Today's ever-vigilant press with Maureen Dowd thrown in

BROKEN NEWS!!!!!

Maureen Dowd,  she of the "liberal"  media, has become the New York Times' Op-ed version of Michele Bachmann.  Forever full of herself, she's been obsessing  against President Obama, most recently likening him to a "sad sack".  She's even gone so far as to say that Hillary might have to run in 2016 to "restore honor" in the White House.   Wow!   It all leads me to speculate on whether she might not have been included on the A-list of a White House dinner.

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A long piece in the Plain Dealer about the life and times of  crusading Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine quoted his soaring reason for wanting to hold office.   "I ran for attorney general not just to hold office, " he asserted. "I ran for attorney general because I wanted to do things."  Noble. Still shouldn't the story also have included  at least one word that among the biggest things that  he's wanted to do was to slap down Obamacare  and company insurance coverage of contraceptives as the lawyer for all Ohioans?  Even women.

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There they go again:  The Beacon Journal ran another op-ed piece by Richard Vedder, the conservative  Ohio University  economics professor emeritus who is being paid $150,000 a year to write his slants by an outfit named Donors Trust.  It is sort of a laundering operation that channels huge amounts of contributions to ideologically compatible "liberty-minded" charities.   Fine. But shouldn't the reader be told that? Vedder did disclose in his most recent column that a Forbes magazine ranking of college president salaries that he used for resource material was compiled by his own think tank.
I've long believed that if you want a strong college degree,  become a conservative economist.  There's money in it.

Post Super Tuesday withdrawal symptoms

AS THE WOEBEGONE 2012 CLASS OF Republican Warriors stumbled across the Super Tuesday finish line, we continued to be told that our freedom was at stake in the hands of,

President Obama. It wasn't one of those Bartlett Quotations liberty-or-death Patrick Henry warnings - the 2012 Class's rhetoric isn't that profound. In the modern world, freedom is the buzz word for Obamacare and at some point Mitt Romney - if he is the nominee - will have to go lectern to lectern with Barack on national TV to offer the second line to his argument of why his Massachusetts health-care plan is so much different than the current plan.

Rick Santorum, when he wasn't preparing everyone for a secure path to the heavenly gates, also believes we are all the President's prisoners. Referring to the wide curse of government health care, he told a Steubenville audience as much, declaring: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom. Once the government has control of your life, they've got you."

Meanwhile. here are some footnotes that didn't make it to the front page:

(1)When Romney carried Summit County, it reminded us of the straw poll - ballyhooed as the largest in the state, for God's sake - taken at the GOP Lincoln Day Dinner here where Santorum was the supernova speaker. The honored guest won that one with 74 pct. of the vote. We still wonder why the local party made such a fuss over Santorum, but these days we wonder about a lot of things. But it is true that Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine is getting his 15 minutes of national attention for tagging along with Santorum.

(2)Just when you thought the Obama haters couldn't burrow more deeply into the muck, a federal judge in Montana emailed a purported joke that suggested Obama was the child of a mother impregnated by a dog. The state's chief federal judge!!! Responding to calls for his resignation, Judge Richard Cebull, conceded that the joke was racist, but said he only sent it to others because he was "anti-Obama."

(3Down in Laurens County, S. Car, the county GOP has set up new critreria for a candidate to appear on the primary ballot., Candidates will have to swear that they never had pre-marital sex and will never again look at pornographic stuff. The party had first asked the candidates to sign a pledge - signed pledges are quite fashionable in the Republican pure-at-heart schemes these days - but backed off because it might have had legal problems.

I particularly like this part of the requirement: You must be faithful to your wife, cannot marry anyone of the same gender nor support same-sex civil unions. The candidates will be screened for moral purity by a three-member committee. Clearly, this would have been a serious problem for ex-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who had an adulterous fling with a mistress in Argentina while explaining his absences as hikes on the Appalachian Trail. You might have heard, he will have no such morality problems with Fox News, which just signed him to be a political analyst.

(4)And finally, Fox's Chris Wallace has told us that Fox's health insurance plan indeed covers contraceptives. But didn't Bill Reilly, who once resolved a sex harassment suit with a big out-of-court financial settlement, rant that the entire Sandra Fluke uproar was in fact nothing more than a Democratic plot? He said what?! ? You bet he did.

The never-too-late DeWine conversion to Santorum.

AS OHIO ATTY. GEN. Mike DeWine tags along with Rick Santorum as his choice for the GOP nominee, shouldn't somebody remind him that McRick has some terrible off-the-wall ideas about what ails America? OK, Mike. I will.

For example, how do you think it will play on Ohio's higher education campuses that McRick passionately declared just yesterday that they exist solely to indoctrinate students with leftist propaganda? (Are the University of Akron and Kent State University listening?) As for public schools, your guy is just as nasty, arguing that they are a total failure in teaching our kids the sort of wholesome things they learn in home schooling.

I won't even go into his apocalyptic slandering of President Obama and his other hysterical trashing of anything that he believes is the work of Satan. Nothing less than you might expect from a fellow whose candidacy is described by his wife as God's Will. That's the inspiring term that drove Christians on 8 or 9 crusades and they ended up with the Muslims still in control of Jerusalem.

So Mike. while you were wasting so much of your office's time joining a group of six other AG's for a legal challenge to President Obama's compromise on birth control insurance, Santorum has risen to the top of the national charts not only against McMitt Romney but also as an object of gasping ridicule. Forgive me for debating whether you changed candidates at an opportune moment when the polls showed Santorum winning Ohio's primary. Or whether as a public official your well-known Catholic loyalty has led you to ignore those of other faiths.

So what's you game plan, Mike, now that you flip-flopped on Romney and became a Rickista?

