Monthly Archives: November 2011

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 →