The Niam era: Great while it lasted!

THE PASSING OF Gerrie Niam at 85 evokes happier memories of a tiny restaurant on Locust Street that was long the pulsating roundtable for Akron's lively sports crowd . It was a unique eatery that lured Runyonesque characters to debate the eternal truths of winning and losing athletic teams. Niam's Parkette (the modest name suggests it was not on the Mobil Travel

Guide's 5-star list) served as the bully pulpit, earthy gridiron textbook and proud recruiting site for the late Eddie Niam, hometown football scout and Gerrie's combative but usually lovable husband.

But as Eddie held forth on his incisive wisdom on Las Vegas point spreads, an area high school halfback's chances of donning a Notre Dame uniform, or angry doubts about an official's game-changing decision in a game played eons ago, it was Gerrie who nobly tried to maintain a near-normal restaurant business from a cramped grille behind the counter.

Her days were tortuously long - down to the restaurant by 5 a.m. to prepare for the breakfast patrons, on her feet for endless hours, managing the menu for the next day, and carefully trying to make her offerings - from hot dishes to hamburgers and salads - tasteful for all. Much of the time, she was forced to ignore Eddie's booth-hopping to diagram the plays that Notre Dame drew up to defeat a powerful rival the past week end.

Notre Dame? For Eddie, it was the natural progression of loyalty to his former high school buddy, Ara Parseghian, from Northwestern coach to the Fighting Irish, which, from birth, neither Ara nor Eddie ever were. No matter. The clientele soaked up the lore seated underneath Notre Dame game balls and posters and other reminders of Eddie's solid dedication to a campus that he had never attended as a student. The audience included cops, dentists, businessmen, jocks, urologists, journalists and even some Amish folks who did their best to ignore the special ambiance of the place.

In Gerrie's life, not enough attention was accorded her as the sturdy enabler of Eddie's treasured role in the restaurant. She accepted it as her unyielding duty to keep the doors open and the grille hot. And I had the feeling that she proudly found reasons to suffer it as business as usual. She did not take vacations and only once did she join Eddie on a a trip to a post-season bowl in Texas, where he, a collector of everything, brought back a huge sombrero and respectfully tacked it on the wall of their home amid the clutter of his other memorabilia.

She even resorted to some pained humor in their existence. "Funny," she once told me, "that Eddie can remember the score of a particular football game, but can't remember my birthday."

No matter, Gerrie. This piece is how I fondly remember an Akron institution that belongs in any historical account of noteworthy Akron families that offered the old rubber town a unique dimension. Now rest in peace.

Boehner, Jordan: the hermit crabs are back in the shell

THE LEADING VILLAIN in John Boehner's failed attempt to resolve the debt ceiling issue is one of the House speaker's Ohio Tea Party colleagues - Rep. Jim Jordan , a former national wrestling champion. As such, Jordan has maintained a death hold on any Boehner compromise by means of Jordan's chairmanship of the outlandishly conservative House Republican Study Committee. The Tea Party-inspired gang operates much like Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety in its rule over France's perceived enemies.

Jordan, who lives with his family on a farm near Urbana, Oh., has done nothing but issue ultimatums to anyone less sacred than he in matters of his preference. From much of what he's said, he wants government to be run with family values. And maybe no government at all with all of the chickens running wild in the coop.

But wait. As the Republican congressman from Ohio's rural Fourth District that abuts Boehner's Eighth District, Jordan's no-holds-barred behavior has irritated some Ohio Republican lawmakers who will be playing a decisive role in congressional redistricting. The Columbus Dispatch reports that Jordan's "disloyalty" to Boehner has put Jordan in "jeopardy of being zeroed out of a district."

The paper quotes one of its sources as putting it this way:; '"Jim Jordan's boneheadedness has kind of informed everybody's thinking." In wrestling terms, it would mean taking Jordan to the matt. It's technically called the "guillotine," and described as a "pinning move" that is a "combination of leg riding and an open side hook."

I'm not sure what all of that means, but an expert informs me that if executed properly, Jordan would be on his way back to his farm.

Booze leading another state rep to the dock

WELL, THAT'S TWO!

