At KSU: A vision with a healthier outlook

November did produce a happier note  from a nearby university campus with Kent State President Beverly Warren's  asserted goal to  make her school "America's healthiest university".  She devoted a lot of her first State of the University speech  to her vision of a place where physical fitness counts.

For me it was a refreshing departure from the flood of defensive metrics that have  been pouring from the lips of the management team that's running the University of Akron these days.   Sorry, Ohio's Polytechnic University.  How could I have forgotten?

In case you missed the report in the Beacon Journal,   Warren's fitness landscape ranged from concerns about processed food,  to fuller exercise routines to  health insurance discounts for those who participate in the programs.

She also talked of encouraging students to have a positive mission in life that could lead, say,  a geology student working toward society's "access to clean water" and other "positive impacts on the environment".

I haven't heard much of that kind of talk from the upper reaches of higher education  of late.    But who would disagree that a learning experience must embrace  all of those who enter the outside world from the campus with a diploma in one hand as well as a grip by the other hand on the critical  issues we all face today.

So, thank you, President Warren.  There are some of us in these parts who needed that  lift from a titled educator.

The lull after Black Friday...

I'll have Dom Perignon, please...

Thanks, guys. I fully agree!

I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with both George Will and Bill O'Reilly
in the same contentious moment but after seeing a video  clip of their recent TV encounter, it left me with no choice but to praise the wisdom of both guys.  Billo was in his worst snit because of Will's attack on his latest book (Killing Reagan) and called the columnist a "hack". That was after George had pointedly described the Fox  News senior commander as a "liar".

With the fear that a fertile moment like that might not  occur again in  a lifetime I decided to  press it to my breast.  There's something spiritually nourishing when
prominent conservatives talk dirty to each other.  Couldn't have said it better myself.

* * * * *

Our enlightened-comment -of- the- month award must go to Louisiana Gov. and former Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal who, upon withdrawing from the race,  explained:  "I've come to the realization that this is not my time."

Some matters you may be troubled to find in Ohio

We spent a few moments following up on the state's new motto, "Ohio, find it here."

Our curiosity was  aroused by Tourism Director Mary Cusick's  comment that the
Buckeye State was not reaching as many adventurous far-flung tourists as,  we'd add, Virginia's boast of "lovers".   So now we will  have a $6 million blitz of TV and other advertising channeling  the things you would find within our borders if you only looked.

We figured that might include the Ohio legislature, a rather medieval rural oriented body centrally located between Circleville and Sunbury, that clearly needs  rebranding if it is what President Scott Scarborough is trying to shoulder at the University of Akron to attract more students.

So as a public service we set out to find something that you may have missed while the plan to lure out-of- state tourists and college students took shape in the pre-Black Friday days  that began last spring:

Republican State Rep. Barbara Sears (Monclova Twp.) introduced a measure to "reform" the insolvent unemployment compensation fund on the backs of the unemployed despite its already Draconian restrictions.

Rep. Nino Vitale, the Urbana Republican, is fully supportive of a "Pastors Protection Act" to protect the cloth from retaliation for not adhering to the U.S. Supreme Court's
ruling that same-sex marriages are constitutional. Opines Vitale: "It is an issue of  protection; protection  for those who have committed their lives to the service of God and their community."

The Ohio House, by a party-line tally of 62-30, voted to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the GOP's favorite pinatas.

And Rep. Ron  Maag,  Lebanon Republican, introduced a measure to broaden the number of  "unarmed victim zones"  for people who carry concealed weapons.  That includes school zones, places of worship and day care centers.  But not the legislative chambers. Maag said he merely wants to protect folks who exercise their Second Amendment rights.

If you still want to visit the state, we could invite you to some of our wonderful parklands, including the Cuyahoga Valley national park.   But a word of caution:  25 pct. of the state's more than 27,000 bridges are in disrepair,  even if you ignore the ones that have fallen down.  We doubt that those figures are of top priority with the Columbus hoofbeat pols  so dedicated to guns , assaults on Planned Parenthood and resisting gay marriage.

A friend for all who are in need;

Let's start  the week on a happier note:

Should Johnny come marching home?

