Aesop's well-paid fables on Capitol Hill

AS ONE WHO SURFS on to TV sports coverage on occasion, I've become aware of the growing number of moving parts that now have sponsors. "Please rise," the booth announcer implores, "for the seventh inning stretch, brought to you today by Knee World, Inc., the company that is a world leader in leg bends." More: "The kickoff is sponsored by Joy Masters, where you can get you own kicks with a simple 15-minute workout on our exclusive Fleet Feet walking machine."

On and on, from commercials for the National Anthem entrepreneurs to slam -dunk companies that want to remind you that they are unchallenged creators of doughnut holes that can be dunked with miniature spears, even in the morning or midnight darkness.

Wouldn't it be a boon to democracy, such as it is, if the same enterprising spirit could be attached to operatives on Capitol Hill who insist on throttling, say, the health care advances that the country, if not the said operatives, desperately need? Something like this might help our understanding of how the system is not working today:

Today's filibuster by Sen. Aesop is made possible by his sponsor, United Wealth Care, a leader in contributory control of those errant bouts of conscience that might keep you up at night. During these harsh days of the Obama presidency, it is urgent that we all have a good night's sleep. So remember Aesop and UWC in your next trip to the emergency room. What better way to repay your congressman as your friend?

Fabulous, if I have to say so myself.

Disney's "front-page news"

The desperation of newspapers for ad money is unhappily evident in this full page ad for Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Alas, newspapers are edging closer to the rabbit hole every day.

Pew Research: For some, the evil eye exists

PEW RESEARCH is reporting that 16 pct. of Americans believe wholeheartedly in the "evil eye." If the relatives on my mother's side were still breathing, the number would have increased dramatically. Not a day passed that someone wasn't ducking behind a sofa to avoid the sinister stare of a cousin or a stranger. To keep whatever peace was available on any given day, we all gritted our teeth and went along with it until the crises passed.

My loving mother lived courageously with the threats of evil eyes, warning all within her reach of the perils of ignoring them. They were part of a larger assembly of superstitions that guided all of our lives since birth. For example, she warned us never to step outside within three hours of washing our hair - a rigid rule in our house that, if broken, could lead to pneumonia or painful death. She never said why that was so.

We were always under strict orders never to sleep on our left side. It had something to do with the pressure on the heart, as she explained it. Besides, wasn't there a rumor that an elderly fellow up the street had succumbed to a heart attack in the middle of the night and was found to be sleeping on his left side?

I must tell you, too, of my near encounter with death as a 12-year-old as I burned up with fever from pneumonia. Ignoring medical science, Mom slid a large butcher's knife under my pillow and sat at bedside throughout the night until I came to my senses at dawn. With that, she withdrew the knife, kissed it and concluded that it had cut the fever!

My Aunt Lulu played the superstition route daily with stacks of "dream books" that would associate a three-digit number to whatever dream you had in your deepest slumber. A few pennies on the dream image in the book and you would greatly improve your chances of winning a few more cents. Of course, there were 999 possibilities of 3-digit numbers so your chances with this gambling exercise were rather slim. May Aunt Lulu rest (peacefully) in Vegas!

Like countless others, my mother took steps to ward off the evil eye with a tiny gold pendant that she strung around my neck. It was shaped like a an animal horn and called a corno by an Italian family that gave it to her. With a corno, you could be reasonably safe from the dark spirits that threaten us every day. Back when I was being tutored in the Italian language, my teacher was annoyed to get a phone call from his wife that she had been afflicted by an evil eye from a stranger at the next table in the restaurant. She rushed home and went to work ridding herself of the certain misfortune (What? Nobody ever says!) with a batch of tea leaves placed above her head. At least that's how my tutor later explained it with wry disbelief.

History tells us that even Plato referenced evil eyes and may have believed in them himself. Are any of us smart enough to play in Plato's league? I think not. Fair warning to 84 pct. of Americans who reject the notion of the evil eye.

Bunning: a bit player in GOP assault on Obama

NOW THAT MANY of us (except Fox News) have had a little fun over Jim Bunning's meltdown that jammed up the government for a day or so, the more likely version of this mad tale is that he was not really acting alone. Instead, he was merely an unsightly spurt from the boil that forms the seething Republican enclave on Capitol Hill. In the nanosecond after Bunning's first claim to the national media-driven spotlight, it is fair to conclude that some of his partisan colleagues were satisfied that his Caligulan rant had served their cause well in further debasing the Obama Administration. Some even muttered as much. But when the returns came in that the Kentucky senator may have gone too far in holding up his entire party to further ridicule, the game was up. Given Bunning's loony track record on The Hill, no Republican could happily adopt him as the GOP's poster boy - even if they agreed that he got it right.

We are long past the stage of constructive dialogue in Congress, which seriously puts a halt to social progress in a system that most of us with even minimal historical awareness call a democracy and the other side sneers is socialism. The sickness runs incurably deep. Since the day that Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office - Barack Hussein Obama! - the Old South began its dramatic return to the podium with the vibrant assistance of the GOP's high priest, Rush Limbaugh, unapologetically aided and abetted by a television network whose deception begins with the kooky assurance that it is fair and balanced.

Why has the unanimous assault from the political right been so much more bitterly sustained beyond ordinary ideological disagreement? . The most entrenched element, less and less muted as time goes on, is racism. Losing to a Democrat, as has happened from time to time in presidential politics, is one thing. Losing to an African-American Democrat is unacceptably something else. Particularly for the political party that is not represented by a single black in Congress.

As Columnist Bob Cesca writes in the Huffington Post:

"...when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there's no comparative group on the left that's similarly motivated by bigotry and racial hatred."

