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.

Dowd: Can anybody love the white guys?

We hope Maureen Dowd got home from the office OK after her scathing attack on white guys in her latest column. More specifically Republican white guys.  Having written earlier about them myself as a peculiar breed of Rambos in a less than complimentary way,   we were happy to find Dowd in an especially hissy state when she wrote:

"The Mayans were right, as it turns out , when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world:  the GOP universe of arrogant, uptight , entitled, bossy,  retrogressive white guys."

I would have added "pugnacious" and "dyspeptic'', but under deadline pressure you can't think of everything.

Dowd was writing about the consequences of Mitt Romney's  disastrously produced presidential campaign that ran aground long before Election Day. (By the fateful day, it is always too late to do anything about it!)  Along the way, Mitt & Co. seemed to go out of the way to satisfy the predominant Caucasion brand of the party  while the GOP stagehands like Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted were enlisted to shrink the Obama turnout by minorities.

While all of this was going on, did no one in the GOP camp notice that Obama was surging ahead with  the same campaign organization that had earned him his  earlier triumph.  Within a year or so, his organizers were setting up shop in Ohio to replicate the first campaign.  So confident of winning was Team Romney that  it didn't come close to catching up with Obama's  textbook  ground organization when Mitt's operatives arrived in the Buckeye State a couple of years later.

(And didn't they make fun of Obama's community organizing work in Chicago?)

Aside to Maureen Dowd:  Save your breath.  White guys, unlike more socially adjusted white males, never listen to anybody anyway.

Finally, the circus leaves town!

THE TRAVELING CIRCUS has moved on from Iowa with the loss of only one of its performers (Pawlenty), leaving behind a big task for the pooper-scoopers. The headlines and talk shows today hail Michele Bachmann as the "Straw Queen", her euphoric moment of conquest of a wobbly cast of low-wire male candidates.

Where-to from here now that the Tea Partiers and social conservatives have had their say (and their way) with what was once called the Republican Party? Who can say ? The elephants are tiring quickly from overwork and the clowns are anything but funny. The only news that came out of the fury was the report that Bachmann left the debate stage during each commercial break to redo her makeup. Oh, and Maureen Dowd insists she saw Mitt Romney's hair move.

As the dismal circus continues well into next year, shouldn't we be asking more pertinent questions for the remaining candidates who seem wedded to each other in rhetoric and vision to the extent that, as it has been said many times, there's not a dime's worth of difference:

*Do you believe that corporations are people?

*Do you believe that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional?

*How much time do you spend each day praying that President Obama resigns?

*Have you ever considered secession for your state?

*Do you believe that water and air can purify themselves without environmental regulations?

*Have you ever voted for, or supported, the raising of the debt ceiling?

*Has your spouse ever described gays as "barbarians"?

*As a a gay marriage opponent, do you know the difference between a napkin and a paper towel? A wet blanket and an empty suit?

*Would it offend you to be called, in Clarence Darrow's term for William Jennings Bryan, "the idol of all morondom."?

*Can you tell the audience what the capital of Des Moines is?

*Are you now, or have you ever been, clinically insane?

Each candidate much answer all of the above questions directly without crib notes.

On with the show!

The Fellowship is more than fellowship

MAUREEN DOWD'S reference to the "C Street house" in D.C. didn't quite identify it as a house of sinful repute, but played it on a broader scale as a "monument to Republican hypocrisy." In case you missed the column, the place in question is a darkly created religious/political safe house for true believers, straying Capitol Hill pols and whatever else the traffic will bear. Taken altogether, the clan is familiarly known as The Fellowship and its disciples have some important adhesives for their cause: they seek unlimited power, worldwide influence and the daily double of Jesus and political conservatism.

Among the current residents of the right-wing warren are Sen. John Ensign, who sought shelter from the locusts of adultery, and Sen. Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, a deeply religious conservative ob-gyn and deacon who was on hand to counsel the Nevada senator, or whatever went on. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who strayed from the path of righteousness to saunter south of the border, is also a member of The Fellowship. So are countless other Washington evangelically-inclined achievers. There have even been reports it is a great place to bring your lady when day is done as though it were a far-from-home Waikiki Beach house. As a senator, even Hillary Clinton reflected favorably on the group's mission to spiritualize the world in the context of its own fervid dogma. President after president, including Barack Obama, have shown up at the annual prayer breakfast sponsored by The Fellowship. To ignore it is to expose yourself to disdain or worse in your critics' prayers.