If Gov. Kasich's presidential campaign had been a light comedy  with a Broadway stage in mind,  the warmup production would have closed in Boston long before heading for the Big Apple. The reviews have been uniformly awful.

From his snappish behavior in the last debate to his most recent goof that he would create a federal agency to beam Judeo-Christian values around the world, he has lost ground.  The agency notion drew so many boos that within 24 hours he said never mind. He conceded it wasn't necessary after all.  There were other ways to reach pagan countries, Kasich said, with,  say, the Voice of America, which  reaches 188 million people a week around the world, but wasn't really getting the story of American values across.

He doubtless had kicked up a fuss with conservatives who weren't buying the idea,  Judeo-Christian values or not.  For them, another government agency was an unspeakable  sin in itself.  On the liberal side, columnist Joe Conason referred to  Kasich as a "useful idiot".

It didn't help him to knock  a rival who is leading Kasich in New Hampshire by 20 points and with far more than enough millions in campaign cash.  Donald Trump, no slouch at bombast himself, huffed that Kasich was "irrelevant"   and not worth wasting money on TV ads to point that out. So fancy that, Guv.

In all of this,  you have to wonder how Kasich,   who  brags  that (figuratively) he can  land an airplane to show his skill at leadership, decides  on his talking points each day.  Do his advisors caution him that for a guy who was in Congress a couple of decades ago, there are some things that don't work in the modern era of politics.  Or is it possible  that he is so brashly confident of his own brilliance that he doesn't need calm advice?

From all appearances, he is running a theocratic tough guy  campaign with a disposition that glowers but seldom glows. He doesn't consume his daily bread with nuance.

I would think that from all of this, the  time has arrived  to lower the curtain on his road show,  pack up the scenery and head back to Columbus  to manage some  lingering odds and ends: The disgraceful cheating and  mismanagement of Charter schools that have already led to the resignation of  the husband of your campaign manager; your fumbling of a plan to control  carbon emissions; your non-Judeo-Christian  outburst to deny admission of Syrian migrants to Ohio.

Don't get me started.








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We should all feel safer

NEW POSTER BOY  FOR ADVOCATES OF BOOTS ON GROUND IN SYRIA

Rubio spin: welders vs philosophers

We should all be grateful that Marco Rubio has offered us some fresh insight into the  exercise that we once called presidential politics.  The Florida Republican informed us that welders make more money than philosophers.  I'm not sure where that fits into the  grand narrative of leading America, as Donald  Trump puts it, to greatness again.  But there it is:   welders vs philosophers. What an exciting thought!  Never heard anybody
of a lesser mind put  it quite that way.  The pace is quickening.

For those of us  who have never encountered  the thought after many years in the partisan foxholes,  we had no choice but to leave  it to the metrics of the welders and philosophers to tell us of the relative merits of  their chosen  life's work.  Having been neither, I can only say that several reliable sources quickly dug into their volumes of scholarly research and concluded  that Rubio's reach may have exceeded his grasp in the opaque world of, say, Hegel  or Schopenhauer, both of whom I joylessly encountered in a single college level philosophy class.

Besides, both have expired and are not here to defend themselves.

So I looked for parallel comparisons to challenge the senator.  Do welders make more money than,  say, U.S. senators?  It may be argued that  politicians who weld hollow  ideas on the campaign trail  or wherever there is a TV camera in their face should be considered for a pay raise and  better parking spots to inflate  their  own prestige  as engaged representatives of the people.

That much would be required if they spent  24 hours a day to deliver themselves from such public menaces to civilization as Ben Carson, who has likened migrants to "mad dogs"  and Trump, who roars that the  only way to defeat ISIS is  to "bomb the shit out of them" leaving only a moonscape  behind.

With the phalanx of Republican presidential candidates groping to pick up cues to counter Rubio, must we consider whether pizza twirlers have a brighter future than the whirling windmill of current GOP aspirants for the Oval office?  We can only guess where this is going.

Scarborough alters program with same message

 University of Akron President Scott Scarborough's talk to a swollen Akron Press Club audience  of 150 at Quaker Station on Wednesday  was packaged in a new format without PowerPoint and included an odd  geography lesson to explain the rebranding of his school's name.

