The Iowa return of Donald Trump

THE DONALD IS BACK! Donald Trump, birther, BS artist and the only person with a bigger ego than Newt Gingrich, will be the host of still another debate before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus. The Dec. 27 event, which will hype Trump more than the woebegone GOP candidates, will be in Des Moines and sponsored by Newsmax, a very conservative outfit that has puffed up Trump with a number of friendly references to his singular importance to the conservative cause. I think the Newsmax crowd would really like to see him back in the race, for which Trump is especially grateful. It keeps reminding everybody - including him - how really important he is.

Actually, this may be a first for a potential presidential candidate: Interrogating the others who would be his opponents as he does job applicants on his TV show. His ego could reach beyond the point of no return by looking at, say, Michele Bachmann and asserting, "You're fired."

For some reason, I am besieged by e-mails from Newsmax with warnings from a Dr. David Brownstein, often challenging the conventional wisdom of medical science. The latest warning is to avoid flu shots. Something about mercury in the serum. Or, "The one thing you do for your prostate every morning." Other than taking it with you when you go for a long walk, I don't know what Newsmax is proposing. Didn't open up the text.

Each day, scary health tips for someone like me, who was under the wing of two uncles who were very good physicians. But even scarier is the fact that The Donald is sitting in front of a TV camera and measuring the worth of each candidate on stage. Upstaging them, really.

But as the call from the control room softly summons the conductor the moments before the opera:

"Maestro to the pit. Maestro to the pit."

In this Des Moines opera buffa, Trump is handed the baton.

Maybe Cain should have tried ham salad instead....

THE REPUBLICAN efforts at Scrabble to make a word out of "winner" continue with one big difference: They can't turn in all of their candidates and draw a complete set of new ones.

On Saturday, the field shrank by one. Declaring that "politics is a dirty business,"(Oh?)

Herman Cain, the pizza guy, gave up his hopeless bid for the Oval Office. Cain's reason was not unusual in politics today: something about a female relationship (s). Think, Dem John Edwards. And GOP starlets Mark Sanford and John Ensign.

I, for one, will miss the Hermanator. He had a way with logic. "Listen," he once demanded. "You might just learn something." On another occasion, he soberly declared: "You need chicken to make chicken salad."

And that may explain why Candidate Cain laid an egg.

Newt has so much to tell us

WHAT ARE WE to do about Newt Gingrich? He would have us believe that he is the reincarnation of King Solomon, with the only difference being that Solomon had 300 wives and Newt a mere three (so far). No longer the underdog in the GOP presidential workouts - not for the moment, at least - he is enjoying his new celebrity by telling people about all of the ways he has played big roles in the best things that have happened in America.

For starters, as a congressman, he led the successful fight against Communism, he told Sean Hannity on Fox in a pattycake interview appropriately staged in Tommy's Country Ham House in Greenville, S.C. (Fox called it, um...a "candid conversation".)

There's more, only because we're talking about Newt and not Solomon here. He wisely helped the Democratic House speaker to balance the budget four times. He sagaciously helped both Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy develop supply-side economics and sagely reformed welfare entitlements. There would be more self-applied merit badges but the interview had to end at a reasonable hour. How disloyal the House, then, to fine him $300,0o0 and reprimand him for ethics violations!

"People want somebody with very substantial big ideas," Newt said modestly, reflecting on his own ascension as America's can-do Professor. He says these things in a matter-of–fact way as if to make you wonder why you didn't already know that.

What? An $1.8 million contract with Freddie Mac, which Newt had criticized for its manipulative mortgage investments? For Heaven's sake, he wasn't lobbying for the outfit, he says, but rather advising it on how to survive from the perspective of a historian.

I have a feeling that he is just getting started on his dreamy history tales, and there's so little time left before the election 11 months away. So in the standard version of a man who comes home to find his wife in bed with the plumber, Gingrich has developed his own escape hatch for his negatives, from a million-dollar credit line at Tiffany's to how he wowed all of his colleagues in Congress. Simple, he says: "I can explain everything."

Even Joe Scarborough, MSNBC talk show host and former Republican congressman himself, isn't quite sure. "He's out of control," Scarborough growled. "Give me a break. His comments are an insult to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush." Others have referred to Newt's "supersized ego" but seldom of his broad expanse of wisdom.

Take it easy guys. I at least want him to get to the place where he invented the forward pass. And how he led the assault on bin Laden. Even Solomon wasn't up to those feats.

Kasich: Read no evil, see no evil

IT'S A LITTLE EARLY to be Ho-Ho-Ho-ing, I know, but it's the only way I know how to respond to the latest utterance from Gov. Kasich. I refer to his comments in a Columbus speech in which, with straight face, he declared that he never reads newspapers. That's a politician's standard cover-up when things are not going well - no curiosity at all to know how he's doing in the media. The other cover-up for the pols is that they will tell you they never look at the polls. Particularly when they don't favor you. To repeat: Ho-Ho-Ho.

In his rejection of the media, our governor, with straight face, informed us: "You should know that I don't read newspapers in the State of Ohio" because one doesn't need to be "aggravated by what I read in newspapers." This is spoken in a town where the daily newspaper, the Dispatch, helped him get elected by endorsing him, thus aggravating to this day a whole lot of other folks who have a dismal view of him.

