US Garage Needs Cleaning

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

According to two pieces I read over the weekend, the world is coming to an end but I am going to be out-of-town for it.

I am at JFK awaiting a flight to Accra, Ghana to whence I will be traveling on behalf of the ONE Campaign. Ghana is introducing two new vaccines to its medical system and I’ll be there to watch (and write about) the roll-out.

However.

While I’m gone I would appreciated it if you would take some steps to straighten up the national garage. It’s a mess and it would be a good thing if we started tossing out the junk and putting the good stuff in its proper place. Continue reading →

Media Miss Real News Again and Again…

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Eleven Secret Service agents and 11 members of the Armed Forces got into deep trouble after allegedly paying for and partying with prostitutes in Cartagena, Columbia, prior to the President’s trip there for a Latin American summit.

The secret service scandal has been on the front pages of newspapers and leading the evening newscasts for days. The outcome of the Latin American summit got a one-day of coverage on Page 11 of the Washington Post and little if any coverage on network television.

Self-promoting political strategist Hillary Rosen made it onto evening news shows and page one of American newspapers for saying Ann Romney hasn’t worked a day in her life. The news outlets made it a point to say that Rosen’s remarks were just a “gaffe” and that she wasn’t speaking for anyone but herself. If that were the case and since few in America know who Hillary Rosen is, why is what she says such big news? Continue reading →

Evangelists and the Almighty…Dollar

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

For decades TV evangelists have effectively used Jesus to make millions. Thankfully, many have been busted for the petty criminals they are. I remember watching Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker testify to the Lord while simultaneously fleecing their flocks to support Tammy’s growing collection of expensive shoes and their fun-filled “house of worship,” the Heritage USA amusement park. The Reverend Jimmy Swaggart preached the bennies of salvation while separating little old ladies and Southern dullards from their savings accounts in order to fund a steady stream of prostitutes. “Jimmy likes the girls.”

Televangelist Robert Tilton, my favorite sleaze, dressed to the nines in silk suits and gold bling, and employed a convincing camera spiel imploring sick and vulnerable people to write checks for which he would deliver his healing powers of faith through the phone lines.

These good ol’ boys knew how to use a belief system to sell some shit, didn’t they?! Continue reading →

Presidential Advance a Different World

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I have no idea what happened, or didn’t happen, in Cartagena last week when at least 11 Secret Service Agents were suddenly sent home and replaced by a different team. You’ve read the headlines: “Agents Procure Prostitutes While Waiting for Obama” or words to a like effect.

A hundred years ago I did a few advance trips for Vice President Quayle. You can argue, and successfully, that the whole notion of putting about 100 people in place up to two weeks ahead of a visit by a President isn’t so much presidential as it is as it is imperial, but that’s a discussion for another day.

This is not something President Obama invented. I’m not sure when it started but it was the Presidential advance staff that arranged events at which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was appearing such that the public couldn’t easily see that he was unable to walk due to having contracted polio. Continue reading →

Rosen, Women, and Media Bias

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The media coverage of the 2012 political campaigns continues to flood the airwaves, like the Mississippi River in Spring time with inaccuracies, hyperbole, exaggerations, innuendo, and outright falsehoods.

It is too bad the media doesn’t have a Fact-Check.com that does such an excellent job correcting the same drivel from the campaigns and the candidates. Keeping the media honest is more than Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz can handle. There’s too much to cover.

Just this week for example, there was the saga of Hillary B. Rosen, the liberal Democratic strategist and mouthpiece, who criticized Mrs. Romney for being a stay-at-home mom and condemned Mitt Romney for inequality toward women. Here is what she has been quoted as saying: “His (Romney’s) wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why we worry about their future.” Continue reading →

Presidential Campaign Rules of the Road

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

From Great Barrington, MA

Now that we’re deep into the general election campaign – about 72 hours into it – let’s review the rules.

