Bob Taft.   Not that I could always agree with them.   But Josh Mandel vanishes in their senatorial presence.

Frankly, Josh, I don't think you prepped nearly enough over the years for this job.  At your age, you still have plenty of time to prep for another one.  And  as an avowed advocate of the middle class, where would you be today without the $20 million from  the big right-wing oil, energy  and corporate power brokers?  If you should win,  they'll be expecting a huge return on their investment, don't you think?   Finally, Josh, for the big dollars, you da man!

Mitt spins health care; Josh visits us with robo-calls

When Mitt Romney dismissed the problems of those without health insurance by saying they can always call an ambulance to take them to an emergency room, it made  one wonder how far he has strayed from the struggles common to many Americans.

We got more evidence of that hollowness from his remarks to the Columbus Dispatch that people don't die from a lack of health insurance.  Would that this be true.  Indeed, as Talking Points Memo has noted, there have been several authoritative  studies that debunk Romney's cold-turkey opinion.

Let me refer to the 2009 study by the Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance that said as many as 44,789 Americans die each year because they have no health insurance.  Furthermore, it  reported, "that alternative measures of access to medical care for the uninsured, such as community health centers, do not provide the protection of private health insurance."

Other studies have turned up similar results.

So, folks, I must ask: Will it take an emetic to find out where Mitt is getting his information these days?

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Josh Mandel's field hands have now robo-called my home to complain about  Sen. Sherrod Brown's'  disposition to be less than thrilled by Josh's oft-repeated boots-on-the-ground tales of his tours in Iraq.    I would have been more tolerant if  Josh would simply tell us what he was doing all of that time in the Green Zone, a story commonly making the rounds today.   How about it, Josh?  Want to tell us?

To Josh Mandel: Have you no decency, sir?

In case you are the curious type, my official one-person poll of the guy who works at my computer has elevated Josh Mandel to the title of Greatest  Liar on the Ohio Ballot.  (GLOB)  He worked hard to get  there with $19 million in out-of-state donations from people who couldn't care less about average Ohioans.  He's merely the convenient front man for the one per centers who want to rid the Senate of Sherrod Brown.

For awhile, Josh was running neck and neck with other Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for the GLOB title,  but as PolitiFact/Ohio  reminded me  in the Plain Dealer today,  Mandel's political ads accusing Brown of missing more than 350 official votes is pulled out of la-la land, although the official record shows Brown has missed only 21 in his entire first-term Senate career. When Brown was in Congress, he missed 83 votes during a hospital  stay after an  auto accident.  He's missed 3 in the past 3 years.

Still , the fact checkers note that Mandel accuses the incumbent  of "living by different rules than us".  I can't argue with that.  Brown has an honest and open accounting of his work as a senator - while Josh  doesn't hesitate to lie about it. They do play by different rules.  Which leads me to ask, How desperate must this Whiz Kid  be to run such  TV garbage like this? Very desperate, I'd say, even with a $19 million war chest.

Coal mines: No pay for mandatory attendance among friends

Remember that Republican candidates' day earlier this month in Ohio coal mining country that featured Mitt Romney, Josh Mandel and the gang telling a group of miners how much they cared for the welfare of the workers?

The back-channel story in the Plain Dealer  is much more interesting.  It  reported the backlash to the event  by some mine employes to Radio Station WWVA (Wheeling) over how the political love-in   was orchestrated.  The miners in attendance lost a day's pay because their mine closed that day in their absence.

The Pepper Pike owner of the Century Mine conveyed  word down the line that the event would be  mandatory and unpaid,  according to the company's  chief financial officer Rob Moore. "No one was forced to attend".  (In the companies I worked for over the decades, mandatory implied force.)

Moore did try to engage in damage control by  telling WWVA host David Bloomquist there was nothing wrong with having the miners show up for the GOP tourists.   "We are talking about an event that was in the best interest of anyone that's related to the coal industry in our area."

Lest I forget:  The PD reported that the Center for Responsive Politics "show that Murray Energy  [ the mine 's owner] has contributed more than $900,000 to Republican candidates over the past two years."
With that kind of money up for grabs,  you'd think that the company would find a way to pay the miners for their mandatory attendance to hear Romney assail Obama for his "job-killing war on coal."

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With Josh: Global warming a fraud

 

When I reached for the Plain Dealer today for my first word from the  outside world, I found this headline commanding the front page:

    Mandel blasts president, Brown, calls global warming 'inconclusive'

Whoa there, pony. Was Republican Josh off the reservation again? Well, it's true that he was down in Tampa to impress his GOP friends that he's a candidate of  action wherever there's trouble on the planet.

I pressed on to read the story, but got no further after I arrived at this paragraph:

'The state treasurer [Mandel] thinks scientific research on the matter is "inconclusive and riddled with fraud."

It quickly recalled Mandel's recent visit to Ohio's grimy coal mining district where the whiz kid  promised on the bible of his billionaire energy princes that he would end the "war on coal."  As one who grew up among coal mining families I wondered why he didn't bother to mention  the early deaths of miners  in the hands of negligent mine owners.

The above photo of melting ice fields  is from the on-line National Geographic, the left-wing, radical pubication that has never seen a global warming report  that it didn't embrace.  The heading on the photo said...

          The planet is heating up - and fast

Josh, Josh:  Among the magazine's listed advisors is a guy you doubtless know:  David Koch.  He couldn't be happy with National Geo.  But at least he can be confident that he has you in his pocket.

UPDATE:  Late word from the NY Times Monday afternoon:

"The amount of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen to the lowest level on record ,  a confirmation of the drastic  warming in the region and a likely harbinger of larger changes to come."

