Hey, Republicans finally claim a minority

It occurs to me that the Republicans have achieved a major break-through in their ancient mission to broaden their  base  by engaging minorities.  They are now, in fact, reeking with Tea Partyers - a minority that polls tells us  is hardly more than 30 pct. of the electorate.  Way to go, GOP.  Persistence finally paid off.

Portman collecting style points in...New Hampshire

SAVE THE DATE. Friday, June 14.  ( Flag Day.)  Where: Salem, New Hampshire. What: Republican Party private fund-raiser.  Time:  After sundown.  Cost: $250 a ticket. Celebrity guests:  Ohio Sen. Rob Portman.  New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

Let the speculation begin on connecting the dots.  Or as the Columbus Dispatch told us  about its favorite senator, Portman is "considered a possible presidential hopeful."  Or not.

It gets better, but not much.  A Portman spokesman said his boss "reached out"  to Ayotte to tell her he would be in the state for a Dartmouth College reunion.   So she asked him to host the fund-raiser. For the Ohioan, a fund-raiser is one way to collect good-buddy style points when dreaming  of a better job.  Particularly in New Hampshire, which breaks the ice for the remaining presidential campaign.

Portman and Ayotte's most recent collaboration saw them both voting against the background check gun bill. Up, up and away...

From Woody Hayes... to Gordon Gee's woodshed..

When OSU icon Woody Hayes nastily slugged a Clemson linebacker  who had intercepted a pass in the 1978 Gator Bowl (in full view of a national TV audience),  he was fired.   When OSU president Gordon Gee verbally slugged Notre Dame and Catholics - only jesting, he said  - the school's Board of Trustees, decided it was time to send him  to class for...eh... remedial behavior sessions.

For Gee, whose annual pay with compensation is nearly $2 million, it could get worse.  The board has warned him that it doesn't expect to be ambarrassed by his childish humor again and quite likely will fire him if he doesn't shape up.   Meantime,  the Board has set a regimen for him that is weirdly not fashionable for the modern  breed of university officials .

 For example, it's not every day that a board of trustees orders  the campus president to work with professionals to clean up his act with a "more targeted selection of the most  appropriate speaking engagements and appearances."

It also wants him to enlist professionals in "revisiting your personal communications and speechwriting processes..."

Those and other behavioral conditions just don't seem the sort of  things you have to tell a multimillion-dollar president of a mammoth university. Even if they have to be told to him.

As long as the trustees are at it, they should also remind him to never run with scissors.

 

Gordon, Catholic and Polish jokes ain't funny

Hasn't the time come for Gordon Gee, the OSU president, to grow up? Shouldn't he decide whether he wants to sit atop a mega-university or be a standup comedian who slammed (ha, ha) the priests at Notre Dame University as "those damn Catholics"   and declared that Catholics couldn't be trusted.  The remarks were contained in a recording of his remarks to a meeting of the school's Athletic Council (ha, ha) in which  he disparaged the Notre Dame football presence, saying: "The fathers are holy on Sunday and holy hell on the rest of the week." (ha, ha)

Gee, a Mormon, had run  into earlier image problems by complaining that coordinating OSU's many divisions was similar to trying to organize the Polish army.

Gee, who is richly paid for his tenure at OSU, has apologized for his remarks, saying they were intended to be funny.  So why are a lot of people not laughing?

P.S. Problem quickly solved.  Gee reportedly is undergoing something the University described as  a "remediation" plan in lieu of sending him off to the hungry I for his next gig. (I.e., fuhgeddaboudit)

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The Chicago Sun-Times added a new dark chapter to the inexorable decline of newspapers by firing its entire photography staff of 20, plus a group of free-lancers.   The paper's front office, like many front offices today, groped for an explanation by saying: "Our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news" and the S-T was working to meet that demand "to restructure the way we manage multimedia including photography, across the network."

Do you think the paper's next desperate step will be to offer free popcorn for everyone who prefers the videos?   Forbes contributor Michelin Maynard said the paper will rely on reporters to snap photographs with smart phones."

We liked the epitaph from former Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, who tersely summed up the paper's shrinkage:  "The front page yielded to the bottom line".

* * * * *

Talk about chutzpah!  When a political party can openly deny an audit of how public money is spent on a private company set up by that party, that's big-time chutzpah.

