Letter: One Generation to Another

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change at TCBMag.com

Talking last week with a client about social media, she commented, “Facebook posts really provide me with a lot of thought-provoking information I otherwise would never find myself.” I mostly agree. It’s like having 500 peers on the lookout for interesting perspectives and thoughtful insights from the collective conscious. I have found that Twitter provides very much the same kind of access, though it’s mostly up to me to find it. I rarely find re-tweets of much value. Somehow FB is more substantive. I particularly am a fan of apps like Flipboard that aggregate information.

That said, there are volumes of crap on FB. From privacy-invading ads to schmaltzy Stuart Smalley bromides and games like Dr. Zoo Little to inane updates on trivial daily activities, it’s astonishing how some people burn up their precious time.

Then there are times when a post is important and enlightening.

One such post was of a column in the Washington Post’s Guest Voices section, written by Thomas Day, an Iraq War veteran, Penn State graduate, Catholic, product of Jerry Sandusky’s infamous Second Mile foundation, and a current graduate student at the University of Chicago.

The line in his column that really jolted me was: “I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents’ generation.” Given that he was referring to me, I decided to respond. Continue reading →

Important New View of China

BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from Townhall.com

A just released book, “Bowing to Beijing” by Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II, will change forever the way you think about China — even if, like me, you already have the deepest worries about the Chinese threat. As I opened the book, I was expecting to find many useful examples of Chinese military and industrial efforts to get the better of the United States and the West.

Indeed, there are 100 pages of examples of the most remorseless Chinese successes at stealing the military and industrial secrets of the West and converting them into a growing menace — soon to be a leviathan — bent on domination and defeat of America. The authors itemize the sheer, unprecedented magnitude of this effort. But the opening chapters dealt with human rights abuses, and my first thought as I started reading was that I wanted to get right to the military and industrial examples.

But the authors were right to lead with 50 pages itemizing in grizzly detail Chinese human rights abuses — for the profound reason that after reading those first 50 pages, the reader will be impassioned to resist Chinese domination not only on behalf of American interests, but also for the sake of humanity. Continue reading →

On Upton: Left Not Right; Right is Wrong

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Energy and Commerce Committee chairman and Super Committee member Fred Upton of Michigan must be doing something right. He’s being criticized by both right and left wings of America’s political ideology.

The Left Wing, particularly environmental organizations, believes Chairman Upton poses a threat to the radicalized environmental agenda that emerged following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Upton has aimed the Committee’s big guns on the regulatory excesses of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is attempting to implement the new agenda without bothering to run things past the Congress.

Continue reading →

A Good Deal for Grover

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from the FeeheryTheory.com

I like Grover Norquist. He is a smart guy who has built an impressive organization, Americans for Tax Reform, that has served the conservative cause well over the last 25 years or so.

Grover has gone far in Washington by being unyielding in his opposition to increased tax revenue. His premise is simple: Washington is too big and spends too much. It doesn’t need any more money, and if it wants to balance the budget, it should cut spending.

His argument works for most Americans. Poll after poll shows that the American people want Washington spending cut, don’t want their taxes to go up and don’t like messy compromises that increase spending and raise taxes.

So why in the world would a supercommittee deal that includes increased revenues be good for Grover Norquist? And how can so many Republicans who have signed the Norquist pledge betray their own principles and vote for such a package and hope to survive a GOP primary?

Here are five reasons: Continue reading →

Oxy-Morons

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change at TCBMag.com

A young man I know visited a college campus with some friends this past weekend. For very good reason, he’s not inclined to whoop it up much. While on campus he was confronted by a college wrestler who used a homosexual slur to try to start a fight. Sensing considerable danger, the young man wisely chose to leave. The wrestler followed him to his car and proceeded to cold cock him in the face five or six times, knocking him senseless as he sat buckled up in his car seat. His friends drove to an emergency room where it was determined he had a severe concussion.

The wrestler will hopefully be prosecuted. We know who he is. His wrestling coach has a responsibility, once he’s found guilty, to kick the bully off the team. Beating campus visitors senseless can’t possibly be the type of behavior the school administration or the wrestling team at a Division 1 school espouses.

