Author Archives: mjohnson

A Table and A Christmas Story

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Dad came around the corner from the hallway and there sitting underneath the dining room table was daughter Jessie, around three years old, practicing the Pledge of Allegiance she had learned from her friends on Sesame Street.

The table was Jessie’s refuge from the noise and hubbub of the recent arrival of twin sisters, born just months before. The table was where Jessie went for quiet time. She had the Pledge down pat. No doubt a brilliant child, Dad thought. She was just three, you know. Continue reading →

Happy, Happy, Happ…

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I’ve been trying to ignore the whole Phil Robertson – Duck Dynasty thing.

But, I can’t.

I am a huge fan of Duck Dynasty. I found it by accident last year when, one Friday night, I woke up at about 3 AM and, flipping around the channels came across it. I watched the entire overnight marathon until about 6:30. Continue reading →

Ya Gotta Have an Enemy

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Organizations that depend on fundraising (as opposed to selling a product or a service) have got to have an enemy to survive.

When I was very young my brother – four years my senior – was stricken with polio which was the scourge of the nation back in the early 50s. He recovered but the cost of his treatment was covered by an organization known, as least colloquially, as “The March of Dimes” because a major method of raising money was sending people out with containers that look like Pringles cans, with a slit in the top into which people, answering their doors or walking into their local A&P, would drop a dime. Continue reading →

GOP Civil War

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Despite being more philosophically in tune than ever before in its history, the Republican Party is theoretically in a civil war. The GOP used to have a prominent pro-choice wing, a prominent environmentalist wing, a prominent civil rights wing, a wing that wanted to raise taxes and wing that wanted to broadly increase spending, but those days are long over.

Since Ronald Reagan gained the White House, the GOP has been built on three sturdy legs of the stool. First, there was a libertarian, pro-growth, pro-low tax cut economic conservative leg. Then, there was a values-based, pro-family, anti-abortion socially conservative leg. Third, there was the military industrial, pro-defense, neo-conservative leg. Continue reading →

Boehner and Outside Influences

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“I am as conservative as they come and there is nothing we have done in this Congress that violates conservative principles.”

That sums it up and sets it up.

Speaker John Boehner made that point last week while criticizing several outside interest groups that have raised havoc with the Republican agenda in the 113th Congress, shut down the government for 16 days at a cost of $24 billion to American taxpayers, deliberately fomented division and distrust among the populous, and prevented the government from governing. Continue reading →

Bigger Problems for Obamacare

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

A poll released yesterday by the Associated Press and GfK demonstrated a point I’ve been making with eye-glazing regularity: The problems with healthcare.gov will be solved; when they are solved they will reveal a far more damaging problem for the Obama Administration and its Democratic supporters: Obamacare itself stinks.

It was ill conceived, ill designed, ill written, and is being ill implemented.

The problems with healthcare.gov have been a technical failure. The problems with Obamacare are a policy failure. Continue reading →

Can’t Always Get What You Want

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

In 1969, the Rolling Stones – who have been touring since about 1343 – put out an album that had as one of its songs, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

The U.S. House and Senate should do a quorum call right after the prayer and have every Member sing that song, every day they’re in session – which is only about five days a month. Continue reading →

Looking to Generations of Knights for Better Days

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  ’64

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”   — Abraham Lincoln

There is reason to be hopeful about the future of our Republic, but a lot depends on a generation of Americans only just leaving school and getting a solid grip on life.

If you are a disciple of historians Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, as is my friend Jerry Climer, who tutors me on their theories of generational change, generations fresh from the classroom of the 21st Century, will have much to say about the next 30 years, a critical era in our future, and not unlike a time less than a century ago.

Strauss and Howe advanced the notion of history repeating itself to a new dimension. They did so in a sophisticated review of generational history dating back to the late 16th Century.  Continue reading →

Mandela Was Well Armed

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I have a rule about Tweeting: If I delay for even a nano-second from pressing the “Tweet” button, I don’t send it. This was an example of something that I did not send yesterday afternoon: How much of the keening over the death of Mandela is by people feeling guilt over largely ignoring his having been in jail for 3 decades?

I didn’t send that, because I wasn’t sure of who was in charge of what during the 27 years that Nelson Mandela was incarcerated from 1962 to 1989.

Now I do.

In those years – for every single day of those 27 years – a Democrat was Speaker of the U.S. House: John McCormack (D-MA), Carl Albert (D-OK), Tip O’Neill (D-MA), Jim Wright (D-TX). Continue reading →

The United States of…France

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

While we have been totally focused, for the past two months, on the amount of time it takes a webpage to load on healthcare.gov, the rest of the globe appears to be continuing to spin.

And it appears to be spinning away from us.

After more than a decade of what is known as kinetic action in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, Americans are tired of being the alpha dog in the global pack. According to a poll released by the Pew organization, the public thinks that the nation does too much to solve world problems, and increasing percentages want the U.S. to “mind its own business internationally” and pay more attention to problems here at home. Continue reading →

The Vast Majority

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

A phrase that haunted the Nixon Administration (in addition to “I am not a crook”) was his claim that he was representing what he called, in a 1969 speech, the “Silent Majority.”

A phrase that will haunt the Administration of President Obama will likely be the “Vast Majority.”

