Poor Rob Portman.  It’s not  enough that Mitt Romney ignored his faithful traveling companion in Ohio in choosing Paul Ryan as a running mate;  it’s not enough that the GOP right-wing is flapping hysterically because of his seismic  shift to support gay marriage; it’s not enough that the liberals have targeted him because of his opposition to background checks (and a lot of other things).

Portman,  the junior senator from Ohio – more accurately, the right-leaning Cincinnati area – has now become a noun and a verb.  As in :  Portmanization.   And Portmanize.  These are not words that have been pattering [...]

With the NFL draft in full throttle the past week end, Gov. Kasich got his man.   Fellow named Matthew Borges (not to be confused with Borgia).  A right guard, I believe, although Republicans in the Dawg Pound will have to go on trust regarding his talent.

He had been touted all along as the governor’s chosen crony to replace the temporary Republican chairman, Bob Bennett, a former chairman himself who came out of the steam room to fill a  vacancy at headquarters after the governor exiled  Kevin
DeWine.  But that’s another story,  which is hardly worth repeating.

The GOP [...]

Nearly a century ago Walter Lippmann, the wise and widely respected political analyst and essayist, wrote of the perils of meaningless gibberish in defining human discourse. He came down hard on are the media of his day, but his dark message had a much longer reach.

In his essay “Liberty and the News,” he wrote;

“It is almost impossible to overestimate the confusion in daily life caused by sheer inability to use language with intention. We talk scornfully of  ’mere words’.   Yet through words the whole vast process of human communication takes place. The sights and sounds and meanings of [...]

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;  he’s not  slipping out of the right-wing mask [...]

The arrival of March Madness II so soon after CPAC’s March Madness I is forcing all of us to consider whether the floor games will be a more valid expression of  the soul  of America than the conservative fringe that went to the convention in hopes of a slam dunk.  The distractions for the bounty-hunters couldn’t have come at a worst time  as speaker after speaker tried to convince us that the former Republican Party lacked, um… relevancy and that Barack Obama was at least a socialist..

The delegates were upstaged by Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, a conservative Republican who conceded that his notions about [...]

In view of Plain Dealer news room’s mission to report the news, the absence of news about the people who are supposed to report the news of others has left the staff in a state of day-to-day suspended animation.  And hardly feeling secure in their line of work.

The problem, of course, is the presumed impending doom of the state’s biggest and often most puzzling newspaper (as we now know it), a deeply ensconced establishment journal that has tight-roped for years through local issues in a diverse city that has needed little encouragement to become unruly.

Ever since the word got [...]