At least that’s what the school spokesperson would insist if asked. But frankly, the goings on at Penn State make me wonder if even the most respected universities give a damn, until of course they’re caught holding the bag. Continue reading →

Newt Up, Newt Down, Never Count Newt Out

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I have mentioned to you before that when it comes to making political predictions I am exactly 50-50. I am wrong exactly as often as I am correct, thus you can’t make any money betting on what I say, nor betting against me.

As a case in point let me direct your attention to MULLINGS from May 20, 2011, in which I wrote: In the week or so since Newt formally announced that he was a candidate for President, his campaign has gone from sputtering to on the rocks. I, like just about everyone else inside the Beltway, declared his candidacy over and his quest for the Presidency dead.

Yeah. Well…

In a poll released late last week Mitt Romney was leading Republican candidates with 23%; but Newt Gingrich was right on his heels at 19% (just outside the margin of error which was 3.5% among registered voters in the poll). Herman Cain may be succumbing to both political gravity and the grave nature of the charges against him and was at 17 percent in this poll. Continue reading →

Ricky, Ricky, Ricky

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

You’ve seen it a thousand times since Wednesday night. Gov. Rick Perry, primed with a talking point about the three Federal Departments he would shut down as President named the Departments of Commerce and Education and then couldn’t remember the name of the third Department.

One of the other contestants suggested the EPA, but that wasn’t it. John Harwood pressed the issue: “You can’t name the third one? Perry repeated the Department of Education, fumbled around for the Department of Commerce, and finally surrendered… “and let’s see. I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”

So, Perry can’t debate. So what?

Here’s his problem: Voters have precious few data points on which to decide for whom they will vote for President. News reports (which they largely don’t trust). Advertisements. Mail. Phone calls. And, for a very, very few in the totality of the popular vote, having seen and/or met the candidate somewhere on the campaign trail. Continue reading →

Cain, Paterno Will Not Survive Scandals

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

One of my Tweets (@richgalen) as I watched the Herman Cain presser the other day: “I am now officially as over watching pressers re: #thehermancain as I am watching GOP primary debates”

I said on Channel 9 in Washington, DC Monday night about Cain: [This is] the fourth one. I mean, the first one you say: “It never happened.” The second one you say: “Well, something happened but it was a misunderstanding.” The third one you go: “Well, it happened but not the way you think.” Now you’ve got the fourth one, all you can say is: “I’m, going to rehab.”

Mullfave Alex Castellanos was on CNN yesterday saying that Republicans needed to hold Herman Cain to the same standard they demanded of Bill Clinton. When I e-mailed him to say I thought that was a pretty good point he wrote back:

This is like Mel Brooks in The Producers. Herman never thought he’d get this far. The damned show was supposed to be fun, then fold!

Herman Cain will not survive this.

Meanwhile up the road in University Park, Pennsylvania a story has been unfolding which makes all the other violations by every major university in every sport look like they were caught stepping on the line in hopscotch. Continue reading →

Media Commits ‘Comment Creep’

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“This was Romney’s moment to make the case, that he is the substantive one, the electable one…But he didn’t. Instead he queued up his talking points…”

Who would you think made a comment like that? A cable news show talking head or a political consultant from the camp of the opposition? A newspaper columnist or a blogger? Not this time.

The opinion, not factual reporting or even analysis– was that of Philip Rucker, reporter for the Washington Post and it appeared in a Page 1 story under the opinion-rich headline: “Up close and way out of his comfort zone; On campaign trail Romney boggles chance to make connection with voters.”

The headline and the story violated what I, and I assume other consumers of American journalism, consider one of the sacred standards of reporting: objectivity.

Rucker’s opinions weren’t confined to the first couple of paragraphs. Most of the piece was opinion or at best subjective analysis. But it wasn’t labeled commentary or analysis or opinion. It was presented as a straight-up news story, on the front page, no less. Continue reading →

5 Roads to Open Republican Convention

BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from The Washington Times

Here’s a thought: The GOP presidential primaries may well prove to be inconclusive, with the nominee actually being chosen at the convention in Tampa, Fla., in the fourth week of August next year.

True, it has been generations since a presidential nominating convention actually made that decision, although, admittedly, this idea pops up every four years. The last contested GOP convention that went beyond the first ballot was 1948, when Thomas Dewey was chosen on the third ballot – and went on to lose to Harry Truman. For the Democrats it was 1952, when Adlai Stevenson was chosen also on the third ballot – and went on to lose to Dwight Eisenhower. The longest was the Democratic convention of 1924 that went on for more than two weeks and took 103 ballots to nominate John Davis, who lost to Calvin Coolidge.

