BJ's charter schools report demands your attention

Today's MUST-READ:  Doug Livingston's report in the Beacon Journal on Ohio's charter schools that have ripped more than $900 million from public school funds this school year,  aided and abetted by the Republican controlled Ohio legislature with a kindly nod from Gov. Kasich.   The charters, founded and controlled by Akron's David Brennan,  operate along the lines of a top-down feudal system with no more than mediocre results.

Kasich seeking pure gold in Adelson's Wheel of Fortune...

Should we be surprised that Gov.Kasich  earned the coveted Sheldon Adelson White Guy  Mr.Congeniality Award at the Republican Jewish Coalition's spring conference in Las Vegas?  That became a slam-dunk as the governor daringly referred several times to the mega-casino owner - for God's sake one of the  richest men in the world - on a chummy first-name basis. Unless you are a car salesman, you don't get much friendlier than that.

Nosy reporters, of course,  wanted to know whether the governor was running for president by trying to suck up as much cash as he could in Las Vegas from Adelson's Wheel  of Fortune. Kasich, always as coy as a squirrel  darting to the new batch of sunflower seeds in he driveway, denied any interest in the presidency.

Rather,   he wanted to assure his host and most conservative  audience  that he shared their commitment to a better, lower taxed, world..

How? Saw this quote in the Plain Dealer:

"All the things we believe in?  They work."

Not Bartlett quality.  Not even up to the standards of George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism.  But to his appreciative host that Forbes reports makes $32 milion a day, it wasn't that hard to crack the code. What's more, Vegas is a long way from Steubenville.

About the governors avowed disinterest in higher office:  The Washington Post has claimed the field of assigning Pinocchios to political utterances that fare badly  against fact.

Rather than piggyback the Post's colorful version of lies, I will  create my own tag and assign several Cyranos to Ohio's non-presidential candidate candidate. Clip and save.

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If corporations are persons...

The impending merger of Time Warner and Comcast could create a unique problem for those who agree with Mitt Romney that corporations are persons, too. It could develop into a thorny case for the true believers when two giant  media companies with similar identities swear to unite to   love,  honor and obey the challenging call of the marketplace, so help them Wall Street! In bound personhood, that sure sounds like same-sex marriage to me.

A lexicon for chichi foodies, only

When it comes to food, I'm not a gourmet.  I grew up in a family where the Sunday speciality was well-oiled raw kibbee with a side dish of crunchy raw onions.  The day began with a breakfast of thick coffee, toast and shankleesh,  a fetid cheese ball with  a fermented greenish-black pocked surface. As for the kibbee, a merger of ground round steak,wheat and a few herbs, we hung in there  and ate heartily despite warnings from folks with less-conditioned stomachs that raw meat was an open invitation to deadly tape worms.  My parents each lived into their 90s.

I thought of those daring days as I ran across a review in  the New Yorker of a new restaurant in Manhattan called All'Onda, which referred to things you get from the sea and prepared with Japanese and Venitian influences.  Clearly a fashionable approach for foodies and quite distant from the perilous dishes served by my mother.

But after a few paragraphs into the piece , I realized that  my lexicon of  stuff that you can readily drop into your cart at supermarkets was hardly sufficient to  cover the upscale terminology of  All'Onda's in-crowd.

Try this thought  from the review:  "All'Onda  has fashioned a lovely menu of seafood-driven   crudi (or is it creative sashimi?)  and homemade pastas, for a sophisticated foodie crowd."  My italics.  Google informed me that both words refer to "raw".  Now we kibbee eaters are getting somewhere.

Next came uni, which I looked up. You can imagine how my mother would have felt if I told her uni were the gonads of sea urchins!  There were ecstatic allusions to the eatery's sardines cut in chunky parallelograms and sweetbreads with "pale pink  bonito flakes,   which dance in the air, as if alive."

Let's stop right there because I'm not getting hungry. There's also the downside of knowing that there's a chichi culinary world out there that thrills overs miso-cured eggs, monkfish liver, peekytoe-crab garganelli and soy-sauce gelato. The latter is too much to bear for  a guy who dashed  for the first gelaterria in every town I ever visited in Italy.  You don't mess with gelato.

The reviewer did say, however, that a lot of very nice people worked at the restaurant. .  Just like my mother.









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Alito: What if delis are barred from serving kosher food?

l see that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who is always a thrill, hypothetically linked contraceptive insurance coverage to a potential threat to Jewish and Muslim butchers if their shops are incorporated.  He said these shopkeepers would be in trouble if  Congress  outlawed their blessed meats as a form of animal cruelty.   I don't expect you to understand this leap.  Nor do I.     But  I can safely  say I've never heard of a case in which a woman became pregnant from eating a corned beef sandwich.

On the Pluto sports section, Limbaugh books and the return of Mitt.

While I'm still thinking about it...


The Sunday Plain Dealer sports section continues to trend toward a leather-bound volume of Terry Pluto's cascading stuff, which whelms even sports fans like me. The latest featured works boldly covered the equivalent of at least four (!)  full pages ranging widely and inclusively across the sports universe.  (My scanned guess is that it didn't cover pickleball.  But that may be next if the Browns find a quarterback while picking through the ranks of the latest national rage.)

I did happen to see  a piece by sports columnist Bill Livingston on Page 6  with a powered endorsement of Jim Tressel  as the president-in-waiting of the University of Akron. Livingston thought it would be great to have the former Ohio State University football coach on hand  as a motivational pole star with cash-ready corporate donors.   But as with so much talk of Tressel's magnetic abilities,  no one has yet taken a breath to put in a word about the importance of book-learning as the basis of academic achievement.