So-called mainstream Republicans have stood before angry crowds and stared diectly into the ugly racist placards with indifference. At the same time, Cesca notes that Limbaugh "can stoke racial animosity on his show by suggesting health-care reform is a civil rights bill - reparation - and no one seems to mind. The Tea Party is an extension of talk radio...of the Fox News Channel. It's an extension of the southern faction of the Republican Party - the faction that gave us the Southern Strategy, the Willie Horton ad, the White Hands ad , the racially divisive politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It's an extension of the race-baiting and, often, of the outright racism evident in all of those conservative spheres."

In the grand scheme of things, Jim Bunning was no more than a bit player who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame for the team. Unfortunately, there will be others.

Of killer whales and right-wing prophecy

YOU KNEW IT would happen. The American Family Assn., one of the nation's biggest right-wing Christian groups, has concluded that the death of a whale trainer at SeaWorld was a matter of biblical vengeance. Why did the killer whale Tilikum attack the victim, Dawn Brancheau? I won't go through the AFA's dark narrative other then to say it believed the trainer's fate was clearly sealed in Exodus. Something about sinful neglect. As Think Progress points out, the AFA is the bell-cow for the "War on Christmas" campaign against retailers who don't honor the day with appropriate respect. But if you think the AFA is way off the main political track, it includes among its supporters Republican Reps. Michele Bachmann and Steve king as well as Sens. Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback.

The optimism of the season

CHEER UP! There's a new infusion of optimism in America flowing from Arizona to Florida. It is widely adorned with the hopelessly exaggerated pronouncements of Capitol Hill but is a non-partisan exercise that happily escapes the political bombast of the plodding and predictable Sunday morning talk shows. It is called spring training and not a day passes in a snowbound winter that a baseball player or manager in the warmer venues doesn't offer a Utopian vision of how much better he feels about this year's prospects than those of the team that finished 62 games out of first place last year.

There is, for example, Manny Acta, the Indians new manager. Commenting in the Beacon Journal after the team's four-inning intrasquad game, Acta was upbeat:

"I liked the way the hitters looked. They are not so far behind [the pitchers]. Also, the pitchers pounded the strike zone."

Fans who are suffering from political fatigue should be feeling better already. Acta is not alone in his optimism. Everybody on the practice fields has something good to say about himself or his team to build the club's confidence level with no filibuster on the horizon. Players with stitched up shoulder and mending ankles insist they have never felt better; front offices trying to sell season tickets in lean times point to a new look at third base or right field that will elevate the team to the playoffs. Hotdog vendors give no indication that they are prepared to strike this year.

It's the way the world was meant to be in March. Of course, for the have-nots perhaps not even luck will improve their fortunes. As Walter Alston was heard to say:

"It's pretty hard to be lucky when your pitching is bad."

Bunning's one plus one: Two trillion $$$$

While Jim Bunning has his defenders in trashing an extension of unemployment benefits because they are too expensive, he was quite supportive of George Bush's tax cuts (at left, in 2001) that ripped more than $1 trillion from the federal treasury. Bunning also strongly supported Bush's $1 trillion Iraq war. My math is usually terrible, but it does appear to add up to $2 trillion - or more. (Notice how all of the budget hawks are happily wearing black suits, funereal fashion, in photo.)

Tale of two cities, one publisher

THE BIG MEDIA story in Hawaii isn't the tsunami threat anymore but rather David Black's purchase of the Honolulu Advertiser - the longtime rival of Black's smaller Honolulu Star-Bulletin. As Harry Liggett, formerly of the Beacon Journal, noted on the BJ Retirees blog:

The sale will lead to layoffs when and if the papers are combined, although the number of layoffs has not been determined.

Black's joy over his latest deal was only slightly muted. "It's a sad day when we can't keep two good papers running in a city of this size," he said.

Sad, indeed. At the time of the announced merger, Black's Beacon Journal was trying to wrap up negotiations with the Guild on a contract that expired way back in July 2008. And later this week the down-sized union will be voting on a proposed settlement that Guild spokesperson Stephanie Warsmith says is "concessionary" in pay and benefits. More concessions for a newsroom that has already been reduced to the size of a holiday staff. (Latest departures: three sportswriters.)

Buying and selling newspapers has been Black's modus operandi since he purchased the Beacon Journal and other papers in 2006 from McClatchy, which bought them from Knight-Ridder. At the time, Black, a Canadian publisher who owns a large estate of mostly weekly newspapers, expressed his delight in acquiring the Beacon Journal, asserting in a memo to the staff that there would be no layoffs while recognizing the paper's labor unions. Now-former BJ publisher Jim Crutchfield lauded Black's reputation "for figuring out how things work and making them better. He appreciates that value of journalism."

There is nothing that I can add.

Will the media leap to Tom Ganley's ad dollars?

AN INTERESTING situation is shaping up in the 13th Congressional District as financially weakened newspapers grope for shrinking advertising dollars. Mega-millionaire right-wing auto dealer Tom Ganley is not only expected to win the Republican primary to face U.S. Rep Betty Sutton, he also is the Plain Dealer's biggest advertiser. That's real big! So how much will that count when he marches in to see the paper's brass about an endorsement? I don't know. But the odds would seem to favor him - particularly against a liberal Democrat with friendly ties to organized labor. The only cautionary note is that fewer and fewer readers are taking newspaper endorsements seriously. Who can forget the thrashing that the Beacon Journal editorial page gave to U. S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a liberal Democrat, in 2006 on his way to clobbering incumbent Republican Mike DeWine?

Bunning: His fastball is in the dirt these days

Republican Sen. Jim Bunning: "He missed the pitch by this much, and if you don't think so,

TOUGH S--T!!!"

Moral: "S--T happens" - even in Congress when an ex-Major League pitcher from Kentucky decides to block the extension of unemployment benefits and construction projects.