For Renacci, NRA check is in the mail

Thanks to the Sun News, the Cleveland weekly, we recently got a glimpse of Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci in action at a Town Hall meeting in Fairview Park.  The dominant topic was guns, largely because a  group of pickets showed up to protest his standardized Republican opposition to gun control.

As you know, the multimillionaire  businessman (reported by Roll Call to be $35.8 million!)  is comfortably operating out of the  new Ohio 16th congressional district created just for him in northern Ohio.

Still, Renacci, now in his second term,  is taking no chances  by slipping out of the right-wing mask  on this issue, even to the point of advising his listeners that guns don't kill people,  only the mentally ill do.   " I believe that when it comes to guns, the biggest issue is the mental health issue," the paper reported his comments to his restless audience.

Safe enough for the easily persuaded.  But it's right out of Wayne LaPierre's playbook.    The problem with it is,  nobody - particularly tight-fisted Republicans -  can tell us how, when, where and to whom does the country direct its attention?  (When the late Republican Gov. Jim Rhodes was advised of complaints about the state's shabby mental health system, he shrugged,  "Those people [patients} don't vote anyway."

No one can deny that the mentally ill need all of the attention that society can offer.  But it will  require a lot more money than the budget balancers would be willing to spend over endless time.  So when guys like Renacci try to divert attention from guns by addressing mental health, he should be asked:  Where do you go from here?  Specifics are never clearly offered and it becomes a talking points abstraction. On the other hand, simply limiting  the size of magazine rounds alone would be helpful.

Renacci,the former mayor of Wadsworth,  built his wealth with investments in nursing homes,  motorcycles and minor league baseball.  He  describes himself as a "common-sense congressman," and denies that that he  serving at the pleasure of the NRA - a group with which he was tied for first place nationally for  campaign support.  Renacci's cut of the pie was a mere $9.9 million, but when you have your very own safe district thanks to redistricting, you don't need much more,

"You keep saying that I'm listening to the NRA," Renacci protested to the Town Hall group, "but I've got to keep telling  you, the NRA has never come to my office and said anything.  I am a proponent of the Second Amendment.

Can we then assume that the check was in the mail?

A weasel is a weasel is a weasel

There seems to be a rash of never-minds from politicians who, as Mitt Romney once described his own linguistic detours, didn't express something as "elegantly" as it might have been stated.  Now we have word from Rep. Don Young, the long-serving  Alaska Republican, that he was sorry he referred to workers on his father's California ranch as "wetbacks".  Even speaker John Boehner recoiled from that remark.

All of which leads me to the Spring issue of Lapham's Quarterly (from Lewis Lapham, the civilized former editor of Harper's Magazine).  There you will find the following insight attributed to The Simpsons:

"Weaseling out of things is important to learn.  It's what separates us from the animals - except the weasel."   

Cornyn revives the hostile French connection

To hear Sen John Cornyn, the Texas Republican,  tell  it, the French are back to haunt America's way of life, both in war and peace. He says he has informed by a "guy" that French-speaking people were among the illegal immigrants crossing the border into Texas.  (Some  of the others were heard "speaking Chinese or basically all of the languages in the world...") But specific mention of the French  took us back to a decade ago when the  offended patriots in the U.S.House of Representatives boldly changed the name of French fries to "Freedom fries" in  the House cafeterias in a blunt reprisal for France's  refusal to join us in invading Iraq. Not one of democracy's finer hours.

Two Republicans who led  the demolition of Gallic fries were Reps. Walter Jones of North Carolina and Bob Ney of Ohio , the latter moving on to still greater heights by pleading guilty to corruption charges and spending some time in prison for his inexcusable  bad judgment.

Sacre bleu! (Update: French fries have regained their original name and are again being served  in the cafeteria.)

P.S. For all of his partisan concern about lax border security, surely the senator must know that border crossings  are now down to where they were under President Nixon.