The Fellowship is headed by an influential evangelical operative, Doug Coe, who has been aided in the movement by such household Nixon/Reagan luminaries as Chuck Colson and Ed Meese. The group has served as a conduit for young college-fresh evangelicals to enter government at various levels and also as a guest stop for world leaders. It makes allowances for dictators who have no interest in Christianity but are drawn to the tactics and the kind of covenants the Fellowship's leadership finds effective in the Mafia, Hitler and their fellow-travelers.

Although it has been around for decades, it's reasonable to ask why the Fellowship is becoming a topic du jour on the Potomac. For one thing, it has obviously increased its clout on Capitol Hill with folks who carry its banner. The breath and depth of the movement far exceeds normal church involvement. That much was made clear enough in a book published last year titled: "The Family: the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American Power." Its author is Jeff Sharlet, an associate research scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media. Sharlet lived at the Fellowship's estate in Arlington. Va., to witness a remarkable religious movement that is organized in prayer cells at the highest governmental and corporate levels, meeting secretly while luring likely prospects to what the movement calls "Biblical capitalism".

Sharlet writes: "The Family (fellowship) maintains a closely guarded database of associates, members, and key men, but issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities." But there is evidence that in its carefully guarded way, it has demonstrated considerable political influence in its lifetime, often without fanfare. One example: Former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird helped convince Gerald Ford that, Sharlet tells us, "Richard Nixon deserved not just Christian forgiveness but also a legal pardon." On the other hand, some of the members' lifestyles are deliciously bizarre, as was that of one religiously dutiful chap who wore a plastic get-up on his wrist that he called a "masturband". Sharlet writes that the fellow allowed himself to wear the band to tell him how long he had refrained from masturbating.

The author gives us detailed view of The Fellowship behemoth and it qualifies as recommended serious reading by anyone who wants a much closer look at its intricate subterranean quest for worldwide power that can only be achieved by recruiting the already-powerful. And, as Sharlet

writes of The Fellowship, "it is the story of an American fundamentalism, gentle and militant, conservative and revolutionary, that has been hiding in plain sight all along."

All the news that's fit to outsource

IF, INDEED, bad news comes in threes, then I will offer these examples from the week end as supporting evidence: one is from the NY Times, one from the Plain Dealer, one from the Beacon Journal - which could only mean that I'm back to the sobering topic of the decline of America's newspapers. 

First, Maureen Dowd's Sunday column in the Times.  She  told of an enterprising lunatic  in California  with an outrageous plan to cover your latest church luncheon program or library booksale with an online surrogate "reporter"  based in India.   Yep, his name is James Macpherson and he boasts of creating "glocal" news from his home in Pasadena. That's a McNews word that fits his claim to pioneering  something he calls Internet-centric news from his Pasadena Now editorial (?) offices.  A former garment salesman who outsourced his stuff to Vietnam, Macpherson told Dowd  that he will outsource news with foreign-based stringers who are paid $7.50 per 1,000 words.  It will be a simple matter, he says, to provide those content providers with telephone numbers, email addresses and anything else they need  to report whatever is news in our city.  If newspapers claim they can't afford to pay yesterday's staff, then Macpherson says he will pay them the way shoes , made much more cheaply in China,  are imported into our shopping malls.  From where I sit, the only difference is that you can  try on the shoes before you buy them.  You never know what you might be getting from an unprofessional stringer halfway around a very troubled world.   Macpherson's goals sound like a hellish way to make a living.  But shrinkage is really what the traditional media are all about these days.  I can hear a lot of copycats already  bestirring themselves into gasping "Yeah, Yeah! I can do it, too!" You heard it here second.  

In another piece, PD columnist  Elizabeth Sullivan writes with intelligence and grace about the death of her journalist mother while lamenting the dismantling of today's newspapers.  Sullivan notes that the PD is in the process  of expanding projected layoffs in the newsroom from 38 to 50.  She writes:

"That's 50 of my friends. Fifty people who work hard every day to deliver something meaningful, contextual, important and unique to hundreds of thousands of readers who don't have the time, skills or inclination to do the digging themselves."  (The layoffs are expected to be announced this week and you can imagine the tension as the straws are drawn.)  Sullivan is hoping to delay the inevitable but newspaper ownership today will hear none of it.  It has been part of the problem, retreating meekly and greedily in the face of heavy competition from the Internet.  To what end?  Profit?  Survival?  So far, the front offices have yet to come up with an answer other than to lend a hand to their eventual demise with less quality, less competence and less commitment to the things that newspapers are supposed to do best. 

Finally, with the Cleveland Cavaliers showing championship  potential, Sunday's BJ reported the game just up the road from Akron with the Associated Press rather than its own beat reporter.  Nothing more to add about that. On the other hand, it may be a rung or two higher than game coverage from that person in India at $7.50 per.