No matter how many times you’ve hear it, it bears repeating that an election for President in the United States are not a national event. It is a collection of 51 separate elections. The number of electoral votes each state gets equals the number of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives plus its two Senators. Thus California gets 55 electoral votes (53 Congressional Districts plus two Senators) while Wyoming (a single Member state) gets three.

The District of Columbia, although it has one non-voting Delegate to the House and no Senators, by virtue of the 23rd Amendment gets three electoral votes which is why there are 535 voting Members of the House and Senate but 538 electoral votes. One half of 538 is 269. Thus, the magic number to be able to take the Oath of Office on January 20, 2013 is 270 – half of the electoral votes plus one.

I took your valuable time to remind you of all that because as you listen to geniuses like me on TV and radio for the next seven months talk about how many women are voting for Obama; how many men are voting for Romney; how many religious conservatives and how many college students will actually turn out to vote you should keep all that in mind. Continue reading →

Mitt, Rick, and Newt

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Rick Santorum called it a day yesterday afternoon.

In one of those weird campaign events, Santorum’s folks tried to keep what the event was to be under wraps until about 2pm Eastern. But, the staff got buffaloed into giving up the fact that Santorum would be “suspending” his campaign so, by the time the event started at about 2:20, every person on the planet with a Twitter account was writing about it.

Santorum’s withdrawal from the campaign was a paradox: He had done too well to stay in any longer.

The Pennsylvania primary will be held on April 24. If Santorum were to win (not a foregone conclusion) he would have been locked into the race through May and probably through June.

This is April 10. Santorum is pretty much out of money. The notion of pretending to compete against Mitt Romney for the next 10 weeks was too much to contemplate.

If Santorum were to lose in Pennsylvania (also not a foregone conclusion) then his political career would end with a dull thud. Santorum had no good way to move on, so he got out.

Much has been made about the fact that Santorum didn’t mention Romney in his exit speech, but there is not a great deal of love between the two, so we should give Santorum a pass. Continue reading →

Work More? Go Home? Honestly, Go Home

BY GARY JOHNSON
Loose Change Reprinted from TwinCitiesMagazine.com

I’ve heard hundreds of wails from people who claim they work 60- to 70-hour weeks. Occasionally, I’ll even hear about someone working 100-plus-hour weeks, the most recent example coming from my own company. The individual just had a heart bypass at age 47. Ahem.

I mostly don’t believe the hours-worked stories any more than I believe compensation stories. However, if one does the math on a 70-hour work week, over a five-day period one must work 14 hours per day, i.e., a 6 a.m. start would land you home at 8 p.m., every single flipping day of the week. Actually, working that schedule would not land you home—more likely you’d end up in a clinic or psych ward.

Continue reading →

Martin Killing Not Trivial Moment

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The Trayvon Martin incident is no trivial moment in American history.

Mr. Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman in a Sanford, Florida gated community. Zimmerman says he was defending himself. Civil rights leaders and the Martin family believe it was murder.

The Sanford Police Department doesn’t quite know what to believe, and so far, has refused to arrest Zimmerman.

Upon this one deadly confrontation, America’s racial past and future collapse.

Will we ever live in a post-racial society or must we continue to harbor resentments and fears that poison our respective outlooks on our society?

I was watching a documentary the other night on PBS about Reconstruction in the old South. For a brief moment in time, things improved for blacks in the South after the Civil War. African-Americans were allowed to vote, and several were elected to political office, including the United States Senate. Continue reading →

Etch-a-Sketching a Campaign

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from apcoworldwide.com

One might say that the Etch-a-Sketch is the perfect metaphor for the Republican primary season. One day, Mitt Romney is featured on the screen; the next (shake-a, shake-a) Rick Santorum appears! Shake-a, shake-a, ba da bing – Mitt’s back!! Shake-a, shake-a…well, you get the idea.

