What's that? Conservatives are now bleeding hearts on Obamacare?

Do you find it  bizarrely interesting, as I do, that the conservatives who have long resisted the "train wreck" of Obamacare are now the bleeding hearts who are gravely complaining  about the computer problems that are forcing millions of Americans to delay  enrollment in the program?...

And if you happened to see the sloppy fielding by the Cardinals in the opening game of the World Series, you can be sure somebody will step before a TV camera to blame it on Obamacare, the health reform plague on  all that is good in America the Beautiful.   Take it from Rep. Michele Bachmann, who speaks with Olympian wisdom.  The plan, she insists, is already killing women and children.  We can only ponder how much worse it will be by her standards once the plan is fully activated.

Finally, the more I encounter Ted Cruz on the airwaves, the more he impresses me as the brutish guy who would  saunter into a bakery and willfully sneeze all over the dough.      

Will shutdown cast pall over Summit GOP event?

Are you ready for the government shutdown that the experts are now conceding? No, still not necessary to start storing extra food and water in the basement.  But we are still facing a mess dumped on us by the weird collection of  anarchists on Capitol Hill who insist they only want to do what's best for the American people, imaginary or otherwise.

Easy for them to say.   While a sea of Americans will lose paychecks  and other government services, the laws are so devised that the Capitol Hill gang of Tea Party lawmakers will still get paid, even if their employes will not. To the topside goes the spoils.

And it took not John Boehner but another Ohioan to put the anarchists' self-styled  noble   work in context.    That would be Rep. Jim Jordan, from somewhere down in  central Ohio, a  hard right Republican (!) who believes it's all a matter of "basic civics" to do what has to be done for the people.

"Sometimes I go back to basic civics.  We're the House of Representatives.  We're the body that's supposed to be closer to the people," he said.  "That's why the founders gave a chance for the people to throw us out every two years."

From  his rural Republican-pure district?  He's kidding, of course.

He also s didn't mention that a majority of his colleagues in the People's House would disagree with his sophomoric  civics lesson.

Meantime, a shutdown might cast a pall over  the annual  Summit County GOP finance committee dinner Tuesday night at the Akron-Fairlawn Hilton.  For $300 a plate (or more) the guests will get to hear yet another boast from Gov. John (Ohio Miracle) Kasich.  A big honor for Chairman Alex Arshinkoff, I might add, inasmuch as he's paid $10,000 a month to be the University of Akron's guy to lobby...John Kasich. 

Once again at these annual moneyfests, Alex will get his chance to slam every  titled Democratic leader with scandalous behavior that would even force the late Ray Bliss to blush.  Whatever's going wrong, he will tell them, is the fault of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and such without once mentioning chief Republican/Tea Party anarchist Ted Cruz.

Long ago I chose the wrong line of work to make a good living.

P.S. I would provide you with an on-site report of the event as I did for many years when Bliss was chair. But a couple of years ago Alex  closed the doors to me, thus doing himself and me  a  favor.  

GOP's Ted Cruz, a Joe McCarthy rising star

Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz's  odyssey toward an even more debased  GOP  dropped him off on a stage in Independence, Oh., this week  for the Cuyahoga County Republican Party's annual  in-name-only dinner toast to  Abe Lincoln.  For the evening Cruz received a share of partisan  huzzahs for his cockeyed  mythology and the published reports didn't hesitate to refer to him as a "rising star" in national politics.  That destined-to-be ephemeral title seems to be catching on at least with his bug-eyed gang, which tells you how easy it is today to be an acclaimed  star if you traffic in saying a lot of crazy things.

In Cruz's  case, the freshman Texas senator has slandered  Chuck Hagel by questioning whether the decorated war veteran and nominee for Secretary of Defense was on the payroll (maybe $200,000!) of  America's worst  enemies, say, Iran and North Korea.  He couldn't prove it, but that's part of Cruz's mystical  M.O.  It would have made more sense if he had accused Hagel of spilling spaghetti sauce on his new necktie or not lowering  the toilet seat.

Cruz also tossed in his world-view that Iran praised the Hagel nomination - which it didn't.

The rising star - `Whoops, now I'm saying it -   is drawing a lot of attention for being a reincarnation of Red-baiter Joe McCarthy for his questioning of his targets' patriotism.  Writing  on the New Yorker's blog, Jane Mayer recalled that Cruz,  a Harvard law school man as was Obama,   once  declared in a speech that Obama would have made a "perfect president of  Harvard Law School"  because there were  a dozen Marxists on the faculty.

