The GOP Bottom feeders are in full voice

Since the earliest moments when Barack Obama  - he of the darker skin - entered the Oval Office, the bottom feeders of the Republican Party have denied that he was elected by The People.  Nearly  two terms later, they're still at it with Sen.  Mitch McConnell providing the hapless  face of his political class.

Never has that been more evident than their hollowed-out  opposition to a replacement in the President's  final year in office.  The orchestrated  off-key reaction to Obama's  nomination of Merrick Garland to  the U.S. Supreme Court  the morning after Tuesday's round of primaries revived the notion that Obama somehow mythically botched the U.S Constitution by stealing into the office when the voters weren't looking.

With McConnell leading the choir, his senators chanted that the next court appointment should come from The People,. a majority of whom have already spoken  in favor of appointment this year. In his own humorless way, the Senate leader continues to be staring at the shadowy walls of Plato's cave.

Crouching forward as the Republican National Committee Chairman, Reince Priebus mumbled that Obama was doing a "disservice" to the voters by trying to upstage the next president.  Priebus, who seldom makes sense in his responses to easy questions,  accused Obama of attempting to "tip  the balance of the court with a liberal justice in the eleventh hour of his presidency" .

And Ohio Sen . Rob Portman, who insists he's a "commonsense " conservative,  opposed an appointment his year - a year in which his own job will be severely tested by former Ohio Democratic Gov.  Ted Strickland.  "I believe the best thing for the country is to trust the American people and allow them to weigh in on the issue".  "Weighing in",   of course, is something Portman, whose greatest strength is  piloting the Koch brothers ship in Ohio,  is rarely inclined  to do.

Folks, these bottom feeders are not only intellectually corrupt but rather just plain politically stupid.  And they wonder how Donald Trump has gotten this far!

Will this turtle lay an egg, too?

As most people probably know,  turtles - among the slowest moving creatures -   lay eggs. Even slower, however, is the GOP Senate boss  who has now stalled a vote on Loretta Lynch for attorney general for more than 5 months because of a sex trafficking bill held back by anti-abortion politics.

But while the Senate turtle is having his say to prove that Republicans clearly  know  how to govern,  he could wind up  laying his own egg by inciting  the wrath of his opponents.

But his stone-walling has been shared so far by Ohio Sen.Rob Portman, who will only say he's still "weighing whether to vote on the bill." Five months, Rob!  Five months!.

Between McConnell and Portman,  I would have to think about it a long time before giving either one the edge for procrastination.  Portman already is being targeted by women's and minority groups. ( By the way, that's the turtle below.)

To McConnell, the Woeful Walrus Award

To memorialize   the  35,000 walrus who moved to the Alaskan shore for safe ground from their melting off-shore ice base, we are urging friends of these forlorn creatures to join us in awarding Senate minority  leader and climate change denier Mitch McConnell the first Grumpy Abe WOEFUL WALRUS award.

McConnell conceded that "I'm not a scientist", which is the preamble to many deniers' responses to questions about global warming before they damn the idea altogether. The senator needs an asterisk in history, and this would be a good start.  As Lewis Carroll once quoted the Walrus:

"The time has come to talk of many things: Of shoes -  and ships - and sealing-wax - of cabbages and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - And whether pigs have wings."

Nonsensical, of course.  But a perfect fit for Mitch, (although the sea is not yet boiling hot) who says a lot of nonsensical things.   Bottom photo is the one with the senator.     

New Yorker mag shows us Obama medicating McConnell.

The New Yorker has often used its cover for satirical  illustrations, but none more clever than the latest depicting President Obama spooning a dose of healh care to  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In lower right (not a pun, but could be)  is half of Speaker John Boehner's face.   ENJOY!  I did .

A liveried John Boehner doing his thing for Tea Party

It hasn't been a good week for John Boehner, the Tea Party's liveried delivery man in its   stable.  In fact, it has been an awful week for the in-name-only House speaker. He has become the poster child for subservience  to a modern political scourge.

This has been coming on for some time since Mitch McConnell declared five years ago that his first order of business was to make Barack Obama a one-term president.  We all know how that turned out, leaving Obama's (hence, Obamacare) enemies to explain to the white guys how an African-American got into the White House without breaking a lock.

