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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GOP morphing into cult

DEAR REPUBLICANS (wherever you are):

If I may use the vernacular, your party has gone to hell.

Repugnant evidence is growing each day that  the Grand Old Party has become a cult.  It now excludes anybody who is slightly to the left of Planet Limbaugh and therefore has shrunk beyond recognition unless you are an expert in atomic imaging.      The gatekeepers for the cult have placed a premium on losing. 

The events in just the  last few days have demonstrated that the cult is so deeply intrenched in ideological cleansing that it may soon require all true-believing  members to perform  the "loyalty dance"  so popular back in the days of Mao.  

Check these:

• THE REPUBLICAN  chairman of Kent County, Mich. (Grand Rapids) has canceled a talk at a party fund-raiser by Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.  He's too moderate, the chairman said. My God!  The Republican governor of Utah, a proud red state, too moderate? 
• FOX NETWORK refused to air President Obama's Wednesday night news conference - the only network to lower the curtain -  with the apparent decision to not report so that nobody can decide. Instead the network programmed something called "Lie to Me."(I think Fox should rely more on John Stewart to upgrade its limp attempt for clever humor. )  
• RUSHBO HAS has urged John McCain to become a Democrat, too, and take his daughter with him.  
• SEN. OLYMPIA SNOWE,  Maine Republican, was placed on the right-wing's enemies list after an op-ed piece in the New Y0rk Times that questioned the GOP's exclusivity that drove out Sen. Arlen specter.
• REPUBLICAN representatives leading the fight  against the hate-crimes bill (which passed, despite their rants), declared it was a transparent attempt to protect homosexuals. Sample:  Rep. Steve King, the crackpot Iowa Republican, said of hate crimes, "I, Mr. Speaker,oppose and I defy the logic of the people that would advocate for such legislation the very idea we could divine what goes on in the heads of people when they commit crimes".  (I do have a clue to what isn't going on in King's mind.)
• GREG MUELLER,  a high-ranking Republican consultant, proposes that the party can regain its bearing by dusting  off Newt Gingrich's old Contract with America, and Newt couldn't agree more wherever he goes these days, which is usually Fox News.  
• FINALLY, FOR this hour at least, there's this word from the Cincinnati Enquirer about the Hamilton County Republican chairman, Alex Triantafilou, who shamlessly posted two photos on his blog in reaction to Specter's action.  One was a photo of a bald Specter during his chemotherapy; the other of a bald Dr. Evil from the "Austin Powers" movies.

 Believe me, folks, I don't these things up.  Jonestown next for GOP strays?  

  

The Republican Four Horsemen

TIME FOR a new assessment of this week's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Award with some familiar names...

REP. MICHELLE BACHMANN. Minnesota Republican,  who suggested that swine flu epidemics only occur under Democratic presidents.  She later had to be reminded that the last one occurred under Gerald Ford, a Republican according to all of the papers at that time. 

        SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, of Kentucky, the U.S. Senate minority leader,  whose fatherly assessment of President Obama's first 100 days was long on criticism and short on praise, while closing with a Republican promise that it would continue the party's "principled support, principled opposition and pragmatic, creative solutions to meet the challenges of the day."   But he also warned that Arlen Specter's defection was a threat to the nation because it would give the Democrats too much power. ( Almost as much as the Republicans had during George Bush's first single-party six years, Mitch?)

       MICHELE MALKIN, simple-spoken columnist who spells her first named differently than does Bachmann,  who has traced swine flu to Obama's visit to Mexico and called the President a "frivolous man" who never goes anywhere without his teleprompter.    She heard about the swine flu source from Rush, who is believe to have heard it from the old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate. She was delighted that Specter bolted the party and advised him to not let the door hit him on the way out. He didn't.  

        MICHAEL STEELE, Republican national chairman who is always in the act, despite growing impatience within his party with his blundering comments about, well...everything.  There's an undertow of feeling that Steele must resign.  I hope they don't get ahead of the curve by the next trading deadline. .  The Democrats already have a chairman.