The tag of "Ohio's Polytechnic University", he said, referenced  Ohio for all of the out-of-towners who don't know where Akron is on the globe. Who knew?

Working from a series of topics suggested by the audience  that  was heavily laced with faculty and  students, he posted each with grease pencil on two white boards  - and checked them off with his replies  with the ease of a  scripted delivery that suggested a heavy layer of Teflon.

The responses were familiar to anyone who has heard his talks around town.  Yes, change is difficult when you are trying to reduce $40 million debt, he said. .  And if there are critics of his administration's policies, they are the result of misunderstanding and miscommunication in what he's trying to accomplish.

Scarborough,   part academic and part bank  auditor with some preacherly hints of  his southern Baptist  background, seems untroubled by the swirl of controversy, major donor tropouts  and messy rollout of his plans since arriving in July 2014 from the University of Toledo.  He's glibly self-confident that he's rising to his calling and victimized by people who don't understand the job he's been asked to do.  With the servile politically appointed Board of Trustees that hired him, and the Creator on his side, he's now on an  assured  fail-safe course.

To the question of how he has surrounded himself with a clutch of highly  paid managers  in his comfort zone,  he responded that in order to convert UA into a national monument of higher education you faced  supply and demand in recruiting the most gifted people for the job.

He summed up any missteps  by his team as a natural  flaw in laying out a new course of action,  adding the chestnut that leaders  are only mistake-free when they are not doing anything to move forward.

 The pro forma speech drew only light applause when he finished.

So maybe now's the time to turn the page for  some TV ads emphasizing that Akron is in Ohio.   By his standards, it couldn't hurt.

P.S. Akron is in northern Ohio, just south of Cleveland.

Cruz: Only migrant Christians should be admitted

A woman in a doctor's office in our area was heard to  say she was happy  to know that any effort to keep out refugees would  stop all of those  "Sicilians" from landing on our shores.  That was a head-turner as various nations desperately try to figure out what to do with massive war-driven migration  across European borders.  It once again  alerted us  to the unwashed views of many folks   about the staggering reality of a horrific world that defies  solutions.

So you can forgive the woman's error about  the terrorist peril and paralysis the past few days that even the right-wing presidential candidates and their playmates insist belonged in the lap of President Obama.

From the breast-pounding fringe has come calls that he resign, blaming him for not mentioning  "Islam" in his responses; Columnist Michelle Malkin  referred to Obama as the "Nobel Prize-winning workplace violence whitewasher," a  cheek-swelling  mouthful, if moronic.

Some of the Pavlovian candidates, their hearts pounding in feverish anticipation,  rushed off to Fox News to vent their shopworn political violence on the president with glib accusations but absolutely no solutions of their own. No one was more defiant than Sen.Ted Cruz, who asserted  that any admission of refugees should be limited to Christians because  they do not "commit acts of terror".  (Hitler, a Catholic Christian, rehabbed).

And  unsurprisingly, Jeb! challenged our short-term memory by accusing Obama of creating the "quagmire" in the Middle East.

His dysfunctionally hawkish brother - can we mention that?  - at least was inventive enough to don a pilot's uniform and land on an aircraft carrier to declare "Mission Accomplished". It was one of history's greatest theatrical allegories of presidential chutzpah  in action.

(His supporting cast  wasn't much more persuasive as Dick Cheney batted away questions about the duration of the Iraq war by assuring the audience that it wasn't likely to last more than several weeks and that Iraqi oil would pay for the high cost of the American invasion.)

Frustration and uncertainty  - that's what the whole civilized world faces.  You'd think that in these days of need, the fringe would try to understand that there are no bumper-sticker solutions. None.  For the superhawks, sending tens of thousands of American soldiers to Syria would satisfy the critics' needs to say something,  but what would we do about terrorists scattered around the globe? And even in Belgium,where the pot was stirred for the bloodshed in Paris.

If we decide to bomb Brussels, should we first drop warning leaflets, as they did  with Monte Cassino in WW11  with little  success?  The bombs killed more than 200 Italian civilians;  the Germans had abandoned the hilltop abbey without a single casualty. .

The Bush-Cheney class  now pretends that it is methodically in control and knows all of the answers.  So Belgium, beware.  And non-Christians, better fly business class.