Wagoner's $20 million pain pill

SHALL WE SHED no tears for Rick Wagoner,  GM's hitherto chairman and chief White House.  For a man who presided over a thudding crash of the giant auto company, he will live out his years in private life with a $20 million  "allowance" from the company.  The transition might be a little  bumpy in the short term; sky-high CEO royalty doesn't  adjust easily, I'd guess, after living  cloistered lives surrounded by servile enablers whose own jobs are on the line every moment of the day.  There may be exceptions, of course, but I don't know of any.  

That fact of corporate life, of course, will not discourage the usual chorus of Cassandras who are already counting down the minutes to doomsday with the arrival of  Barack Obama in the White House.  His most secure refuge, however, is the silliness of the Republican responses to his every move.  

Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell continues to belabor the notion that his party has been shut out of any discussion of the stimulus package, although there are plenty of videos around that can be shown of the President reaching out to the GOP,  whose leaders didn't even bother to respond to some of  Obama's invitations.    I don't know what House minority leader John Boehner wants except to haul out his tax cut litanies as well as a shallow budget plan that must have embarrassed a lot of folks in his own party.  And Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas no-man and chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, has now threatened to delay a resolution of the Minnesota senate contest  forever, if not longer. It is further evidence of what  desperate Republicans are thinking these day.  And it  has even annoyed Minnesota's Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, who objects to a state with only one senator. 

Until the GOP starts acting like a party of grown-ups, with a leader who can begin to capture the imagination of the voters,  it seems unlikely that it will be anything more than it is today, a bunch of trapped whiners that has not yet found a way to unlock the barn door.  

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Anyone who has followed this  blog knows that I have been critical of  Summit County Chairman Alex Arshinkoff on occasion for some of his inexplicable antics.  But having just been introduced to his Republican opponents' blog, I have to wonder what wannabe comedian is  trying out, badly at that, for Comedy Central. The anti-Arshinkoff post on - get this, Fat Al is Not My Pal -  is juvenile cutesy pie stuff with references to blonde bimbos, Bryan "Fredo Corleone" Williams (the guy at the Board of Elections). an unnamed  "bumbling former retired executive" and "Boy wonder Jon 'Teddy Bear'  Husted. There is also an incoherent reference to Arshinkoff's dancing style. Do they do these things because they can?  Or is it that they just don't know any better?  Unless the level of opposition  rises to adulthood, I pass.