First,we recently learned of the sinful behavior of ex-State Rep. Robert Mecklenborg, the holiest-of-holies Republican from the Dayton area who resigned in the wake of a deadly combination of booze, a young female stripper and Viagra , as discovered by an Indiana (for Heaven's sake!) state trooper.

Now, the Columbus Dispatch is reporting that one of Mecklenborg's very conservative colleagues, Rep. Jarrod Martin (R- Beavercreek) has fallen victim to the spirits. He was arrested on charges of drunk driving and child endangerment, having had two children in his car that was spotted weaving in and out of traffic. The Dispatch said today that it was the very same Jarrod Martin who was discovered passed out in the Statehouse garage last year - so intoxicated that he could not be immediately revived.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not picking on Republican lawmakers. Alcoholism, I've learned over the years of hanging around with these sturdy representatives of the people, is non-partisan. But hypocrisy is something else. When the God-fearing pretenders in the Republican ranks want us to believe that they have the only sure route to the great beyond, it's good to be reminded every now and then that hypocrites seldom practice what they preach, sober or inebriated..

Meantime, the blessed Ohio GOP lawmakers are doing something to themselves that the minority Democrats are incapable of accomplishing: laundering their ranks. Good for them!

UPDATE: As long as we're talking about hypocrites, how about the world-class example being reported about Chicago-area Tea Party Republican U.S.Rep. Joe Walsh, who ranted on TV against raising the debt limit because he didn't want it to be on the backs of his children and grandchildren. It now turns out, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, that his ex-wife has sued him for being delinquent on paying more than $117,000 in child support for their three children.

McCain is for and against the Tea Party

BOY, DID JOHN MCCAIN fool us. I, for one, had been preparing to say something nice about his gritty attack on the Tea Party and its ilk in Congress. Next thing I know is, there is our hero on hands and knees on the Sean Hannity show praising the Tea Party. As Tea Party apologist Hannity bore in relentlessly on the teetering senator, McCain responded ever so defensively, purring:

"I admire, respect and appreciate the Tea Party, and they're the ones that gave us a majority in the House of Representatives so that we can get something done."

With that, the white flag went up in the face of a stern inquisition by Hannity and the Tea Partyers who had expressed anger at the senator from Arizona.

You never know about McCain anymore. He took some shots from Hannity with a Mona Lisa smile on his face, hoping to salvage the moment. Meantime, I would ask the senator to head up to MSNBC to explain what "something'' will be done by the TPers on Capitol Hill. Aside from creating havoc, of course.

Limbaugh: Heat wave is government plot!

JUST AS I WAS beginning to feel a little more comf0rtable with the moderating July heat wave, my upbeat mood suffered a setback when I learned that all of the past scorching days were a government hoax to appease the global warming crowd. That late word comes from Rush Limbaugh, himself a hot-air savant whom I have been trying to ignore in recent weeks. Rush says the temperature is hardly as awful as what we think it is because the government has created a heat index to make your neighborhood seem to be hotter than it really is by a couple of points. We have long known Rush to be a denier of climate change because he denies anything that is anathema to the mindless right-wingers in his dittohead audience. For the extremes that have created an unabated record draught throughout the south, floods, tornadoes and other awful things, Rushbo says you must consider how phony the temperature index is (particularly in his air conditioned den) and the Feds are responsible for your discomfort for raising the index beyond the true reading. (Why they would go to this trouble to fool everybody, I'm not sure.) Well, being the curious sort, I checked the reported temperature on the computer's weather page and it registered 82.6 degrees. The index in dispute was a non-inflated 82! So I would have to rate his comment as they do on PolitiFact: pants on fire.

Mary Taylor "clearly" befogs health care reform

L.T. GOV. MARY TAYLOR is bursting out these days as a vigorous opponent of the Obama Administration's health care reform law. That's not really surprising in the anti--health care reform crowd. Taylor, who is also director of the Ohio Insurance department, wrote a letter to the Beacon Journal to express her opposition, declaring: 'Let me be perfectly clear: I oppose the Affordable Care Act", and then went on, as a BJ follow-up editorial pointed out, to befog the various elements in the law.

