A Regula guy

RETIRING CONGRESSMAN Ralph Regula, among the last of the vanishing breed of moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, spoke at an Akron Press Club luncheon Friday with some words of advice to his political colleagues:   Constituents first.  The words appear on lapel pins worn by him and his staff.  The motto expressed his sentiments about the state of the GOP these days, which he said needed to be "a little bit more sensitive about the things that are important to the people."

That's asking a lot.  With Regula  leaving office after 36 years of represesenting the 16th District just south of Akron, those prescribed  sensitivities are even less likely to characterize the Republican Party today, Joe the Plumber notwithstanding.  The cruel action of those fat-and-happy southern Republicans who are quite pleased with their foreign auto factories stepped far over the line by blocking the bailout of the northern Big 3 American producers without kicking a tire.  Indeed, there seems to be something "anti-American" by pitting region against region when the entire economy is driving over a cliff.  With few available options, the GOP senators stood firmly against the lesser of two evils and challenged workers to eat cake instead.   

  

So there was Sen. Mitch McConnell, the owlish  union-hating Senate minority leader who led the assault on the proposal, offering the sort of condolence-light  that Tony 

Soprano might extend to the wife of a wiseguy that his own henchmen had just whacked.  "None of us want to see them go down," McConnell said sadly of the  Detroit crowd.  "But very few of us had anything to do with the dilemma they created for themselves." Well, sniffles!

When you put it that way, it may be technically true.  But when it's said by the Col. Sanders of the Senate who proudly supported spending  up to a trillion dollars for a miscast war halfway around the world to protect our security, you have to wonder why he wouldn't give a little to protect the security of armies of  workers at home.  I know why.

The conspicuous irony of such dark behavior is that McConnell was doubtless  the cheerleader for his wife, Elaine Chao, to be appointed by George Bush in 2001 as labor secretary. Her short bio notes that she is committed to "promoting the health, safety, retirement security and competiveness of the nation's workforce."  The senator and the labor secretary  obviously never talk business with each other on their days off.

MORE ON REGULA:  With University of Akron president Luis Proenza seated at the front table, Regula took the opportunity to defend the use of earmarks for home state projects that work, specifically noting a UA facility in Medina as an example of a worthy earmark. He was probably on the side of the angels in his defense of these special Federal outlays.  McCain's attacks on earmarks during the campaign created very little uplift for his chances and in fact may have aggrieved the voters still more.  So I ask: Who in the world earmarked earmarks as a critical issue to be exploited by McCain and Palin?  

Regula did support the Big 3 bailout and demonstrated over the years that he could act calmly with his colleagues across the aisle.  He worked closely with the late Rep. John  Seiberling of Akron on creating the Cuyahoga Valley National Park with a critical assist from the late Ray Bliss.  He also played a hand in delivering the cash for several other major projects in northern Ohio.  

In retirement  as an octogenarian,  Regula will now be able to spend more time back on his farm in Stark County.  He may find that the livestock that might show up on his  acreage will be a tad more civilized than some of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. 

Flying monkeys at Christmas

I'VE BEEN  waiting for the sun to force itself through the clouds to brighten my waning  interest in Christmas shopping.  At this time of the year Northern Ohio is an image of Ireland's overcast without the rainbows.  Nancy says the sun never shines here.  But "never" is a pretty strong word.  For whatever reason, you can still find suntan lotion in most of the stores.

From my vantage point, I can see the big shopping mall, if not Sardinia nor the Roman Forum. That alone should inspire me to get a move  on.   Yet, once inside the mall, it seems like the day after Christmas unless you came for a slice of pizza or a fast sandwich.  The price cuts are dizzying.  To be on the safe side, I recommend a pocket calculator to figure what 75 pct. off from 50 pct. off is.  It's doubtless the new spirit of  Double Discount Christmas.

