Browns Brew: Bad to the last drop

WATCHING Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards drop another pass yesterday - he's the NFL leader in aborted receptions - I had to wonder whether the Browns had ever considered enrolling him in one of State Farm's "good hands" insurance policies. Either that, or give him a pair of catcher's mitts , one for each hand, and throw the ball to somebody else.  

The shame of McCain's refrain

SHAMELESS. How else can you describe the torrent of political pornography gushing from the McCain-Palin camp in the final days of the campaign?  John "Country First" McCain, desperate to put himself first, has left no rumor, whisper or slander unturned in leading his mob of Republican lemmings to the living rooms of American voters.  

Unable to clearly articulate his plan for America other than resorting to  such cliches as  being "pro growth and pro jobs" - whatever the hell those rhetorical placebos mean - McCain's only other non-radioactive bid to stroke the voters is that he is, um... tested.  Surely no one would discredit his POW experience, but he is in fact saying that any POW- and there were many -  is prepared to be president.  I think not. No more so than Sarah Palin is prepared to be president.  Since she was summarily added to the ticket she has proved to be no more than an anatomical expression for leering guys and a vacant substitute for Hillary Clinton as a not so subliminal walk-on role for the benefit of the ladies in her audience. 

In the final days, the McCain camp's rap sheet on Obama has included outrageous charges that he threatens to bring on a Holocaust (courtesy of a rightwing Republican Jewish organization), that he would be a threat to the peace and tranquillity - with maybe even bodily harm - to your family and mine  (you must know the origins of those fears with an African-American challenging McCain);  that Obama favored criminals over cops; that he was not an American citizen (don't kid yourself, folks; this is as racist as it gets without mentioning the n-word. )

The GOP has fallen so low into the muck that the Rep. John Boehner, the Republican minority leader from Hamilton, Oh.,  didn't hesitate to refer to Obama as "chicken shit".  Boehner? Wasn't he the guy who was seen passing out lobbyists' money on the House floor? 

However Tuesday's election turns out, neither McCain nor his party deserve to win.  The antagonists in this race would need more than $150,000 for clothes to freshen up their images after giving their brand of moral values a bad name, not only in America but to a watchful world whose support the U.S. will desperately need in the months and years ahead. The only   good news landing in the Democratic camp from their adversaries is that some guy named Cheney heartily endorsed his friend, John McCain.  With friends like that, you don't need many  enemies. 

Hemingway once described courage as "grace under pressure."  I didn't see any of that in McCain's frantic appeals to our worst instincts as we headed  to the polls. No honor.  No decency.  Even for the hysteria of ugly politics, it was despicably out of bounds.

And error in progress

Oops.  If you see a deletion on the past post I can assure you that I was not trying to deny Sarah Palin her First Amendment rights. Actually I erred on the post from FARGOZ on the Night Before Christmas and somehow it was credited to me.  Because I am not Blog Smart, I was unable to remove my name from the top of the FARGOZ post and as you will note, despite my hunt-and-peck efforts to remove Grumpy Abe from the credit line, it's still there.  However, I did manage to credit Fargoz this time.  Phew!   There are days when I long for my old Smith-Corona.    

He ain't finished yet!

PRESIDENT BUSH,  the self-proclaimed decider  who has been exiled by his own party since the GOP convention, is still trying to recapture a few moments of past glory in the closing days of his residency in the Oval Office.  Apparently hopeful that he will be best remembered by the people who sustained him for 8 dark years in the White House, Bush is calling for new  rules to relax federal regulations  on several environmental  fronts:  disposal of radioactive waste, mining exploration, commercial fishing, auto emissions, etc.  I would place this in the category of a reverse Hail Mary pass.  But for those of us who found little cheer in the Bush presidency, I would offer this consolation prize:  As of today, there are only 80 days left to his nightmarish run since the fateful day when the U.S Supreme Court, by a single vote, granted him the job.  You can celebrate, if you wish, by going shopping.  

Obsessing the Recession

I'M NOT sure when I first learned that two plus two equaled four,  but it has somehow stuck with me for many years.  But not being a disciple of  Pythagoras, I continue to have problems with simple numbers as well as explanations of why numbers are  so important in defining an economic recession.  It seems ages ago when the gurus who  inspect such events began to wonder when, if ever, the U.S would finally sink into a recession, as if everyone who had lost a job along the way didn't already know.  Forever in denial, the experts cautiously inched backward with such descriptions as downturn, economic  stagnation, slowdown, contraction   and  slump.  But recession?  Well the GDP and the real GDP, it says here,  have declined .3 and .8 pct.  respectively.   And real personal consumption is down .04 pct.  You could have fooled me.  

Alas, the euphemistic days are over.  Now the talk is about when did the recession actually begin! Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Hall, Stanford professor and chairman of the National Bureau of Economic Research Committee,  says there is a chance we can finally know the answer. He says:  "...the severity of the credit crunch could be enough for some committee members to make a recession conclusion as early s next month."   

Good.  I hope that such clarity  comes in time for Christmas shopping.   With the semantics of the country's recessive economic ills out of the way, it's time to head back to the shopping malls, just as George Bush once urged all Americans to do as his earlier remedy for a, um, downturn. Meantime,  the Fed has cut prime interest rates another .5 pct. to jump start the economy.  With the rate now shaved to a mere 1 pct., without any discernible help for the economy in the wake of all previous cuts, I wouldn't be surprised if the future cuts will be in eighths to give the Fed experts more room to convince the public that it is indeed trying to help us out of this mess.    Don't know that even that will work.  In fact until we know when the recession began, I'm not even sure that two and two are still four.  

