It’s been several weeks since I wrote an “Editor’s Notes” column, which was basically a mechanism for slopping a bunch of unrelated opinions into one big bag. Instead, I’ve reverted back to my long-time column, “Wearing Thin,” an average-length column that focuses on one issue each time.

But dozens of half-baked, reactionary opinions have been piling up in my cluttered brain, and it’s time for a fall house-cleaning. So here goes…

• First of all, Rush Limbaugh. You might have read the story last week about a group of sports businessmen trying to buy the St. Louis Rams NFL franchise. Blowhard talk-shot host Limbaugh had been a part of the group, but after the predictable controversy arose over his owning an NFL team, the group dumped him, figuring his participation just wasn’t worth the trouble.

After this happened, Limbaugh declared on his radio show that the controversy about his participating in the ownership effort “is not about the NFL; it’s not about the St. Louis Rams; it’s not about me. This is an ongoing effort by the left in this country, wherever you find them, in the media, the Democrat Party, or wherever, to destroy conservatism, to prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a conservative.”

Take a minute to read that carefully.

Here we have Rush Limbaugh, in the running for the biggest crybaby of all time, spending all of his airtime vilifying, slandering and assassinating the character of not just the “left,” but anyone to the left of him. This crowded club includes just about everybody.

So when a group of businesspeople, whose main concern is whether they can buy the team and then manage it, realizes that a potential partner is a human enemy-making machine, their business sense tells them he would be a distraction and a liability.

Is this a conspiracy to sabotage the “mainstreaming” of prominent conservatives?

Not hardly. I could come up with an endless list of prominent conservatives who could join the Rams purchasing group, and not cause a peep of criticism. In fact, if you look at the current owners of pro sports teams, I’m sure you’d find hundreds of conservatives, prominent and otherwise.

What actually happened here is that Rush Limbaugh sabotaged his own chances of becoming part owner of an NFL team by being a jerk of the first order. When you spend so much time viciously attacking people, that inevitably will have negative repercussions on your business and social activities.

As a pro-business conservative, Limbaugh really ought to know that.

THE ADS FOR STATE Issue 3 are getting crazier and crazier. My favorite was the one that ran for much of the summer featuring the head of an Ohio law-enforcement group (either FOP or statewide police chiefs, I can’t recall) arguing that voters should support the casino-authorizing amendment because… well, because people like him support it.

Great argument there (the cops actually support it because it sets aside a small percentage of profits for police).

Recently, some of the ads have been chewing over the issue of how many jobs would be created by Issue 3. Those who support it predict something like 34,000 jobs, and mainly for Ohioans. Opponents dispute those figures and say the jobs will mainly go to out-of-state interlopers, including all those blackjack dealers in Vegas looking to relocate in the balmy Midwest.

Both sides seem to be sensitive to the importance of Issue 3 creating jobs for mainly Ohioans.

Let’s look at this from a different perspective. I don’t know most of the 11.5 million people who live in Ohio, and have nothing in common with them other than the happenstance of living within the same arbitrarily set physical borders, paying taxes to the same bureaucracy in Columbus, and rooting for the same consistently awful sports teams. I’m guessing that all these Ohioans whom I don’t know are no better or worse than the 295 million non-Ohio Americans, or the 6.45 billion people in the world who aren’t Ohio residents.

So if Issue 3 creates 34,000 jobs, I really don’t care whom they’re going to. People are people, whether they live in Ohio, Nevada or Timbuktu. If they come to Ohio to work, they’ll still pay taxes in Ohio and spend their money in Ohio.

THE REPUBLICANS IN THE Ohio House finally have come up with a plan to eliminate the need to delay a state income-tax cut that took effect Jan. 1.

Gov. Ted Strickland says the last part of a multi-year tax cut must be postponed for two years in order to plug a $851 million budget hole that opened up after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the slot-machine plan intended to raise that money needed to go to the voters, no earlier than November 2010.

Strickland and many state Democrats say postponing the tax cut is the only option short of making further cuts that will force thousands more state employees out of work, and decimate already ravaged services such as prisons and mental-health programs.

The House Republicans, who are in the minority, have the luxury of playing politics with this issue, since they know the House Democrats probably can pass it anyway. That allows them to put forward their incredibly unrealistic and silly proposal to cut state government programs from 24 to 11, eliminating 11,000 state jobs and saving $2 billion.

They say this is possible because, well, it just is. This is despite the fact that the state already has cut nearly 5,000 jobs since January 2007, and areas where more jobs could be cut are limited to such things as prisons and mental health programs, areas where we can least afford a further degradation in services.

The House Republicans evidently don’t care about such things as responsible government, or more to the point, the human victims of a state declaring that it’s no longer obligated to safely operate prisons or care for people with mental illnesses. They’re more concerned about being able to say “we didn’t raise taxes, they did” when it’s election time.

One would hope that such gross, reprehensible irresponsibility would warrant voter payback at election time. Don’t count on it.

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