update: corrected version Pepper for Turner

Can we talk?
As some of you surely know, much of my professional career plunged me into the printed word - newspapers, magazines, books, some crabby letters to editors and now the digital offspring, blogs.  I say this only because some of you may be wondering why I' ve been picking on newspapers so much during this dreadful election year for which they must accept some of the responsibility for its odor.

I do want to say that the decline of newspapers, which is now  past the point of no return, gives me no joy. Still too much printer's ink in me.    Nor would I deny that newspapers have their rights to  endorsing  whatever candidate they find in their comfort zones.  But this year they seem intent on dwelling in conflicts of interest with themselves, thus costing them more  ounces of credibility. That hurts.

The most blatant recent example derives from a story in the Columbus Dispatch,  in which Republican endorsements  have been grandfathered  since Gutenberg. (Good grief!  Josh Mandel won the paper's approval?  )

Still the Dispatch published a piece reporting that during Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine's four years in office, Ohio has filed 53 amicus curae (friend of the court) briefs, at taxpayers expense,  with the  U.S. Supreme Court on out-of-state  cases.  Unsurprisingly, many of them satisfy his need to demonstrate his support of social conservative issues -  his long-held opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control, ObamaCare.etc.

You might say, as others have pointed out, that he has converted his office into a chapel.
The defining paragraph in the Dispatch story confirms that.

He was asked about  his defense of Hobby Lobby 's denial to employes of health insurance coverage that  includes  birth control.

Did he base his decision on these matters  simply on his opinion or what's best for the state?

"It's both, really," DeWine replied. "Do my principles, do my beliefs in what is right, impact it?  Well, sure."

OK, he's made it clear on women's issues.  Not only in the Dispatch but whenever he has been asked about the access to hospitals  by abortion clinics.

But about the time that the Dispatch was parsing his positions, the BJ's editorial page, a pro-choice advocate, bore a column  by Michael Douglas, the editorial page editor, pointedly  complaining  about the anti-abortion obstructionists.

Douglas wrote: "Gov. John Kasich  and the Republican legislature have embarked on a mission to all but eliiminate abortion rights in the state" -   without mentioning DeWine as one of the perps.

 He  concludes by disapprovingly asserting:

"The fight over abortion in the courts and elsewhere won't end soon.  Yet, for now, one thing stands:  Abortion is a right, and those exercising that right deserves to be treated accordingly."

But shouldn't the treatment be applied accordingly to DeWine, too?  The paper has maintained a cozy attitude with the AG and even endorsed him despite his closed-fist activism against abortion.  In so doing,  it rejected DeWine's opponent,
David Pepper,  a pro-choice Democrat and aggressive campaigner.

Don't spend too much time trying to follow the bouncing ball, folks.

Romney hits Obama with the F-letter

AS A COLLEGE student, I filled a 24- page booklet for an ancient history essay exam, much of it in frantic gibberish. When the professor, a tall reserved lecturer, returned my work I was shocked to see that he had given it an F with no further assessment. I rushed into his office and demanded: "Wasn't there enough in all of those handwritten pages to merit a D?"

"Oh, there might have been," he said. "I stopped reading it after the third or fourth page. You were writing everything you know and hoping that the right answer was in there somewhere. That told me you were fishing and didn't know the answer."

Hurrumph...! End of discussion.

Which leads me to Mitt Romney, whom many people say is the Hollywood version of a president although he doesn't come close to resembling Michael Douglas, do you think? For one thing, Mitt's mechanics are bad, as when he begins to tell us everything he knows about everything. His head snaps to a fixed position, as his starched open collar white shirt remains motionless. For all of his good looks and studied body language, he's simply not there yet. But it's really what he says that casts him in a B movie. The dialogue is astonishingly weak.

Today, for example, appearing on the Today show, he gave President Obama an F. On everything. National security, foreign policy, leadership. He might have even accused Obama of being obese. I didn't get that far into the Talking Points Memo account. Somebody should mention to him that even though he is better looking than everyone else in the field, he will have to start making a little sense one of these days. Otherwise he will emerge as a handsome political hack to please all of those right-wing folks in Iowa. After that, he will discover that looks aren't everything.

