Anyone for a second opinion?

HERE IS A quote headed straight to Bartlett's:

"Joe the plumber - and you can quote me - is a dumb ass. He should stick to plumbing".....................Meghan McCain

Buchanan (not the old prez) is deep-sixing

WOULD SOMEBODY please toss out a life raft to Pat Buchanan, the over-exposed TV-commentator who has been engaging in a non-stop rant against Sonia Sotomayor from the day her name surfaced as President Obama's Supreme Court nominee. Buchanan's well deserved reputation as an anti- Hispanic, anti-Semitic writer/talker from the ranks of Richard Nixon's inner-circle has pulled him under the heavy undertow now favoring Sotomayor. He frantically gasps that she is a wicked witch who will cost white males any claims to their ruling masculinity, charging her in a Human Events column with a "lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males."

I really think his sociopathic comments on MSNBC and elsewhere may be prompted by watching Albert Pujols (eh, Domincan Republic lad) belt another one into the distant upper deck against an inferior white male pitcher. Does anybody except MSNBC and Pat's dead-enders take him that seriously anymore as the old bigot appears to be prepping for his own show on Comedy Central?

Southern GOPers: Here's to your health!

I HAPPENED to watch a handful of southern and southwestern Republican congressmen on C-SPAN this morning making a fuss over their God-sent health care reform proposals. They wanted you to know that their only true motive in opposing the Obama administration's plan was their deep concern for the American people, particularly those who are out of work, indigent and not covered by a dime's worth of insurance. They didn't see how any plan but theirs could actually "reform" health care - a plan that would control costs, spread the insurance around and give all of us an option to choose whatever path we preferred to follow. Just below the surface, however, is the GOP's protection of the health insurance industry , which is paying off a lot of congressmen on both sides of the aisle to keep the status quo.

Insofar as the cost of the administration's single payer plan is a major talking point for the Party of No, shouldn't somebody mention that health care costs shot up unmercifully when Medicare became mired in countless private insurance plans. Figures I've seen say the actual administrative cost of Medicare was about three percent; after the insurance industry cut into the pie, administrative costs of your health insurance coverage rose to beyond 20 percent. Anybody care to explain the difference?

But hearing the handsomely insured GOP group defend Americans' right to "freedom of choice" (except for abortion, of course) in selecting a plan free of the government, I am again reminded of the age-old saying that "Republicans are for a lot of things - but not very much."

As I have written time again, the Republicans had their chance with GOP presidents and congressional majorities to take up the challenge of our health care crisis - and did nothing. So why should we believe that they are our saviors now?

Coughlin bows out. That's news?

SEN. KEVIN Coughlin's withdrawal as a Republican gubernatorial candidate should have surprised nobody. He was never in the game, even before ex-congressman John Kasich blustered his way onto the GOP's A-list with deluded promises to cut taxes. Tax reduction is no longer a serious policy matter with GOP candidates. It is simply feel-good politics, like telling the voters that you were late for a town hall meeting because you were busy delivering groceries to an elderly couple. It has a nice rosy glow to it even if it is a fool's paradise in a time of desperate revenue needs.

Interestingly, it would be hard to distinguish the ideological differences between the two men. Both are crackerjack conservatives, and you can take it from there. The only difference, I'd guess, is that Kasich, being a Central Ohioan with more than a few dimes in his pocket as a former Wall Streeter, has earned more Brownie points from the GOP's front office in Columbus than did Coughlin, who allows that he may try again someday.

Still, it must be said that his decision to forgo a gubernatorial campaign was the fastest exit since the late Sen. Oliver Ocasek decided his chances for winning the Democratic nomination for governor in 1978 were none and none. I doubt whether you will find any mention of Ocasek's clandestine candidacy in the political annals, but for a short time at least he was an eager warrior. His ambition was carefully nurtured by his good friend and Summit County Democratic powerhouse Robert Blakemore, who believed that Ollie had toiled long enough as a leader in the Ohio Senate to build a statewide constituency . Blakemore assembled a group of labor, education and political activists in private meetings around Mansfield, Oh., to discuss an Ocasek candidacy.

