A Valentine evening with local Democrats!

The annual Summit County Democrats' Valentine Party is a modest family reunion of officeholders and staffers for a couple of hours of schmoozing over  finger food and whatever the bar will allow. This year's $25-per-person event at the Tangier also offered the locals a glimpse of one and maybe two state candidates on the 2014 ballot,  

Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, one of the party's  fresher faces, made the rounds , clasping welcoming hands and offering a brief talk on the ills sprouting from the  Kasich administration from taxation to school district funding.  It's the sort of thing he's been saying all over the state in weighing his  own decision on whether to challenge the governor.

He told me afterward that he will decide in March on whether to run.  The big question, of course, is whether he can be encouraged by the campaign cash that will be available.  That won't be a problem for Kasich, who's isn't likely to be flying tourist class between now and election day.

If anything is certain at this stage it's that State Sen. Nina Turner, a Clevelander,  is already making her presence felt as an energized  candidate for Secretary of State.   She became a frequent guest on national television during the presidential campaign as a leading critic of  Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted (he, of the Husted Hustle)  who was dead set on restricting the turnout in November.    His mission, he said, was to eliminate fraud - a chestnut that a few other Republicans conceded was a not-so-sly  effort to elect Mitt Romney.

Turner has also placed herself on national TV as in  the most outspoken vanguard for women's rights.   She didn't hestitate to tell the Democratic Valentiners that she's just getting started.  Cheaters, she insisted,  should never win.  With her on the stump, it won't be a campaign for the faint-of-heart.

Meet the "moderate" Rob Portman

Remember Rob Portman?  Ohio senator.  Republican. Former Bush budget director. The guy who was always hanging out with Mitt Romney in the presidential campaign while some pundits were sure he would be the perfect complement to Mitt in Ohio as his running mate.

Oh.  That Rob Portman?  Right.

I know it's hard to keep track of him unless you're a political junkie.  As an un-showy Mr. Plain, he prefers  to remain below the radar. Ohio's doting newspapers seldom report his votes  on major issues, which is doubtless why even the national media have described him as a political moderate, or a "center-rightest''.  All of which gives the senator cover to act while he's still locked in to his days as a congressman representing his conservative district in Southwestern Ohio.

Whether it's gun control, abortion rights, a constitutional amendment barring  same-sex marriage  and a host of other way-over  issues, you'll find him voting with the extreme right.  Just this week he voted to hold up  Chuck Hagel's  nomination.  Portman says he wants more facts on Benghazi.  That, of course,  joins the Republican fishing expedition that merely delays an up-or-down vote.

Moderate?  Centrist,  when the Party of No needs to pull away from the fringe?  Show me.  

GOP: Obama socialist, communist, Hitler,Stalin, or what?

There's nothing more effective in advancing the  Republicans toxic mental breakdown than a speech  by President Obama.  An occasion such as the annual  State of the Union address, first administered by Obama in 2009,  has been  the party's proven emetic ever since, although the response  seems to have gotten  even worse this week.  Struggling to find something imaginative to say, Fox News' iconic analysts even questioned the news value of a 102-year-old woman's efforts to vote in Florida.

You sense a pall of desperation over the GOP brood as they resort to their familiar assault weapons as a means of replacing serious policy with quackery.  Even before the speech, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina referred to Hillary Clinton as a murderer and threatened more nastiness on the Benghazi issue.  We should probably excuse this sorrowfully whining  guy because it is being widely reported that he could face a stiff challenge in the Republican primary  from a Ron Paul libertarian loyalist.

Some other expletives  from the Right:

"Dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Obama" (Limbaugh).

"A Castro-like-speech" (Conservative author Mark Levin on Fox)

Obama's gun-control efforts a "disaster":  (Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe)

Obama nominee Chuck Hagel may be on  the payroll of overseas radicals (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz)

Obama is against free enterprise (read: dictator) obsessed with raising taxes (Florida Sen. Marco Rubio)

But none of this rises to a higher intellectual level than Fox News Psychiatrist (honest!) Dr. Keith Ablow,  who unpleasantly accused Obama of being "psychologically predictable".

"He does not surprise." Ablow   opined.  "Having been abandoned as a boy by his father and then his mother, only to then learn that his grandmother feared people of his race, he seems inherently to distrust initiative and intention and to place his trust only in the collective."

Sounds a lot like a reference to a socialist or communist to me.   I wonder how much they pay Ablow to give Fox News such a much-needed soaring sense of panache.  I also wonder whether they'll get around to having him do the 50-minute hour on the  couch for Limbaugh.