A hopeless yearning to become attorney general in a Republican administration? You are chirping for a political dead-ender and I would think that a guy who has been at or near the political trough for so many years would know that by now. Maybe you should return my tax money that you have spent tilting windmills on the national scene while staying on the good side of a radical theocrat instead of tending to the business of ALL Ohioans. I'll be checking my mail.

Meantime, I would assume that all of the huzzahs by the front office of the Summit County Republicans who hosted Santorum last week would be a source of embarrassment to the local cheerleaders. A copy of the invitations for the Lincoln Day dinner, handed to me by a friend on the party's mailing list, lured the faithful with the usual hype of a newly celebrated Republican.

It described its guest speaker as having an "unmatched conservative [that] has built Rick Santorum's winning reputation as a fighter for an unapologetic America - a nation true to its founding values, with smaller government, less wasteful spending and a strong national defense." Even as political hyperbole, this one is a bit too much., don't you think?

Winning reputation? The last time Santorum was on the ballot in Pennsylvania as an incumbent senator, he lost by 18 points. It took a while, but the Keystoner voters caught on to him. Shouldn't Ohio's Republicans be forewarned?

Better hurry. The Ohio primary is arriving soon. Until then, we might want to call this nonsense a scandal of Biblical proportions.

White House to thank Mike DeWine on right to work?

IT WOULD BE fair to assume that someone at the White House has sent a thank-you note to Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine and his tea party constituency for helping President Obama to capture Ohio in November.

Mike DeWine, a very conservative Republican? OK. So maybe he didn't do it intentionally! But we're talking about the outcome just the same.

Now for an explanation: In mid-week, he advanced the drive to put a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would make Ohio a right-to-work state. He certified a petition that would do just that.

It's the same November ballot in which Ohioans will vote for their preferred presidential candidate. Considering the aroused electorate that crushed the anti-union Senate Bill 5 the past November, would you bet $10,000 that the same voters will be inspired to turn out to defeat the right-to-work initiative? Right. Unionists who traditionally cast their lot with Democrats.

As an added caveat to the right-to-work crowd, Obama's likely opponent on the ballot will be Mc Mitt Romney, who sided with Gov. Kasich on SB 5 during a visit to Ohio before last November's election.

DeWine could argue that certifiying the petition was no more than a routine legal matter for his office. But at some point, someone will step forward to ask him about his personal feelings toward right-to-work laws. At that moment you will learn that he signed the petition as a friendly gesture without giving any thought to the measure's best interests.

Cordray: The GOP threatens a filibuster

IN THE CURRENT chaotic state of the Republican Party, intelligence is never equated with public office. And so here we are , on the verge of another rejection of Richard Cordray, the former Democratic Ohio attorney general who had the terrible fortune to run for reelection in 2010 when Republicans of all measures waltzed into office, some whose only credentials were that they were the Other Party in bad economic times. Which is why we have a Republican, Mike DeWine, as our attorney general despite the fact that every major newspaper in the state had endorsed Cordray. (When the history of DeWine's term of office is finally written, he will be remembered primarily for having vigorously opposed the healthcare reform law.)

Cordray, exceptionally intelligent (Oxford scholar) , honest and progressive, has since been nominated by President Obama to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a product of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Law. When the confirmation of Cordray comes up in the Senate on Thursday, few Republicans say they will support him. But as everyone except a few Eskimos north of the Arctic Circle must know by now, anything that smacks of consumer protection at the expense of the financial industry is ghoulish. The GOP's price for their support: Across-the-board restrictions on the bureau's regulatory power. It would mean that Cordray would be all dressed up with no place to go.

Ah, the Republicans insist that it has nothing to do with whether it's Cordray or some parish priest. It's the threat of regulating their friends' daily bread.

But the aginners had better be careful about what they filibuster against. Obama's previous choice, Elizabeth Warren, pulled out under heavy attacks on her liberal reputation by the other side. (And we thought it wasn't the person but the agency that worried her opponents!)

She decided to run for the Senate in Massachusetts against Republican Sen. Scott Brown. It could cost the GOP a senate seat. She's running slightly ahead of Brown. Will this be an unintended consequence?

It's still DeWine vs. Cordray

OHIO ATTY. GEN. Mike DeWine has official priorities about when to appeal to Congress and when to take a pass. For the purposes of this piece, we are talking about Asian carp and Richard Cordray, the former attorney general whom DeWine managed to defeat - not on relative merit - in 2010 through the essential benefit of a Republican monsoon that swept the state. In that instance it was not an uplifting day for the electorate.

According to Plain Dealer business columnist Sheryl Harris, 37 attorneys general - Republicans and Democrats - strongly recommended the seating of Cordray as the first director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In a letter to Congress from the National Association of Attorneys General, Cordray was described as "both brilliant and balanced." That was hardly a stretch for a person of Cordray's character and talent.

Wanna guess who refused to sign it? Our guy DeWine, of course, who had earlier described Cordray as "highly qualified" and one who would "do an excellent job. As a former U.S. senator, DeWine didn't think he should butt in to tell congressmen how to run their shop. Pure baloney!

I hadn't heard of a excuse like that one for a political no-show. But as he did in his campaign against Cordray in 2010, he will always find a way to rise above the battle, or at least disappear from the radar screen.

As for the Asian carp, Harris reported that DeWine did concede that he made an exception in contacting Congress about the rapacious fish eating their way through Lake Erie.

The only valid story here: The Republicans on Capitol Hill will not seat anybody to the consumers' job unless the consumer protection bureau is gutted. So Cordray will remain a hostage to the roadblock. DeWine is aware of that and will not do anything to discourage his GOP brethren. Maybe somebody will name a carp after him for his service.

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