There may be a pattern there. As G. Terry Madonna and Michael Young point out in their insightful Dec. 6, 2007, article “What if the conventions are contested?” “It is no coincidence that brokered conventions ended after networks began to televise them. The 1952 convention is instructive. Actually settled on the first ballot when Dwight Eisenhower beat Robert Taft, the intraparty brawling that preceded the Eisenhower victory appalled thousands who watched it on TV.”

In fact, hotly contentious conventions – whether the GOP in 1912 or the riotous Democratic Chicago convention in 1968 – often augur poorly for the general election. But whether good news or bad, five odd features of this season’s GOP primary process suggest inconclusiveness. Continue reading →

Questioning the Capacity to Lead

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

On November 6 next year – 52 weeks from tomorrow – those of us who haven’t availed ourselves of early voting, absentee voting, mail-in voting or some other form of not standing in line on election day will, in fact, be stepping into a voting booth to vote for President and Congress and for about a third of the population, for U.S. Senator.

For those of us who do this for a living, we will spend the next 12 months trying to tease out who is ahead, who’s behind and why. This process is easier when we are into the finals; when we know who the Republican candidate will be to run against President Obama.

While the popular press thinks the muddled GOP results are good for Obama, I think they are wrong. We’ll get back to that later.

The most recent poll was the ABC News/Washington Post poll which shows Romney about two percentage points ahead of Cain (25-23). That poll was, as we say, “in the field” from last Monday through last Wednesday meaning the Cain story had broken and was on everyone’s lips in between sips of coffee. Continue reading →

In God We Trust

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

When official Washington wasn’t trying to figure out who said what to whom about what Herman Cain might or might not have said or done while he was running the National Restaurant Association…

SIDEBAR
In addition to its other problems, the National Restaurant Association’s acronym is “NRA.” You may remember there is another organization which has those same initials: The National Rifle Association. All week people here have been talking about the NRA and having to add “That’s the Restaurant people, not the Gun folks.”
END SIDEBAR

… there was a minor issue over the House voting to re-affirm the national motto as “In God We Trust” not, as President Obama thought E pluribus unum “Out of Many, One.” The House vote was, according to the aptly named Christian Science Monitor “396-9, with 2 abstentions.”

The phrase “In God We Trust” first appeared on U.S. currency on the two-cent coin in 1864 after the Congress passed legislation allowing in in April of that year. Since 1938 “In God We Trust” has appeared on the obverse (the tails side) of every American coin. Continue reading →

Cainsian Politics

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

I haven’t got a clue what happened or didn’t happen while Herman Cain was CEO of the National Restaurant Association. There appear to be fewer than a dozen people – the two women and their lawyers, the general counsel and whoever produced the paperwork at the association, the people who wrote and signed the checks, and Herman Cain – who do know, and as of this writing none of them are talking. So, let’s put aside what, if anything, Cain did wrong.

But, I do know a lot about Combat Campaign Communications.

There is a saying in Washington: It’s not the crime; it’s the cover up. Even if there is no crime, shifting explanations make it look like the accused is putting up a smokescreen. The media will always gravitate to the conclusion that where there’s smoke …

The first mistake the Cain campaign made was responding to the original story on the Politico.com website at shortly after 9 PM Sunday. The Twitter-verse exploded within seconds. The Associated Press referred to the Politico story about 45 minutes later.

Rule: There is no Constitutional requirement for a campaign to respond to a reporter’s request, plea, demand, or appeal for a comment.

“But, I’m on DEADLINE!” ≠ a subpoena from a U.S. Attorney. Continue reading →

The Rich are Different

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from theFeeheryTheory.com

The rich are different than you and me. And it isn’t only that they have more money. The rich have come under attack recently, so I decided to take a look at who is really, really rich.

What I found was a group of people who have changed our world profoundly. Think of the Walton family, responsible for Walmart. The Mars family, responsible for all of that Halloween candy. Bill Gates and the dearly departed Steve Jobs, who revolutionized how we work, how we interact, how we live. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, and the Google guys are at the top too.

There is Warren Buffett, a role-model for all the savvy investors. And at both ends of the political spectrum, you have controversial figures like George Soros and the Koch brothers who made their money because they worked hard and were smarter than their competitors.