When I learned of it as a political writer for the Beacon Journal, I wrote something to the effect that Ocasek, though a decent man, was on a wild goose chase inasmuch as another Democrat, Richard Celeste, had a huge head start in raising cash. Always the gentleman, Ollie called to say that he was deeply hurt by my article and would prove me wrong. He took off around the state, meeting countless township trustees, school officials and political friends, certain that his campaign would rise to any challenge. But, alas, when he returned to Akron several weeks later, he arrived in our office with a one-line statement: He had decided not to run after all. He was in shock, really, that for all of his good efforts as an Ohio state senator, he was given so little encouragement -and cash - to fulfill his dream. He also sustained the theory that nice guys don't win pennants.

A successful Italian American Festival downtown

AS A CONFIRMED Italophile, I would be remiss if I didn't pass out a huge compliment to the sponsors of the past week end's Italian American Festival at Lock 3 in downtown Akron. The synergy between the Council of Italian-American Societies of Summit County and the Plusquellic Administration successfully connected hundreds of volunteers and patrons ( along with a welcome blessing from the weatherman).

Deputy Mayor Dave Lieberth said the crowd of 52,000 for the three-day event exceeded expectations . "We demonstrated we can handle major events - and there was not a single problem for the police," Lieberth said.

When the Society decided to move from Cuyahoga Falls to downtown Akron this year, among the first concerns of the critics of the move was that security would be a problem in an urban center. Didn't happen. Meantime, on the plus side were the additional space available to the vendors and the various attractions (slides, cliff climbing, high flying swings) for the kids.

Nancy and I arrived Sunday afternoon and wandered through a big crowd. We ended up at the pavilion in time to enjoy the all-in-the family four-member music group, Cavalieri Reale, on stage. It's a great outfit from Cleveland, proving once again that not everything in that city is a bust. I even bought one of the Cavalieri Reale CDs. I do what I can to help Cleveland, and in this instance it was an excellent investment.

Not being grumpy when I came home Sunday evening, I waited until Monday morning to write this - and I still was not ready to complain about Republicans.

The faint pulse of the Mendenhall team

DESPITE MAYOR Plusquellic's trouncing of Warner Mendenhall's forces in the recall election, a faint beat goes on. The Akron Law Department continues to receive post-election public records requests from Mendenhall's allies, including Miss Tia and the mayor's long-time nemesis, Bob Smith. To what end? No doubt they are frantically fishing for information that might be useful to help their slate of candidates in the September primaries.

Miss Tia's request that remains active would require the city to research and turn over an estimated 500 documents, says City Law Director Max Rothal. Confronted with that burden on the staff, the department is trying to work out a compromise with Miss Tia to lessen the workload. An example of the administration's opponents' search mission: Copies of all correspondence between the Law Department and also the Mayor's office with First Merit Bank. What? That's what they're asking at the Law Department and now that the recallers have been vanquished at the polls, it seems like a reasonable question to ask.

P.S. Who is Miss Tia? She's Miss Tia. That's her legal name, which she requested some time ago for reasons only she can explain.

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When Democrats reach for their hankies

"It's like deja vu all over again" - Yogi Berra

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS are mournful worriers. The untreatable sense of foreboding by my crowd is a kind of genetic guilt that took hold when the Democratic Party, which was less than progressive, foolishly endorsed George McClellan, a terrible general, against Lincoln in 1864. But things were so bad that even Lincoln, a Republican seeking a second term against the backdrop of the Civil War, didn't think he would be reelected. Since then the prevailing gloom among liberals was that if there was a way to lose an election, Democrats would certainly find it. It's the curse of John McClellan.