You may have read, seen, or heard about the fact that the homepage of Obamacare – healthcare.gov – was nowhere ready for prime time when it launched on October 1, 2013. After stumbling and bumbling through an embarrassing press conference to explain how that might have happened his team came up with a date, November 30, by which it would be working smoothly. Continue reading →

Papal Populism

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

At the height of the Guilded Age in America and the Industrial Revolution elsewhere, Pope Leo the XIII issued a papal proclamation on the plight of the working classes in the new economy.

Rerum Novarum (Latin for “Of Revolutionary”) ironically was more evolutionary in its approach than revolutionary. It rejected communism as it affirmed the right of citizens to have private property. But it also said that laborers had a right to organize while rejecting unbridled capitalism. Continue reading →

I Ran, You Ran, We All Ran

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Everyone who thinks they know all the aspects of the Iran deal raise their hands.

Secretary Kerry, put your hand down.

I have no idea whether this is a good deal, a bad deal, or no deal at all. I hope it is a good deal and I hope it leads to a safer Middle East and, thus, a safer world.

But I don’t know.

This deal was brokered by what is known as the P5+1. That is the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (U.S., France, Continue reading →

Market Forces Still ‘Work’ in America

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

One of the more interesting things about working on Capitol Hill was learning what big words mean when luminaries such as Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker and just about every other famous economist or technical expert came to testify in Congress.

‘Disintermediation’ was one of those words. We heard a lot of it on the House Banking Committee when the S&L industry melted away between 1985 and 1990. We also heard a lot of it during the financial meltdown of 2008 when commentators on CNBC repeatedly talked about the threat of ‘disintermediation’ on financial giants such as Wachovia (which passed away) and Bank of America (which somehow survived, albeit with massive taxpayer-supported federal help). Continue reading →

Where Were You When…

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Anyone over the age of 55 will be asking everyone else over the age of 55: “Where were you when you heard the news?” We all know exactly where we were.

Here’s my story.

I was a senior at West Orange Mountain High School in West Orange, New Jersey. I was in drama class in the auditorium and the teacher, Miss Levin, asked me to go backstage to get some piece of business that she needed to demonstrate a point. Continue reading →

Fifty Years After Kennedy

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally published in The Hill

Five decades after the brutal murder of President Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, who had promised to keep America out of war in the election of 1912, became the first president to show a movie at the White House.

That movie, “Birth of a Nation,” directed by D.W. Griffith, was a wonder of technical achievement. It also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in heroic terms, employed white actors in black face (presumably because the director refused to hire actual black actors) and generally denigrated the historic legacy of America’s 16th president.

Continue reading →

Got Real?

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change (TCBMag.com) 

“We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” — Joni Mitchell

When I was in second grade, the ancient monsignor who ran our parish died. He was a player, having managed the seat of the bishopric for decades, the former Papal Chamberlain and right reverend from “Baaahstun,” Monsignor William L. Mulloney. When he kicked, the nuns of the parish draped the cathedral in black crepe. A Requiem High Mass was celebrated by the bishop, a special service performed exclusively for the students of St. Joseph’s Cathedral grade and high school. The wee ones were required to processional up to the open casket at the foot of the high altar in the heavily incensed, darkly lit cathedral as funereal dirges droned from the formidable pipes and organ donated by the good monsignor’s Brahmin family.

We circled around the casket enabling a 200x zoom-shot of the body—a breath-catching moment as smothering as Aunt Betty burying my face in her considerable bosom on

Continue reading →

Making Ron Burgundy Proud

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The commercials are frickin’ hilarious. Ron Burgundy, Anchorman, selling the Dodge Durango.

The ad campaign is brilliant. In one, Burgundy (aka Will Ferrell) talks about the size of the glove box, which comes standard, in case you didn’t know. In another, he shoos off some “dirty dancers” who are dancing too close to his beloved Durango. In a third, he wins a staring contest against a white horse, who he mocks as having insufficient giddy up compared to the horse power of the SUV.

There would have been no ad campaign like this if George Bush hadn’t started the bailout of the auto industry at the end of his tenure. Continue reading →

26,794

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Since the grand opening of Healthcare.gov – the federal home of Obamacare – on October 1, 2013, the federal government has been able to sign up only 26,794 people.

26,794 people is something short of what the Administration of Barack Obama had hoped for, had sneered at Republicans for doubting, and had assured the American public it was on target to produce.

Put another way, after spending over three years and, according to the Washington Post, between $170 and $300 million (just for the website), the geniuses at the Department of Health and Human Services have been able to sign up the equivalent of the entire population of … Carbondale, Illinois (Pop. 26,241).

If you’re looking for something to compare all this with, Amazon.com gets about 4.3 million unique visitors – per day; almost 129 million per month.

According to NBC News, HHS has had a “goal of 7 million newly signed up by the end of March” 2014. Continue reading →

The Great War

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Frank Buckles is dead. He didn’t die this week. He died in February 2011 at the age of 110.

Why do we care? Frank Buckles was the last living American veteran of World War I.

At the time, World War I was not known as World War I. It was known as “The Great War.” We didn’t know we were going to have to number world wars back then.

The shorthand for the beginning of The Great War is this (from PBS.org):

— On June 28, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo. Continue reading →