With enemies like these, Obama and his soaring popularity don't need more friends.  

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Specter: Being a Republican no fun anymore

WELL, ARLEN SPECTER just crossed an aisle as wide as the Delaware River.  He is becoming a Democrat, elevating the Republican McParty's  outbursts of hysteria to Vesuvian levels.  And in the early damage-control reaction the best that Republican National Chairman Michael Steele could offer, allowing for his minimal political insights,  was that the Pennsylvania senator was, after all, a renegade with a left-wing voting record. In a prepared statement (who writes these things anyway?)  Steele further noted that Specter was not acting on  "principles of any kind" but rather on the  reality that he was going to be defeated in the  Republican primary. Meantime,  Specter's other navel-gazing critics will have to take a number for their turns on the Fox network. The veins will be popping out of Sean Hannity's forehead.   

But just as it failed to spin socialism, Marxism and all of the other isms into the cloth worn by President Obama, few people outside of Rush Limbaugh's revivalist followers will be impressed by the current GOP's obtuse vocabulary.  Clearly, his former party had put an overwhelming hit on  him by posting up a right-winger in the next senatorial primary with overwhelming appeal to the shrinking right-wing base.  Yes, Sir Michael, you could bet the farm and every luxury car in Pennsylvania that Specter would lose.  And Specter was no more disaffected by his party's suffocating base than the 200,000 Pennsylvania Republicans who are now registered as Democrats.

Although Specter's forced defection will cause more havoc in the Senate's Republican caucus, where it clings to its  fantasy of Government by Filibuster,  don't look for a sudden change in ideological direction.  Check out its gagging  resistance to the appointment of  Kansas Gov.  Kathleen Sibelius as secretary of health and human services.  How toxic could she be as a Democrat who was widely popular in one of the most Republican states in the Union?   Oh, she's pro-choice.  I see.  Republicans now in charge of controlling their party's destiny just don't get it.    

There was an old poem that said "for want  a nail the shoe was lost" and  "for want of a horse the rider was lost."

The GOP today has no horses nor riders.  Nor ideas.  Without them,  the party of Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh  is sounding only its death rattle.  The Moral?  Be careful what you wish for...

 

Plusquellic supporters: Recalling recall signatures?

ADD THIS TWIST TO the final days of the mindless attempt to recall Mayor Don Plusquellic: Persons who signed  recall petitions  have an opportunity to change their minds before their signatures are validated in the final count.   At least, that's the goal of Citizens for Akron, the group supporting the mayor against Warner Mendenhall's forces. Letters will be sent to the signees this week reminding them that the City Charter permits them to withdraw their names from the petitions by contacting Akron City Council Clerk Bob Keith.  I'm told the rationale for the  home-stretch tactic:  There may be some who are now quite disenchanted with recall leader Mendenhall in the wake of reports  that there are nearly $170,000 in  federal tax liens against him.  

Mendenhall's forces fell 508 valid signatures short in the petitions filed on April 16.  The campaign is now working through a 20-day extension in its hope to satisfy the legal requirement of 3,179 valid  signatures.  It's my idea of having nothing more productive to do.   

Haley Barbour: Another door left open

A WASHINGTON source is reporting that Haley Barbour, the Republican Mississippi governor, has "left the door open" to a candidacy for president in 2012.  In political jargon, Barbour, once the Republican national chairman, is sending a coy signal that he may very well run if the planets line up in his favor.    It's smart politics.  He'll keep everybody guessing that he might be the 25th or 50th potential Republican candidate in the race and lobbyists and donors will tread carefully around him the next year or so  in the outside chance that the will be in the presidential pack. 