Dick Cheney: From chicken hawk to military expert

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, he of the robotic heart,  had some bizarre things to say the other night about President Obama's choice of cabinet members.  Speaking to a friendly audience  of about 300 Republicans in Wyoming, Cheney asserted that Obama has appointed "second-rate people" who can be expected to degrade the U.S. military.

The timing of his cheap shot  left no doubt that he was referring to John Kerry, the new secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel, who is awaiting confirmation as the secretary of defense. Huh?

As the record will show, both of his targets are war veterans who served well while Cheney preferred to comfortably sit out the battlefield with several deferments.  And as a strong infuence in guiding the U.S. into an invasion of Iraq, he demonstrated his profound understanding of warfare by assuring us the conflict might not last for more than several weeks. I needn't tell you  the rest of the story.

The governor's food for political thought

Privately run prisons, as the New Yorker  recently described the TV series "Girls," has become a "trending topic".  That's because Gov. Kasich, determined not become privatized himself  when the voters head out to the polls in 2014, has found still another way  to downsize the government he manages with swagger each day.  He wants to turn over food services at  Ohio's prisons to the non-elected  entrepreneurial class  that swells with each new opportunity for its investments.  He says it will save the state maybe $16 million a year.

Like so many of  his "bold'"  initiatives, once the headlines fade into yesterday, you have to pay more attention to second opinions.  Privately run prison services   have a history of failure that equal the inmates they're supposed to contain.

Cost savings for taxpayers? As Paul Krugman has pointed out,  a study by the U.S. Department of Justice has concluded that such savings in other states "have simply not materialized.''

"So let's see," Krugman wrote, "Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards and other workers, and by paying them badly.  And then we get horror stories  about how these prisons are run.   What a surprise!"

Reviewing earlier  consequences, Plunderbund reported an audit by former Republican State Auditor Jim Petro  of privatized food service at the Noble Correctional Institution in Caldwell, Oh.    The audit showed Aramark, the company involved,   "failed multiple sanitary inspections and was unable to provide   acceptable portion sizes as agreed upon in the contract. What's more, Plunderbund said the audit revealed that "Aramark ended up billing the state for millions of meals it never actually served resulting in $2 million in overpayment being made to the company."

Never mind, the Kasich people contend,  we're looking at $16 million in savings even though a transfer to private hands would eliminate 456 state jobs.  Oh, it says here, the private operators would hire some of these people.

And now we come to the real bottom line.  Kasich, who has no use for unions, would eliminate that many jobs covered by Civil Service.  Christopher Mabe, president of the Ohio Civil Service  Employes Association, is already preparing for a brawl. "This is unfair, unsafe and hurts us all and we will not stand for it," he told the Columbus Dispatch.

From the standpoint of purely practical politics, after being drubbed in his fight against public employe  unions with Senate Bill 5, is Kasich really prepared to provoke labor again in an election year?

Smithsonian Magazine:The myth of split infinitives

There was some good news in the February Smithsonian magazine for those us who have labored over typewriters and then computers for so many years.  According to the experts, you won't go to Hell  if you split an infinitive.   And you won't suffer in purgatory if you, as I just did, begin a sentence sentence with a conjunction.  What's more, there's no shameful abuse of grammar if you end a sentence with a preposition.

A periodical of Smithsonian's worthy standards has now reassured us that all of the above transgressions are myths  That's right, myths that should in no way intrude on clearly written texts..  Indeed, it goes still farther by telling  us:

"But perhaps the biggest grammar myth of all is the infamous taboo against splitting  an infinitive,  as in "to boldly go'".  The truth is that you can't split an infinitive,  since 'to'  isn't part of the  infinitive, there's nothing to split."  If that gets a little technical for you, don't bother.   Go back to the part that says infinitives aren't divisible and move on with a clear conscience.

Smithsonian also quotes some notable sources to free us from our guilty conscience.  There were the comforting words of Katharine Hepburn, who once observed:

"If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."

Then it closes with the outburst of an angry Raymond Chandler when a copy editor at the Atlantic Monthly messed around with the author's  prose:

"When I split an in infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split."

That works for me.

NOTE:  My column on Kasich's budget and the pizza twirlers in the Ohio General Assembly is posted on Plunderbund.

Rove returns to slay the vampires!

Good grief!  Karl Rove, one of the big losers in the November election, is unapologetically back to slay the GOP's no-longer-welcome intruders. He's prepared to offer  a daring new see-through Spring Collection for his winless lot of hapless candidates. Editorial writers would describe the plan as "bold". You could say that, too, as in "desperately bold". Everybody in the political world is talking about it.

