Star Trek: Romney and Obama Like Mr. Spock

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Mark Liebovich revealed yesterday in the New York Times that both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are huge fans of the television show Star Trek.

He didn’t mention if they were also fans of Star Trek, the Next Generation. I bet you dollars to donuts that Mr. Obama is a big fan of Star Trek Voyager. If you recall, Geri Ryan starred in Star Trek Voyager, and she was married to Jack Ryan.

Jack Ryan, you might recall, was the leading contender and favorite in the Republican primary until it was revealed that his ex-wife divorced him because he wanted to have sex with her in a Parisian sex club.

That shocked and surprised Illinois Republican primary voters, who didn’t realize that you could have sex with your wife in a Parisian sex club. Ryan dropped out of the race, and Mr. Obama ended up facing Alan Keyes, who turned out to be the closest thing to a real life Star Trek character, in the general election. Continue reading →

Wisconsin Win

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

It is tempting, but not entirely accurate, to say “Obama Loses!” after Democrats suffered another embarrassing defeat last night when the effort to recall Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker failed by the surprisingly wide margin of 55 percent to 44 percent for the Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. An independent got about one percent of the vote.

As of this writing, with 76 percent of Wisconsin’s precincts reporting, it’s over. Walker wins. Much of the Political Punditry Class has been touting this as a preview of the 2012 Presidential election, but now that the Republican won, don’t expect to hear too much of that kind of talk.

In fact, the ink was barely dry on the headlines when the word went forth that it was actually a good night for Obama because the exit polling showed Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney 51-45. This is being spun by the Obama team as a victory even though Obama won Wisconsin by a 56-42 margin over John McCain in 2008.

An exit poll showing the incumbent President just barely over 50 percent does not a victory make, seems to me. Continue reading →

Economy Ticking Time Bomb

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

From Bayeux, France, I am in Normandy for the annual D-Day commemoration on Wednesday. As part of this year’s festivities the World War II Foundation, headed by Tim Cook is presenting a statue of Major Dick Winters who was the central character in “Band of Brothers.”

More about that on Wednesday.

As I type this it is 5 AM Monday morning in France. That means it is 11PM Sunday night on the East Coast of the United States.

That is only useful because I am looking at the Asian markets as they open for business after Friday’s dreadful jobs numbers. As of this moment both the Japanese and Hong Kong market indices are down two percent. The European markets are set to open lower in that same range which means if the Dow follows suit it will lose nearly 250 more points today and end well below 12,000.

Other than my 401(k) being worth about 268.67(k) or minus one-third of its value, I am not much of a player in the stock market. However, like you and everyone else I have a monetary interest in the direction of the economy.

The direction appears to be decidedly down. Continue reading →

Future of Artur Davis

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

“While I’ve gone to great lengths to keep this website a forum for ideas, and not a personal forum, I should say something about the various stories regarding my political future in Virginia, the state that has been my primary home since late December 2010.The short of it is this: I don’t know and am nowhere near deciding. If I were to run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another….If you have read this blog, and taken the time to look for a theme in the thousands of words (or free opposition research) contained in it, you see the imperfect musings of a voter who describes growth as a deeper problem than exaggerated inequality; who wants to radically reform the way we educate our children; who despises identity politics and the practice of speaking for groups and not one national interest; who knows that our current course on entitlements will eventually break our solvency and cause us to break promises to our most vulnerable—that is, if we don’t start the hard work of fixing it….On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country.”

This is an excerpt from the blog of Artur Davis, a former Member of Congress from Alabama. When he served in the House, Davis was unique in that he was a proud member of the Black Caucus and the Blue Dogs. He was also the only Democrat to vote against Obamacare. Continue reading →

Trumped Up Trump

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

A made-up controversy over where the President was born trumped a real tragedy that unfolded in the President’s adopted hometown, which tells you a lot about the nature of this campaign.

Donald Trump somehow wormed his way into the campaign coverage by continuing to question where the President was born. Trump is a private citizen and he can have all of the doubts he wants about Mr. Obama. It’s not really relevant to a bigger national discussion about where we are going as a nation.

The Obama campaign is more than happy to keep the focus on the Donald and off what is actually happening in America, more specifically what is happening in the City of Big Shoulders. Continue reading →

Facebook

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The investing community is agog at the prospect of the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Facebook on Friday.

