Scarborough file adds new critical voice

We can now add the Beacon Journal's  editorial page editor Mike Douglas to critics of  UA President Scott Scarborough's bleak performance since his sceptered arrival from Toledo University.  For many months, Douglas offered his readers a virtual politically correct touch-and go job rating.

Not this time.  From the tone of the Douglas piece, the prez  has fallen more deeply into the mire of a badly scripted promise to  ease the school's $60 million debt.

Moreover, for the first time, the question appeared from a top row of the ivory
tower of whether Scarborough is professionally fit to manage the school.  Douglas wrote, in what can ony be a desperate shot across the bow:

''Is Scarborough, for all the promising ambition for the university, the right person to get the school there?   Jonathan Pavloff, the chairman of the university board of trustees,  describes the  president as possessing the 'precise talents' for the job.  Actually that isn't clear..."

Since the new Maestro took over the university with the sound of silence from the cowering trustees, it's been one thing after another as he  ignored critics and insisted that only those who don't understand his format for change  are now complaining.  He  was the model of the right way, some of it even shaped by his deeply religious Texas background that has referenced church people as the ones who stooped to pick up trash.

His campus culture was to be one of discipline, discipline,  discipline - an "organization engaged in disciplined thought and action."  He even initiated a new uniformed Corps of Cadets as a campus role model.  Meantime, he became embroiled in a badly executed name change for the school, which soured more people than he cared to acknowledge.

Throughout the upheaveal on the campus, he seemed to be conducting the thunderous Ride of the Valkyries as a lilting Strauss waltz.

Things are finally catching up.  From Douglas to mega-philanthropist Eileen Burg to the UA Women's Committee to the AAUP and to those of us who questioned his muddled game plan, the clock is ticking faster. At least we  are having more reason to hope .

I once worked for an editor who defended an unpopular decision by shrugging that if you want to make an omelet, you have to break an egg..  In the editor's case, his own egg was finally broken as he headed out the door.

With Husted challenged, BJ's Douglas to the rescue

Secretary of State Jon Husted has been flitting around the state in search of a safe harbor  for his besieged voting "reforms", and he couldn't have found a more hospitable port   than Mike Douglas' Sunday column in the Beacon Journal.  In a piece that asks teasingly  "How hard is it to vote in Ohio?'  the BJ  editorial page editor solemnly went on and on to cast Husted as the Wizard of Oz in cleaning up an election system that has been  victimized by long lines, shfting polling places, shortened voting hours  and - I pause - the Zombie cheaters. Douglas concludes that it  isn't that hard to vote. Problem solved.  

Indeed, that has been Husted's rallying cry as he seeks reelection against a fiery Democratic opponent, Sen. Nina Turner.  The secretary prides himself in creating a new culture that makes it "easier to vote and harder to cheat".  On Sunday, Douglas oddly  bought into the  argument that is being scorned by some other newspapers as well as ordinary folks like you and me.  (A columnist in the Toledo Blade booed the Husted Hustle (my noun ) in  a piece headlined  ''Why Ohio's GOP is strangling voters' access to the polls."

On that point, I think I know why. It's the grand design by the Republican deep thinkers that emerged at the start of the Obama era as the party nervously sought ways to resist  voting trends that threatened its survival forever.  (Years earlier, a Republican county chairman expressed hope that it would rain on Election Day to lower the turnout in certain politically unfriendly urban precincts.)

The Republicans decided the whole idea could be sold as a  Boy Scout effort to eliminate wholesale voter fraud.  When none surfaced in studies, they turned to other  ploys.

Besides piling voter turnout on voter turnout that he compared  favorably with Husted's efforts, Douglas also lashed the New York Times - which is really too big to fail  - for an editorial that accused the Ohio GOP of rigging the election system to hurt the Democrats.  After a couple of Republican officials unwisely said  the so-called reforms were intended to help Mitt Romney, I can only respond:  Well?