Rove has  created a new Super PAC that he calls the modern Conservative Victory Project to halt the Tea Partyers in their tracks.  And if you think that will finally bring peace,  harmony  and a little sense to Rove's party, you haven't followed the modern saga of the more distressed right-wing crowd that finds something to hate in government every hour.

Rove has always been something of a behavioral therapist, leading  George W.Bush's through more reflective moments as "Bush's Brain."  But now, even though his money machine, American Crossroads, was unable to elect a single conservative candidate on his personal list, he's decided to charge into the deepest quarters of his natural habitat   for what he clearly intends to be a game changing moment on the national runway.

Simply put, if that's possible, he wants to protect moderately conservative candidates from primary challenges from the horrific people who call President Obama a socialist born in a rain forest and say profoundly stupid things about women who have been raped.

Not that a man of Rove's towering presence  in the GOP hasn't managed to open a new front in the political wars.  The right wing that has guided the party through four-plus years of Barack Obama  is flapping loudly.    Their gurus are assailing him as a turncoat feeding at the Potomac trough and have begun to re-enlist their battered forces from the past campaign.  The torpedoes from the Club for Growth, the treasure house for political rightists,  are making the rounds on Fox News  and other sympathetic outlets to condemn Rove's plan. Names are being called on all sides.

From FreedomWorks, where Dick Armey reigned until recently, comes this troubling thought:  The Republican Party would be sapped of the energy and wisdom of guys like Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Pat Toomey and Mike Lee if Rove's designated hitters drive them from competitive races.

When they put it like that, I may find myself reluctantly agreeing with Rove on a one-time basis as he wanders into his familiar  divide-and-conquer comfort zone.  Do I really have a choice?

Remember when Twinkies were simply Twinkies?

We can all sleep well tonight despite our 15-cent monthly bank interest  on savings.  I'm here to report  an exploding entrepreneurial spirit in America that would certainly merit the highest respect  even from folks who have car elevators attached  to their homes.    It is churning up a tidal wave of speculators who cleared the  food market shelves of Archie Bunker's favorite sweet sponge  just as its maker cast its fatal shadow:  Twinkies! for God's sake.

I do not exaggerate  the wild investment phenomenon by the profit-conscious who are ignoring  Wall Street to head for the other Big Board -  eBay.  At last count, there were more than 2,400  Twinkies offerings ranging from under $10 to $200,000 (shipping included).    A bid of $7.55 was drawing a lively response for a goody called a Hostess Twinkie Coffin, "a great gift for a mourning Twinkie lover!"  And $40 would win   "Newly listed Hostess Twinkie 2 boxes."

Twinkies lovers will tell you that the treats never spoil. But one dealer turned up a collectible rotten one and it passed $24 - as is - which may be the out-of-the-box steal of this systemic madness.

 Before bidding, you may want to consult your Twinkies broker to determine whether the boom has peaked or whether there will be even more cream for you dough.  

Super Bowl: The King of Beers pays royally

If you are the curious sort when you tune in the Super Bowl game,  prepare yourself with a stopwatch and calculator.  The New York Times reports that sponsors will pay CBS  up to $133,333 a second for their ads.  In some cases, the cost for a 30-second spot could rise to $4 million and maybe some change.

Imagine dropping those numbers on your boss's desk with your personal expense account.  The biggest spender is Anheuser-Busch, the Times says.   Small wonder that all of the giddy,  slap-happy people in the beer commercials are forever whooping it up. Their companies' payouts  are challenging the speed of light.

Kasich: Repent "liberal nihilists" who oppose me

I

There are days when it's  hard to separate Gov. Kasich from
Elmer Gantry.  That's when he berates inquiring reporters and critics in general about a lawsuit filed by ProgressOhio against  his economic development JobsOhio plan.

To a question asked by Gongwer News about the interest rates on the bonds that would pay for his privatization plan, it wasn't enough for the governor to refer to "liberal nihilists"  - which doubtless sent some of his own people to their dictionaries.  He became even testier  and warned that his critics were "going to have to answer to a much higher power than me."

Well, now.  For those of us who have been led to believe that there is no higher power than Kasich, this came as a revelation. As Plunderbund helpfully recalled,  it was the same pulpeteering Kasich who was quoted in the New York Times back in September as believing  that he had been sent by God to save the  state.

Why do Republican pols  consistently play the God card and say things like that as though they are so insecure about going it alone?  One comes quickly to mind: Sarah Palin, and where is she today?  

If I were to be a candidate against the governor the first words out of my mouth would be that I had also talked to God and  He reassured me that the governor had shamefully quoted Him out of context.