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Rush Limbaugh, the conservative Great White Whale, has conducted his own probe of the same-sex marriage issue and identified the homosexual perps as the "Gay Mafia".  We're not sure where he would cast the blame for his own four marriages.

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Proving once against that even crackpots can earn fortunes in America, Glenn Beck is now "reporting" that Rep. Michele Bachmann is being investigated by the Office of Congressional Ethics because it has been infiltrated by radical Muslims.   "We have been sold to radical Islam", he warned.  "It has been infiltrated and we have documented it."
Bachmann supposedly provoked the blowback last year by asserting that important aides in the Obama Administration were connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.  

I can't make this up, but Beck can - and often does.

Get ready for the invasion of Republican circuit riders

A million years ago, maybe a little longer, Ohio Republican Chairman Bob Bennett (then in his earlier  term) and Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff  insisted to me that their party would expand its base to include you-know-whos. It would be a magisterial commitment by two GOP draft horses to make the party whole for generations to come.

Didn't happen quite that way.  Not even close.  So after its  Comeback Team Romney/Ryan debacle in November -  a presidential election that even Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan decided was in their party's victory column for the asking -  the Republican brass are at it again.  They will spend $10 million, it says here, to send an army of circuit riders into the boonies to preach  the party's brand.  Suddenly minorities have become the party's search for the Holy Grail.

If there is a true opposite to Knute Rockne's famous half-time dressing room oration to his wilting team before sending it back onto the field, Reince Priebus,  the less-than-inspiring  national Republican Party chairman will have to do. He says the voter roundup  will  include "hundreds of people - paid - across the country, from coast to coast, in Hispanic, African-American, Asian communities, talking about our party, talking about our brand,  talking about what we believe in---"

Hold it right there, fella!  Ohioans already know what the party believes in. Let me remind you:

Begin with the belabored effort to limit the voter turnout last November. None other than John Boehner, the funereal Speaker,  told a luncheon group  hosted by the Christian Science Monitor last August: "This election is about economics...These groups [minority and poor voters] have been hit the hardest.  They may not show up and vote for our candidate but I'd suggest to  you they won't show up and vote for the president either."

Oh?
Now the Ohio Republican pols want to cut back the time to gather signatures  for  referendums, a bill that Kasich signed a few days ago. It impedes any effort to challenge a law.

From Planned Parenthood, to abortion, to same-sex marriage (Sen. Portman gets an ad hoc  pass on this one), to gun control,  the governor and the Republican controlled legislature keep doing awful things that are running in the opposite direction of the public mood.

And I haven't even mentioned Republicans' failed attack on unions in SB5, which was mauled at the polls.

Come to think of it, when Priebus talks of a $10 million outlay to  woo new voters with the Republican brand, he does sound like  a cheapskate. It won't be that easy. Tea Partyers are talking about starting their own party in Ohio.  Nobody except the governor and his A-Team seems happy about his proposed tax plan.

 Politically, the Buckeye State for national Republicans has become Brand X. The only question now:  What has taken them so long to figure that out - if indeed they have?  

Thank Steve Gunderson for an incisive memory

One of the most illuminating comments in the archives of the same-sex marriage controversy  was recorded in 1996 when a Republican congressman was outed by a colleague during a floor debate in the House.

Rep.  Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin, then the only gay lawmaker in the GOP caucus and the only member of his party to vote against a Defense of Marriage Act, was openly criticized by a notoriously  ultra-right congressman from California, Bob Dornan, who hissed: "I didn't believe when I came here  that we'd  be discussing giving homosexuals the same rights as holy matrimony!"

To which Gunderson (now retired from the House) tartly replied:

"In all due respect to my colleagues, lesbians have no interest in your wives,  and gay men have no interest in your husbands.  Should not my partner of 13 years have the same rights as the partners of my colleagues around here on their second and  third marriages?"

That one soared out of the park!

Sarah Palin's new acting career in works

Ever since Sarah Palin's stunning Big Gulp comedy act at CPAC, rumors have raised  the possibility of a new acting career to replace a waning political role.  Some insiders are suggesting  that she would be a perfect Annie Oakley in  a Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun inasmuch as she could provide her own arsenal of guns. And a grizzly or two.