The former New York Times columnist Russell Baker once called it the great mentioning game.  And you have little chance of winning a free lunch at McDonald's if you are not at least mentioned on all of the Sunday morning talk shows, particularly by George Will on a good day. Newt Gingrich also says he might run if things don't change.    He had better hope that they do inasmuch as President Obama's latest  ABC News poll numbers gives Barack a startling 72 pct. "favorability" rating with Americans.  Against  congressional Republicans, he leads 61-24.

 But the mere fact that Gingrich is now leaving the door open means he will be a regular guest on conservative talk shows to revive his failed "contract with America."  Right now, there are doubtless 20 others leaving the door open with a promise of letting in some fresh air.  It works wonders with political egos. So if any of them is invited to throw out the first pitch at a baseball game, the announcer is bound to say, "Congressman Smiley is from Arkansas and has left the door open to run for president.

One, however, must be careful not to get too far ahead of the curve.  Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, made quite a spectacle of himself at a photo-op to declare that Texas might secede if the Feds don't leave him alone with stimulus money and other Big Brotherly incursions.  How silly he must look today after he asked the very same Feds for help in combatting the swine flu epidemic. (Sorry, Texas politicians never think they look silly about anything.)

I never left the door open for myself.  Happily for me, when I came home from grade school with a report card with two c's on it, my mother sensed my gloom, but came though with a consoling remark by a dear mother who preferred bingo to books.    "Don't worry," she said. "You're never gonna be president anyway."

She was right.  Mothers usually are.  

  

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Columbus Dispatch shocker: Raise taxes! :

GATHER 'ROUND ME, all ye unhappy tea baggers.   I have news for you:  You just lost another one. Glaring harshly at you from the editorial page of the Columbus Dispatch today is  an uncharacteristic plea to raise Ohio taxes to meet the peril of a financial crisis that neither political party seems ready to address,

As George Costanza might say, "This is HUGE." Over the years, the political graveyard was filled by the Big D with the bodies of candidates who even whispered tax increases on, oh... Life Savers,  in their sleep.  This was the paper that once chaperoned a number of conservative pols into the legislature and governor's office simply because they had an R after their name on the ballot.  In the earlier days it was bloody bad business for anyone to suggest that there were at least one or two liberals who shouldn't be institutionalized.  

But give the current Dispatch credit.  It has grown philosophically.  And now, in this time of great need, the paper entered the fray with words  that surely will jolt the tea bagging leprechauns from their postmodern  fantasy world of Coolidge, Hoover, McCain et al. Spoke the Dispatch:

No one wants to take the lead.  No one wants to be first to utter the T-word.

Everyone in the Strickland administration, the Democratic-controlled Ohio House and Republican-controlled Ohio Senate knows the only way to fill an $8 billion budget hole is with a combination of new taxes and service reductions....If it is quaintly anachronistic to hope for bipartisan, statesmanlike leadership to tackle one of the state's  most historic economic  crises  then Ohio may have no hope at all.

The world has changed.   I wonder why there are still some people around who don't know that.  

Lieberman's brain runs dry

I HAD RESISTED piling on poor  Sen. Joe Lieberman because I'm really not a bad guy when you get to know me.  But when he said a couple of extraordinarily contradictory things, I felt it was necessary to resurrect him from McCain's ashes from the last presidential campaign.  I was constrained to give him not one, but two,  Grumpy Abe  Linguistic Lunacy Awards (GALL) - the first such double honor of the year, which will qualify him for the annual GALL Award in December.   Take a look:

Joining his  road-show pals McCain and Lindsay Graham,  Lieberman signed on to a letter to President Obama  regarding waterboarding and other means of torture that said:

"We have also strongly  opposed the overly coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that these memos deemed legal."

However, two days earlier,  ensconced in his comfort zone at Fox News, Lieberman said:

"Well, I take a minority position on this.  Most people think it's definitely torture.  The truth is, it has  mostly a psychological impact on people....We ought to be able to use something like waterboarding.

Uh, he did say that it was a terrible thing to do if we had to do it.  But...