Not that Boehner  will admit his  obsequious dead-end role in the service of the brutal right-wing House caucus.  He needs his old title, and the perks, even if he is forced to blackmail the sane folks with a threat to take down the whole government with him. (He really can't - but at least it will be  shabby performance art that might warrant his survival a bit longer.)

Columnist Dana Milbank refers to the speaker's  abject surrender  to the loonies as "followership" and he is a lot closer to the scene than I  am.  Boehner, southwest Ohio's gift to Tea Party-style governance, is obsessed with killing Obamacare, which he calls a train wreck. In this respect, he's fully supported by the 80 or so Tea Partyers in the House who have the finest health  insurance that they could enact for themselves.

How could Boehner be so obtuse to judge an act that has yet to be tried?  He's not dumb, which means he wants all of us to fear the fictional Wabash Cannonball roaring down the tracks.   As hyperbole, train wreck conjures up bloody messes.

Trouble is, neither Boehner nor  the Tea Party's other minions on Capitol Hill give much of a damn about how history will judge them after their duties in the stable finally come to an end.  In other words, you can't insult, ridicule, blaspheme nor mention how their grandchildren might have to explain them someday. They are short-term historical figures.

But for those hundreds of millions of us who must live in their midst, a government shutdown would be the real train wreck. And that ain't fiction, folks.

McConnell politicking in the depths of Hell.

That's Mitch McConnell, of course, the leader of the 12  Hounding Fathers  who have decided to filibuster the background check vote rather than allow all of the other senators to vote on it.  If you want the most dramatic evidence of voter fraud that spiritually drives so many Republicans these days, this will do until something more nauseating  comes along.  Mitch is up for reelection in 2014 and he needs all of the Tea Partyers that he can appease, even if 80 to 90 pct. of Americans support background checks. I will b e kind and merely refer to him as a thoroughly disgusting human being.  Shouldn't all civilized people be rising and shouting:  "We want our country back!"?

Today's GOP: a group of leaderless old white guys

The Obama Inaugural festivities are now over and the reviews are in.  While many national pundits  parse every sentence in the president's rousing speech, one thing is certain:  For the grim Republicans and their fellow-snivelers, there is no joy in Mudville.  The Grand Old Party  is neither grand nor a party.  It is rather a chaotic collection of old white guys in vain search of a leader.    Twice defeated by an African-American Democrat  - the latest by  5 million votes! - who has deftly connected with a new generation of voters,  woebegone Republicans have only a beleaguered John Boehner to try to put his House in order in a cave teeming with Tea Partyers.  

Still, there is no evidence that Obama's opponents have learned anything  as they whimper that the "foxy"  Obama  must come out of the chicken coop to meet them halfway in solving the nation's problems.  Of all things, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is demanding compromise - a word that collides with his notorious  earlier mission for his routed party after Obama's first victory:

"The single most important  thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"

The quote even made page 190 of the Mann-Ornstein best- seller, It's Even Worse than It Looks.  And that was published before  the 2012 election. Can anyone now guess what Mitch's second most important thing is?

Their  post-inaugural chorus was filled out by many of the usual tattered suspects complaining about the usual irritants that guaranteed them a shot at the usual TV cameras.  Sens. McCain and Graham, a couple of tiresome cronies  from past debacles, expressed their displeasure, to name a few.  And Wayne LaPierre, the NRA megaphone, pathetic as he is, isn't going to let anybody forget that tyrannical government is at the doorstep and you can only be saved by even arming department store mannequins.   Fox News, Rush Limbaugh  and the Tea Partyers were heaped among the vanquished.

These folks will never change.   Their work is too profitable. And as  Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing: They owe their soul to the company store.

They could only deal in playground dares as Obama reeled off his agenda that was immediately described as liberal but dealt with ideas and programs that a majority of Americans support. It's now OK to mention liberalism in polite circles. And about time! 

There was another aspect of the Inaugural that was lost in the excitement:  Mitt Romney's absence from the historic  event.  Few people asked, and most couldn't care less.  Where  was he? We learned that he was at home in California.

Watching the parade as a broadly-grinning Obama waved and Joe Biden sprinted here and there,  I tried to imagine what the scene would have been if Romney and Paul Ryan had won.  It would have been a dreadful setback for a nation whose people would have been  so well ahead of its new team: a presidential  candidate of whom his son asserted never wanted  the job anyway, and a vice president who is a disciple of Ayn Rand. Neither Mitt nor his Tonto had much to say about the dramatic change underway in America because they didn't recognize it.

