Where there's life (sort of), there's now Coach Chud

As if you might not have already  known it, the Northeast Ohio versions of the Sporting News are massively reporting that the Browns have a new coach. The Beacon Journal and Plain Dealer arrived Saturday with the front pages dominated by the Browns' hiring of their latest find: Rob Chudzinski, to try his hand with the long hapless team.  Beneath his wide angle photo the headline told me that he's "eager to bring excitement back to the lakefront".  Not to be outdone with its commitment to the sports world, the Beacon Journal turned over half of the front page  to report that "new coach enjoys life on cloud nine."

That was just the start  as the photos grew on their path to the sports section.

It was left to Bud Shaw, the PD's always readable sports columnist, to  pull back on the reins of  native enthusiasm with a column  topped by a headline  assessing the climactic event  as, " no drum roll, but a 'process'".  Shaw  verdict;  "Chudzinski  hire brings a minimal 'wow' factor."

I figured that would more than substantially cover the team's latest sports spectacular until both papers arrived on Sunday. A commanding illustration of the "Browns' family" stretched  across the mid-section of P1  to inform us that "Chudzinski embraces loyalty, dedication".  The BJ meanwhile retreated to the sports section with a lead story and another big Chud photo  with the message that he is seen as a   "man of vision".

 Don't get me wrong.  I'm a voracious pro football fan.  But wasn't there more than enough of this hyperventilating when Mike Holmgren was brought in as the wizard who restore the team to respectability?  Yep.  And he's no longer in the front office in the wake of another change in team ownership.

So let's just wish Coach Chud well while keeping in mind the TV commercial that boasts of something "magical" happening at McDonald's.  If that ever happens to the Browns, I can't imagine how the papers - if they're still around - will  display that event.  Is there a Cloud 10?

For gun enthusiasts, Adolph Obama is just around the corner

A world class right-wing Plain Dealer columnist once warned me  that  if America became a dictatorship,   journalists would be the first to be throttled.   Indeed,  imprisoned or worse. What could I do to calm his fears?  Nothing, really.  He had long concluded that the country was drifting into the hands of oppressors and feared that we are ignoring the threats to our way of life.

There's a lot of that going around today in the debate over  gun control.  U.S. history has suffered through these things before in full technicolor.   There was the Yellow Peril, so vividly covered in Barbara Tuchman's Zimmermann Telegram; the Red incursion  of the McCarthy Era, and now the Black threat, which by extension, derives from the presence of an African-American doing a second turn in the Oval Office.

No stronger evidence of the baloney attached to the ranks of the gun defenders - a sort of mix-and-match catch-all for handguns and assault weapons - than  the shouted fears by such tetchy guys as Matt Drudge, who wants his crowd to shiver from the thought that a reincarnated Hitler or Stalin will be in the Rose Garden before you know it.

 Speaking of shivers, did you see the explosive meltdown of conservative radio host Alex Jones on the Piers Morgan show?  Jones  insisted that assault weapons were critically needed to fight a  sinister  force running the government - when that horrific  day arrives.

I wish I knew what happened to my BB gun that my parents gave me after the docs took out my tonsils when I was 6.  From what they tell me these days, every little weapon will help in the approaching clash between good and evil.

On the networks, look who's talking about climate change

Have I ever mentioned that I  never watch the Sunday morning talk shows?  Oh, I do get a glimpse of one or the other when I happen to pass by a TV set  while  these elitest panels are fussing over the latest crises.  Although Henry Luce is not one of my inspired journalistic heros, I do agree with his view that objectivity is a  "false god."

Talk about objectivity,  a study by  Media Matters reported a remarkable imbalance in discussions of climate change on the network Sunday shows in which Democrats were shut out of any comments.

"In  2012," Media Matters reports, "the Sunday shows did not  quote a single Democratic politician on climate change.  Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming 'junk science' on ABC's This Week.    More than half of the climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address  climate change."

Among the pundits who have dismissed climate change is George Will.  Of course, he was also one of the gifted thinkers who predicted a landslide victory for Mitt Romney.  And for Republicans, the dark clouds have been gathering ever since Election Day.

NOTE:  My column on the upheaval at the Plain Dealer and newspaper passivity toward key issues has been posted on Plunderbund. 

Hagel's enemies: The renenactment of Little Bighorn?

You might wonder how desperately low the psychopathic core of the Republican Party would go until you are reminded that it is flailing in a bottomless pit.

That became obvious once again following President Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel to be our next secretary of defense.  On cue, as if on orders from  Gen. Custer,   they angrily surged  before the ever-present TV cameras to denounce the former Republican senator from Nebraska with a series of threats that may yet produce a new swiftboat assault on a decorated war hero.

