The lame post-Scalia hacks.

Did you ever think there were so many hacks and quacks among us from still-breathing Republican politicians to, say, Plain Dealer columnist Kevin O'Brien, who want to prevent President Obama from replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia?

Claiming constitutional insights that escape many of us, they insist that a lame-duck president should not do what the U.S. Constitution requires him to do.  It's their tiresome assault on Obama from the first day he stepped into office 7.5 years ago.

Never mind.  It's a big leap  from  lame-duck Obama to the lame-brains on the right.  But a democracy guarantees rightists safe, if silly,  passage for it.

Wordsmith McCarthy's untrustable dictionary

It was not a good week for words in the political arena.   Let me show you:

Kevin McCarthy, a minor league prospect to succeed Speaker John Boehner, described Hillary Clinton as "untrustable".   Even if you grant the  guy from California some rein as a wordsmith,  it may not guarantee him that he will be promoted. Indeed, some of his colleagues in the House prefer to call him a pleasant "hack".

Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson, a soft- voiced hard rightest,  warned New Hampshire voters that America is heading toward Nazi control in the highest places. "If you go back and look at the  history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts,it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech," he said.  But he controlled  his own thoughts when he only implied that President Obama was  the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. "I'm not going to go into that," he said. "I think that example is pretty clear."

Jeb! Bush disappointed those who believed he had a chance to be the only sane candidate in the GOP field  because of his dynastic genes, skipped a definitive response on gun control in the wake of the Oregon massacre  by saying, '"We're in difficult times in our country ... Stuff happens".   Jeb!  is new at the presidential campaign game and needs a lot more work on bumper sticker neologisms.

John Kasich, soldiering on and on for an American Miracle  despite his two pct. approval rating in the national polls, mixed his own brand of hard-shell conservatism  with cautious pragmatism as a gun-rights advocate by dodging the issue of gun control:  "Stripping law-abiding citizens of their guns, I just don't know.  I don't believe it would get the job done.  I just don't."  As a Plunderbund writer reported, guv, "Never mind that nobody serious on this issue is suggesting we strip law-abiding citizens of their guns."    Time for Kasich to get back, in his prosaic words,  to "leading America back to prosperity".

Finally, can't ignore the wisdom of Plain Dealer columnist  Kevin O'Brien, a guardian of the Chicken Coop Fringe, who believes the GOP needs to pursue its destiny with a kick -ass conservative to succeed Boehner,  who got too little "rope"  in  defining the GOP's  pit bull playbook.

O'Brien's soaring  recommendations included devout conservative  Rep. Jim Jordan,  the Ohio farm resident who now leads the untrustable GOP's Freedom Caucus - another neologism that connects a pair of mutually exclusive words on Capitol Hill,where dictionaries  are seldom found open..  .

PD's O'Brien: No escape from the fringe's lunacy

Kevin O'Brien, the Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page editor, wrote that  U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder "lives and breathes racial politics" and that the Justice Department is "racially obsessed".    These wicked insights from the leaning ivory tower of Planet PD were sent to the reader  in O'Brien's screed about the clearance of Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

And whose investigation cleared the officer of guilt?  Oh.  The "racially obsessed" Justice Department!

I must tell you, folks, when weirdness and non sequiturs are permitted by press freedom - which I stoutly favor - you must grudgingly defend O'Brien, a fringe columnist, for being a reckless fool in disseminating his op-ed page crap.

There have been a number of occasions when I've been tempted to respond to O'Brien's right-wing notions simply because they in no way qualify as worthy of serious  discussion in the biggest newspaper in the state.  But journalism has many faults today, so I've backed off to leave  other offended readers to gasp at one of the PD's higher titled editorial page writers.  I used to think he performed only as the court jester , but I've concluded that the guy really believes everything that he writes.  Even when he personally warned me back  in my days as a newspaperman that when America's powerful enemies reached  our  shores journalists would be the first to be seized. Or, on another occasion,  that an uninspected  major bridge collapsed because we gave the feds too much to do.  And today we shiver when somebody mentions that  Louie Gohmert is  in our midst.