Sorry, Joe.  You lost me at the last trickle.  Waterboarding is not good to the last drop.  

   

Mayoral recall: Trial by mire

WARNER MENDENHALL'S grim recall army against Mayor Plusquellic is continuing to obsess.  The latest gambit in its ongoing trial by mire is to force the city to release some records, most of which have already been issued except for a redaction of  privileged attorney-client material.  Such "editing" was unanimously upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court in another case earlier this week. 

A key figure in this farcical matter is Bob Smith, a former Akron resident, former Hudson resident and now a Chagrin Falls resident who has been a tormentor of  City Hall since the days of Simon Perkins, Akron's founder.  Maybe even earlier than that.  Got that? An expatriate now living in another town is in the vanguard of the crusade to throw out the mayor of Akron.  Couldn't we at least expect it to be reciprocal with Chagrin Falls?  In attempting to build a case against Plusquellic over the years, Smith has nibbled at every public document with the mayor's name on it and cost the city tens of thousand of dollars in city-worker hours to turn up whatever information that he supposed might help his cause.   Less obsessive people  devote some of their leisure hours to reading good books or scavenging for unusual shells at the seashore.  I would donate the first dollar to a counter-movement to buy him some interesting reading material  that would not require the labor of  city employes.  

It would seem to me that Mendenhall, a lawyer himself, would know something about attorney-client privilege and doubtless would be among the first to squeal if his were the privilege that was being gored.  Or maybe not.  With his own hours devoted to ridding the city of its mayor I doubt he thinks very much about his private law practice these days. There are many more signatures to be sought for the recall petitions while possibly   spending  some time hunting for a loan to pay off his $169,000 tax lien to the IRS.

I tell you, life can get complicated at times.

How phones can improve your reading habits...

OOPS!  SORRY if I might have kept you waiting.  I've been on the phone with...well, nobody exactly.  A voice, probably the creation of zeroes and ones in dense computer talk, popped up at intervals to tell me that "all of our representatives are currently assisting our other customers. But your call IS important and somebody will  be with you in a moment."  And for reasons that I can't explain, I'm always told that  my call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes even when there is no more than a 50-50 chance that I will finally talk to any living soul.   If you're looking for a growth industry in America,  put your few remaining dollars in Recorded Messages, Inc.  

First of all, I doubt that there is more than one representative on duty.  And that one may very well be taking a coffee break.  Secondly, I didn't reach this point without first pumping a series of digits from one to infinity to determine the party or department I would like to talk to if anybody is working at the other end today.  In the interim there are cheery sales pitches and really awful elevator music.  I shouldn't have to say this, I guess, because if you have a telephone, you know what I mean.

While wasting your  time and mine, wouldn't it benefit a company to develop a plan to educate or entertain you while the minutes and hours pass. You can always find old fishing magazines in doctors offices and barber shops to keep you moderately occupied until it's finally  your turn . Cable companies, however, can get you well into War & Peace before you decide to take a second bathroom break instead.   ( A friend lamented to me that it took seven hours to remedy a problem with his computer, which put him on a first name basis with a fellow in India.   I think they will  exchange birthday cards to honor their global experience. )

For others similarly situated, it would make a lot of sense to have somebody  at the other end read from a current best-seller to make the dead time useful.  Or from J.D. Salinger's short stories.  Or even Pericles' funeral oration as you are being asked to kill an afternoon. A lot of people seem to enjoy figuring out riddles, so maybe that would work, too.  Or how about electronic bingo until you find a real person to talk to.?  

 Remember,  folks, I grew up in a small town with four-digit telephone numbers and where my Old World grandmother, upon being introduced to her first telephone as a birthday gift from the family, nearly  dropped dead when she was urged to pick up the receiver and hear a cousin's voice.  

On the other hand, I might react the same way today if I heard a real voice at the other end, especially if it were a certain cousin.