Browns to install hoops in end zone?

If the Cleveland Browns wanted to grab the attention of midweek sports buffs they couldn't have done it with more finesse than to earn delicious headlines for their latest quarterback   acquisition. Backup quarterback, that is.  He's Alex Tanney, who,  it says here, is a "trick shot artist" formerly of the Dallas Cowboys practice squad.

He's what?/?/?  His ability to throw footballs into moving pickup trucks, among other fetching off-the field feats, is said to be revealed in a two-year-old YouTube video  that has been witnessed more than 3 million times.

Not  experienced in being first in anything  else,  the Browns shouldn't be criticized for   adding intrigue to their playbook. Their new guy reportedly can throw a football from some distance into a basketball hoop.  (You'd think the Cavaliers would have bid on his talent first.)

Still, we confess to some doubt about Tanney's  potential on an open field.  Can he throw a football into the hands of  a friendly receiver with three or four pickup trucks  in his face?

But the Browns are hopeful.  As  Yogi Berra once explained why he liked baseball more than football:

"It ain't like football.You can't  make up no trick plays."

Governor Kasich,the original Lima being?

Gov. Kasich, who has his mind and career set on being a Republican original, headed into the GOP heartland of Western Ohio again this week to sign a resolution calling for a federal balanced budget. It was in Lima, marking the spot of Kasich's  "makeshift capital" for his earlier state-of-the-state speech.

 He was joined by a platoon of his party's leaders in the Ohio General Assembly.  According to the event's chroniclers,  the sub-historic document (unless it was a first for Lima) will be sent to President Obama  and Congress.  In so doing,  he proved me wrong.  I had expected him to do it at the Ohio State-Michigan  game hovering over Ann Arbor in the Goodyear blimp.

I should remind the Guv,  however, that the balancing act,  like cutting food stamps to impress the penny savers,  is nothing new as a means to  flatter one's public image. The idea has been around since Henry VIII and has limped through a series of administrations in Washington  (including Reagan and the Bushes) without gaining an inch.

So where's the originality, the prescience , the nobility, of these charades to upgrade one's standing on the ballot?  Wanna bet this empty gesture will be DOA again?

For the sports fan who knows everything...

If you want to impress your friends at the sports bar, lay this  one on them:

A newspaper reported after the Browns-Steelers game that it was  only the sixth time in NFL history that 27-11 was the final score!

My guess is that 101-2 would even be rarer, but life is much too short to look it up..

Issa's sleighbells ringing in red states

With the holiday season and all upon us, Rep. Darrell Issa has taken off to Deck the Halls in several red states with hearings reveling in heavily spiked Obamanog. As the chairman of House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee, he has loaded up the sleigh for grandstand appearances in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Arizona.

Carefully selected for his road show, the audiences will doubtless be quite friendly as he rips President Obama and the Affordable Care Act without calling a single witness from the other side. With Issa’s tactics, matters must be settle by acclimation.

The hearings will be a Christmas present to himself. Issa, the richest fellow in Congress (ca. $400 million) still can’t get enough of tilted hearings where only his side can testify. You may recall that he staged an all-male witness panel when he took up the subject of contraception coverage required of insurers.

When Issa, a southern Californian from a red-hot conservative district, succeeded Henry Waxman as the committee chair, he demanded of his 7 subcommittees: “I want seven hearings a week – times 40. ” He then staged 280 hearings in one year; Waxman, 208 in two years. You must also remember that in his hatred of the president, Issa also told Rush Limbaugh that Obama was “One of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”

Issa always impresses me as a guy who swallowed a horsefly in his soup before realizing it and never really got over the nausea.

He is a right-wing committee chairman with a darkly piercing glare and a ruthless agenda on how government should be exposed by his ongoing performance art… If only in the red states.

Nov. 22, for those of us who struggled through it...

On this day,  the memorable Bill Mauldin cartoon of a weeping Lincoln :

For Sen. McConnell, a really bad day at the office

My only comment to the walking dead in Congress who are having anxiety attacks over the Senate Democrats' action on filibusters:

"What don't you know about yes?  

Walmart: Gifts that don't keep on giving

The latest heartfelt story fully making the rounds about Walmart is that bins have been  set up at the Canton store that urge Walmart associates to deposit  Thanksgiving food offerings for their needy fellow workers.  Comedian Stephen Colbert found a lot not to like about the idea.  With his finger always on the pulse, he noted that he  couldn't agree with those who accuse Walmart of not doing enough for its employes. "Wrong," he said. "They don't do anything."  

* * * * *

The table tops at the  Summit Mall food court have inset space for posting ads.  The current ones promote Roto-Rooter with the troubling message for fast-food customers:  "Complete plumbing and drain service."

* * * * *

MSNBC's Ed Schultz and Ohio Sen. Nina Turner joined for a Happy Hour assailing the State GOPs multi-pronged attacks on voting rights. Schultz complained that such tactics, with Republican Gov. Kasich at the helm, hardly reveal him as the  political moderate creeping into some national media stories about him as a presidential candidate so many years from now.  Turner is challenging Secretary of State Jon Husted and is making the voting stink a major issue in the campaign. That's an easy case to make.