Rather than deal with the numbers, I prefer to look at the nefarious ways that Husted and the hoofbeat Republican legislature   have carried out their game plan. The victims of two losses in presidential elections, they have been frantically rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I am cynical enough to dismiss voter turnouts in past elections as the sole measure of the merit of Husted's handiwork. I prefer to look at the  wide pool of the carefully nurtured Republican efforts to close some doors in urban polling places. Shorter voting hours, the elimination (now restored) of Golden Week for same-day registration and voting, Republican attempts to bar universities from issuing residency IDs, and,  the measure that would make it quite difficult for a third party to appear on the ballot. It's not a playbook that inspires confidence in the party's  moves to purify the vote.

You might want to know, too,  that Republican Sen.Frank LaRose from Akron's back yard sponsored the measure to end Golden Week.

The issue has generated  a suit by the ACLU, League of Women Voters and NAACP. And not so incidentally, a federal judge in Cincinnati has ordered Husted to restore the early voting hours of the three days leading to the election.

Wherever you land on this, I believe this much is certain: Husted will be a key figure in one of the state's liveliest issues up to Election Day.  It has already cut to the quick the folks who will be most deeply affected. You know  who they are, even if Husted's side won't tell you.  

For Mayor Robart, federal money is only good for what it's good for

Excuse me. But didn't the headline above Mike Douglas' column in today's Beacon Journal say Gov. Kasich "is against federal spending until he's for it"?
Don't get me wrong.  I have nothing against criticism of the governor.  But in this instance of the old for-and-against sequence...Well....

On the very same page there was another reference to the BJ's endorsement of Cuyahoga Falls Tea Party associate Don Robart, the mayor.  As you well know, the Tea Party and others on the ding-a-ling hard right hate all things federal with a kind of anarchical spirit. The BJ editorials haven't  been hesitant about saying so.

So excuse me, again.  A few days ago, the Falls News-Press, the mayor's hometown weekly, also endorsed Robart, mentioning among other assets his eagerness to get federal money for some of his programs, which the paper referred to as "exciting".

So given Robart's record over  the years,  can we now say that he was FOR  federal money before he was FOR more federal money?

Three not a crowd when OSU moves $50 million to a venture capitalist

Let us begin the week in Beautiful Ohio with a squinty look at the academic/political complex that is the pride of Gov. Kasich.   While public universities genuflect to the governor and legislature in hopes of squeezing out a few more public dollars for their campuses, Ohio State University and a private venture capital fund have worked out an investment scheme - private! -  that has been exposed by a couple of Plain Dealer reporters.

But only partly exposed because the major players in the deal aren't talking - enforced silence that Kasich honed from his days with the defunct Lehman Brothers.

Such ideas were seeded when Kasich replaced the state development department with a new office with the seductive  name of JobsOhio, a merger of two prized words in the governor's lexicon.  To protect the agency's virginity, it was guaranteed total secrecy in its stated workaday world  of creating new jobs in the Buckeye marketplace.

So now we are told that OSU has invested $50 million in the secret venture capital fund run by Mark Kvamme, who had directed JobsOhio until a a year ago when he left  to create his very own private fund. A close friend of Kasich, Kvamme isn't talking about the deal.  Nor is recently retired  OSU president  E.Gordon Gee, who surely knows a lot more about it as the widely reputed Wizard of Oz.

 And where will the invested money eventually land?  Only the privileged insiders to the flow know.  And given OSU's iconic position in the state's academic universe, it appears no one will find out soon.

As the PD's Brent Larkin observed  in a Sunday column,  OSU has long nurtured a bad habit of keeping blemished  episodes  under the radar.   He described the lastest stone-walling on major transfers of public money, as is this one, as an exercise in obfuscation".

Meanwhile, Mike Douglas  called it "coziness" in Sunday's Beacon Journal  but more gently  dampened  concern by describing Kvamme as a credentialed operative with success in his past who "may prove to be a winner" in this instance.

Kasich,  Gee,  Kvamme.  Connecting the dots can raise dark suspicions.  Coziness?   While we're waiting for transparency, it looks more like crony capitalism under a rock in the governor's office.