Believe it: Somebody got a stimulus job!

SO MY CONSERVATIVE friends are sitting there at lunch and insisting that the economic stimulus program - I will take this slowly in hopes of getting it right - "has not created a single job." That's the line that John Boehner and others have passed down from Mt. Olympus to be repeated without challenge - or thought, for that matter. It's probably tucked down on line No. 3 or 4 on the ways that President Obama will be defeated in 2012.

Well, with all due respect to these friends who will not take "no" for an answer, I'd say, "Nice try for your side, but you have nothing to back you up".

That's where we are today in America's great debate on the economy. One friend even argues that a laid-off worker who is called back and returned to the payroll doesn't count. Oh? I' ll leave that to the family of the reemployed worker to figure out. A job is a job is a job. I have also been advised that money should be going to infrastructure rather than hiring a few cops or firefighters or teachers. Or adding to entitlements.

A few tidbits: In Akron alone, about $20 million of the Federal money from the stimulus will be spent on roads and bridges and such. By last fall 17,000 jobs had been created in Ohio. It is far from boom times, but there have been some improvements.

Infrastructure and energy? A friend who drove from Columbus to Denver said she was impressed by the number of wind turbines that had sprung up along the route. Since then, the New York Times reported that the "American wind power industry grew at a blistering pace in 2009, adding 39 pct. more capacity. The American Wind Energy Assn. noted in its annual report that the growth of wind power was "helped by the federal stimulus package that passed a year ago, which extended tax credit and provided other investment incentives for the industry. It's only a guess, but might I assume that one or two more jobs were added?

It doesn't take much time or effort to find this information, folks. For whatever it's worth. The mess left by the last guy in the Oval Office is far from cleaned up. But there are signs here and there that you can't ignore, that we may have pulled back a little from the brink. On the other hand, if we had played the Republican card and benignly neglected the illness, what might we have expected? Well, what?

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Cuyahoga Falls Mayor Don Robart's tantrum that government workers shouldn't be represented by unions will hardly make life easier for him. One doesn't have to support nor deny the validity of such unions to know that they are here to stay, so you might as well try to make the most of it instead of calling for their abolition. Problem-solving comes with the mayor's territory. Can you imagine the howl from City Hall if the unions called for the abolition of the mayor's office? See what I mean? Back into the sandbox, mayor.

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a fellow named Daniel Stout was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives recently to replace a guy who resigned after it was disclosed that he had an affair with a lobbyist. Stout, a family values Republican, is the same pol who earlier admitted to having an extra-marital affair with his first wife's mother-in-law. Some Georgia peaches are obviously sweeter than others. So much for mother-in-law jokes!

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Recommended reading: Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times that delivers the goods on the off-the-page right-wing movement that is a raggedly loose confederation of anti-government Tea Partiers, white supremacists, armed militia and the resurgent John Birch Society. Anarchy is in the wind.

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Finally, I happened to see a TV commercial promoting something called "Meaningful Beauty." Am I suffering from generational lag or what? Is there something about beauty that I don't understand and wouldn't regard as meaningful?

The balloon boy: the televised version

FRANK RICH, the New York Times magisterial op-ed essayist, observed Sunday that America's fascination with the "balloon boy" episode reflected a media-driven society with a willing audience seduced by the latest hoax du jour. TV hustles spectacles. Millions of unthinking viewers buy into them. Think not? Oh? If you weren't among the glazed viewers watching an empty saucer-shaped balloon wafting for miles with voice-over, there was something nagging you that Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was a put-on that, in one form or another, still exists in the tawdry tourist shops along the New Jersey boardwalks not that far from where the Martians landed.

Fantasies are the lifeline of television, from escapist reality shows to the soberly empty helicopter coverage of celebrities heading to the courthouse for still another hearing. That we were hustled by the balloon boy's dad was no more cynical than the meteoric rise of Joe the Plumber as a man hawked as a spokesman for the millions of unrepresented citizens (as well as a handy crowd-pleaser for John McCain.) And as some Americans wanted to believe, Sarah Palin's family was the moral equivalent of Ozzie and Harriet. (Some males went still farther and fantasized about Sarah.)

The fantasies never stop for today's Thumb Generation. Aim the remote at the screen and you may soon find an 800 telephone number that will end your labors and worries. Pyramid schemes abound with the fantasies of overnight riches. We go to war in the Middle East being told that the end of Saddam Hussein will take no longer than a few weeks or a few months - at most. The empty balloon made more sense.