Romney’s campaign guy, Eric Fernstrom, mucked up with his comment. It happens in a campaign. And in a campaign marred by a few of these kinds of comments (see: Mitt Romney, more than a few times, so far), Fernstrom’s comment becomes an even bigger “story” because the media’s “narrative” of Romney’s campaign is they say dumb things at dumb times and Mitt’s a chameleon. His slip up becomes a “gotcha” – well, if you buy the “narrative.” Continue reading →

Time to Hit The Road We’ve Traveled

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Does anyone else find it odd that the President’s campaign team is releasing its Hollywood biopic “The Road We’ve Traveled,” a full six months before the actual election and in the middle of a bloody and nasty Republican primary?

This is not some in-house production. Davis Guggenheim, who put together “Waiting for Superman”, and “Inconvenient Truth”, produced this for the President and perhaps the most popular actor in Hollywood, Tom Hanks, is the narrator.

This is the kind of film you show at the Convention. This is the kind of film you buy network time in the middle of High School football season. You don’t release this the day before St. Patrick’s Day, unless of course you are starting to panic about your crashing poll ratings.

Speaking of St. Patrick’s Day, the former White House Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, an Irishman if there ever was one, decided his first move after leaving the Obama Team was to join the Third Way, the “think tank” dedicated to making the Democratic Party less radically socialist. Good luck with that. Continue reading →

I Know It When I See It

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

This column may well generate about 40,000 “Unsubscribes” this morning, but there you are.

In the early 1960s a man named Nico Jacobellis was arrested after the showing of a French movie in his theater by the name of “The Lovers” on the grounds that the film was obscene.

This case would doubtless be relegated to punishing second year law school students were it not for the fact that (a) the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court and (b) in a concurring opinion Justice Potter Stewart penned one of the most memorable phrases in Court history.

In concurring with a reversal of Mr. Jacobellis’ conviction, Justice Stewart wrote about trying to define the phrase “hard-core pornography”: I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Putting aside how Mr. Justice Stewart had come upon comparative material, this famous quote came to mind when I read that GOP Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum plans to boldly go where Supreme Court Justices have feared to tread.

On his campaign web page a position paper on pornography contains this: While the Obama Department of Justice seems to favor pornographers over children and families, that will change under a Santorum Administration. Continue reading →

Dixie

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Alabama and Mississippi. Southern States. States that help define the word “Southern” in the United States.

Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania – western Pennsylvania, not southern – won them both.

Newt Gingrich made it clear after Nevada that he had a plan to turbocharge his campaign once the primary calendar moved into the South. On CNN a couple of weeks ago, Gingrich said he thought he’d win at least two among Mississippi, Alabama and Kansas.

He didn’t win Kansas. Santorum won Kansas, too.

That meant, by his own arithmetic, Gingrich needed to win both Mississippi and Alabama. Continue reading →

Civility Isn’t Easy

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

This will be a test. A civility test. I want to talk about this Rush Limbaugh v Bill Maher business of using really bad words to describe people they don’t agree with.

This is not a discussion about contraception or Obama-care or Women’s reproductive rights or free speech.

It will be a discussion about civility. Of which we are in dreadfully short supply these days.

Those of us who are professional political hacks – Republican and Democrat – have been taught since kindergarten that the way to win is to draw the starkest possible distinction between your candidate and your opponent.

If your opponent says it’s dawn, you claim the man was probably up partying until all hours and can’t tell day from night. If your opponent says it’s a nice day, you turn it into a full-blown attack on his belief that global warming is killing baby seals. Continue reading →

Romney Did Win

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

At 10:08 PM Rick Santorum was hanging on to a two percentage point lead in Ohio, but it was a very good night for Santorum no matter what happens as the rest of Ohio’s votes are counted.

The pre-game analysis – by me – was that Romney would probably win Ohio fairly easily – by four or five percentage points. He had closed a double-digit gap over the past 10 days and I thought he was catching Super Tuesday on an upswing.

I was wrong.

I also thought that he would have a good chance of picking off Tennessee where he had been doing well among late deciders. I was wrong. The high-level of Evangelical voters there boosted Santorum to an easy 9 percentage point win.