Nowadays, although some Dems are putting up a brave front, down deep they just know that Governor Strickland will be a one-term governor because of his dithering over a state budget. They flinch and reach for their moist handkerchiefs when polls show his approval rating in a nosedive. Frankly, I have no idea how that will turn out at the polls next year. The media will be full of dire warnings for Strickland, and will continue to urge him to raise taxes to pay some bills. That, of course, would only serve to increase the despair in his party, particularly among other Democratic candidates on the state ticket who will be forced to toss and turn at press conferences over whether they support tax increases, too.

On the other hand, liberals will be scowling at Republican John Kasich, hanging effigies of him in their basements, and fretting that their party's brief years of glory will be ended regardless of Kasich's ludicrous sing-song pledges to lower taxes. He, after all, was a big-time executive with Lehman Brothers before it tanked and would not be expected to know something worthwhile about the financial system. Sorry, not enough to assuage hanky-twisting liberals that the end is near. They will keep their cell phones turned on should a friend want to report the latest dismal poll. Damn the McClellan curse anyway!

There is even concern with the aforementioned crowd about President Obama, who still has three and half years remaining to define his work before the next election. My friends have been skittish about polls that say Barack has dropped some points but remains around 60 pct. job approval. It is of no consolation among always- nervous Dems that as a married man cavorting with a teenage girl friend, Italy's Silvio Belusconi's approval rating in the polls fell only two points. Boastfully defiant, the Italian president declared: "This is how I am. I am not going to change a thing. If they like me this way, they like me this way." The McClellan factor obviously has not found its way to Rome.

I quickly recall that during the past presidential election campaign, my gang was standing

on tall ladders looking ahead to the next poll and fully expecting defeat. John McCain and the national media mentioned more than once that the Republican was closing the gap. On the other hand McCain was cool and confident that nature, and even the Supreme Court, if necessary, would again favor the GOP.

Republicans, particularly conservatives, aren't like that at all. Guys like William Kristol, the Neocons' foster parent, grin their way through another Fox hour full of certainty that in the end, America is a just nation and will do what's extreme right. Even now, Kristol is finding ways to justify another national campaign for Sarah Palin.

It would have been different if Lincoln had been a Democrat.

Boehner's obtuse view of Ohio's stimulus

RIGHT OR WRONG, John Boehner, the House Republicans' darkly loquacious mouthpiece, should qualify for a citation for partisan crabbiness. Most recently, he unloaded on President Obama's stimulus plans in Ohio, complaining on Fox News that it has been essentially a bust. He said he saw no evidence of anything - anything - happening on the upside . But when he was taken to task by critics for being unaware of such projects already under way in the state, he retreated to Plan B: He said, well, the process has been "absurdly slow." Right. By now the five-month-old plan should have put a chicken in every pot and stocked Lake Erie with gourmet lobsters. And added a domed stadium for every town with more than 25,000 sports fans.

Boehner should have quit carping when he was behind. As Joan Mazzolini pointed out in the Plain Dealer, the Ohio Department of Transportation has approved about $84 million in road and bridge projects with stimulus money , which is also at the heart of new programs to rescue indigent mothers and children from Medicaid cuts. To reverse an old saying, what Boehner doesn't know about his home state is hurting his image. At least what's left of it.

A quiet week in Lake Grump-begone

LET'S SEE...Where was I before Time Warner abruptly darkened my Internet screen and cut off the phone service for a week-long ...eh, outage. Well, with apologies to Garrison Keillor, it was a quiet week at Lake Grump-begone. Oh, there were the countless calls to the company demanding Service on Demand instead of Movies on Demand. But it soon became obvious to me that Warner Cable was in charge, not me, and the cable savants would fix the problem whenever they were damned ready.

Meantime, I could only spend the down time wondering whether the Indians would call up another relief pitcher from a sandlot down south and how I could be so obtuse not to appreciate the seismic consequences of Michael Jackson's death. On some days the media coverage far exceeded President Obama's discussions with the Russian front office on nuclear weapons and the worsening war in Afghanistan. It is anybody's guess what horrendous world event would have been able to draw our attention from Neverland.