Other ideas would have her playing Eleanor
Roosevelt,  Mother Teresa (Sarah's not getting any younger!)  or Kate Smith reprising God Bless America in a TV series scripted just for her.  (Kate Smith would be a perfect fit for Sarah  if the former Alaska governor insists on gulping  sugary soda for her comedy routines.)

My choice is the  gossip that she is already in rehearsal to play Tina Fey on Broadway.  Go ahead and gulp, if you like. Just one won't hurt you.

No need for the dog warden when Bachmann barks

With FDR, there was his "little dog Fala". With Richard Nixon, we learned of his dog Checkers.  With Michele Bachmann, there is her fantasy that President Obama spends taxpayers' dollars on dog-walkers for his family pet.  Even Bill O'Reilly is aghast at her fictions, declaring her latest one is not true. But the more things change, they more they stay the same for Michele, who has been walking around on her knuckles ever since she arrived on Capitol Hill as a Minnesota congresswoman.

You may recall that a couple of years ago she accused Obama of running  up a bill of $200 million a day for his official visit to India. That's eight zeroes after the two, folks.

FDR handled folks like Michele with cool panache.  When FDR's critics accused him of wasting $20 million by sending a destroyer to the Aleutian Islands to get his dog, the president wryly complained that Fala, who was Scotch, resented the spurious tale of loose spending.   "I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself,"  FDR  declared with staged indignation.  "But I have  a right to object to libelous statements about my dog."

Can county GOP April Lincoln Day dinner bring May flowers?

If you need further evidence that Republican politicians are running behind the times, you might check the date on this announcement by the Summit County Republican Party for its annual ...um...Lincoln Day Dinner.  Yep, it says April 27.  The last time I looked, that  would make it two and half months after - Lincoln's birthday!  Nor did the notice promise to compensate for the delay by staging an Independence Day event in May.

This year's  celebrated Republican speakers will be Ohio Reps. Dave Joyce and Jim Renacci, both of whom just voted for Paul Ryan's mystical budget, a dead-end document whose theme and slight variations have included the repeal of ObamaCare - a stunt that has been defeated more than 30 times.  Obviously, for the GOP, it's the thought that continues to count.    

Happy anniversary, Dick

Jeff Darcy's cartoon in Plain Dealer struck home!!!

The big White Hat bulging with taxpayers' money

For the past 15 years Akron mega-businessman David Brennan  has been been passing the hat - the  familiar white one big enough to bleed the state education treasury of enormous sums.   It began in 1998 when Brennan, as savvy an entrepreneur as you'll find on Planet Romney - founded White Hat management to establish a series of charter schools in Ohio and elsewhere.

According to Plunderbund, the flow from the state treasury to White Hat's account has reached nearly $1 billion and is continuing with a friend like alleged budget hawk Gov. Kasich and a Republican legislature.  Such success was not based on results and the offhand chance that his presence as a big GOP contributor would be ignored.  And if the pols didn't already know, he told them so. It didn't fail.

The cozy enterprise ran into problems three years ago when the governing boards of 10 charter schools sued White Hat to learn what happened to 96 pct. of the money that the for-profit company received.  And as you might suspect, White Hat stonewalled that since it is a private company its ledgers are not open to public scrutiny.  The suits have passed through court after court, finally landing in the 10th District Court of Appeals in Columbus, which supported the charter boards' claims.  Kasich just went through the same challenge - and lost - to Jobs/Ohio.

But as the Beacon Journal editorially noted, the charter schools' case could  now head to the Ohio Supreme Court, with a 6-1 Republican majority. That, said the BJ, means White Hat "could evade transparency for a long while yet."  Did I tell you that Brennan was a savvy entrepreneur?

For now, may I ask about the costs of the long legal battle which, I'm sure, are  coming from White Hat's taxpayers' gifts?

Did I tell you that Brennan was a savvy entrepreneur?