 To the vanquished go the snivels. And why not?  It's the only thing that seems to make the losers happy these days.

The GOP's midsummer night's dreams

All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players...

--- Shakespeare

Of all of the charades being played in politics today, the leading entry must be the right-wing Republican choral group on Capitol Hill that is demanding a vote on a balanced budget

constitutional amendment before any agreement with President Obama on a plan to avoid default. Guys like Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell may be foolish, but they aren't stupid on their better days. You do have to wonder, however, how they intend to continue tilting windmills right up until the last seconds before the nation defaults from Wall Street to Beijing.

To remind you of the formidable task of adding an amendment to the Constitution:

It requires a two-thirds vote to pass in both houses, which would make it DOA in the Senate.

It requires the approval of three-fourths of the state legislatures.

The bad news for most of the Boehner-McConnell Republicans is that they wouldn't be around long enough to see it happen. Nor, for that matter the Ol' USA as we have come to love it. No matter. All 47 Republican senators are supporting this long day's journey into night - and many nights afterward.

So what's the point of this political theater of the absurd? There isn't any point aside from politics while the nation is held hostage.

**********

While we're on the subject of charades, I loved Gov. Kasich's official reason for not attending the forthcoming Ohio Republican Party's royal outing of the year in Cleveland - the annual dinner - coming on Friday. He has, it says here, a "scheduling conflict" in southwestern Ohio, his aides explained with a straight face. It's the most hackneyed explanation for a political no-show that the pol didn't want to attend anyway. Even in the day of Jim Rhodes, he was always out of town during civil rights programs in Columbus. He even showed up at a place where he wasn't expected.

Kasich's snub of his party, immediately set off hisses among Republicans that it again demonstrates the icy feeling between the governor and State Chairman Kevin DeWine dating back to the November campaigns. This could get interesting in a matchup of egos over who is really running the state party - or running away from it.

By the way, Kasich's sidekick, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, will be skipping the dinner, too. Another scheduling conflict. The state and county Republicans continue to look south for their after-dinner speakers. This year's state dinner will feature Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. It will be his second coming to Ohio for a free dinner. He's already appeared in the lineup of southerners who have become regulars on the dais of the Summit County GOP dinners.

**********

The Columbus Dispatch reported Sunday that Richard Cordray, former Ohio attorney general, will be nominated by President Obama to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau scheduled to open this week. But wait. The congressional Republicans have already caused Elizabeth Warren , a Harvard law professor, to withdraw from consideration for the j0b even though the bureau was her idea in the first place. Republicans stopped short of calling for a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the bureau to satisfy objections from America's financiers on Wall Street.

Ohio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown expects Cordray, among the Democratic Party's brightest stars, to be confirmed. Cordray was defeated by Mike DeWine in last Noember's Republican near sweep in Ohio as the economy played the major role.

P.S.: a GOP Constitutional Amendment against the consumer affairs bureau may still be in play.

Hubris, thy name is Mitch McConnell

(Twelfth of a series)

THAT GUY in the photo with thumbs-up glee is Sen.. Mitch McConnell of Ken-turkey. As the Senate minority leader, he is soooo proud that his GOP clan has just defeated a tax cut for the middle class. It's an historic moment for hypocritical Republicans who have built a constituency from promoting tax cuts. You'll be hearing a lot of such nonsense from wealthy political hacks like McConnell & Co. for at least two more years, so this photo will serve nicely as the party's brand. Clip and save. (Thanks to Talking Points Memo for posting this classic picture. )

When truth is the victim of political nonsense

NOW THAT THE National Republican Governors conference has ended with huzzahs for all, it can be safely reported that there are presently 126 Republicans running for president. That figure will grow when my out-of-work cousin adds his name to the list in hopes of being the party's compromise candidate on the 43rd ballot. It's silly, I know, but you have never met my cousin.

It is also being reported by Matt Drudge, who heard it from an unidentified janitor in Rupert Murdoch's office, that Sarah Palin will be offered a new multimillion dollar contract to play Florence Henderson in a reprise of The Brady Bunch, the sweet domestic assembly sometimes known as the basic "blended" family. However, in the spirit of the blend, it was considered wise not to permit teenaged Willow Palin to refer to another student as a "faggot" on Facebook while demanding that people stop dumping "shit" on her family.