These folks have collectively revolutionized modern society. They had vision, creativity, persistence, and an innate toughness to get where they got.

So why should we begrudge them their wealth? Why should we talk them down and try to take their hard-earned money away from them? Continue reading →

The 7 Billionth Person

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from the FeeheryTheory.com

According to the United Nations, the 7 billionth person came into the world the other day. I was wondering why it felt kind of crowded around here.

The 1 billionth person arrived when Thomas Jefferson was president. No. 2 billion came when Calvin Coolidge was president, the 3 billionth when Dwight Eisenhower was president, the 4 billionth when Nixon was getting impeached, the 5 billionth when Reagan was in his second term, the 6 billionth when Clinton was in his second term, and now Obama is president with No. 7 billion.

If it seems like the pace is picking up, well, you are right. At this rate, we will hit 10 billion by 2050.

Most of the growth is occurring in Asia, Africa and South America. The United States and Europe are expected to stay fairly flat in their population growth, but that doesn’t mean that Europeans and Americans won’t be profoundly affected by the population explosion in other parts of the globe.
Continue reading →

Protest Media Bias

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

There is a lot of comparison being drawn between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. There are some similarities, but more differences between them, especially one: the coverage by news media.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters got their faces on ABC, CBS and NBC 33 times in the first eleven days of October. The Tea Party movement got coverage 13 times in all of 2009. The Media Research Center also found that the protesters got on camera delivering their message 87 percent of the time, compared to eight percent for their critics.

That was not the tea party’s experience, if I recall.

PEW research found that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) got more coverage quicker than the tea partiers. It took about three months for the media to pay attention to tea party demonstrations; it took less than a month with OWS, and OWS got its own acronym in no time. Continue reading →

Medicare Paid For?

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus.com

You know the ad we are talking about. The one where the burly-looking senior looks in the camera like John Wayne and intones something to this effect:

‘You mess with our Social Security and Medicare benefits…and we are gonna kick your butt!’

How is that for ‘thoughtful, rational civil discourse’ in America today, huh? We wouldn’t want to face that guy in a showdown death match on the golf course or the shuffleboard court. Continue reading →

Sizing Up Iowa Race

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The Des Moines Register released its poll of how Republicans in Iowa see the GOP candidates running for President.

The top line numbers are:
Herman Cain – 23%
Mitt Romney – 22%
Ron Paul – 12%
Michelle Bachmann – 8%
Newt Gingrich – 7%
Rick Perry – 7%
Rick Santorum – 5%
Jon Huntsman – 1%

The surprise to me was not that Herman Cain and Mitt Romney are at the top of the layer cake; it is that Rick Perry’s campaign has fallen so far, and so fast. In the run up to the Straw Poll in Ames, Iowa (which, you remember, was won by Michele Bachmann) Rick Perry announced he would announce, but he was a write-in for the actual tally. He got 4.3% of the votes cast and those of us who think about these things wondered how well he would have done had he paid the entry fee and had his name on the ballot. Continue reading →

Spam, Football, & Twitter

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Like you, I get about 2,713 e-mails a day. Most are routine work-related, or Mullings-related; and messages from campaigns or political organizations. I get plenty of spam and I normally ignore them, but one came in yesterday which made me laugh out loud. Here’s how it began: Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise and may offend your personality for contacting you without your prior consent and writing through this channel.

Of course it had to do with a box full of money containing “9.7 Million U.S. Dollars” which this guy needed to move out of, in this case, Afghanistan. I was just about to send the guy all the personal information he asked for when I read that the box is in Mazar-e-Sharif “which is a suburb not too far from here in Kabul.” Continue reading →

Victory in Iraq? Maybe.

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

President Obama has announced all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the year. Eight years, 4,500 U.S. troops killed and more than 33,000 wounded and we’re leaving. My vast store of knowledge about the military/political situation in Iraq ended in May 2004 when I came home and it wasn’t that vast even when I was there. I point that out to put myself squarely in the corner of people who say “I have no clue whether this is a good idea or not.”

Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta said in what I read as an extremely diffident statement, “Going forward, we will work closely with the Iraqi government and their armed forces to help them continue to build a stronger and more prosperous country.” I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone yesterday with a friend in the Gulf region – the “Persian,” not the “of Mexico” – who said with some conviction that the Iranians would be calling the shots in Iraq in short order. Continue reading →