Trouble is,  there's no counter-force in Columbus to prevent the schemers on the Republican side from letting us see how the money channeled to JobsOhio (RobsOhio, says Plunderbund) is being pocketed.  Both houses of the Republican-controlled General Assembly, which have left the minority Democrats impotent, blocked  an attempt to audit the JobsOhio books by the state auditor.  It becomes clearer each day why Gov. Kasich promoted the creation of JobsOhio as a private development company free of public oversight.

Jeez!  What will the Rustics  at the Statehouse think of next to screw the public?

Michel(l)e Bachmann, how could you abandon us?

Somehow, I'm going to miss Michele Bachmann.  It has taken me so long to remember whether she spelled her name with one "l" or two, as in Obama and Pfeiffer.  (I didn't always succeed in print!)

For the lifespan of my  Grumpy Abe and Plunderbund posts , she  provided bizarre "content" when everything else seemed to be on the serious side while Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert  and Rand Paul were taking the day off.  You may recall that it was Gohmert, the wacko Republican representative from Texas who advanced the notion that immigrant women bear children  on American soil so  that the kids will grow up to become terrorists.  (If you don't recall it, you've  lost nothing, folks.)

You could always count on the Flat-Earth Goddess of the Tea Party  in the U.S. House to say something scarily entertaining even though it didn't make sense.   But. alas, she announced during a tour of Russia - see how comedic this can be? -  that she will not seek another term from a Minnesota district in 2014.

You would have thought that Queen Elizabeth had  abdicated and moved to Ireland. The Bachmann  news reverberated across Big Media, if not shopping malls, baseball games and garden clubs.

Still it's  hard to imagine a planet without  Michele's wisdom,  the preferred sweet-sounding voice of the Flintstones.  The immediate buzz was that she will be offered a fat contract by Fox News to continue her unofficial  labors for much that is wrong about political life in America.

In a melancholy mood, I  offer a few Bachmannisms as a going-away cache  from the Micel(l)e archives.:

She accused President Obama of spending $200 million on a trip to India.

During her overreaching presidential campaign, she promised the electorate that as president she would let Americans  choose their own  light bulbs.

She insisted that an aide to Hillary Clinton was "affiliated" with the Muslim Brotherhood.

She thought it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu outbreaks in the 1970s and again in 2009 occurred during Democratic presidencies.

Michel(l)e, how could you leave  us bloggers when you have so much to offer on those days when we have nothing more to think about but the hapless Ohio legislature?

Rubio: Obamacare led to IRS scandal

Sen. Marco Rubio  has his grandiose ambition wrapped so tightly around his yearning to be president that maybe we should forgive him for sounding as dumb as Sarah Palin at times.  The Florida Republican wannabe wunderkind's latest non-sequitur exposed the sort of logic that could leap the Grand Canyon.

 In an email to a constituent, Rubio blamed Obamacare for the IRS controversy.  As you may have heard, Rubio hates Obamacare and hopes to ride it to the Republican nomination for president in 2016.  So, the only answer to things like the IRS keyhole, he says, is to repeal Obamacare". He may yet throw in the Oklahoma tornado as manufactured in the Oval Office,   but you  get my point about Obama-hating.

The May issue of Smithsonian magazine quotes an angry response by a specialist in microbe research to a scientific team's report that changes in gut bacteria could  protect us from strokes.   Jonathan Eisen of the University of California scowled that the team's ideas were "completely absurd, dangerous , and self-serving claims that confuse  the issue of correlation versus causation."

Back to Rubio:  Wish I'd said that.

The Buckeye assembly of headless horsemen

During a recent visit to  Summit Mall,  the sprawling retail center in Fairlawn, I heard a small boy shriek as he looked up in awe to a store window featuring several headless manikins:

"They don't got no heads!!!"

No heads, indeed.

You could only wonder how he might have reacted during a visit to the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature where a lot of denizens (hardly fashion humanikins) strut around ceremoniously every day with nothing attached to their necks. Reinforcing their  party's bizarre higher echelon on Capitol Hill, the Buckeye version of rusticated politics is seriously dedicated to subverting the GOP's stage persona of trying to win new friends with ideas that only have the opposite effect.