I thought Ron Paul might pick up his first win in North Dakota. I was wrong. Santorum won there, too. Even though only about 10,000 people participated, Santorum got about 40% of them. Continue reading →

Hazing The Rich

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change at TCBMag.com

Hey brother, can you spare a dime?

On second thought, keep it. . . . I’d prefer that people like me.

Two-thousand twelve is not a good year to be rich. I haven’t seen rich-bashing like this since my days as a 10-year-old caddy at Minnehaha Country Club in Sioux Falls. My pals and I would deride the potbellied, Cadillac-driving, cigar-chomping rich guys whose golf bags we lugged around on hot summer afternoons, chasing down their shanks, duck hooks, and chili dips for a 25-cent tip.

Although we had nothing but contempt and fear for these guys, not a day went by that we didn’t think to ourselves, “I’m going to work my butt off and someday have a bunch of money just like them.” Unfortunately for me and some chums—Jaybird, Kenny the Torch, Boo Radley, Punjab, Laff-A-Lot, and Bucky—that plan didn’t work out so well. Continue reading →

Time To Pack It In, Rush

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

If Rush were my Mother’s child, she would have washed his mouth out with soap, smacked his butt with a ping pong paddle and sat him in the corner for some quiet time with the Catholic missile to read.

But Rush is no child. He is a powerful voice in and for conservative America who influences both thinking and behavior.

Limbaugh, on Feb. 29^th, called a female law school student, who testified at a faux hearing on Capitol Hill in support of insurance payments for contraception, the equivalent of a “slut” and a “prostitute”.

Limbaugh went way beyond the bounds of civility, maturity, simple human decency and most importantly, Christian behavior. Continue reading →

Super Pacs are Over-Rated

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

It is conventional wisdom that the rise of the so-called Super Pac is good for the Republican Party.

That is false.

The Super Pac is very good for some campaign consultants who want to ply their trade without having to consult directly with the pesky candidate. But they have been bad for the party as a whole.

Rick Santorum wouldn’t still be in the race if it weren’t for his Super Pac. Newt Gingrich wouldn’t still be in the race if it weren’t for his Super Pac. Those two Super Pacs have largely been funded by two rich guys who kind of like Rick and Newt.

The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that one rich guy gave money to the Rick Super Pac, the Newt Super Pac, and the Mitt Super Pac. Those Super Pac dollars were then used to beat the hell out of Rick, Newt and Mitt. So, in a sense, this one rich guy spent a million dollars so that Republicans could attack each other. Continue reading →

Regular Order Guy

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

When David Dreier co-chaired the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress in 1993, Bob Michel assigned me to keep an eye on the process for him.

Even back then, Dreier was a regular order guy. He believed in the best possibilities of open rules, open debate and an open process.

Of course, back then, Republicans in the Minority, and an open process was the only shot we had at influencing legislation.

When Dreier first came to Congress in the early 80’s, Tip O’Neill was the Speaker and open rules were more of a regular occurrence. But Jim Wright ascended to the throne, and soon it became harder for Republicans to offer amendments.

Wright wasn’t much of a fan of open debate, and he used all kind of parliamentary shenanigans to impose his will on the House of Representatives. Wright’s abuse of the process begat the radicalism of Newt Gingrich, which begat an era in the Congress that can only be described as dysfunctional. Continue reading →

Michigan, Arizona – Sigh.

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

All over big cities across this great nation of ours Establishment Republicans (ERs) are breathing again because Mitt Romney won both Michigan and Arizona. And Michigan.

Establishment Democrats (EDs – I know, I know) had been breaking out the kazoos and confetti to celebrate running against Rick Santorum in the Fall had he won in Michigan.

There was some serious (a Mary Matalin-ism) projectile sweat from the ERs through yesterday afternoon that Rick Santorum might actually win Michigan, one of Romney’s many home states. What would they do?

Santorum? Anti-Satan Santorum? Anti-Contraception Santorum? Pro-Theocracy Santorum? Senator Santorum who lost his seat by 134 percentage points? THAT Santorum was going to be the GOP nominee?

omg. OMG. O*M*G! Continue reading →