So I can only report that his long rant against what he considers to be racially based injustices against white police officers failed to tell us of the feds' documented instances of Ferguson's  institutional racial bias:   Blacks  stopped in traffic without cause; the top court clerk (since finally fired)  sending emails casting President Obama as a chimpanzee or giving a black woman an award for crime-prevention for having an abortion.  Or official indifference to higher traffic fines levied on blacks,   and other evidence  of an imbalance in carrying out the system of justice.

What about it, Kevin? Will that be included in your next column?.

As one who married into a fine Irish family, I can swear that the elders knew something about bias,  too. Like signs  that said "Irish need not apply".  Or another that I remember:  "Machine Gun Kelly was not an Italian."

In O'Brien's own city, the anti-Irish feeling was rampant in my days of covering mayoral elections there.  As a couple of bar stoolers complained to me, there are too damn many Carneys, Feighans, Hagans and Corrigans thriving in the shadows of the Mother Church and running the city!

 Funny,they didn't mention O'Brien. Sorry Kevin, you didn't make the cut.

The rightwing era of the NoBamans

Reposted from Plnderbund



As we're sure you're  aware of by now,   the White House is in the merciless throes of  the NoBama plague that has had everyone on edge.  For six years, the president has faced assaults from the NoBama GOP that will feverishly  grow  for another couple of years.  Even the party's newly minted African-American Democrat-turned-Republican , Ben Carson, a doctor from South Carolina of all places, has added to his  conservative star power  by accusing Obama of presiding over worsening race relations,which takes a lot of white guys off the hook, right?

Keep an eye on him.  He's an author, essayist and opponent of Obamacare who figures to get royal treatment  by his party.  There's already a "Run, Ben, Run" national presidential  draft movement under way .

But if you've been too busy to notice the rise of the NoBama phenomenon,  the right-wing pundits will hammer it into your consciousness.  Up in Cleveland, for example, a VIP Plain Dealer  editor/columnist showers NoBama thunderbolts from his aerie high atop the Ivory Tower.

Oddly enough, NoBama Kevin O'Brien's  column this week  led the reader over a path of direct orders to the NoBamans in Congress to stonewall the president's proposed appointments unless he cancels  his immigration plans (as if this crowd hasn't thought of it already!).  He wanted to punish Obama for "posterity".  I'm sure he knows his own choir well.

But wait, he is only warming up, and what comes next is an astonishing leap of  logic from a guy who is  offended by a president trying to execute  immigration reforms that have long been stalled in the Republican  Tea Party House.  For this disconnect, he singles out Congresswoman Marcia  Fudge, Democrat    from  Northeastern Ohio, archly accusing her of being "irresponsible"   for saying that Ferguson was a "miscarriage of justice".

From his perch, he didn't know how Fudge could possibly reach that conclusion from  her district 500 miles from Ferguson.

But since we're only talking about distance here and not of the right or wrong of the grand jury decision, I suspect your draconian dictates to Congress, Kevin,  have little force inasmuch as you live 363 driving miles from Washington.  So I am a tad impressed by such Palin-like  powers that enable you to see Capitol Hill from your front porch.

Whatever happened to El Nino?

Polar vortex, did someone call it?  The icy burden of zero-dipping weather, I mean.  In America, where we must have names and explanations for everything, the term was just one more blank in the pre-millennial dictionary in my head. And we had long thought that with El Nino, we had heard  everything there was to know about crazy weather.

(Along with the thousands of flight cancellations and dead batteries, PV aIso will lead to friendly approaches by folks blithely asking: "Is it cold enough for you?"  I have yet to figure out an appropriate response.)

The media loves freaky weather.  Headline writers can top stories with "Brrrr..."  or "city digs out"  - observations that do not require advanced journalism degrees. And then there was the news  editor across the room from me who who lived for the moment that we would get a photo of  an old woman, head scarf flat out and a twisted umbrella,  bent forward against the wind!

The interesting  non-confrontational thing about freaky weather is that nobody can trace it to the liberal media.  Can't happen when nature takes over. No risks that anybody will turn off the TV or cancel a newspaper subscription over sub-zero reports. And although the TV meteorologist  commands the screen with weird looking maps (a benefit I never enjoyed growing up in a frigid hill town)  their boasts of being first with the stories lose some credibility when you consider that all of the reports arrive from the same  National Weather Service.