House majority leader Eric Cantor said he was "profoundly" concerned about the president's choice, declaring Hagel to be an enemy of Israel. (When was the last time that Cantor was profound about anything?)  Sen. Lindsay Graham agreed and called it an "in your face" action by Obama.  Sens. John McCain and Jon Cornyn couldn't find enough words to slam their former colleague.  The sky was falling.

Shame on them, even if they are psychopaths.   All of this nastiness flared just as the final figures of  the popular tally in November gave Obama a five-million vote margin. Oh, and the conservative Log Cabin Republicans came out swinging because Hagel was suspected of being against gays.  You get another whiff of how quickly the "Just say NO"gang mobilizes.

The emptiness of these losers recalls the scene from Cinema Paradiso in which the old film projectionist tells a long rambling  story to his  young companion.  "What does it all mean?" the puzzled boy asks.

"What does it all mean?" the old man gruffily replies.  "It doesn't mean nothing."

Well, Kelly made good copy while it lasted

Foolish me!

Why did I allow myself to be  so gulled by the gushing media reports  all week telling me that Oregon Ducks head coach  Chip Kelly would be on the Browns' payroll in the 2013 season?  I should have known better. This was  just another Browns' failed  gold rush that has encouraged so many previous coaches and quarterbacks to take a sabbatical on Lake Erie.

The Plain Dealer called this spectacle to my attention this morning with the headline on the sports page:

Browns walk away from Kelly; report says he's staying at Oregon.

The reach for gridiron greatness  met the same fate  as John Boehner's Plan B.

So now there will be the usual speculation  over the possible  replacement of the replacement of the replacement, etc.   Even the Plan C second choice, Syracuse coach Doug Marrone, went to Buffalo to coach the Bills.

If I may butt in, I would call attention to a large cutout of  former Notre Dame and Akron U.  coach Gerry Faust standing in Summit Mall.  It's  sponsored by the Crystal Clinic Orthopedic Center with Gerry's praise of how well the clinic treated his hip and knee problems.

If the new  Brownsmeisters can find a way to make it worthwhile, Gerry might be available now that he is free of bodily pain.

Better yet, he lives just down the road and there wouldn't be any moving expenses.

P.S. As I noted in the previous post, the Browns are always more interesting after the season than when the team is on the field.

Is another Kelly heading into a shipwreck with Browns?

Did  you notice that the Cleveland Browns are on the verge (if they haven't already done so) of hiring a  head coach, Kelly by name.  No, not Shipwreck Kelly, although with that foreboding nickname it could bear a resemblance in a year or two after the new guy arrives in Cleveland.

This particular Kelly is  Chip Kelly, the  successful coach of the  Oregon Ducks, one of the winningest  and most entertaining teams in college football.  Anybody who has seen the Ducks on ESPN could swear they were recruited from an Olympic  track team.

And so the Browns will begin the 2013 season with their seventh coach since   2000 alone, with the departing  Pat Shurmur following Mangini, Crennel, Robiskie, Davis, and Palmer - if  trivial pursuit is your thing. At the same time, they have started 18 quarterbacks!

Help me. I lost track half way back across the decade.  Let's just say the lineup stretches from Brandon Weeden and Thaddeus Lewis to Doug Pederson, Tim Couch and Spergon Wynn in 2000.

There are more turnovers  in Brownsland than in a giant bakery.  Tim Hagan, the Cleveland politico, once lamented to me after his candidate lost that "in Cleveland it had to be in the water."

I don't know  why I'm telling you this, but we do need a holiday from  the other blood sport on Capitol Hill.

The Browns are all over  the papers these days with the pending news of a  new coach.    But I do have to ask:  Why are they always more interesting after still  another  dismal season than they are when the team is on the field?  

Lieberman vacates a role as most boring person

With the departure of  Joe Lieberman   from Congress,   I've been poking around the honored rolls to settle on someone to replace him as Capitol Hill's most boring person.  The field is so crowded that the choice didn't come quickly.

 I was leaning toward Newt Gingrich until I remembered that during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination I had already tagged him as Crazy Guggenheim, a title that seemed close enough when he promised to fire all  school janitors and replace them with the students.  (He also promised to put a permanent base on the moon during  his second  term in the Oval Office,  but I couldn't convince myself that there would even be a first term for Newtie.)

Then, there was Jon Husted, Ohio's secretary of state, who droned on and on that his voter restrictions were meant to purify the whole system.  Few believed him, but he droned on and on, defending the indefensible.   We haven't heard that much from him  since his class lost, so no need to drag out the story.