The advertisers who clog my e-mail with "bargains" have been busy to pump up holiday sales.  At one point I counted 27 offers ranging from fail-safe auto sponges to Gevalia coffee (the "perfect holiday gift").  I could get an "amazing screaming Flying Monkey" at  $9.99 plus shipping, a gift said to have been voted the"stocking stuffer of the year."  There also were assorted come-ons for an "impact racing super sport helmet" with the the added benefit of a free helmet bag, plus more practical items like cartridge ink, a call box money bank and a promise for debt relief. 

There has also been an overabundance of "as-seen-on " merchandise.  Mostly weight-loss stuff that would shrink you to Twiggy by Christmas Eve and authenticated with exposure "as seen on Oprah, CNN, CBS, MSNBC"  and doubtless in your monthly utilities bill.  I was particularly struck by the Diet Wu-yi System, which was not recommended for folks who only want to "lose a few pounds." That sounded serious.  I won't even ask my doctor.  

For some, Christmas giving is hardly the  challenge that some  of us face today.  I once had an aunt who lived in Miami, Fla., who shipped us a big box of orange and grapefruit  each year without laying hands on it herself.  It was a kind of vanity thing to show us how fortunate it was to live where they grew citrus fruit  while we were frozen into popsicles in northern winters.  (It took awhile for me to convince my father, who moved to Florida with our entire tribe,  that despite all of that sunshine,  people died  in Miami Beach just as they did in Newfoundland). 

Alas,  my aunt didn't make it past her 95th year and the oranges have not arrived for several years  for Christmas.   In fact, in her final years, she moved in with some cousins in Phoenix and often remarked how wonderful it was to live in such heat.  I told her I could imagine.  

Meantime, I can't get those amazing flying monkeys out of mind.  But only at 50 pct. off!  

Are you nuts, Blago?

IF WHAT  is being  said  about Gov. Rod Blagojevich is true, we can safely conclude that he is a fool, or deranged or no more than a street corner crook - or all of the above.  Even the dumbest mobsters use pay phones or aliases for their shakedowns.    With the shuddering allegations pouring out of the district attorney's office against the Democratic Illinois governor's office, the stench took  me back to the pages of Upton Sinclair's  expose of the early days of Chicago's sordid meatpacking industry, The Jungle,  in which operators and their agents cut more bloody deals than cattle carcasses under the filthiest of circumstances.

I don't know.  Maybe the governor had been reading up on the successful modus operandi  of the Iraqi politicians who became millionaires at our expense simply by  exchanging vows with the American government.  Whatever the case, Blagojevich is history, except for whatever tidy things  the D.A. and the justice system have in mind for him.  

As an Illini graduate who spent more than a little time in and around Chicago, I confess that I have a soft spot for the Windy City  and cannot bring myself to condemn it for the slipping and sliding of some of its politicians.  Maybe I am still taking a cue from my late father-in-law, who lived in a suburb on the edge of the city.   A businessman, he was a dedicated Republican.  But he did insist that although he never voted for a Democrat, he lamented that as a suburbanite he couldn't cast a ballot for the first  Mayor Richard Daley.  "He's the one Democrat I would vote for,"  my-father-in-law said unapologetically.  "He runs  a great city."  

I agree that Chicago is a great neighborly  town today, too, with much to appeal to the residents and visitors. Even the Cubs came close to a championship this year.  (It would have been the first since, let me think, the great Chicago fire?)    In Chicago, loyalties run deeply to the point of making exceptions for the sort of political mischief that would hardly win any style points.  And  that made for some bartering, whenever necessary.  The story is told of a visit to Daley's office by a physician who was having trouble getting an easement for some improvements at his office.  The mayor offered him, um, a deal. He would see to it that the easement was granted by City Council on one condition:  The doctor had to promise free medical care for the Mayor's political operative in the neighborhood.  It worked.  Not the same as shaking down people to buy a Senate seat, not by a long shot.  But it's how things get started to the satisfaction of everyone involved.     