Assuming that she doesn't intend to be stranded in a state job the rest of life, could this be her opening salvo to enter the U.S. Senate race next year against Democratic Sen Sherrod Brown?Recent polls indicate he is ahead of the leading Republican challenger, Ohio

treasurer John Mandel, a serial candidate who never saw a higher job that he didn't immediately love. Taylor could be the GOP's go-to candidate if Mandel decides to leapfrog the senate seat to run for U.S. president, or British prime minister if the job opens up in the always shaky European political market.

Soros: Not sure democracy will survive

GEORGE SOROS' incisive, if not entirely optimistic, essay in the June 23 issue of the New York Review of Books ought to be read - and reread - not as the incidental passing commentary of a billionaire liberal activist but as a provocative survey of the global mess in which America is deeply mired.

(I will pause at this point for all of Soros' right-wing critics and Fox News perps to turn blue at the very mention of his name.)

The Soros opus, which appears in the June 23 issue and is available on line, covers a broad field of trial-and-error government and spares neither side of the aisle. The guiding force of Soros' piece might be summed up in this wistful warning by the author:

''The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect." [Italics added]

An essential attribute of a faltering society, he believes, is its inability to face reality - the unpleasant burden that all of us in a free society must necessarily share.

"Already the reelection of President Bush had convinced me that the malaise of an American society went deeper than incompetent leadership. The American public was unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems. The fate of the Obama presidency reinforced that conviction."

Asserting that the Republican narrative thrived in a propaganda machine - Orwellian Newspeak - he says the party advanced its own game plan that the "government cannot be trusted and its role in the economy - both regulation and taxation - should be reduced to a minimum."

That sort of mindless political hogwash plays well with a public that doesn't want to hear the bad news, particularly from the politicians on the stump. And quite likely it will stay that way in our lifetime.

Soros says he has spent more than $8 billion creating a global network, the Open Society Foundation, to explore "new frontiers" in searching for solutions to make the globe more livable but wonders about its viability and continued work once he passes from the scene.

. The essay is not recommended for patio reading while waiting for guests to arrive at any moment. But it brutally reaches to the core of where we are today and why we are not anywhere near Camelot.

Boehner only negotiates what belongs to others

WATCHING THE BIZARRE PERFORMANCE OF JOHN BOEHNER WHO WOULD RATHER FORCE THE COUNTRY INTO DEEP RECESSION THAN WAVER ON HIS PLEDGE TO THE TEA PARTYERS ON TAXES REMINDS ME OF THE LINE ATTRIBUTED TO NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV:

"What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable"

(Boehner's attempt to sustain parity with President Obama fell to a new low when he reportedly did not take four phone calls from the White House. It was an abominable snub, not solely to the President - whomever he could have been - but to the very office itself. At this point, Boehner is looking more like Icarus, who, despite warnings, flew too close to the sun, fatally melting his wings.)

Right! Bush indeed shaped it

WHO SAID:

"Americans should not fear our economic future, because we intend to shape it."

Or how about this one:

"Our economy is healthy and vigorous, and growing faster than other industrialized nations...Even in the face of higher energy prices and natural disasters, the American people have turned in an economic performance that is the envy of the world."

No fair. You peeked. The good news came from President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech, Jan 31, 2006.

Unfortunately, the Republican congress went gently into the good night and, by golly, Bush did shape it. With tax cuts. You know the rest of the story.

The Washington Spectator, which carried segments of the speech in its Feb. 15, 2006, edition, had another take on Bush's euphoria, warning:

"Don't believe the hype. Our 'Healthy' Economy is heading for trouble.'"

But really, folks. How could anyone take a liberal publication seriously?

Wall Street's booming "bare" market

FROM A READER COMES a Reuters report of the indictments Wednesday of 17 people charged with running a "high-end prostitution ring that catered to Wall Street clients." The customers reportedly spent as much as $10,000 a night. Despite the downside of the economy, the ring was prospering, said Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. "The business of high-end prostitution is enormously profitable," he said, adding that clients often spent more than $10,000 in a single night.

And why not? The ring was called High Class NY and like some pharmacies and supermarkets was open for business 24 hours a day, which was quite considerate of clients who had to stay at the office after hours to help pay for their mischief. Fees ranged from $400 to $3,600 an hour for the ring's services. Hynes called the Wall Street clientele "all high-end customers coming from the financial markets. People with nothing but money." Still, we have to wonder about how the $3,600 sex investors figured to write off their high-end action as therapeutic business expenses.