At the same time, we've noticed that the climate deniers are stomping with finger-pointing delight to the minus-30s in some northern states.  Numbing evidence, they'll  tell you, with anecdotal science to satisfy their spinning.The Plain Dealer's Kevin O'Brien, the very conservative editorial page columnist, went to great, if fog-bound, lengths to satirically link an ice-trapped ship in Anarctica to the myth of climate change.

In my old town, they closed the mile-long east-west Main Street in snowy weather so we kids could belly slam our sleds at the top of the hill and burst all the way down  to the other end below.   If we had only known about polar vortex as the source of our pleasure!    But now that we've mentioned Newt Gingrich's attempt to be cool with soy latte, I wonder if the TV millennials with their weather maps will  accept me as a senior  observer if I mention polar vortex to them with a  wind chill factor thrown in to be even cooler. Better yet, frozen.  

From today's news heap, Kasich pleads ignorance

Today's latest news, Hot off the Mess:

Leave it to our governor to produce another Kasich Kerfuffle in response to a question following his speech to the Cleveland City Club on Wednesday.  It occurred when a woman in the audience asked him whether he agreed with fellow-Republican Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike Dewine's fellowship with some other Republican AG's in a lawsuit involving employers and contraceptives insurance.

Dewine has never let anybody forget since the day he ran for the office that he wants to slay the Obamacare dragon and has channeled it with religious fervor into an assault on the legality of whether employers should include contraceptives in their employes' insurance coverage.

It's been in all  of the papers.  The governor, however, batted away the issue by saying he had not heard of the Dewine gambit and ducked the question.  Besides, as the governor has boasted, he never reads newspapers because sometimes they leave him unhappy.

* * * * *

Is it just me,  or do you find it a bit odd that two obstinate anti-gun control congressmen will be the featured guests at a dinner celebrating an  historic Republican icon?

Yep, that's a reference, folks,  to the annual Summit County Republican Lincoln Day dinner. L-I-N-C-O-L-N.  The anointed guests are Ohio Reps. Jim Renacci and  Dave Joyce,   sworn opponents of restrictions on guns.

Is this Lincolnian crowd, who will be dining quite well the night of the repast, April 27, aware of how Lincoln's life was abruptly ended?   Was it from the gun of John Wilkes Boothe, the Confederacy sympathizer?

Oh, to be fair, maybe they missed the movie.

* * * * *

We close with  this bit of gloomy insight into the American Century:

According to the respected Public Policy Polling (PPP), 20 pct. of registered Republicans believe President Obama is the Antichrist. ( 6 pct. of Democrats agree!)  37 pct. of Republicans believe global warming is a hoax; 7 pct. says the moon landing was a hoax.

In my poll of today's Plain Dealer op-ed page, one right-wing columnist (Kevin O'Brien), wrote that the Connecticut gun-control law was"ridiculously restrictive"  because nothing could have prevented the Newtown massacre.    He also threw in the notion  that "teaching children is a side job for public schools".

On the other hand, the Beacon Journal reported that charter schools - the answer by the governor  and his ilk to creating an enlightened nation - can expect a dismal report card from the Ohio Department of Education's new grading standards next year.   Get this: 89 pct. of tax-supported charter schools will get an"F" for their graduation rate; public schools, 7 pct. would receive an "F".  Who knew?  








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What's that? Obama wants another crisis?

The always-amusing Kevin O'Brien, the Plain Dealer's way-over-on-the-right deputy editorial page editor, today joined  those who are bashing President Obama's initiative on the gun issue.  Ignoring the NRA's blitzkrieg  against Obama,   O'Brien's quaint spin is that the president "doing his best to create a crisis" and unsurpsingly for Kevin,  worked in something about Obama's support of abortion.

That's as far as I got before turning to the comic pages to justify my cost of the day's paper. A fair question:  Do you want to believe O'Brien,  or do you want to believe the folks on the other side, including Ronald Reagan, Antonin Scalia, Rupert Murdoch,  Colin Powell and all of those law-enforcement agencies?