Michele Bachmann reportedly is preparing a lengthy mea culpa for gossiping that President Obama's trip to the Far East was costing $200 million a day. She will confess her error, saying it was more like $400 million a day.

Mitch McConnell will finally concede that all of his talk about balancing the budget by cutting taxes has been a ruse to disguise his singular reptilian goal of burying Obama in 2012.

Actually, except for the trash-talking Willow Palin, none of the above is true. But it doesn't have to be, does it? As the recent campaign so vividly demonstrated, there are words flowing from the lips of the pols and their hustler friends that are so Pavlovian that they would give

Barnum even greater reason to shout "sucker".

If the past election proved anything it's that many voters don't hold candidates to account for their sins, even though the Christian Right claims the higher moral ground when it sends its people to the polls. Try, for example, the Florida election that elected Rick Scott governor. He's the fellow whose private career included a run-in with the Feds of biblical proportions. His health-care company, Columbia/HCA (from which he was forced to resign) paid a $1.7 billion fine for Medicare fraud. He insists that it wasn't his idea to raid the Federal treasury and promises to run Florida as a business.

You might understand now why I told you my cousin is running for president. I was only kidding. But so are all of those Republicans who say they can lower taxes, balance the budget and create jobs. What will they think of next? The fun house has gotten quite crowded, don't you think?

Out of the mouths of knaves

ADD THESE POINTS OF interest in your entertainment guide for your visit to Capitol Hill:

Meet Andy Harris, the conservative Maryland anesthesiologist, who will be going to Congress as a big winner with an anti-Obamacare campaign. At a freshman orientation meeting, he declared his confusion over why his federal health care benefits didn't kick in immediately after he was sworn-in in January instead of having him wait until February. Well, it is what it is, Doc. Maybe all of your sleep-inducing has had an effect on you, too.

Meet Sen. John Ensign, Nevada Republican, another harsh opponent of Obamacare, who accepted without protest a $960,000 earmarked grant to the University of Nevada for a primary care residency program. Ensign has opposed earmarks, too.

Meet Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose state of Kentucky has received nearly $1 million in earmarks. He now says he supports a moratorium on ....um...earmarks.

Finally, meet conservative Rep. Darrell Issa, a fun guy from California and the wealthiest congressman in the corps, who went on Rush Limbaugh's show and denounced President Obama "as one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times." When he was challenged later to put up or shut up - Rep. Dennis Kucinich was among those who joined the assault on him - Issa meekly recanted on CNN with regrets about his fumble in his own (Limbaugh's) end zone. "If I had to do it over again, I'd have parsed my words a little more carefully," he said.

"Do I think the president is personally corrupt? No. I should never have implied that or created that in a quick statement on a radio call-in."

Strange things are said with so much adrenalin flowing in the Republican ranks these days.

Change the 14th Amendment? Just another scam

IN CASE YOU HAVE been trying to dodge the thunderbolts from Fox and other Olympian gods, there's one quaking burst that you can discount as an appetite killer. It's the ridiculous effort by some congressmen and their allies who should know better (but seldom do these days) to rewrite the 14th Amendment guaranteeing birthrights. Indeed, it's a scam by Republicans planning a new Gingrich-type Contract with America after they sweep the November elections.

In this instance, the dirty work is being done by a veteran team of "mainstream" GOP plaintiffs that includes Sens. McCain (will he ever get over his humiliating defeat in 2008?) and his over-the-shoulder buddy, Lindsey Graham, as well as Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, a pathetic soul who will go down in history with far less grandeur than Colonel Sanders' fried chicken.

For good reason, none of them is talking about the geological time frame for an amendment. First, as these three amigos are saying they must have hearings, and we all know how those things go. Then it must pass both houses with a two-thirds vote, which in these times would

be akin to pushing the Queen Mary up Mt. Everest.

Then the proposed amendment would have to work its way through state legislatures for

approval while the locals are busy trying to figure out how to deal with such minor distractions as budgetary holes.

Although the Supreme Court once ruled that all of this nonsense must be completed within a "reasonable time", anybody want to define reasonable?

Folks, fools are playing us for fools. The move is aimed strictly at you-know-who with various shades of skin color other than pasty white. (Not even Boehner favors that color.) But I would bet my office computer and treasured old Steelers towel that we will have a Hispanic president long before this ploy reaches the GOP's promised land.