The Bush "haters"

TAKE COVER!   Karl Rove has put on his game face to herald his forthcoming book.   In a preemptive strike to  expose those who have been naughty and those who have been nice during the Bush years,  Rove told Cox News that he knows who the "Bush haters"   are and, in a threatening mood,  will "name names" in his book.  Although his whodunnit  sounds a lot like a reincarnation  of Nixon's enemies list,   Rove's book-length accounting of political villainy could bestir even  the Georgetown Cocktail Party Conservatives (in McCain's memorable words) to don their dogtags and come out fighting against a sea of socialism that is washing up on the Potomac's shores.  Some of those named, of course, will do nothing more than to ask for a refill of their martinis.  Nice sales pitch for your book,  Karl.  But we already know who those haters are.     

Lost weekenders

PEGGY NOONAN,  author and conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal,  has this  defense mechanism to ease her idol George Bush through history.  Bush, she writes, protected America against terrorists.  Eh, sorry, Peggy.  I think you missed one....

WITH soaring unemployment, public debt,  and ugly international conflicts,  President-elect Obama may have to crash through a number of   brick walls to turn the country around.  His situation  reminds me of something that President Kennedy said when he described  his biggest surprise after he entered the Oval Office:   "When we got into office the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were."  

HEY, TAKE a breath!    A little more than a month since the presidential election, the pollsters are working overtime to give us a glimpse of where the next campaign will take us.  CNN says its poll of Republicans and Independents show Mike Huckabee leading the GOP  field with 34 pct. followed by Sarah Palin at 32 pct.  Since this is all gross  nonsense at this point, it would be interesting to see where these two "frontrunners" would wind up in the next poll if Warren Harding were added to the list. 

HOLIDAY SHOPPING, 2008.   I came across a plastic medalli0n that read "American Hero, U.S. Air Force."...Yep.  Made in China.  

BROWN(ie)S POINTS: The Sunday Plain Dealer excessively devoted most of its front page and acres of space inside the paper to the question: "What's Wrong with the Browns?" Obviously it was an attempt to lighten up the reader with some bright hometown news amid the really serious stuff eating at all of us these days.  I don't claim to be a deep thinker about that team by the lake, which qualifies  me as much as anybody else to analyze the Browns' annual sickly status.  It's called the Modell Curse.  Trust me.  Since Art moved the franchise from Cleveland, his Baltimore Ravens have won one Super Bowl, which  puts him one-up over the Browns.  By the way, the Browns lost against today.    

Mike Duncan's new math

  I HAD promised myself that I would break from the  herd and not write about Saxby Chambliss. But I could not resist the temptation that finally overcame my better judgment.  So to repeat the obvious, the Hollywood-looking snowy-haired Republican senator won the Georgia run-off  this week - as expected in a very conservative southern state where a very talented professional football player was sent to jail for engaging in dog-fighting and a former Democratic governor and U.S. Senator, Zell Miller,   turned up at the Republican convention to praise Bush and damn Kerry while noisily wishing that he lived in a day when he could challenge Chris Matthews to a dual. Georgia is not Vermont. 

I'm still trying to figure out how the proud voters of the Peach State first went for Chambliss - who had eagerly  avoided military service - in  2002  against the Democratic incumbent senator, Max Cleland,  a triple amputee  from his service in Vietnam.  Chambliss got away with describing his opponent as a wimp on fighting terrorism.  Georgia Republicans are an easy sell.

So now here was Mike Duncan, the incidental chairman of the Republican National Committee, crowing that Saxby's win was so profound that it serves as  irrefutable evidence that Barack Obama doesn't have a mandate to lead the country.  Let him explain:

"Georgians clearly sent a message that any rhetoric about a liberal mandate is nothing but hot air." 

Message to whom?  He didn't say.  But he did say that Saxby gave the GOP conservatives  the "momentum" that the party had been seeking since Obama's...um...mandate-less triumph on Nov. 4. 

All of this high-level consideration of mandates led me to put it in some kind of historical context to define the word.  