NOTE:  My column on the Ohio political races has been posted on Plunderbund

At least one positive side to Romney's gaffes?

Growing up in the newspaper business I was occasionally reminded by some older pros that it was bad manners - ungentlemanly, really - to  criticize other members of the press.  Newspapers generally are not comfortable about negative references to their line of work, particularly self-reported negative references to their line of work

So I will qualify today's Grumpy Abe's wisdom by saying it is not intended to be criticism but rather  entry level reporting about views expressed by another columnist.

FACT:  Such conservative stalwarts as Karl Rove and  Charles Krauthammer were stunned by Road Scholar Mitt Romney's widely reported gaffes on his overseas trip.  Rove said Mitt blew it; Krauthammer found the Republican candidate's verbal behavior  "incomprehensible," "unbelievable" and "beyond human comprehension."

But in fairness, I should also tell you that at least one editorial board conservative columnist at the Plain Dealer lauded Romney and blamed  his image problems on the always suspect national media.

So here, without further comment, is the conclusion of Kevin O'Brien, while admitting that one of my bad habits, culturally speaking,  is to occasionally read from the bottom up:

"The national media can't get over Obama, so they'll never be your friends.

"Final scorecard:  "You [Romney] visited allies we've badly neglected these last three years, said things that made sense and offended people who don't like you, anyway.

"Good road trip."

Take that, libs  Krauthammer and Rove!

O'My, O'Brien sinks to new depths

DURING MY YEARS AS a newspaperman, I tried to follow the rule of a wise old friend who said it did not serve our business well to criticize a fellow journalist. It made some sense, at least to those of us in that line of work. But a recent column by Kevin O'Brien in the Plain Dealer forces me to break the rule. O'Brien is the paper's deputy editorial page editor and is entitled to say whatever the hell he pleases so long as the paper's editors don't mind suffering the embarrassment of his mindless gibberish.

His latest opus is a further grisly attack on the health care reform bill that finally passed after more than a year of ugly infighting. Granted, there are some reasonable folks who find fault in the historic initiative by the Obama Administration. O'Brien, an overheated ultra-conservative with a deceptively benign smile, is not satisfied with mere disagreement. He writes:

"The Democrats in Congress and the White House have forced upon the United States of America a federal health care plan designed for people who are too stupid, incompetent and weak to manage their own affairs."

If he were a boxer, those callous words would have cost him the round - and maybe the whole match - for hitting well below the belt. (What, Kevin, is there to manage for someone out of work with no medical coverage and an ailing child? An ailing wife? I know. That's not your problem. Robespierre couldn't have said it with less heart.) The column drew a number of letters complaining about his reckless logic. But I doubt whether that is a problem or him. For guys like O'Brien, it's usually all about getting attention, like a cranky child tugging on mother's skirt. That places him in the back-row Glenn Beck pew. Unfortunately, his title also bears the imprimatur of the leading Northeast Ohio newspaper, which must share the responsibility. I trust the PD won't defend him with the standard reply that, like it or not, O'Brien does get an opportunity to speak for conservatives and secures wider readership on the op-ed page.

If so, what an awful smack-down of conservatism!

A big mop for Wacko America

MOPPING UP:

  Although it would be an insult to serious forensics, do you believe that if Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell debated, they would both lose? 

                                                                        * * *

A salute to the GOP fixer pro tem, Dick Cheney,  for having a practical response to the right-wing furor over President Obama's socialistic teleprompter.  If you saw the former Veep's  talk to the American Enterprise Institute, you'll note that he dispatched the hated teleprompter the old-fashioned way.  With head down and nose pointed down to the lectern,  he read every word from his printed text.  Or was it a hidden conservative  teleprompter? 

