A prescription for walking dogs and circus elephants

Well, another week of frantic stupefying behavior from our homegrown political aliens that would make you wonder why any Martian would ever want to take up residence here. A couple of items - unverified rumors, really - circulating throughout GOP land are interesting enough to reprint and bear watching:

Hospitals in the nation's capitol are reporting a growing number of right-wing U.S. House members suffering from symptoms of repetitive motion syndrome -  particularly weakness and numbness.

A new group of reps covered by plush health insurance have shown up in emergency rooms following the Boehner House's 40th unsuccessful vote to kill Obamacare. Doctors say the only remedy is for the  victims to walk their dogs.  Or their lame circus elephant...

Meantime, a new advocacy group to be known by the acronym WOMBs (Wives of Manic Bubbas)  have taken to Twitter to promote a plan denying sex to their husbands or significant others until the latter stop probing uteruses for even stricter abortion laws.  A spokeswoman said her group got the idea from Aristophanes'  Lysistrata in which women shut down intercourse with their husbands until the militant spouses stopped  their warring behavior.

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Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor,  who also is Ohio's insurance director,  has grabbed more than a few headlines with her department's reports that the Affordable Care Act will raid our pocketbooks with serious increases in premiums. She first warned us that it would drive up costs 88 pct. But last week, Taylor,  a proud CPA in her former life, drew back from that figure to now warn that the price more likely will be 41 pct.   But even that figure, if only invented, got into newspaper headlines in a manner to scare the hell out of those folks who didn't read the actual story.

Score a minor  self-serving propaganda coup for Taylor  in her obsession to resist  health care insurance exchanges in Ohio well beyond the usual partisan opposition. The noise is  likely to remain this way right  up to next year's gubernatorial election as she persists in warning us of an impending economic doomsday under President Obama's health-care plan.    The facts  have no value in this deceptively iterated plan.  But if you want to sanely break down the argument into its many moving parts and come away with a better idea about where it is leading, I recommend Luke Brockmeier's investigative reports in Plunderbund.Com  that could lead you to conclude that we will be witnessing  a Republican Hail Mary that won't produce a touchdown

Husted, Blackwell: Doubling down on 'voter fraud'

Secretary of State Jon Husted will find an audience that will believe him when he appears  at the True the Vote and Ohio Voter Protection summit conference on Saturday in Worthington, Oh.  The mission will be to "discuss election integrity  within the  state," the sponsors say.  And to reassure eveyone that the event will stay on message Husted will join former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell as one of the conferees.

Well, now.   We all know that nobody screwed up the election process more than Blackwell in 2004, from lack of voting machines to challenging the weight of the paper ballots.  I doubt that Husted will want to write home about his noble role at the meeting, particularly now that he is being challenged to show that his new restricted hours policy for early voters is bearing heavily on black voters.  .

Among other speakers will be Anita MonCrief, identified as"ACORN Whistleblower and publisher of something called ''Emerging Corruption'" and a few other self-important defenders of the ballot - as they know it - even though they will have an enduring reputation as elephants in the chicken coop.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder and president of True the Vote,  reassuringly tells us that that one must "make sure that every vote is counted," She says she's excited that  the panel of speakers  "will provide us with thoughts about the challenges related  to voter fraud in Ohio". Isn't that  how Dubya used to warn us about all those non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

 By the way, reporters  can't crash this love-in unless they  have, it says here, media credentials and  "photo ID".   It's a start.

PS:  My column on the anemia of the Republican Party  with candidates like Josh Mandel and Todd Akin has been posted with a (few words about the Summit County GOP) on Plunderbund.Com.

White House to thank Mike DeWine on right to work?

IT WOULD BE fair to assume that someone at the White House has sent a thank-you note to Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine and his tea party constituency for helping President Obama to capture Ohio in November.

Mike DeWine, a very conservative Republican? OK. So maybe he didn't do it intentionally! But we're talking about the outcome just the same.

Now for an explanation: In mid-week, he advanced the drive to put a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would make Ohio a right-to-work state. He certified a petition that would do just that.

It's the same November ballot in which Ohioans will vote for their preferred presidential candidate. Considering the aroused electorate that crushed the anti-union Senate Bill 5 the past November, would you bet $10,000 that the same voters will be inspired to turn out to defeat the right-to-work initiative? Right. Unionists who traditionally cast their lot with Democrats.

As an added caveat to the right-to-work crowd, Obama's likely opponent on the ballot will be Mc Mitt Romney, who sided with Gov. Kasich on SB 5 during a visit to Ohio before last November's election.

DeWine could argue that certifiying the petition was no more than a routine legal matter for his office. But at some point, someone will step forward to ask him about his personal feelings toward right-to-work laws. At that moment you will learn that he signed the petition as a friendly gesture without giving any thought to the measure's best interests.

Come rain or snow in Ohio - or photo IDs.

ONCE UPON A TIME, it was common for Republican politicians to root for bad weather on election day because as one GOP official then confided to me, more of "the coloreds" would stay home. Times have changed, if not the bottom line. Today, thanks to the nasties in the Ohio legislature, the weather is not as crucial to trimming the voter turnout. The perps down there in Columbus - the epicenter of a lot of terrible ideas these days - have turned to less iffy ways to assure their success: under the phony rubric of voter fraud, they want all voters to arrive with photo IDs to prove that they are who they say they are, current felony laws notwithstanding.