Back in 2004, moments after the fateful numbers that sent him to the Oval Office a second time, George Bush clearly exercised his thoughts about his next four years  with a boastful threat to anyone who might stand in his way.  "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital," Dubya sounded off, "and now I intend to spend it.  It is my style."  Cool.

This is where I went off the track with Chairman Duncan.  Using his logic, Bush won with a 3 million vote margin, a hefty 50.7 pct. vs. Kerry's skimpy  48.3 pct.    Obama edged McCain by more than 9 million votes  - 52.7 pct. to 45.8 pct.   Hardly enough to convince  Duncan that Obama had earned enough "political capital" to claim a mandate.  

So I ask: How dumb do you have to be these days  to serve as the Republican National Committee's chairman?    Just asking.  Obviously, math is not a prerequisite.

Going to press with the reporters you have

THE AXE FELL again at the Plain Dealer this week.  Hardly surprising since  it had  been anticipated for many days.  Of the 27 Guildsmen sent out the door with "layoffs"   (added to some 23 buyouts earlier) at least one is a veteran who once worked at the Beacon Journal: Terry Oblander.  Here's how it was explained to me:   On Monday all were told to sit by their phones at home from 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. If you received a call from the paper,  you made the cut and was expected to return to work.  If the phone remained silent during that period, you were history.  The losers are to receive two weeks pay plus a week's pay for each six months on the job, up to one year.  But why do companies call these cuts  "layoffs" when there will be no effort to restore the jobs.  Not these days.  Or ever.  

Rove :Bush's brain drain?

ISN'T THERE  anything we can - or should - do about Karl Rove? In the final drab days of the Bush administration, Rove continues to show up here and there much like a maniacal Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear" just when you think he's been dispatched forever.  There are now reports that Rove is busily engaged in the Bush Legacy Project, a diehard mission to reveal Bush as a regular good  guy for the historians and public.  The other day Rove dismissed the critics, which now include about 80 pct. of Americans, as being the natural consequence of hanging out in the Oval Office for eight years.  As he explained it to Matt Lauer, "Look at the end of eight years...Republicans or Democrats...people tire of it." Right. 

Karl's been around longer than that himself, and now appears to be on a roll to humiliate his own once little-challenged reputation  as the political genius at the end of the yellow brick road.    But unlike many Americans who are more tired of being economically splattered and out of work, Karl is gainfully employed in some conservative quarters to be the yeast in a post-presidential rise of George Walker Bush.  His latest task of rehabbing Bush could be the most daunting, somewhat like reclaiming the hulk of the Titanic.  

 Does anybody remember  his pollyanna view in  2006 of how Republicans would retain control of the Senate and House, a notion revealed to him by his own mysterious polls?  Or that he was a sort-of silent partner in McCain's campaign apparatus with a lot of cheery talk on Fox?  

If I remember Thomas Aquinas'  first-cause argument for the existence of God, he said no event causes itself.  It was so pre-Rovian.   Karl seems to cause himself every moment of the day.

For him it has never been whether you win or lose but how you taint the game.  During the Bush years he was regularly described as "Bush's Brain."  For his own place in history, George could have chosen a brain more carefully.  

The bored national media

DID YOU get a glimpse  of the heartwarming detente between Barack and Hillary when the president-elect announced his national security team?  It was pure family.  And, predictably, the reporters in the room were suspicious that they were witnessing stagecraft rather than statecraft.  They immediately asked Obama whether this was a moment of hallucination after all of the awful things the  two former rivals had said of each other during the campaign.  Obviously prepared for the media's negative spin, Obama smiled broadly  and responded:  "You're having fun" - which he found quite acceptable to relieve their dreary life after a presidential campaign .  It's the sort of downer that you sense on a gray day or two after Christmas when the bright holiday trimmings at the mall suddenly vanish as the stores prepare for Valentine's Day. 

