Couldn’t Help But Notice (070607)
The Ohiosphere’s equilibrium is in better balance, as Bill Sloat has been back to blogging at The Daily Bellwether for about a week after a too-long hiatus.
His return piece was a troubling one about a planned Ohio state agency-sponsored Wilmington-area conference that will feature a speaker discussing “the right of psychiatric patients to take their own lives. Arguments for and against rational suicide will be explored.” Yikes.
A couple of days ago, showing that he’s better off blogging, ex-Plain Dealer reporter Sloat delivered a richly-deserved riposte to ex-colleague Mrs. Sherrod Brown, aka Connie “The World Revolves around Me and the PeeDee” Schultz.
This post at another blog shows that Mrs. Brown aka Connie/MeMe Schultz apparently expects a heads-up before anyone she knows writes anything about her. You’ve got to be kidding.
Update: In a post this morning, Sloat refers to a passage in the book about how Mrs. Brown’s/Schultz’s features editor strongly encouraged her to support her husband’s contemplated Senate run (”this country needs him to run”). I think the really revealing sentence is this one:
Look who you’ve been fighting for your entire career. That’s who he’ll be running for, and they will vote for him and he can win.
Note the use of the word “career,” and not “life.” It’s clear that the PeeDee-ers involved here see themselves in their jobs as societal change agents and not reporters of the news. I am so not surprised.
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A new development in the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation mess, namely the indictment of Cleveland NAACP President George Forbes, led Matt at RAB to get around to something I’ve been meaning to get to — the demonstrably false notion that it was a Republican scandal. Further evidence that ex-PDer Bill Sloat is better off blogging is that PD Openers blogger Mark Rollenhagen managed to write over 600 words without mentioning the (of course) Democratic Party affiliation of Forbes and at least four others involved — while making sure to note Tom Noe’s GOP ties.
The Blade went one better than the PeeDee. Though it noted Forbes’ party, James Drew and Steve Eder wasted a paragraph implying guilt-by-association between former Cleveland Councilman Forbes and George Voinovich, the mayor of Cleveland ….. over 18 years ago.
More substantively, this Columbus Dispatch piece from June 15 noted the indictment of investment adviser Mark Lay. After nearly two years, the Dispatch’s Mark Niquette finally tells readers that “although coin dealer Thomas W. Noe has had most of the headlines, the MDL investment loss is nearly 16 times what Noe was convicted of stealing.” Of course, Niquette didn’t mention Lay’s record as a Dem Party contributor, even though Don Luskin did back in 2005. Thanks, Mark — Now you can say, “See, see, I reported the loss.” Zheesh. But Niquette really didn’t get it right this time either, because Noe stole a portion of the roughly $13 million involved, and lost the rest by poorly investing it.
Even more substantively, while Noe’s conviction got national coverage, the Forbes and Lay indictments have received only scant coverage (Forbes; Lay) in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Lay is/was based, very little coverage elsewhere, and a couple of mentions in “major” Old Media organs — one of them the UK Guardian.
Most substantively, the state would be better off privatizing workers’ comp, as all but a few states, none of which have fallen into the ocean, have.
Update: Cornell McCleary at American-Experience has thoughts on Forbes’ fall and the betrayal of the real civil-rights movement by it leaders — and promises more elaboration down the road.
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The State of Ohio data thefts (it was a month before the one linked to was known), computer crashes, and laptop losses keep on coming.
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Well, excuse me for breathing and living. Does this not tie into the beliefs of so many enviros and globalarmists that there are too many humans (noted and quoted previously here, here, and here), and that a few billion of us need to volunteer to die?
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Speaking of enviros, globalarmists, and their globaloney — There’s “scepticism” on the part of the public, which “believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.” Further, “There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money.”
Well, those who think we’re all a bunch of deluded fools could start by explaining this — if they can.