Three Republicans break ranks on Bush tax cuts

WHAT IN THE WORLD is going on here? It's not often that Republicans break ranks from their talking points oracles. But it is happening, folks, in the debate over exending the Bush tax cuts that have already siphoned more than $2.5 trillion (that's with a "tr") from the treasury with 52 pct. of the benefits going to the richest 5 pct. of our hard-working board room taxpayers.

Let's begin with Alan Greenspan, the craggy gravel-voiced former Fed chairman who told the Meet the Press audience that extending the cuts would be, well.. disastrous. Coming from a power peddler who once defended that Bush giveaway, that would border on heresy if not a common political flip flop. In short, Greenspan now insists the deficit cannot take a major hit like that.

Then there is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, the Virginia Rrepublican just half a shadow behind John Boehner, who said he always likes the sound of tax cuts, but admitted that "Certainly you're a going to dig the hole deeper" into the deficit.

Now comes David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, who wrote in the New York Times:"If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing." So there!

On the other hand, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the senate minority leader, went into denial with second-grade arithmetic even before the other guys showed up. "There's no evidence whatsoever " he soared, " that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy."

With that lofty misstatement, maybe we can get him to give us the solution to pi.

flttroug

Mitch gets another call from Edgar Bergen

...Look out! the McConnell-led Republican senators are back, tripping along to their orders from Frank Luntz, the party's Edgar Bergen, who makes a good living putting words into their mouths. The latest comedy act is the GOP senators' perfect-pitch 41-0 voice against the Democrats' Wall Street Reform proposal. Somebody should remind Mitch that there are a lot of people in the land who have no use for Wall Street, particularly on a day when when the SEC had filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs....

Update: Neglected to add the observation by Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film, Wall Street: Greed is good. Right, Mitch?

What's with the halo, Mitch?

Holy cow!

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? 

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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? 

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       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.  

    

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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.   

The Republican Four Horsemen

TIME FOR a new assessment of this week's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Award with some familiar names...

REP. MICHELLE BACHMANN. Minnesota Republican,  who suggested that swine flu epidemics only occur under Democratic presidents.  She later had to be reminded that the last one occurred under Gerald Ford, a Republican according to all of the papers at that time. 

        SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, of Kentucky, the U.S. Senate minority leader,  whose fatherly assessment of President Obama's first 100 days was long on criticism and short on praise, while closing with a Republican promise that it would continue the party's "principled support, principled opposition and pragmatic, creative solutions to meet the challenges of the day."   But he also warned that Arlen Specter's defection was a threat to the nation because it would give the Democrats too much power. ( Almost as much as the Republicans had during George Bush's first single-party six years, Mitch?)

       MICHELE MALKIN, simple-spoken columnist who spells her first named differently than does Bachmann,  who has traced swine flu to Obama's visit to Mexico and called the President a "frivolous man" who never goes anywhere without his teleprompter.    She heard about the swine flu source from Rush, who is believe to have heard it from the old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate. She was delighted that Specter bolted the party and advised him to not let the door hit him on the way out. He didn't.  

        MICHAEL STEELE, Republican national chairman who is always in the act, despite growing impatience within his party with his blundering comments about, well...everything.  There's an undertow of feeling that Steele must resign.  I hope they don't get ahead of the curve by the next trading deadline. .  The Democrats already have a chairman.

With enemies like these, Obama and his soaring popularity don't need more friends.  

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Wagoner's $20 million pain pill

SHALL WE SHED no tears for Rick Wagoner,  GM's hitherto chairman and chief White House.  For a man who presided over a thudding crash of the giant auto company, he will live out his years in private life with a $20 million  "allowance" from the company.  The transition might be a little  bumpy in the short term; sky-high CEO royalty doesn't  adjust easily, I'd guess, after living  cloistered lives surrounded by servile enablers whose own jobs are on the line every moment of the day.  There may be exceptions, of course, but I don't know of any.  

That fact of corporate life, of course, will not discourage the usual chorus of Cassandras who are already counting down the minutes to doomsday with the arrival of  Barack Obama in the White House.  His most secure refuge, however, is the silliness of the Republican responses to his every move.  

Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell continues to belabor the notion that his party has been shut out of any discussion of the stimulus package, although there are plenty of videos around that can be shown of the President reaching out to the GOP,  whose leaders didn't even bother to respond to some of  Obama's invitations.    I don't know what House minority leader John Boehner wants except to haul out his tax cut litanies as well as a shallow budget plan that must have embarrassed a lot of folks in his own party.  And Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas no-man and chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, has now threatened to delay a resolution of the Minnesota senate contest  forever, if not longer. It is further evidence of what  desperate Republicans are thinking these day.  And it  has even annoyed Minnesota's Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, who objects to a state with only one senator. 