                                                                       * * * 

       The roar of the anti-global warming crowd (read: anti-science)  continues unabated, raising the specter of soaring fuel costs managed by that tyrant, President Obama.   The fuel cost warning isn't new; the alarmist slandering of Obama on the environment by the hard core Republican base on the right went into high gear with his election last November.  As vitriolic as the attacks on environmental concerns might be, some spectators are also reduced to sophomoric cutesy pie humor.  Examples abound.  But the most convenient one unfortunately arrived on my breakfast table yesterday from Plain Dealer columnist Kevin O'Brien, an apparent firm believer in church but not state.  Complaining about Obama's projected fuel-efficiency standards, O'Brien blithely  opined: "Obama likes the idea because it is  his."  

 

         Kevin, my boy, where have you been?  Obama's "idea" of fuel conservation  has been around for a long time with variations on the same theme.  A friendly reminder:   You like the thoughts in your column because they are yours, and I like the thoughts in my blogs because they are mine.   That is hardly something I learned in my high school science class.   By my standards, it's a tested evolutionary theory, if you know what I mean.  

    

                                                                   * * * 

With nearly a month until the Akron mayoral recall election, brace yourself for a furious assault on Don Plusquellic with the sort of reckless statements that appeared in a letter to the  Beacon Journal from Warner Mendenhall's neighborhood pal.  Among the badly aimed shots was a new one to me:  That Plusquellic was responsible for a public  school system  that is a "sham, "  thereby forcing "good citizens" to pay "exorbitant fees above their property taxes to send their children to private schools."  Excuse me, but when did the mayor become the CEO of the public school system that has always been the responsibility of the system's  superintendent and duly elected school board? Folks, we're in for a siege of revisionist history, I'm afraid.   

My vote is for Pericles

IGNORING the worldwide jubilation over Barack Obama's victory, the hardcore conservative ideologues have already set their agenda to take back the country from the jowls of socialism and a lot of other nastiness  that Obama  - they claim  - will bring to  America's Judgment Day.  It's pretty much what I expected, right down to bravura calls for rearming their side before the nation vanishes from the globe.  But I at least hoped that the mourning cycle  would not begin  with such dark overtones for a few days to allow all of us to get some sleep.

Conservatives?  That is, eh, too liberal a description these days.  What this gang is talking about are truly conservative conservatives, which is probably how Attila vetted his volunteers before another battle.  The leader of the conscripts in this instance, as always, is Rush Limbaugh, who shamelessly borrowed Obama's battle call  of "Yes we can" for what he says is the "Reestablishment of Principled Conservatism".  I confess there are times when I wonder about the meaning of such overreaching language.  

Then there is, I noticed, the raised arm of Grover Norquist who has built  a fortune on being an anti-tax lobbyist.  To him, Obama  is nothing more than "John Kerry with a tan."  I was going to ignore these whiners until I popped open today's Plain Dealer to discover on the op-ed page another desperate (truculent, really) column by Kevin O'Brien, the paper's deputy editorial page director.  O'Brien has a long history of whining about liberals, Iraq war opponents and immorality who once opined that the reason that the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis as the result of neglect was that government had too much to do these days to pay close attention to bridge defects.  But in his super-hawkish wisdom he did try to comfort me when I complained about George Bush's reckless plunge into Iraq by suggesting that I should be thankful that the president was trying to protect me. Must be something to that.  Hey, I'm still on my feet, aren't I?

Today's sermon from the O'Brien  Pulpit was that conservatives should not waste a moment in regrouping  their  forces in nanoseconds after Obama's acceptance speech, using such inspirationat gems as "ACORN got its man, but its voters for hire will be disappointed...".  Or that Obama will now have to make decisions, "something he has never, ever done..."  Or that Obama is a "blank slate".  Could the slate be blank if it exposed Obama as a guy who "never, ever" made decisions?  Jeez.  

But in setting up a recruiting office for conservatives on the op-ed page of the Plain Dealer, O'Brien saved his best effort for the final paragraphs, to wit:

"Now, stand for what's right, in season and out of season, and have faith that no matter whether it is rewarded by victories in elections, that steadfastness  will be rewarded with the knowledge that we have done our best.

"Above all, be of good cheer.  We have a country to save, and until the last conservative draws his final breath, that will be our brief.  Surrender never saved a country and moping never won a convert."

It doesn't quite come up to Pericles' funeral oration, but I'll make allowances for his sense of despair as he awaits the dawn.  

 

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