In Ohio,Tea Partiers say they are ready to strike

Mid-week wash:

Interesting, don't you think?,  how a politician's self-serving decision  can come back to haunt him three years later. In 2010, Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff bucked the State GOP by endorsing Tea Party favorite and then-State Rep. Seth Morgan in the Republican primary for Ohio auditor.

The news broke something like this:

Arshinkoff: Morgan is a certified public accountant and has a fresh face and bold ideas. (Read: It was really a bowing concession to the Tea Party much like the ones that other Republicans are handing out these days.)

Morgan: "Alex is a longstanding, respected leader with the Republican establishment...and to gain his endorsement is truly  exciting for this campaign."

Short-term excitement, that is.  Morgan lost to the state party's choice, David Yost.

But his right-wing credentials were impeccable enough for the uber-rich Koch
brothers to take him on as the policy director of Americans for Prosperity, the outfit founded by the Kochs.

Joe Hallett of the Columbus Dispatch lately quoted Morgan as saying the Tea Partiers  now have several options to form a new party, create an "insurrection" within the GOP and "everything in between."

Connect the dots:  Arshinkoff, long an Establishment Republican, now finds the  party facing a serious threat from a guy that he endorsed more for personal political reasons than the  relative merits of the two primary candidates.

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Speaking of the Tea Party, how about this notion  from former State Republican Chairman Kevin DeWine when he spoke to the Akron Press Club in  April 2010:  The Republican Party and the Tea Party have much in common and he (DeWine) would welcome them into the party. At the time  Grumpy Abe  wrote: "It may be more accurate to wonder whether the Tea Partiers would ever welcome Republicans into their ranks"  The answer is clear enough.

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Now that former South  Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has won a special election for a  congressional seat,  can we forever erase the idea of a superior moral compass in the hearts of southern Republicans?

Sanford: sanitized by South Carolina's moral Republicans?

We all know that South Carolina is one of the most conservative states in America even though it does make  exceptions for those northern liberals in the mix who head to Myrtle Beach every summer. We also know that former Gov. Mark Sanford is one of the most conservative politicians running for a congressional seat this year.  Indeed, he  recently offered his plan to build a lively economy.  No, he isn't  recommending that somebody should again bomb Ft. Sumter.   Need I repeat  the Republicans' dynamic duo of remedies?  Cut taxes and governmental regulations.

Still, you have to wonder about the morally imperative voters whom we are always hearing about in the South who handed the Republican primary (57-43) to someone who admitted an  adulterous affair with a woman in Argentina while explaining his absences from the governor's office as his diversion  of "hiking the Appalachian trail".

With his Argentine fiancee at his side on election night, he thanked his supporters, and took the opportunity to thank God and his appreciation of God's grace (as well as that of Republicans) during his most troubling moments.

Now that a conveniently repentant (sort of)  Sanford has openly placed God in his ecosystem, the experts are saying he could win the new job on Capitol Hill.

Sen . McConnell: The hapless hypocrite etc.

HAS THERE EVER been a more hapless hypocrite than Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate? McConnell a Medicare-eligible deadpan who should have been dismissed to his Old Kentucky Home years ago, has been an ardent critic of the stimulus program and once sniffed: "You do have to wonder, though, whether the stimulus has had any impact at all."

Yet, there he was, at the Blue Grass Army Depot construction site in Madison County, Kentucky, puffing up his efforts to finance the site, boasting: " This is going to be a source of significant employment. At the peak, we could have up to 600 people working on this, and we believe the substantial majority of those workers will be Kentuckians."

Guess what? No fair. You peeked. The stimulus package picked up $5,876,000 of the construction tab. Such hypocrisy has become quite common for stimulus opponents, from McConnell , Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford down to the Tea Partying Robart Administration in Cuyahoga Falls. As for McConnell, don't you think he should stop wondering?

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What's that!?!?!!? A new phrase has arrived to describe the health-care debate: Honest truth.

The redundancy appeared in a headline above an Op-Ed Beacon Journal column by conservative Charles Krauthammer, as in: The honest truth about end-of-life counseling. If any of you are aware of a rogue dishonest truth, I'll be happy to post it.

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The passing of Ted Kennedy has already given the Republicans' fascination with death a new platform to resist health-care reform in nefarious ways. The latest to speculate on what Kennedy would have done to defog the so-called debate is Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, another of the party's safely ensconced Medicare-eligible white guys who are out to spare America from

outrageous fortune. Without fear of contradiction from the deceased, Bond now presumes that Kennedy would be the man of the moment in resolving the health-care stalemate. Says Bond:

"I believe that Ted Kennedy, if he were there, would signal time out and let's go back and work together."

How collegial, even if it is fiction. Kennedy is no longer there, so what else do you now have in mind, Senator, to reassemble the inertial proceedings? By the way, LBJ isn't available, either. And by the way a second time, what's a good Missouri Republican doing saying nice things about a senator who declared at the Democratic Convention that universal health care is a right, not a privilege - the opposite of what the Republican mantra would have us believe these days. ?

PS: The reason I make occasional reference to "Medicare-eligible white guys" is that it is pregnant with meaning. The guys are, in fact, crinkly white, and are, in fact, Medicare-eligible. You have to pass a certain age for the latter. .

A Sanford Chronicle

Late word from Alfred Lord Venison:

Mark Sanford has 'fessed up as a cheat

a born-again who was not too discreet!

He was a Republican star

Like Ensign, primed to go far

Soon, only Sarah will be left to compete.

Morning Joe in mourning

I AM COMPELLED to elevate Morning Joe Scarborough (or is it  Mourning Joe?) of MSNBC as the winner of the Republican Obama-hating Panic Patrol button.  Scarborough's credentials as host of the daybreak program is that he is a  former Florida congressman and a rather superficial observer of the world scene.  But he got my attention when he accused President Obama of having never received a paycheck from a profit-making private company.  Hear him out:

"We have a president who never received a paycheck.  This  guy - think about it - he's running Detroit, he's running Wall street, he's gonna run other sectors of our economy ...he's never received a paycheck from a profit-making business in his entire life.  Not one check.  Think about the radicalism in that."

Well, I have thought about it, Joe, and with help of others' research, I have learned that he worked for  4 or 5 firms that paid him in American currency.  And think about it, Joe.  Even the fat checks he got for his books arrived from book publishers, the private profit-making kind.  

True, thanks to the mess left behind by Obama's predecessor, everybody knows these days that not many people are drawing checks from profitable companies.  As deadpan George Gobel once reminded Johnnie Carson about World War II, "It was in all of the papers."

As additional fodder for the Panic Patrol, Scarborough later gushed over South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's highly visible resistance to stimulus funds to his state,  praising him and urging him to run for president.  Joe, the governor already is running for president.  It's been in all of the papers.