Talk about gullibility. There's also a fellow named Arthur Ray, a mega-promoter of a fantasy that he calls" vision quest" that for upward of $10,000 he will literally roast you with heated rocks in a tent in Sedona, Ariz., to purge you of toxic invaders of your mind and body. His latest venture ended with three deaths among the 21 persons rushed to the hospital by emergency crews. Did some really believe they would survive the ordeal to help them overcome claustrophobia? You bet.

Also, despite the proven lies from the right-wing megaphones, there are still a sizable number of gullible folks who do not hesitate to believe that the earth is flat or that melting icebergs do not affect sea levels. The fiction may be stranger than the truth, but it sells to a wider audience, which is how decisions are influenced in the media. The once sacred network evening news reports are now limited to 22 minutes, some of which are superficially dedicated to whatever fantasies we are expected to believe. (Two minutes for the latest jobless figures? Ninety seconds for the hokum that health care reform is either dead or now ready for passage, depending on which lobbyist source is dishing it out?) And the Sunday morning panels have little more depth than boring coffee klatches. I confess: I don't think George Will, Cokie et al are ready for their own compelling reality show.)

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures upstage the fantasy hours on TV with harsh numbers: Newspaper circulation from April through September this year fell 1o.6 pct. from a similar period in 2008. While news rooms are shrinking, we must await the next made-for-TV journey into la-la land, or at least to the breaking "news" arriving in Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room. Some situation! But I don't expect any attitude adjustments. As Norman Lear pointed out on the Huffington Post, the balloon boy's parents were seduced by the networks into believing that "they are - even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax - entitled to their 15 minutes."

With today's coverage of fantasies, it seems more like weeks.. During the Halloween season, at least we have long known that Linus's "great pumpkin" was harmless child's play.

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When politics becomes a religious experience

THE OCTOBER ISSUE of Church and State has a detailed account of the 2009 Values

Voter Summit in Washington, a sort of fun-filled, let's-show-those-godless socialists event sponsored by a number of right-wing politico-religious organizations. If that's how they want to spend a couple of days in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial, that's fine with me. Besides, we've all heard it before.

But the annual haloed conference of true believers is also an enormous magnet for the Republican Party's worst and dimmest who would doubtless be expelled from the rolls of Judeo-Christian (mostly Christian) safe passage to the next election if they didn't turn up with bless-you smiles.

I mean, this isn't a case where a GOP pol with a few battle stripes is invited to be the keynoter that would provide the big photo-op for Fox News. Rather, they eagerly arrive en masse to see and be seen. All leaves are cancelled, even if it means giving up a brother-in-law's funeral or a day at the races to be counted at the conference. In return, their pictures are posted in the program and can be quite heartwarming for those who are deeply attached to these sorts of family reunions.

Check them out: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader John Boehner, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, ex-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, ex-presidential-candidate Mitt Romney, ex-Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, ex Miss California candidate Carrie Prejean, Bill O'Reilly and, of course, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. There were many more, but you get the point. All of these folks have bags and will travel without much encouragement. There was one glaring exception: Sarah Palin, who tentatively agreed to come, was a no-show.

When you hear the damning comments from these speakers, it only gets worse. I've picked out a few from the magazine's report. (The magazne is published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.)

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: "Keep the faith, and have heart, because remember, God is the God of all. He's the God of the White House, of the Congress, of state capitols, of school board meetings, city council meetings, all of it." (Does anybody doubt that Pawlenty is running for president on the God ticket?)

Blackwell: Calling upon his audience to convert Americans to fundamentalism, he declared: "If we don't do it, America in its third century will be redefined." (And I thought we were fighting religious fundamentalists in the Middle East!)

Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey: Calling Obama the "abortion president," Smith complained: "I believe Obamacare represents the greatest threat since Roe Vs. Wade itself."

Ok, so we have the issues laid out for the 2012 presidential race - and sooner: Anti health care reform, anti stimulus package, anti abortion, anti moderate-to-left politicians and pro-fear of "socialism" and Big Brother.

As Frank Rich aptly pointed out in his Sunday New York Times essay, the war in Afghanistan is now costing us $2.6 billion a month. Let us pray that the religious conservatives will take note of that when they complain about the financial burdens that we are placing on the next generation.