As Sen. Keith Faber, the Celina Republican,'' put it in the Columbus Dispatch, the legislative measure is absolutely necessary because it is "relevant, topical and timely"'. And if that isn't persuasive enough to alert us to the evil of massive voter fraud, word was being passed around in the Statehouse that a guy was found to have voted twice in Cincinnati.

We are living in an age of the worst political sorcery in which a party of fake do-gooders has abandoned integrity for a reign of terror on the underclass. So would it be equally ruthless to mention that the Republicans have had their share of election fraud?

For example, Charles P.White, no less than Indiana's Republican secretary of state, has been indicted on seven felony charges involving voting.

And wasn't James Tobin, then President George W. Bush's New England campaign manager, convicted of taking part in a plot to jam Democrats' phones?

Against those exemplary events, maybe I should be a bit troubled to learn that the Cincinnati hoodwinker actually was an out-of-stater who cast a ballot in that city. And there's more: an inmate voted twice from jail. It was hardly reassuring to be told by Hamilton County elections officials that these were the only two mischievous cases out of 400,000 votes cast in the county.

By now, you can see where I am going with this report: There is no evidence of massive voter fraud in the state. The only fraud is the sustained effort to deny voting rights in order to help a political party that is too intellectually corrupt to honestly represent everyone who shows up at the polls. And too dishonest to admit the basis for their shabby schemes.

Oregonians respond to the gravity of their problems

WE ALL KNOW that Republicans look at tax cuts the way that schoolboys are fascinated by the prettiest girl in their class. In Ohio, eliminating the state income tax has become the centerpiece of gubernatorial candidate John Kasich's tax-cutting projects. But in Oregon, the voters made a kind of progressive history this week by easily passing two measures that would increase taxes on upper income residents ($250,000 and up) as well as the minimum tax levels on corporations. (The current corporate minimum of $10 has been around since 1931). Like most states, Oregon has been hit hard by the recession that has resulted in 11 pct. unemployment. Sound familiar?

The first indication of raw political courage arose in the state legislature that was confronted with plugging an estimated $727 million deficit as education and other state services continued to suffer. But the legislative action was quickly challenged by tax opponents in a referendum pursued by an outfit called Oregonians against Job-Killing Taxes.

Although you will be hearing a lot of talk this year about how cutting taxes increases jobs, there is a consensus of economic studies that the Bush tax cuts will rip upwards of $2.4 trillion from the treasury through 2010 without providing a groundswell of jobs. These cuts were covered by borrowed money, which will add another $379 billion in interest.

Well, here's to oregon, whose voters may know something about the cost of a healthier society. So much for an across-the-board tax revolt!

To the G0P: Don't crack open the champagne yet

WHILE REPUBLICANS are celebrating their newly-found glory in Massachusetts as Democrats fall on their swords, may I add two cautionary words for the GOP? Tea Party. Throughout the land the adrenalin is flowing for the political upheaval that has taken over the dialogue, for which the traditional Republican soldiers might pause. The Tea Partyers are up and running, like unleashed pit bulls, against the Republican officeholders in the primaries. A brief recap:

In Texas, where its governor, Rick Perry, has talked of secession when it has suited his audience, eleven Republican congressmen are being challenged in the state primary by the TP's. That's not a misprint. E-L-E-V-E-N! As in football.

In Ohio, a TP candidate, State Rep. Seth Morgan, from rural Huber Heights, has declared his candidacy for Ohio Auditor with strong backing from the TPs who refer to him as a "man of principle". Should the folks at the State GOP Headquarters in Columbus risk the enmity of the hard-right conservatives by giving full support to a party-backed candidate? In Ohio's Second congressional district, a seat already held by U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt (a birther and hardly a lib) now comes Libertarian-TP activist, Marc Johnston, who has entered the race that includes Schmidt and several others. The Ohio U.S. Senate race has at least one TP-friendly candidate, Tom Ganley on the Republican side, and at the top of the ticket, gubernatorial candidate John Kasich has appeared at a TP rally or two to assure them that he is one of their brethren.

In Florida, Gov. Charlie Crist has a challenge in his bid for the U.S. Senate from a TP. In New York's 23rd District, the Republican congressional candidate withdrew from a challenge by a TP who was supported by Sarah Palin (in this instance the TP came up empty as the Democrat won.)

In Massachusetts, Illinois and other states, we may see more TP candidates in the mix. ( I was going to mention Michael Steele, the RNC chairman, too, who is fond of the TP's. But nobody takes Steele seriously these days.)

I wouldn't think that GOP regulars (read: the ones back at the club) could comfortably sniff away these challenges. The TP's are now operating on web sites named Patriotic Resistance, Tea Party Nation and FreedomWorks and they don't speak that highly of either party up on Capitol Hill.

Win or lose, any serious primary challenge will only serve to drain money that could be spent against the Democrats in November. And after all, isn't money what politics is all about these days? Well, that and, eh...socialists.

Something old, not much new

CURRENT  OHIO GOP LINEUP FOR STATE RACES (which rhymes with familiar faces): 

Governor - Former U.S. Rep. John Kasich, who is expected announce his candidacy Friday.

U.S. Senate - Rob Portman, who has announced.

Secretary of State - Jon Husted,  State Senator, announced

Auditor - Incumbent Auditor Mary Taylor, announced

Attorney General l - Mike DeWine, former U.S. senator, to be announced

Treasurer - Josh Mandel, state representative, announced.  

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