If you’re under 103, you probably have a Facebook page. You and about 901 million others. I have a Facebook page. I started it about four years ago when the younger people in the office teased me about being 103 years old.

I opened my Facebook page and immediately started the “friend” chase. I decided that having more friends than people I knew was a good thing so I started trolling for friends. I now have the maximum number of friends an individual can have. 5,000. I actually know about 27 of them. The rest, as I have mentioned before are a combination of “Friends” trollers, people who have seen me on TV but wouldn’t know me at the Safeway, and Ukrainian hookers.

Although, according to CNBC.com, a final decision won’t be made until Thursday evening, analysts expect Facebook shares to cost between $34 and $38 a share which would value its “upcoming offering at as much as $18.5 billion” and the entire company of something in the area of $100 billion. Continue reading →

Where’s Good News?

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Let’s start with Europe and work our way back.

The Greeks held elections last week and they have not been able to form a government since.

The leader of the “Leftist” party (read, Communist), Alexis Tsipras, has told the rest of the European Union that he believes Greece should ignore the promises it made to be bailed out and, in essence, go off on its own.

According to the New York Times, “European leaders have warned that if Greece does not keep its promises, Europe will stop financing it, which would quickly lead to Greece defaulting on its debts and leaving the euro zone, as the countries who share the common euro currency are known.”

I’m not exactly sure what the Greek version of “nanny-nanny-boo-boo” is, but Tsipras appears to be chanting it. If a coalition government cannot be formed, new elections will be called and polls indicate the anti-bailout candidates will gain strength. Continue reading →

From Raging Waters

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

I hadn’t taken a shower or put on clean clothes for several days, but I was alive. Fifteen inches of rain had fallen on the Black Hills of South Dakota in less than six hours. Four inches fell in 30 minutes. Imagine.

The first week of June 1972: I had just taken a job as a handyman, a laughable oxymoron for someone who not only didn’t know how to fix anything but had just turned 23. My first job out of college—on a dude ranch, the Ox Yoke outside of Nemo, operated by the former sheriff of Custer, his wife, their two sons, a ranch foreman with a cast, ankle-to-thigh, and his long-in-the-tooth pregnant wife. There were no guests at the “ranch.” There were, however, 10-plus WWII rehabilitated veterans, likely supported by a considerable government subsidy. Most sported lobotomy marks and outsized personalities. They worked cleaning out cesspools, digging drainage ditches, and running up to the garbage dump every day. I hung with them and the owner’s sons—let’s call them Spin and Marty, whose signature look consisted of toothpicks jammed into their cowboy hat bands. The youngest, usually shirtless, had a hankering for beer, tough talk, and mirrors. For all I know, he could have ended up in some western Dakota bar swinging from a pole in mesh stockings and falsies. Continue reading →

A Marriage of Inconvenience

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

When Joe Biden was selected by Barack Obama to be his Vice Presidential running mate I was thrilled. I thought “If Obama wins, Biden’s propensity to trip over his own tongue will provide enough material to write two columns a week.” I would only have to earn the third column.

For the most part, darn it, Biden has behaved himself and hasn’t been the loose-lipped fool he has been since he was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware when he was 29 years old.

Biden made up for all of that this past weekend when he proclaimed his support for gay marriage on “Meet the Press”.

That put so much pressure on the President, that he had to come out (so to speak) in favor of gay marriage his own self after attempting to finesse the issue until after the November election.

Here’s something you might not know: Biden had taped that interview on Friday. It would appear that no one on the VP’s staff thought it was newsworthy enough to drift into the West Wing and tell the President’s folks that Biden had said he was for gay marriage. After the fact the Obama folks tried to pretend this was all part of a long-ago developed strategy. Continue reading →

Economic Shank Shot

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

My Uncle Bob calls it the dreaded perpendicular shot.

In golf, when you mis-hit a golf ball so badly that it almost kills the person standing next to you, you have hit a shank. A shank can happen to anybody. And it is very, very scary when it does happen.

The golfer has no idea how it happened or why. One minute you are hitting the ball straight as an arrow. Then next minute, your ball is whizzing around the head of your playing partner.