Actually, the reporters weren't quite having fun. They were bored and uneasy.   After exhausting millions of questions and sharing speculative guesses on Meet the Press and National Press Club lunch breaks,  the media players must now find a a way to renew public interest in their work now that there are no polls telling us who was ahead in Montana. Not even Sarah Palin's vicarious wardrobe is of much of public interest these days.  

Speaking from experience, to break the monotony of  post-election blues,   political  reporters seek out each other  for clues to their next career challenges. It is generally agreed that not everyone at the news conference should ask the same question about Hillary.  The president quickly senses a trend and calls on a reporter who has the look of Hillary boredom and wants to ask about First Dog.  

The media's days on the campaign trails are so consuming it could take weeks for news of a great aunt's death to reach a reporter at a pueblo in Arizona where he or she is gauging the electoral power of  indigenous Indian chiefs.    

So now, during the interregnum between Dubya (50 days left and I'm not the only one who's counting) and Barack, the national media can do nothing more than  pretend that the intensity of the campaign has never waned and that Barack can call it "fun" but the "Hillary thing" will have to do until something more exciting comes along.  Maybe it will be a substitute for  all of the juicy campaign reports  that armies of Hillary supporters   would churlishly abandon Obama and vote for McCain.  Let's  hope not.  It would  a be a terrible reminder that in combatting boredom and empty hours you can go too far and be downright silly.      

All the news that's fit to outsource

IF, INDEED, bad news comes in threes, then I will offer these examples from the week end as supporting evidence: one is from the NY Times, one from the Plain Dealer, one from the Beacon Journal - which could only mean that I'm back to the sobering topic of the decline of America's newspapers. 

First, Maureen Dowd's Sunday column in the Times.  She  told of an enterprising lunatic  in California  with an outrageous plan to cover your latest church luncheon program or library booksale with an online surrogate "reporter"  based in India.   Yep, his name is James Macpherson and he boasts of creating "glocal" news from his home in Pasadena. That's a McNews word that fits his claim to pioneering  something he calls Internet-centric news from his Pasadena Now editorial (?) offices.  A former garment salesman who outsourced his stuff to Vietnam, Macpherson told Dowd  that he will outsource news with foreign-based stringers who are paid $7.50 per 1,000 words.  It will be a simple matter, he says, to provide those content providers with telephone numbers, email addresses and anything else they need  to report whatever is news in our city.  If newspapers claim they can't afford to pay yesterday's staff, then Macpherson says he will pay them the way shoes , made much more cheaply in China,  are imported into our shopping malls.  From where I sit, the only difference is that you can  try on the shoes before you buy them.  You never know what you might be getting from an unprofessional stringer halfway around a very troubled world.   Macpherson's goals sound like a hellish way to make a living.  But shrinkage is really what the traditional media are all about these days.  I can hear a lot of copycats already  bestirring themselves into gasping "Yeah, Yeah! I can do it, too!" You heard it here second.  

In another piece, PD columnist  Elizabeth Sullivan writes with intelligence and grace about the death of her journalist mother while lamenting the dismantling of today's newspapers.  Sullivan notes that the PD is in the process  of expanding projected layoffs in the newsroom from 38 to 50.  She writes:

"That's 50 of my friends. Fifty people who work hard every day to deliver something meaningful, contextual, important and unique to hundreds of thousands of readers who don't have the time, skills or inclination to do the digging themselves."  (The layoffs are expected to be announced this week and you can imagine the tension as the straws are drawn.)  Sullivan is hoping to delay the inevitable but newspaper ownership today will hear none of it.  It has been part of the problem, retreating meekly and greedily in the face of heavy competition from the Internet.  To what end?  Profit?  Survival?  So far, the front offices have yet to come up with an answer other than to lend a hand to their eventual demise with less quality, less competence and less commitment to the things that newspapers are supposed to do best. 

Finally, with the Cleveland Cavaliers showing championship  potential, Sunday's BJ reported the game just up the road from Akron with the Associated Press rather than its own beat reporter.  Nothing more to add about that. On the other hand, it may be a rung or two higher than game coverage from that person in India at $7.50 per.