Mandel campaigning in light of full moon

At first glance, I once thought that Josh Mandel was simply  careless about his words and actions because so little of either made much sense.  But as the whiz kid's  campaign against Sen. Sherrod Brown  becomes more visible, I''m now convinced that his  every move as a walk-on to the political stage is calculated with steaming caldrons by the light of a full moon.

The latest example - and there have been many - is his moronic charge that Brown is "un-American" - something Joe McCarthy would have said long before Mandel was born.  And we all know what happened to Tailgunner Joe, whose name is now an eponym for the worst in political assassination.  Will Josh be remembered  from the ashes of his ruthless campaign as  Mandelism?  Give him time,  He's only 34.

His disloyalty charge against Brown was reported by the Columbus Dispatch  in a piece following  a Brown-Mandel sitdown with editors and reporters. He based his troubled remark on Brown's support of the auto industry bailout.  The story reported that Josh never answered directly when he was asked what he would have done differently than Brown on the loans that saved the auto industry and thousands of jobs. His calculated accusation against Brown was so locked into his psyche that he couldn't come up with a reasonable alternative  other than to mention "regulations,  energy production and the U.S. Tax Code," the paper said. Strictly GOP boilerplate.

Josh, please.  You are the Republican/Tea Party nominee for the U.S.Senate.  You are running in Ohio.  Auto industry recovery of jobs is even making Governor Kasich  look better (though he didn't
 have a damn thing to do with it).

Tone it down, Josh.  Check Brown's birth certificate.  Find out whether he's  ever been to California.
Ask him whether he's ever skinny-dipped in the Sea of Galilee.  And why he's never sent a Christmas card to Netanyahu.  Show some...um...gravitas, for God's sake.  Many of us won't vote for you but maybe when you run for president someday a few  people will forget your  un-American crap that you laid before the Dispatch people.

It takes a career pol to know one

Meanwhile, back at the  farm now that we all know it's Paul Ryan:

We are amused by all of those Josh Mandel TV ads accusing Sen. Sherrod Brown of being a "career politician".

Career politician?  Look who's talking.   At the whiz kid age of 34, Mandel has already managed a succession  of political jobs as (1) Lyndhurst City Councilman (2) Ohio state representative and (3) currently, Ohio Treasurer.  Given his urge for higher and higher offices,  he may run out of available new rungs on his political ladder by the age of 40.  Either that, or his financiers will run out of campaign money.

It wouldn't at all be an exaggeration to note that Josh has  already made a career of his career.

Word game of guilt by association.

Although word association tests are not within my comfort zone, they might be just what the political doctor ordered for Grumpy Abe on a balmy August afternoon.  So here is my effort of pregnant associations , which could be augmented if you are one to enjoy word games (my life story!):

Mitt Romney:  Stuff, a neutral non-commital word which is what he said he bought at a hardware store.  (It is also a word that  a friend once complained of having "too much of" in his house).

Newt Gingrich: Food stamps, which Newt accused President Obama of being the biggest provider ever.

Josh Mandel:  Money. No need to elaborate.

Rush Limbaugh: Slut, as in...

The Rev. Pat Robertson:  Godless, describing everyone who isn't on his page.

Sheldon Adelson: Israel, one of the few areas where he and Robertson agree.

Rupert Murdoch: Power, as in "fair and balanced is not what you think"

Gov. Kasich:  Idiot, his  reference to a cop that arrested him for a traffic violation.

Koch Brothers:  Uber wealth,  like Doublemint gum,  Romney's  right-wing "double your treasure" guys.

Sarah Palin:  Front porch, which is where her esoteric worldly vision begins.

Josh Mandel: Money.  Oops.  Already said that.  Still, worth repeating, don't you think?

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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..

PD's Senate race headlines leave us guessing

IF YOU  HAPPENED to see the Sunday Plain Dealer's letters page you might have  noticed the big headline that needed translation:

 Mandel may sling some mud,  but some of it deserves to stick

Oh? Stick to whom?  Josh Mandel? Or his  opponent, a "deserving" Sen. Sherrod Brown?  Brown  would be a  good guess.  Even the sole italicized  quotation under the heading was drawn from an anti-Brown letter.    (The  eight published letters were evenly balanced pro and con, if you got that far.)

The brouhaha was prompted by an earlier PD editorial  taking issue with Mandel's revival of a generation-old issue that Brown assaulted his former wife - now friendly and raising money for his campaign - during a rancorous divorce proceeding.  The story is hardly new, and even was circulated during the liberal Democrat's  successful 2006 challenge of then-Sen. Mike DeWine, who declined to inject it into the narrative of his own campaign. But you should remember that the same Josh Mandel  raised questions about his African-American opponent in 2010 during the race for Ohio Treasurer, suggesting that the guy was a Muslim.  He wasn't, but why should that be a criterion? Mandel won.

Back to the PD:  The critical editorial lost its edge when the writer  concluded that Mandel was "capable of better".   There's no evidence that he can be - or will be - in his catch-as-catch-can rush to Capitol Hill at age 34.   But the ambiguous headline and the italicized quote  weighed against Brown.

The letters rested above another headline over two other letters  near the bottom of the page that read:

Wisdom of Sen. Brown's pollution vote debated

Once again, it certainly appeared to be a Brown negative.

All of this should be put into the context of the state's corporate media (read: Republican) being  less than thrilled by Brown's friendship with organized labor and opposition to exporting America's jobs.   He's been running uphill against the state's editorial writers for years , the last time in his successful challenge to DeWine, which Brown won in a landslide.

The PD seems a tad frustrated that a young right-wing Republican prospect  like Mandel may be forfeiting any claim to credibility by his nastiness, deceptions and callow game plan toward his current opponent when he is "capable of  better."  Hint, Josh. Hint. There are still more than four months to shape up  for editorial endorsements.  Sunday's fuzzy headlines on the PD's  letters page are  another start.










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