He also complained that he doesn't find newspapers to be "uplifting". Uplifting?

Here's one former newspaperman who will tell you that I never once heard that word applied to a newspaper's mission, which is to be "informative". However, sadly I do find that to be less so today. So go ahead, governor, read the papers. You might help somebody in the newsroom save his or her job.

Connie Schultz: A post-PD career

STUART WARNER'S excellent piece in Cleveland Magazine on Columnist Connie Schultz's resignation from the Plain Dealer deserves your attention as a peek into the ways of modern newsroom culture. It never helps a newspaper to lose a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, but Connie's workaday world was never simple since her husband, Sherrod Brown, was elected to the U. S. Senate in 2006. A brassy liberal with a strong social conscience who independently fashioned her own reporting career, she was immediately branded as a shill for her husband by certain critics on the staff. Warner, her editor and friend at the PD, described the growing tension as "awkward". It reached the point where she decided to leave.

Too bad. God knows, the conservative side of the PD writers is quite visible, beginning with an op-ed columnist/editor whose political assumptions would even make some Tea Partiers blush. (But he doesn't have a spouse in the Senate.)

Actually, Schultz was having a problem with an editor before Brown , a congressman, went to the Senate. She once told me that the only thing that kept her from being fired by the former editor was the announcement that she had won a Pulitzer Prize. That would have been an embarrassment for the paper, but most newspaper editors are not known for their social skills.

The messy situation that Schultz has left behind by choosing to clear out her desk will in no way impede her career as an author and national columnist; that's what grit and talent will do for anybody in this business. Connie has both, with plenty to spare.

Her epilogue to her colleagues and friends said in part:

"In recent weeks, it has become painfully clear that my independence, professionally and personally, is possible only if I'm no longer writing for the newspaper that covers my husband's senate race on a daily basis. It's time for me to move on."

As for her 18-year experience at the PD, she described it in three words: "What a ride".

That's vintage Connie Schultz.

Urban America arrives in Columbus

Ohio State hires Urban Meyer as the new football genius and so let us begin the new millennium in the Scarlet and Gray's iconic history. We can confidently tell you that is true because the morning papers reported it in headlines that would normally announce a war or a tsunami on Lake Erie. (See above photo in Beacon Journal)

Add this from the front page of the Plain Dealer:

After a difficult season, Buckeyes get their man

For a winner-starved sports crowd in northern Ohio (albeit, the OSU campus is in Central Ohio!) the media's overly-expressive reaction was based on the employment of a coach with a winning record in an earlier life that has now earned him a six-year contract worth more than $25 million. In some respects, Meyer is the new kid on the block to replace LeBron James, another icon who shattered his blessings by the fans in these parts by skipping town to Miami.

And now we come to what some people will call the apples-and-oranges section of this short Urbanized piece:

The Buckeyes hometown Columbus Dispatch declared on Page One: MEYER ERA BEGINS

But there were a couple of other much less prominent items on the same page, one was headed Parks have to wait for improvements, which reported that the Metro Parks could not upgrade their conditions because of state budget cutbacks; and another: Westerville schools eliminate 62 positions., the result of having to strip $23 million from the budget during these, eh...hard times.

I have a problem dealing with the two universes, folks. As a political writer for decades, I realized that - optimistically speaking - based on election day turnouts, no more than 50 pct. of the readers gave a damn about politics. As for readership, that may have been wildly optimistic.

So is it fair to ask whether the Urbanization of a college football team is worth so much notice in view of all of the other realities of the workaday world?

I think not, but I do follow the happenings in the sports world, even on days like today when I can't avoid it with my morning coffee.

Are we again in the midst of Darkest Ohio?

SOME YEARS AGO, New Republic, then a liberal magazine, ran an editorial that snapped at the right-wing politics of Ohio's capital, Columbus. The headline above the piece was "In Darkest Ohio". As the editor of a small political magazine in Columbus who had written a couple of articles for New Republic, I had provided some of the grist for the editorial. The headline is worth recalling only because it could easily apply to the political culture of the current General

Assembly.

The folly of the Kasich Era should alarm anyone who cares about the Buckeye State's much maligned post-modern image.

The daily mash arriving from the Republican governor and his coterie of theocratic lawmakers is fearsome enough to forget about the legislative days when Democrats and Republicans vigorously argued their viewpoints and then shook hands and moved on to the next issue. (I can recall sitting down to late after-hours dinners near the Statehouse with both parties at the table and not fearing for my life.)

If there is a single word to describe the current political class down there it would have to be overreach - a serious illness, come to think of it - that has infected the ruling powers in the House of Representatives in Congress, too.

But for the time being, let's stick to the overreachers at the Statehouse. Despite the slaughter of Issue 2, the collective bargaining law (Senate Bill 5), there are actually voices in the legislature overreaching for more, insisting that the time has come to make Ohio a right-to-work state. It went to the ballot in 1958 with disastrous results for the proponents. But the anti-labor lawmakers are getting strong signals from an outfit called the Liberty Council (patriotism reigns with these groups that keeping dropping into the news) to add it to the Ohio Constitution.