When is right thing not the right thing?

MICHAEL DOUGLAS, the Beacon Journal's editorial page editor, treated the reader to a symmetrical essay in his Sunday column about Summit County's newest state senator.

Symmetry? He began in the opening line by telling us that Frank LaRose "did the right thing." He closed with the line that the senator "did the right thing". But in between, the reasoning lost traction and distanced itself from Hemingway's literary classic, For Whom the Bell Tolls, that profoundly began and ended with Robert Jordan lying on the floor of a "pine-scented" forest.

Douglas generously credits LaRose with tempering some restrictions on collective bargaining while offering public union workers the right to negotiate wages - a fig leaf, as it's been called - although workers, in return, would give up their right to strike. The last time that I'm aware of that happening was back in the late 1980s when the Guild foolishly agreed not to strike during negotiations with the Beacon Journal.

Contract negotations extended three years beyond its expiration while salaries for guildsmen were frozen. By the way, the Guild also agreed not to make pay increases retroactive!

In the current fray, unions consider collective bargaining - the only generic issue here - with the same sanctity as big-time executives do with stock options and other perks. Secondly, and maybe even more importantly, the issue could lead the way for right-to-work legislation.

For now, LaRose's mistake that is costing him so much loss of credibility is that he had convinced so many that he was a friend of collective bargaining while he worked to restrict it. Had he sold himself as a garden variety anti-union lawmaker from the beginning there would have been less at issue here. But he set the stage for it with his repeated pro public union collective-bargaining assurances. Yes, there were other Republicans with whom he sided in the 17-16 decision. But his vote was critical to both sides. Had he voted against it, he would not now have to be spending so much time explaining his back-channel efforts to soften the blow to unions. Now he is being held accountable. There is a right way to do a right thing.

Gekko is alive and well, even if the rest of us aren't

THERE WAS an auction this week in London in which Christie's fetched $66,500 for a large metal nameplate that had hung at bankrupt Lehman Brothers' London headquarters. That particular moment in the investment firm's life had the deadening sound of finality about it. It is quite common when the once-respected name of your enterprise comes down from the wall to be sold as a collector's item.

Lehman, which went kaput with $600 billion in assets, had fallen victim to its heavily leveraged investments in the subprime housing market. It had been a major player in what nearly led to a Depression. It is big business in the stratosphere in which even some of its slippery deck shufflers don't understand all of the rules.

The ugly arcane side of Wall Street high finance is dismantled to the level of the average movie goer's comprehension in Oliver Stone's sequel to his earlier film a generation ago and now has arrived as "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." And Michael Douglas is back as a felon who has served his prison time and is slyly pawing for more action. His character, of course, is Gordon Gekko, who asserted in the earlier picture the memorable line, "Greed is good."

For the rapacious high rollers along Wall Street today, that can be construed as a compliment as they award themselves the highest of bonuses and salaries with shameless indifference to how a great many Americans are trying to make do these days. The Stone script traces the voices in the luxurious board rooms as they begin to sense that their nifty investments are on the verge of collapse. As one financier tells the other seated at the long table, ""It would be the end of the world." Really.

Gekko shows us that serialized investors who think in terms of of converting $100 million into a quick billion can always find a way. He will do that because he is well beyond good and evil now. He is just trying to show off by outwitting the others. It's a frightful tale and close enough to the truth about the muck on Wall Street to be a documentary.

And there are documents galore today. In the past two days alone , both Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase announced that they are delaying foreclosures because in their haste they, um... didn't read the paperwork. That's only the tip of the iceberg of how the investment industry gamed the system.

If the movie has a moment of failure it is only in the final few minutes, which you might want to see for yourself.

Pardon me, but in watching this grotesque profile of Wall Street, I couldn't help thinking that we have a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, John Kasich, who spent about eight years chasing down investments for Lehman Brothers as the managing director of Lehman's Columbus division. For his loyalties, Lehman paid him $587,175 in salary and a bonus in 2008. He says he didn't have that much to do for the New York office. That makes his big payoff even worse.