There was a great scene in the movie “Tin Cup”, when Kevin Costner, the washed-up player who attempts a dramatic come-back after winning a qualifier to play in the U.S. Open, gets a bad case of the shanks on the practice tee before he starts his round. His caddie, played by Cheech Marin, goes through a crazy routine that seems completely non-sensical, all to achieve one goal: To get Costner’s character to forget about his shank and to start hitting the ball again.

I was thinking about that scene and about shanks in general when thinking about what happened to our financial markets four years ago. Continue reading →

Media Narcissism Dinner’s Entre

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a dazzling display of media narcissism, is slipping from memory now. But before it does, the Association ought to think seriously about not doing it next year. The spectacle is an embarrassment to journalism and the American Presidency. It reinforces an awful perception of Washington culture.

The dinner is an annual affair put on by the White House Correspondents Association under the guise of a fundraising event for journalism scholarships, but it isn’t that at all. The paltry amount of money the Association gives out in scholarships that night could be raised with a tin cup at the corner of Connecticut and K streets in DC.

The newspaper Politico said that the Association has only made $583,000 in scholarship awards in the last 20 years. That averages out to $29,150 a year. The Association website reported this year’s awards at $132,000. Politico said there were 2,800 guests at the dinner, which would mean the scholarship money amounted to no more than $47 per guest. Usually at dinners of this type, some guests are comped–let in free. But those who do pay or have their ticket paid for them, fork over $1,000 a plate.

We don’t know how much the dinner actually grossed or netted, but the numbers raise questions about why there is so little left over for the scholarships. Continue reading →

Unease Showing Up at Ballot Box

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I have no idea whether that translates to “Throw the Rascals Out” but that’s what happened around Europe in elections held yesterday.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy got beaten in his re-election try by Socialist François Hollande.

According to the International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times) Hollande is “seen as a challenge to the German-dominated policy of economic austerity in the Euro Zone, which is suffering from recession and record unemployment.”

In Germany, President Angela Merkel’s party was spanked in a regional election in the northern part of the nation. I am not an expert on electoral politics in Schleswig-Holstein, but according to the IHT the “Pirate party appeared to emerge as the biggest winners with 8 percent of the vote.” Continue reading →

Milbank Fails Free Speech/Press Test

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Freedom of speech and press keep the blood flowing through public discourse. But sometimes they are not all they’re cracked up to be.

A good example is Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post May 2, in which he excoriated House Republicans for not getting anything done. “It’s another recess week for our lazy leaders,” he wrote. “They are planning to be on vacation—er, doing “constituent work”—17 of the year’s remaining 34 weeks, and even when they are in town (Washington) the typical workweek is three days.”

Milbank is way off base on several counts and on balance, contributes more to the ignorance of his readers than their enlightenment, which you would think would be one of the key tests of whether a responsible news outlet prints or broadcasts anything broadly categorized as news or news commentary. In other words does what is printed or broadcast contribute to the public good; that is more the education than the entertainment of the people the media are trying to help govern themselves? Continue reading →

Women of Obamaland and Campaign Fakery

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Perhaps it was all part of a plan.

Still it seems oddly coincidental that just as revelations come out that the woman Barack Obama dated in one of his many autobiographies was actual not a woman but a composite of several women, the Obama campaign is unveiling Julia, another fake woman. Here is a tidbit from National Journal about Julia: “If the 2008 campaign had Joe the Plumber, 2012 might have “Julia,” a fictional woman created by the Obama campaign to show his strengths on women’s issues.

On Thursday, the campaign launched a webpage called “The Life of Julia,” tracking how the president’s policies have helped her throughout her lifetime and contrasting those to Mitt Romney’s policies. Starting at her childhood and ending at retirement, each slide shows an older Julia and a new policy. For example, at 31-years-old, a visibly pregnant Julia is at the doctor’s office. The caption reads, “Under President Obama: Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” As for Romney’s policies, the site says, “Health care reform would be repealed.” Continue reading →

Apple, Corporate Taxes, and Common Sense

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple (neé Apple Computer) “is the most valuable company” in the world. On the heels of its quarterly report last week, stock in Apple reached nearly $620 per share before settling back to end the week at $602.

The WSJ reported that Apple “posted a 94% profit jump to $11.6 billion and a 58.9% revenue increase to $39.2 billion.”