You may be surprised, but my choice for the most boring  politician in our midst is Lindsey Graham, the forever whining South Carolina Republican who was usually seen at Joe Lieberman's side as they traipsed through the trouble spots of the world. He's been back on TV a number of times as his party's  Paul Revere to warn us over and over and over that America is  being consumed by the libs. Unfortunately, he remains in denial about the outcome of the November election.  Even in the few seconds that it takes me to change the channel, I feel a headache coming on.

And I didn't even mention Donald Trump, who at least  is always good for a laugh.




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When news becomes news, sort of...

Now  it has been nobly decided that Democrats as well as Republicans will have House Speaker John Boehner to kick around for  still one more term, let's  take a breath and catch up on some real news:

The  term "fiscal cliff" was repeated 2,390,864 times in the media in the weeks leading up to the vote, thereby narrowly  topping the number of shoes that Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel said he wore out campaigning for one political job or another.

If you  felt slightly less significant  from the report that there are 100 billion moons swirling around in the Milky Way, how about the research reported by the New York Times that human beings have a lot in common with jellyfish, chickens, roundworms and fruit flies.  That's the word from the laboratories that humans have no  more than 21,000 protein-coding genes, which isn't  much different from the jellyfish you disrespectfully squish at the seashore.

You may soon add another pill bottle to your medicine cabinet,  the one labeled "effective against bedbugs".   People who ingest the pill, it says here, will exhale an odorous carbon dioxide that will encourage the vermin to bite you - and die.  So your choice will be between bedbugs and red welts from the bites. That's as far as I want to go with this.

As the year ended, we learned of a fresh supply of terms to describe America's folly, among them the insistence by the right-wing loonies that Hillary Clinton had faked a concussion.    Talk of  faked orgasms has  beome so boringly ancient that in Hillary's case, it became something else called the 'Immaculate Concussion".  Former UN ambassador John Bolton, never at a loss to reveal his madness,  started the rant against Clinton with "diplomatic illness" - the term he used to describe her  tactic  to avoid testifying on Benghazi. This much we know: Bolton is not feigning his loopy view of the world.

It wouldn't be surprising if the nation's TV networks had no sense of a recession last year.  The latest round of reports on political advertising in 2012  said TV revenue was as high as $6 billion, an increase over 2008 of 68 pct., according to, the New America Foundation,  thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling to let the money gush.

Isn't it just like nutritionists to rain on the parade of the power-seekers?  Now we are told that all  of those power drinks that give people a kick  have no more punch than a cup of strong coffee. They're caffeine-based and cost more.  Starbucks will be pleased to hear that.

Finally, for the purest  confirmation that the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The cumulative records of the 2012 Cleveland Indians (68-94),  Browns (5-11)  and, currently, Cavaliers (7-26), is  80 wins, 131 losses.  Did you see this first in Grumpy Abe ?

Life on Capitol Hill: Fibber McGee's closet

Considering  the great number of people in Washington who are unhappy these days, you have to wonder if somebody didn't open up Fibber McGee's bulging closet to let them all pour out in a messy heap.

When was the last time that you heard a Republican congressman from New York (Peter King) denounce his GOP colleagues for delaying a vote on Federal funds for his Sandy-stricken constituents?  He even wants to deny them campaign money when they come to New York  to pass the hat.

When was the last time a New Jersey Republican governor (Chris Christie) described the Republican House delay as "inexcusable"?

On the other side of the aisle, President Obama has been loudly assailed from both reaches of the political spectrum - liberal and conservative - for the deal that drew the nation back from the fiscal cliff. (I used to hear politicians say that when you have become the  target of both sides, you must be doing something right.)

President Truman had the clearest insight into Capitol Hill free-for-alls:

"If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."   

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Note: My column about the forlorn news publishing industry has been posted on Plunderbund 

The Theater of Absurd on Capitol Hill

As we slogged through another day of the Theater of the Absurd on Capitol Hill,  it became clear that there were several levels of interpreting the monstrous action on and off the fiscal cliff stage.

(1) You could try to understand it as John Boehner's desperate attempt to save his speakership as well as his congressional seat, the country be damned.

(2) You could try to understand it as Eric Cantor's wily scheme to succeed Boehner -- Cantor, the modern Cassius whom Shakespeare described as a fellow with a "lean and hungry look" , adding: "he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.".

(3)You could try to understand it as  a new year's toast to Grover Norquist, the unelected anti-tax lobbyist who has a death grip on an army of  Republicans in the House of Representatives.

(4) You could try to understand it as a malignant hatred of President Obama, more so now that he won the election by nearly 5 million votes.

(5)You could try to understand it as unsurpassed,  if foolhardy,  grandstanding  driven by an absolute disregard of how history will remember the participants.

(6)Or you could try to understand it  as  the mob scene of a bunch  of overfed lunatics.

If you weave all of these into the narrative, you can see that we are in deep trouble, folks.