* * * * *

Why do I get a  headache when Dick Cheney, a Cyborg with a pulseless mechanical  heart, turns up on TV with still more lies?  I thought those days were gone for the unchastened veep after he told us that the Iraq war would end in a matter of weeks - and not a year longer. He also guaranteed the skeptics that  the freedom-loving Iraqi greeters would shower our troops with candy and flowers from their balconies.  Try to remember.

* * * * *

In case you missed it, the U.S. House has now voted 46 times to abolish Obamacare.  At the same time latest poll figures report that Speaker John Boehner is the most unpopular politician in the universe. They needed a poll for that?

Beacon Journal: A hard look at State Board of Education

(Re-posted from Plunderbund)



Doug Livingston's excellent series in the Beacon Journal documenting the rightward ooze of the State Board of Education should be a primer on the private agendas  of those overseeing public education in Ohio today.   Much of it has occurred during Gov. Kasich's reign, who hastened the Tea Party/evangelical  take-over of what should be a  non-political non-sectarian approach to preparing students  for whatever greets them when they leave the classroom.

Nothing better illustrates the board's political  fault lines than its chairman, Debra Terhar, an avowed Tea Party member appointed by Kasich to the current 17 member panel. Her arrival from Montford Heights in Hamilton County was disputed by critics of  her right-wing mindset, but to no avail.

Terhar is one of eight appointees added to 11 elected members (currently: 2 vacancies) , which gave the governor a free hand  to stack the deck for the ultraconservative Kansas-style  direction  of the state's  education policies, where princely riches can be,  and are,  earned through Republican fondness for charter schools. It is packaged marketplace education for winners and losers, forever the ethos of the GOP.

Back in August, the governor also appointed David Hansen, whose chief merit badge was that he was a the ex-president of the conservative  Buckeye Institute in Circleville to look after the state's Charter School and Voucher programs - some of the very same schools that are getting grades of D or lower.  Among the strongest advocates on the board is former Summit County Elections Board chief Brian Williams, a Republican who fared so badly in a challenge to Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic. Williams is now a lobbyist for the non-union Associated Builders and Contractors of America.  Go ahead, call him the comeback kid.

The BJ quoted Williams on charters: "Choice to me is another word for competition, and competition is another word to me for eventual excellence."    Marketplace philsophy in education does prevail down to kindergarten economics.

Race and gender also raise questions.  The BJ reported:

• Of the seven appointees seated today, all are white and one is female. 
• Eight of nine board committees are chaired by white men, although board gender is is 9-8 male. Seven of the those committees are chaired by appointees.
• The only African American board member,  Jeffrey Mims, who was elected, is retiring to return to a job in city government.   Almost all appointees are significant Republican donors,  organizers or fund-raisers.

This is just a fragment of the stuff you learn about the ABC's of the board's ideological descent, from religious fervor, to potential conflicts of interest to bare-faced servility by the governor to the intrusion by members committed to a medieval agenda.

Item:  When Terhar objected to Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye on the school reading list because it described a rape, Terhar was defended by board member Mark Smith, the Ohio Christian University president, who  told the Columbus Dispatch: "I see an underlying socialist-communist agenda...that is anti what the nation about."

And, if you didn't already know, Terhar satisfied the juices of gun lobbyists aftter the bloody Connecticut school massacre by displaying a photo of Hitler and asserting that   tyrants are the first to come after your guns.

Meantime, Bryan Williams also supports the makeup of the board, telling the BJ that it's good that the members are friendly to the governor.

"That helps," he assured everyone.  "That gets possible conflict out of the way."

You bet. Thanks for the teaching moment.

With Sen. LaRose, three's not an anti-vote crowd

Last August, State Sen. Frank LaRose of  Copley Twp., announced that he was planting seeds to introduce politicians to civility.  A Republican, he would join with former State Rep. Ted Celeste, a Democrat,  to pursue the noble bipartisan goal.  Considering the infusion of the Tea Party into the GOP's veins and thought processes, LaRose could be commended for what would require the hand of a brilliant alchemist.

I can't say preciesely whether he has inched forward. (My guess:  Not much.)   But a report in Plunderbund suggests that he is still hanging out with his family of lawmakers who keep looking for ways to shrink the vote because, well, they see that as the path to the reemergence of more victories in state and federal elections.

 (Or as Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff, an early  LaRose enthusiast, used to say,  bad weather would help his side because it encourages  some of the folks who supported the other side to stay home. Such logic, after all, could be a greater benefit than poll taxes.)

Back to LaRose:  the Plunderbund article noted that committee hearings will begin Tuesday on three Republican anti-voting bills.  One, by State Sen. Bill Coley, a hard-right freshman senator  from hard-right Liberty (!) Township in hard-right Butler County, that would offer  a crash landing for absentee balloting.  Coley would prevent  the Secretary of State from mailing absentee ballots in primary and special elections.  Absentee ballots mailed for general elections?  Only if the Republican-controlled General Assembly approved the funds!  Wanna bet?

A second Republican bill to be heard arrives from State Sen. Joe Uecker,  another winger who represents several counties down along the Ohio River.  He's looking for ways to reduce the number of voting machines. As Plunderbund notes, if Coley's bill to restrict absentee voters passes , more machines would be needed.

And now, I regret to say, Sen. LaRose joins in the hunt by  offering a bill to slice six more days from the early voting track.

Sorry to be so uncivil, senator, but this is partisan madness and I've already seen the game film too many times.