A hit man for breakfast!

AS I WAS reaching for my morning Plain Dealer to enjoy the latest rerun of "Peanuts",  a thin 5x7" packet  fell from it to my breakfast table.  It was a packaged DVD titled HYPE the Obama Effect. Oh, oh.  Midnight in America,  from the same torpedoes  who have earned a longstanding reputation  for political smear-bombs.  I'd rather ignore this sort of wingnut crap, but when it is transported inside the PD's pages to thousands of readers,  ya gotta at least offer an alert about the crowd that is behind the so-called documentary.

The first hint comes from a  sound bite (which you can find on your computer) featuring Ken Blackwell.  You all remember how he led the Ohio Republican Party down to sorry defeat as a gubernatorial candidate in 2006.  To quote  Blackwell's assault  on Obama:  "It's only when you begin to peel back layers that you begin to see a disturbing pattern."   At this point I had to wonder how smart the movie's producers were to include a fast-talking loser in its pantheon and then have it circulated so widely in a state that has already passed judgment on his pathetic credentials. 

But the of real villain is David Bossie,  the head of Citizens' United, the rightwing group that has had a lot of foul things to say about past Democratic candidates.   Bossie is the same fellow who was behind the film Hillary: The Movie.  It didn't  quite fulfill his designs as a diatribe against Hillary because she didn' get the nomination.    You should also know that Bossie had a role in the awful Willie Horton commercial that helped sink Michael Dukakis in 1988.  Oh, and he was fired as an investigator for the U.S. House Government and Oversight Committee for leaking information that he edited to damage Hillary. He has also asserted that Chinese espionage is "a most serious scandal" in the highest levels of the government.  

Apart from all of this, no one has accused Bossie of littering expressways with his trash. 

And now, back to "Peanuts".      

Multiple @%#&%*@?! choice

I'VE DONE my  best to keep up with the McCain campaign's nasty name-calling and it's wearying, unlike anything I've covered since the days of LBJ, whose opponents were kind enough to unify on one word: Communist. Earlier, with Eisenhower, it was slightly more respectful:  They simply accused Ike of being a  comsymp, if you know what I mean.  Jack Kennedy had to defend himself against being called a Catholic, for heaven's sake.   And Nixon, was Tricky Dick, but firmly denied that he also was a crook.    Al Gore was described as an "alpha" man, but few people outside of   Maureen Dowd's inner circle quite knew what that meant.    I had better stop this little political history lesson before I  get to Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Internet, after all, has a mixed audience and kids.

Still, I have all of these terrible terms aimed at Barack Obama by the McCain School of Lesser Invective Politics, and I can't think of anything else to do with them but to dump them on anyone who has read this far.  So, here goes:

Lucifer admirer; traitor; terrorist; Muslim alien; socialist; uppity;  elitist; street man ; closet socialist; communist; dirtiest campaigner; redistributionist-in-chief; drug addict; most liberal member of congress; baby murderer; black power threat; unprepared; stylist without substance; Ivy-league egghead; tax-and-spend 

Democrat; and finally, a Democrat.  

You'd think that by now that a presidential campaign with a specific message would have settled on one.  You could think that, but you would be wrong.  

Condi: Out of the Frying Pan?

THERE ARE reports that Condi Rice, who will become a free agent when George Bush leaves office, is interested in joining the front office, possibly as president,  of the San Francisco Forty Niners.  She had been at Stanford U. before becoming a passenger on Bush's train wreck and is said to be "passionate" about football.  I would be shocked if it happened.  The Niners are dismally in last place with a 2-6 record. Why would she want to move from one loser to another one?    

Palin's home-front downer

IT USED to be a clever talking point for the partisans on both sides to note that even the hometown newspaper - the folks who knew the most about one's opponent - found reason not to endorse that opponent.  Well, now.  The largest paper in Alaska has endorsed Barack Obama!  Although the Anchorage Daily News insisted that both McCain and Sarah Palin were too "risky" to endorse in a troubled nation and world, here is the paper's conclusion about Alaska's governor:

        "Yet despite her formidable gifts, few who  have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth.  To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crises would stretch the governor  beyond her  range." 

          You betcha.  As Palin has become more of McCain's  chattering nuisance in the final days of the campaign, she has quickly reminded me of the disruptive student in a grade school class  who was constantly waving an  arm for permission to go to the bathroom.  

McCain: It's a question of answers

AS A college freshman,  I was terribly challenged by my first essay exam in a history course.  The professor, a tall distinguished man who wrote the book for the course, passed out blank 16-page  booklets for our responses to his questions.  I filled up the pages, turned it in and walked out of the room confident that I had nailed the test.  Several days later it came back to me with a big "F" on the cover.   I was shocked and met the professor at his desk.  "I clearly wrote 16 pages and you gave me an F!  How could you do that to me?"    With obvious experience in such student complaints, he raised his long arm and replied:  "Indeed, you did write 16 pages.  But I think you wrote that much in hopes that the right answer would be in there somewhere.  And I'm not confident that you still know what the correct answer is."

It might explain my reaction to Tom Brokaw's interview with John McCain on Meet the Press this morning.  To each question, McCain went on and on, zigging and zagging,  hoping to convince his  doubters that he knew the answer even if  it spun off from the original question.  

Fully conditioned by my old history professor, I had no choice but to give McCain an F.