But the late Mr. Jackson's fullest measure of media coverage did serve as a another glimpse of desperation by newspapers and television to sustain or increase their audiences by whatever it takes regardless of the relative consequence to the world. It has sadly become a truism that for all of their problems, the media's front offices have yet to define journalism as a means of making a profit. And my hunch is that at this late date, they never will. There are not enough Michael Jacksons to advance the media to the next level of professionalism, if indeed that is the medium's sublimated goal.

But I did find more than enough time the past week to follow the perils of Palin. Sarah, that is. Hearing her out on her resignation as the Alaskan governor, I realized that if there was a hidden massage in her rambling comments, I was too unsophisticated to discover it. I did, however, gain a tad of satisfaction by reading some national commentaries that appeared to be as much in the dark as I was. As a blazing-comet political celebrity, Palin has become as much a curiosity as a wannabe national political force.

I could only add to the Palintology that a loopy Alaskan politician with her national aspirations could come along not more than once in a lifetime. For that, we should all be thankful.

* * * * *

Scanning today's Op-Ed columns in the Beacon Journal, I caught up with one that was headlined Sarah Palin, victim of media sexism. It was a lament by Marie Cocco, a Washington Post columnist that strongly traced Palin's problems to a male-dominated media empire. That, to say the least, is a tearful stretch. As a white male writer who has spent 99 pct. of my complaints on incompetent white male politicians, I figure I should be able to say a few unkind things about Palin, too. I'm quite astonished that a national political columnist like Cocco could bring her comments down to such an adolescent level (which, I suppose, exposes me to being a sexist re Cocco.) Ms. Cocco, the same rules apply to anybody stumbling up the tower in the political arena which includes Mark Sanford, John Ensign, etc. etc. etc. And if Helen Thomas or Maureen Dowd decide that George Bush is a adrift, I would hesitate to blame it on sexism.

Sarah Palin happens to be a woman. She also happens to have said and done a lot of foolish things. And I am a male who happens to think she is fair game.

Folks, it's good to be back!

Left out of the Jackson news avalanche

AMONG THE MANY disadvantages for people of my generation is that we often find ourselves adrift in an alien pop culture from which there is no respectable escape. That has never been more evident than in the days since the passing of Michael Jackson. I was again reminded of my distance from the pop scene when a friend apologetically suggested that he had reached the breaking point from the media's overkilling reports of the event. Another friend tried to put it in perspective for the grumpiest among us. "It's a generational thing," he said. "A generational thing."

With no disrespect for the deceased, one could surely ask at what point would an international pop star's death cease to be a media commodity to be endlessly marketed above all other issues. And after all, it is in fact news marketing. It wasn't until I chanced to learn that Jackson's estate in California was called Neverland that I realized that my generation has been shunted to Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow, where the common folks walked around in

"continual reverie."

But even as a child growing up in a small town, I knew little about pop culture, unless you count Vic and Sade and, oh...Ma Perkins. I also have vivid memories of the Saturday night wedding celebrations at the Kosciusko Hall where we all foolishly exhausted ourselves by whirling to polkas without the benefit of a standby emergency squad. That was pop to us, even though nobody thought to call it that. The same applied for wakes where my mother made it a point to sit by the casket even though she had never met the supine person in it.

Such were the events that made up our days with no intrusions by cable networks sucking the last detail out of the poppers and only the weekly Journal to report that one hometown couple or another traveled over "hard surfaced roads" to visit friends in another town! My parents would mention it at dinner.

It's terrible now to know that you are missing something that appears to be is colossal but don't have a clue about what you have missed. That's my generational thing, which is what I'm likely to say to the new generation's pop savants who glare at me and begin by saying, "You mean you don't know? You can't be serious."

Honest, I don't know. And I'm serious.