* * * * *

Speaking of books,  did you see that  Rush Limbaugh's latest book, "Rush Revere. etc." is now No. 5 on the New York Times children's best-seller list?    It confirms my long-held belief that Rushbo has a special knack for appealing to childish interests.

* * * * *

As the search continued for the missing Malaysian aircraft, the TV networks were beside themselves to find something new to say when there wasn't anything new to say.   They showed the same photos and  interviewed every aviation expert but a descendant of the Wright brothers over and over with "breaking news"  about the tragedy.  The  repetitive motion reminded us of the search for a needle in the haystack while it seemed the real uanswered question will remain,  how did the needle get into the haystack?

* * * * *

Finally, there  was Mitt Romney on CBS  violating past residential courtesy by piling on Barack Obama's  "naivete"  and, he was sure, lack of leadership in  foreign policy that  could have   deterred the Russian takeover of  Crimea.  By that measure, Mitt was certain that he possessed the clairvoyance that would have worked everything out just fine.  To which we respond:  "Hey, Mitt.  The election's history.   You lost.  Get over it."

Mitch McConnell's chilling Alley Oop Act

Reposted from Plunderbund:


Did you happen to see the campaign  photo of a befuddled  Mitch McConnell brandishing a gun?  It had the chilling appearance of a modern-day Alley Oop ambling out of a cave with his life-threatening  cudgel. But the Senate minority leader isn't trying to sell tourism for this  state's Mammoth Cave. No sirree.  He's hoping to sell himself to the gun lobby and its well-stocked bluegrass militia.  Besides,  he's in his sixth year of fulfilling his sorehead  pledge to destroy Barack Obama .  Mitch is the poster pol for blemished but still unfinished business.

 McConnell is in a tough race  that could cost the Republican  his proud senate seat. Down in Ken-tuck, guns speak louder than words.  (It won't be that long before the Derby jockeys will be wearing sidearms.)

Still, you have to wonder about the absurd  state of a  political system in which firearms are the tectonic stage props of choice.  We once were thought to live in a kinder, gentler nation.  The stagecraft wasn't nearly as horrific.

The late Howard Metzenbaum, campaigning  against Republican Sen. Robert Taft in 1976, fashioned his pep talks to his audiences by whipping out a loaf of bread  from behind him with the rhetorical question: "Do you know how much this used to cost?

They didn't need to know.  It had an electrifying effect when inflation was in the news during a Republican regime.  The late congressman Donald "Buz" Lukens, a primordial right (wrong!) winger from Middletown, Oh., arrived at an airport press conference with an American flag  on a pole that scraped the ceiling.  Patriotism never had it so good.

And then there was George W.Bush in his historic landing on an aircraft carrier fully togged  in a fighter pilot get-up while a sign declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.   Some of us huffed in disbelief at this staged lunacy,  "The hell it was."

If McConnell's Oop image doesn't work, think Dubya will lend him the pilot uniform and have him land on a barge on the Ohio River?    Doesn't matter that the suit  was never in harm's way anyway.


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Is UA board headed to the corner?

The University of Akron's extended search for  a new president could produce a result of unintended consequences  if it passes on Jim Tressel. The iconic former OSU football coach has been groomed for the job since his arrival on the downtown Akron campus in May 2012 and is among the 19 applicants on a list released Friday by the UA
board of trustees. .   His current title is executive vice president.

If the UA  board hasn't painted itself in a corner, it certainly seems to be headed that way.  It it could be an embarrassing snub by the board of Tressel's  hitherto  assumed  worth if he doesn't emerge the winner  from  the otherwise uninspiring  list of applicants, wouldn't you think?

Tressel does want UA job, after all

Surprise. Surprise.

After months of media speculation  that  Jim Tressel was heading toward the president's desk at the University of Akron,  the former Ohio State University football coach's name was on a list of 19 applicants for the job released Friday by  UA's Board of Trustees.

Until now, neither UA's presidential search committee nor Tressel had confirmed the reports of his active interest in seeking the post. He is currently  on an upwardly mobile career track  at the heavily debt-challenged  university that has earned him the newly created title of vice president for student success.

He has also emerged as a potential candidate for the presidency at Youngstown State University, again without confirmation of his personal interest.

The UA search has followed President Luis Proenza's announcement last summer that he was retiring  after the current school  year. The speculation that Tressel  would succeed Proenza  met with raised eyebrows by some faculty members inasmuch as Tressel lacked the important academic credentials of a doctorate.

 Indeed, the list of applicants was something less than a roster of noteworthy scholars.  And Tressel reportedly was only one of four applicants who didn't have a doctorate.
The Board said it will interview the finalists in April.

So Tressel does want the UA job, after all

GOP congressional candidate describes source of tornadoes

I'm feeling even  more relieved today after retreating from my  brief conversion to the Republican Party in hopes of receiving the many upscale benefits not available to me as a liberal Democrat.  Call it the Susanne Atanus moment of awakening.

She's the winner of the Cook County (Chicago) Republican congressional primary by a handful of votes after insisting that abortion  and same-sex marriage  were the sources of autism, dementia and tornadoes. (She didn't mention the hapless Cubs.)  Who knew?  I didn't.

Atanus was so off the reservation that even Republican leaders urged her to withdraw from the race.  But how could she as she wanted the voters to know that "God is angry" and was punishing them for their misbehavior. She was, of course, playing the old Pat Robertson card.  In this instance, she was also quite fortunate, edging a primary opponent who was accused of domestic violence against a girlfriend and ordered by a court to attend anger management classes  while undergoing mental health testing.

It would be my luck as a Republican that I would be  seated next to her on the plane to the GOP convention as she urged me to repent.