Well, the GOP has had a series of rising stars that immediately come to mind. Sarah Palin.  Tim Pawlenty. Bobby Jindal.  And the party ended up with the likes of John McCain and Mitt Romney at the top of the tickets.

So I'll stick with the big Thermador kitchen appliance ad in Smithsonian magazine that says:  "Some stars burn brighter than others". It's also true that, conversely,  some stars are not very bright at all.

GOP: Obama socialist, communist, Hitler,Stalin, or what?

There's nothing more effective in advancing the  Republicans toxic mental breakdown than a speech  by President Obama.  An occasion such as the annual  State of the Union address, first administered by Obama in 2009,  has been  the party's proven emetic ever since, although the response  seems to have gotten  even worse this week.  Struggling to find something imaginative to say, Fox News' iconic analysts even questioned the news value of a 102-year-old woman's efforts to vote in Florida.

You sense a pall of desperation over the GOP brood as they resort to their familiar assault weapons as a means of replacing serious policy with quackery.  Even before the speech, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina referred to Hillary Clinton as a murderer and threatened more nastiness on the Benghazi issue.  We should probably excuse this sorrowfully whining  guy because it is being widely reported that he could face a stiff challenge in the Republican primary  from a Ron Paul libertarian loyalist.

Some other expletives  from the Right:

"Dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Obama" (Limbaugh).

"A Castro-like-speech" (Conservative author Mark Levin on Fox)

Obama's gun-control efforts a "disaster":  (Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe)

Obama nominee Chuck Hagel may be on  the payroll of overseas radicals (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz)

Obama is against free enterprise (read: dictator) obsessed with raising taxes (Florida Sen. Marco Rubio)

But none of this rises to a higher intellectual level than Fox News Psychiatrist (honest!) Dr. Keith Ablow,  who unpleasantly accused Obama of being "psychologically predictable".

"He does not surprise." Ablow   opined.  "Having been abandoned as a boy by his father and then his mother, only to then learn that his grandmother feared people of his race, he seems inherently to distrust initiative and intention and to place his trust only in the collective."

Sounds a lot like a reference to a socialist or communist to me.   I wonder how much they pay Ablow to give Fox News such a much-needed soaring sense of panache.  I also wonder whether they'll get around to having him do the 50-minute hour on the  couch for Limbaugh.

Some people can make these things up

NOTES FROM THE RIGHT WING  BOTTOM  FEEDERS:

Gayle Trotter, the conservative Washington D.C. lawyer who testified against stronger gun controls at yesterday's Senate hearing, asserted that she merely wanted to defend women against  attacks by intruders and crazed  husbands, even, we assume, if that meant keeping an assault weapon and a few hand grenades under  her pillow.

With the clock ticking on her 15 minutes of fame - and, doubtless  more business from howitzer owners  for her law firm - the soon-to-be whatshername recounted the plight of a distressed woman who was threatened by guys who broke into her house  as she  remained defenseless with a limited supply of bullets. As Lawrence O'Donnell  demonstrated in an interview with whatshername, she couldn't produce a shred of evidence that her scary story was true.  None of it. Pure fantasy.

And now we learn from Talking Points Memo that whatshername has a website called Independent Women's Forum  in which she argued against the Violence Against Women Act. She wrote on her website  that among other things, VAWA  "has the potential to encourage immigration fraud [!],   false allegations of abuse and denial of a rebuttal by the accused spouse..."

OK,  Gayle.  Your 15 minutes are up.

* * * *  *

Next: The past week brought us the three Republican musketeers who were the only senators to vote against the nomination of John Kerry as secretary of state.  According to Ted Cruz, one of the two Texans to oppose the decorated Vietnam veteran, there are doubts about Kerry's commitment to the military that would reveal  U.S. weakness to our opponents.  But we do wonder why Cruz, who was never in the service,  doesn't prove his own commitment by joining the forces in Afghanistan or at least  the Alamo.

* * * * *

Oh, c'mon.  The Plain Dealer reports  that Republican State Rep.  Mike Dovilla  of Berea thinks there is interest in the legislature to revive the photo ID cause before  the 2014 mid-term election.    "We think there is broad support in the public," Dovilla told the PD.    Three problems with that:  Republicans  aren't thinking very much these days,  (2) the idea failed to gain support in 2011 even though it kept the lawmakers off the streets for many long hours debating it;  (3) despite the efforts by Secretary of State Jon Husted to purify the voters with various restrictions, there wasn't any proof in 2012 of the voter fraud that the GOP preaches from high on the mount.




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