President Calvin Coolidge, in a snarky mood,  once huffed about  Sen. William Borah , a maverick Republican from Idaho and a daily horseback rider: "It's hard to imagine Borah going in the same direction as his horse."

Today, much of what I've  seen of  the Republican lawmakers in Columbus and Washington is that whatever the consequence they're all in fact  riding in the same direction despite their uncooperative horses -  heedless of  public opinion - that has sent Congress to its scandalously low public approval rating.

Whether it be Medicaid, background gun checks, Planned Parenthood, labor unions, minorities  or  a host of other issues, they have revived the scary headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, hanging on for dear life to sustain a spooky ideology that has cost them two presidential elections.

(My favorite quote from the last election was uttered by the Republican whiner-in chief, John Boehner,  who lamented to a luncheon group in Tampa that he didn't think his party could win Latinos and blacks, so he hoped that they would apathetically stay home and not vote at all.  I'm not sure you can call that a valid political strategy. And, by the way, they didn't stay home.)

Guys like Boehner and Sen. Rob Portman ought to be from Utah or Idaho, where they would be a perfect fit for the Red State political landscape.  Unfortunately, Ohio  must bear  the national  image of not only being the home of presidents but also the home of
GOP naifs who have turned the legislature into their very own assembly of  headless manikins.  

A senator, a grieving mother, and a dead end

 If you were a U.S.senator  who had voted against background gun checks, what would you tell a grieving mother whose son was fatally shot in the Aurora, Co., theatre massacre?

It  apparently was not a problem when Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican, met with Jerri Jackson, of Springfield, Oh, whose son, Matthew McQuinn,  was killed by nine bullets while he tried to shield his girl friend from the  madman's weapon. As reported by the Springfield News-Sun, Portman was shown a picture of her son by Mrs. Jackson, who told the senator: "We're not saying you can't have have a gun.  You don't need 100 rounds at a time."

Portman,  a gun enthusiast who has repeatedly insisted that background checks would not save lives, later described Mrs. Jackson as a "great lady" and her son as a "hero",  adding, without a hint of heroism guiding his own conscience, "I respect her tremendously, and what she's going through is very difficult."

"We agree on a lot," he said.  We don't agree on everything,".

Oh? He tried to explain: "Ultimately, there's no one answer to this." Problem solved.

What did Portman's old boss, George W. Bush call it?  Compassionate conservatism?

Husted takes credit for cleaning up a non-problem

Do you recall how Secretary of State Jon Husted and a number of other Republicans on the voter-suppression goon squad were trying to narrow the goal posts for Ohio's  minorities in the last presidential election?  Voter fraud might  alter the outcome of the election, they warned.

Well, I'm pleased to report that of the 5.6 million votes that were cast, only 625 were considered questionable, according to a post-election survey by Husted's office and county boards of election.  Of those only 115  were sent to local prosecutors for possible action.

Now upbeat from the findings, Husted said his efforts to clean up the election paid off.  Cool.

Husted's pre-election hustle, he now says, was merely an attempt to get at the facts.
He said the concerns of voters were driven by "hyperbole" and it was through his office's efforts that  fraud was hardly existent,  or as he put it in a puffy release: "This report demonstrates that voter fraud does exist, but it is not epidemic. (Of those cases where duplicate ballots were cast, "only one of those ballots was ultimately counted,"  he boasted.

Immodestly, he took credit for the clean-up, insisting  that the "safeguards we have in place worked in the majority of these cases."

We have a winner for our latest Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy (GALL) award.  See above.

Republican medieval ideologues - Oklahoma style

What in the name of medieval enlightenment is going on in Oklahoma in the wake of the horrendous disaster?  For the state's political class, it's still business as usual.  Both senators - Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn, Republican fiscal vultures - are rejecting Federal relief unless the money can be matched by cuts elsewhere in the Federal budget. If that isn't done immediately, you can guess the rest of the story for the stricken survivors.  (Both guys opposed federal relief aid in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, too.)

Meantime, the Oklahama legislature routinely went about its daily business this week by  defunding Planned Parenthood.   There are priorities - and there are priorities.

But Inhofe did offer his own version of palliative relief, tweeting:

"The devastation in Okahoma is heartbreaking. Please join me and pray for  Oklahoma.  Spread the word."

OK, senator.  Then what do you have in mind for Plan B?