This is not a stock picking column, and that is about everything I know about the stock market, but I wanted to tell you that so that what follows made more sense.

The New York Times published a long piece looking at how Apple cleverly, but legally, has built a tax strategy that saves it billions of dollars. The Times reported that “the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent.” Continue reading →

ONE Campaign Doing Good in Ghana

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The reason I came to Ghana was to help publicize the introduction of two vaccines to the Ghanaian heath care system: a rotaviral vaccine and a pneumococcal vaccine for newborns.

These vaccines will help stave off infant diarrhea and pneumonia which kill more children under the age of five than malaria and tuberculosis combined.

A quick geography lesson: Ghana is located on the western coast of Africa, sort of. According to the CIA World Factbook it has a population of a little over 25 million of whom nearly 70 percent are Christian. The country is slightly smaller than Oregon.

This is sub-Saharan Africa, located just eight degrees north of the equator, so it is hot just about all the time. The temps have been in the high 80’s every day with a “feels like” temperature of about 104 because of the humidity. This is the beginning of the rainy season but we had only one rain storm, which was a dandy, and it passed in about an hour. Continue reading →

Taxpayers Paying for Perpetual Campaigns

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

President Obama is expected to spend a record-breaking $1 billion on his re-election campaign. That’s a lot of money, but there’s more. There are super PACS and interest groups and party organizations, all of which will spend added millions on his re-election.

There’s another pot of money, however, that should be added to the total–the growing amount of tax dollars being used to fund trips and functions that are classified by the White House as “official government business” but are in reality, purely partisan campaign events.

Speaker John Boehner finally spoke up last week, calling the President’s whirlwind taxpayer funded tour of college campuses “pathetic” and “beneath the dignity” of the White House. The President went to colleges in three battleground states, at taxpayers’ expense, presumably to rally support for a problem that was pretty much solved before Air Force One left the ground.

The college town tour was just one of many diversions of taxpayer funds to the campaign. It’s been going on for nine months, and it’s getting worse. Continue reading →

Postal System Politics and Productivity

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Before Ben Franklin revolutionized the delivery of mail in all Thirteen Colonies in North America, in the Southern colonies, postal duties often fell to slaves, who were responsible for carrying the mail from plantation to plantation. Failure to expedite the delivery of the mail cost the plantation owner a hogs head of tobacco under the local rules of the day.

In the northern colonies, most post offices doubled as taverns. Those taverns also doubled as inns (and who knows what else).

Responsibility for delivering the mail fell to merchants, friends or the kindness of strangers, until the localities decided that a more regular process was needed. And for most of the 1600’s, each colony had its own system to deliver the mail.

When Ben Franklin ran the Post Office for the City of Philadelphia, he set about modernizing the service across state lines. He surveyed land, built buildings, set up postal routes and created the first successful communication system between the states. Continue reading →

Mothers Who Worked

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

“You come along, tearing your shirt, yelling about Jesus. I want to know, what the hell you know about Jesus?”—Carl Sandburg’s “Billy Sunday”

My mom was a single mother at a time when couples simply didn’t get divorced. The only kids without dads lost them in the war. Involuntarily, she went from being a mother at home with three kids to finding an occupation to keep her family’s boat from sinking. She moved in with her mother, who had a large house of female boarders. And she chose teaching school as a way to make a living, all the while worrying about whether child welfare would come and take her kids away.

She worked for 35 years from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., five days a week. As a child, I remember her coming home right around the time the soap opera Edge of Night was ending. As the TV show “edged” toward its dramatic climax, an always to-be-continued episode, the schmaltzy music and credits rolling signaled her entrance through the front door. Once home, she’d grab the kid baton from grandma, who worked as a seamstress at home and who provided us with no-cost day care, i.e., keeping us fed and out of juvenile detention.

I’ve been listening for decades to the endless opinions about working moms and mothers at home. I recall the sound bites from the women’s liberation screed excoriating mothers at home as mindless automatons. Later, post-lib females wondered aloud if there might actually be some benefit to staying at home with kids, particularly for the kids. I heard countless cases for and against home versus work, single moms versus married, breast versus bottle, two dads-no mom, or dad being mom. Most recently I’ve listened to the ridiculous back and forth around Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen pillorying Ann Romney, mother at home and wife of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as a “basketball wife.” Continue reading →