Until the GOP starts acting like a party of grown-ups, with a leader who can begin to capture the imagination of the voters,  it seems unlikely that it will be anything more than it is today, a bunch of trapped whiners that has not yet found a way to unlock the barn door.  

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Anyone who has followed this  blog knows that I have been critical of  Summit County Chairman Alex Arshinkoff on occasion for some of his inexplicable antics.  But having just been introduced to his Republican opponents' blog, I have to wonder what wannabe comedian is  trying out, badly at that, for Comedy Central. The anti-Arshinkoff post on - get this, Fat Al is Not My Pal -  is juvenile cutesy pie stuff with references to blonde bimbos, Bryan "Fredo Corleone" Williams (the guy at the Board of Elections). an unnamed  "bumbling former retired executive" and "Boy wonder Jon 'Teddy Bear'  Husted. There is also an incoherent reference to Arshinkoff's dancing style. Do they do these things because they can?  Or is it that they just don't know any better?  Unless the level of opposition  rises to adulthood, I pass.                                        

 

 

A Regula guy

RETIRING CONGRESSMAN Ralph Regula, among the last of the vanishing breed of moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, spoke at an Akron Press Club luncheon Friday with some words of advice to his political colleagues:   Constituents first.  The words appear on lapel pins worn by him and his staff.  The motto expressed his sentiments about the state of the GOP these days, which he said needed to be "a little bit more sensitive about the things that are important to the people."

That's asking a lot.  With Regula  leaving office after 36 years of represesenting the 16th District just south of Akron, those prescribed  sensitivities are even less likely to characterize the Republican Party today, Joe the Plumber notwithstanding.  The cruel action of those fat-and-happy southern Republicans who are quite pleased with their foreign auto factories stepped far over the line by blocking the bailout of the northern Big 3 American producers without kicking a tire.  Indeed, there seems to be something "anti-American" by pitting region against region when the entire economy is driving over a cliff.  With few available options, the GOP senators stood firmly against the lesser of two evils and challenged workers to eat cake instead.   

  

So there was Sen. Mitch McConnell, the owlish  union-hating Senate minority leader who led the assault on the proposal, offering the sort of condolence-light  that Tony 

Soprano might extend to the wife of a wiseguy that his own henchmen had just whacked.  "None of us want to see them go down," McConnell said sadly of the  Detroit crowd.  "But very few of us had anything to do with the dilemma they created for themselves." Well, sniffles!

When you put it that way, it may be technically true.  But when it's said by the Col. Sanders of the Senate who proudly supported spending  up to a trillion dollars for a miscast war halfway around the world to protect our security, you have to wonder why he wouldn't give a little to protect the security of armies of  workers at home.  I know why.

The conspicuous irony of such dark behavior is that McConnell was doubtless  the cheerleader for his wife, Elaine Chao, to be appointed by George Bush in 2001 as labor secretary. Her short bio notes that she is committed to "promoting the health, safety, retirement security and competiveness of the nation's workforce."  The senator and the labor secretary  obviously never talk business with each other on their days off.

MORE ON REGULA:  With University of Akron president Luis Proenza seated at the front table, Regula took the opportunity to defend the use of earmarks for home state projects that work, specifically noting a UA facility in Medina as an example of a worthy earmark. He was probably on the side of the angels in his defense of these special Federal outlays.  McCain's attacks on earmarks during the campaign created very little uplift for his chances and in fact may have aggrieved the voters still more.  So I ask: Who in the world earmarked earmarks as a critical issue to be exploited by McCain and Palin?  

Regula did support the Big 3 bailout and demonstrated over the years that he could act calmly with his colleagues across the aisle.  He worked closely with the late Rep. John  Seiberling of Akron on creating the Cuyahoga Valley National Park with a critical assist from the late Ray Bliss.  He also played a hand in delivering the cash for several other major projects in northern Ohio.  

In retirement  as an octogenarian,  Regula will now be able to spend more time back on his farm in Stark County.  He may find that the livestock that might show up on his  acreage will be a tad more civilized than some of his colleagues on Capitol Hill.