There are also steps being taken for another constitutional add-on next year, the so-called Personhood Amendment that declares the creation of life at the nanosecond that the human egg is fertilized. It would be the most-restrictive anti-abortion measure in the nation. (Mississippi voters earlier this month overwhelmingly rejected a Personhood Amendment.)

Since things are believed to happen in threes, we've already seen the fatuous emergence of a restriction on the national health care law on this November's ballot and was passed 2-1. It would eliminate the mandate for everyone to buy health insurance. It played to the voters like a silent movie; even its opponents largely ignored it. Why? Because a state law can't override a federal law, that's why. But it will give Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine, who hates that national health care law, something to crow about.

What's going on in Buckeye Land? Unless you are a Tea Partier or right-wing religionist with a stranglehold on the Republicans in Columbus, you'll never be able to fully explain it. Nor will your state representative, who may not represent you at all.

For Gingrich, the good bad news

THE GOOD NEWS for Newt Gingrich, the new Golden Oldie to capture the media's imagination, is that he was endorsed by the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, the state's biggest newspaper (Sunday circ. 63,991; daily, 48,342). The bad news for Newt Gingrich is that the influential right-wing daily endorsed the nominations of Steve Forbes in the 2000 Republican primary and, for God's sake, Pat Buchanan in the 1992 and 1996 primaries.

The paper's front-page Sunday editorial signed by publisher Joseph W. McQuaid sent waves of breathless reports across the cyberworld, which figured it had some hard news to bestir the saliva of a politically inattentive nation caught up in the frenzy of the National Football League.

According to McQuaid's extrasensory perception, we can count on Gingrich to "improve Washington" just as he did in the 1990s as the Republican House Speaker. You can see where this is all going.

The same, though younger Gingrich, was reprimanded in 1997 by a bipartisan House vote of 395 to 28 and required to pay a $300,000 penalty on ethics violations. The Washington Post reported at the time that"Gingrich admitted that he brought discredit to the House and broke its rules by failing to ensure that financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.

Added Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican,

"Newt has done some things that have embarrassed House Republicans and embarrassed the House."

No previous House speaker in 208 years had been so disciplined.

How's that for "improving Washington"?

Once again, the Fox Crocks are exposed

SOMETHING TELLS ME that I shouldn't be too surprised about the latest polls that are not too kind to Fox News. But on the other hand, when was the last time that you learned the downside of the Fox Crocks more or less confirming that "no Fox news is good news"?

Here's what happily inspires me to mention this: According to a Farleigh Dickinson University poll, "people who watch Fox News are 18-p0ints less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew the government" than people who don't watch any news at all. There are more examples of the network's abiding slow learners. It reinforces something that the University of Maryland's research turned up last year. Alas, people who watch the Fox Crocks are more likely to be misinformed. Well, now.

We thought of this as Fox News "legal expert" Megyn Kelly joined Bill O'Reilly in putting a happy face on the pepper sprayers in Oakland. She called it a "food product". But as one commenter dared: Let's see you spray it on your own food.

And another thing: O'Reilly didn't hesitate to slip in the thought that UC Davis, where the horrendous event occurred, is a "fairly liberal" campus.

Never mind. That explains everything.

Blitzer: H-he-e-e-r-r-r-e-s Romney...

I USUALLY ONLY WATCH the Republican presidential debates (No. 11 last night!) a short time before turning to a more productive moment in my life. The CNN assemblage of mean-spirited candidates was no different, despite host Wolf Blitzer's rallying cries in introducing each participant. Hyped introductions are not the usually staid Blitzer's strongest suit, if indeed he has any at all. But here he was, excitedly shouting the names of each as if they were the Chicago Bulls bounding onto the floor from the dressing room.

By now, the candidates have had plenty of opportunities to craft their comments. This is not to say that they don't sound foolish. (Does anybody take them seriously?) Last night, they were to focus on foreign policy, and in the short time that I followed their remarkable insights, they wanted their audience - in house and on TV - to know that all of the world's terrorists are being ignored by President Obama. "He's a failure," asserted Mitt Romney, his favorite description of the president. Others - excepting Ron Paul - would have us looking for terrorists under every bed, much like the prescription for rooting out communists in the old days. And we all thought that it was a sign of progress if we fetched Osama bin Laden.

Yet, when I hear from Mitt, I am reminded he is the same guy whose handlers have posted TV ads accusing Obama of comments that were actually those of John McCain. It's called a hi-tech lie, and Romney will not call it that. (They've also lashed Obama for saying that Americans are "lazy" when in fact, he was referring to the federal government's efforts to lure foreign corporations to America. You need only to roll the tape to discover that!)

Still, it is Newt Gingrich who has forced me to haul out the Grumpy Abe Linguïstic Lunacy (GALL) award for declaring that school janitors should be replaced by kids. After all, on Planet Gingrich "Child labor laws are stupid."

Long ago, I referred to Newt as Crazy Guggenheim, and his current antics merely confirm that I was right. Only the First Amendment would put up with Newt.