Due to the kindnesses extended by friends and family, my daughter and I will now be able to attend Tom’s memorial service next Saturday. Which is also my Mom’s 81st birthday.

My Saturday began with a call from my sister, asking “Hasn’t the family had enough to endure?” And it was downhill from there.

Matt, the coke-addict brother, saw his wife sentenced to a year in jail last week. This morning, a call came that he had been in a traffic accident last night and was life-flighted to a Tampa hospital, where he was in ICU, unconscious and on a ventilator.

My Mom, a brother, and Matt’s two sons hopped in the car for the drive an hour away. They discovered he was critical but stable, sedated to keep him out due to a small hematoma, his breastbone’s broken and he may have breaks in his spine. But the early prognosis is no paralysis has occurred and we think he’ll recover.

The rest: He was DUI, and either out of anger or on purpose, with a passenger involved, was driving erratically, lost control, went down into a culvert, back up and broadsided a parked van. But for a couple of hours, I thought I might lose two of my three brothers in the same week.

The Gods must be angry, eh?

To: Earl, Copeland, Palamedes, Riggsveda, Avedon, KC, Flamingo, Susie, Jenny, Sarah, Becky G, BitchPhD, Hesiod, Emma, Rod, Ayn, Elise, eRobin, Annie, Morgaine, all the others who emailed, and especially Melanie, Fred, Lorri…..Thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers. Every bit of support has helped.

Today’s Sermonette is a special edition for a special election in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District.

Draws on the cautionary tale of Jean “File Card Memory” Schmidt, whose encyclopedic recall for names and faces didn’t extend to Coingate’s Tom Noe or, even more unfortunately, to the paper trail connecting Noe and Schmidt.

Some people ask why we should be good without God. Secularist Mark Twain offers one of the many good reasons to be moral whether you believe in a higher power or not:

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.–Mark Twain

This morning Republican congressional hopeful Jean Schmidt told the CBS 12 “Newsmakers” program that she had never met Tom Noe, the Republican activist who stole millions from the state of Ohio in the “Coingate” scandal.

Bob Brigham of the Swing State Project explains:

In an effort to cover up Jean Schmidt’s involvement in the scandalous culture of corruption, Schmidt said she didn’t know Tom Noe. Schmidt said she’d never met Tom Noe. Schmidt said she had never even heard of Tom Noe. [Emphasis added.]

As an Ohio state legislator, Schmidt chaired the Higher Education Subcommittee of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee . During the same period Tom Noe was a member of the Ohio Board of Regents.

Official state documents dated March 21, 2002 show that Jean Schmidt had met with the Ohio Board of Regents the day before. Noe attended the March 21 meeting of the Ohio Board of Regents when the following report was delivered on the Jean Schmidt’s involvement with the Board:

Yesterday, the Inter-University Council Presidents and the Ohio Board of Regents had a retreat and the focus was on how we communicate the higher education message to legislators, business entities and influencers. We invited Rep. Jean Schmidt to our committee meeting for the purpose of gaining her perspective on how the Legislature sees higher education and the initiatives in which we are interested. […] There are a number of areas where we are totally lined up with her thinking. In any event, the conclusion is that we need more contact, more often.

Additional official state documents establish that Tom Noe testified before Jean Schmidt’s committee on March 18, 2003.

Never heard of the guy, eh? How stupid does Jean Schmidt think we are? Typical Republican hubris.

Maybe even less than a clue, but interesting … Massimo Calabresi writes in Time magazine that it appears “White House officials” knew about Valrie Plame weeks before Joe Wilson’s famous New York Times op ed. If so, it is more likely that Karl Rove learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from a journalist. Read the rest of this entry »