Week in Review Part IV: Random Musings

The first real polls pitting President Obama head-to-head with Mitt Romney since the departure of Rick Santorum from the race are now flooding in. [Nationwide, registered voters]

Gallup…Romney 48-44
Fox News…Romney 46-44
CNN/ORC…Obama 52-43
Pew Research Center…Obama 49-45
Quinnipiac…Obama 46-42
ABC News/Washington Post…Obama 51-44
NBC News /Wall Street Journal…Obama 49-43
CBS News/New York Times…46-46

In the NBC/WSJ survey, taken in late February and early March, Mitt Romney’s positive rating was just 28% and now it’s up to 33%, some progress. 48% have a positive view of President Obama, basically in line with the winter’s data. By a six-point margin, more Americans saw Romney rather than Obama as having good ideas for improving the economy.

Obama’s overall approval rating stood at 49% in the NBC/WSJ poll. [The low in this survey was 44% from August through November.] Among independents, 47% approve, 43% disapprove.

But one major headwind for the president; 59% still believe the country is on the wrong track, though down from a high under Obama of 74% in October.

--In the Pew survey, 86% said the economy was the most important issue.

--In the CBS/N.Y. Times poll, Obama was favored by women 49-43, but was tied 43-43 among independents.

--In the CNN/ORC survey, Obama was favored by women 55-39, and 48-43 among independents.

--In the Pew poll, Obama beats Romney 67-27 among Hispanic voters. In 2008, Obama defeated Sen. John McCain 67-31 among this group. The RNC recently announced it would target Hispanic voters with an outreach program in Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Nevada. Look for the Dos Equis if you opt to attend an event. Or rather, demand it.
“You call this stinkin’ outreach?! Where’s the Dos Equis?!”
Stay thirsty, my friends.

--In the Quinnipiac poll, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the choice among Republicans to be Romney’s running mate at 31%, ahead of 24% for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and 23% for Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
--Kathleen Parker / Washington Post

“For reasons that don’t interest me much, ‘girl fights’ have always had a particular tug on our imaginations.

“Thus, when consultant/pundit/Democrat Hilary Rosen commented on CNN that Ann Romney had never held a job (and therefore was ill-suited to advise her husband on women’s employment concerns), the body politic convulsed in paroxysms of outrage.
“And off they went.

“Stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) allegedly were insulted. Working mothers who allegedly envy SAHMs recoiled from the blinding truth of Rosen’s observation. Single moms with mouths to feed and no jobs allegedly were furious at the Romneys’ apparent cluelessness.

“Regular folks, meanwhile, who know better than to argue about ‘women issues’ when the political masses are engaged, somehow managed to get through another night without pondering whether the gender gap can ever be bridged….

“President Obama, reminding folks that he was raised by a single mom, noted that women who stay home with children are doing hard work and that anyone who argues otherwise should ‘rethink their statement.’ Rosen quickly rethunk and apologized for saying something true, which is never allowed in politics – but the heat is still high….

“Only gravel doesn’t know that the women’s vote is all-important this election season. Never mind the perennial insult that women are monolithic and vote only as their female parts dictate. Women, as Ann Romney has tried to point out, care about jobs and the economy because they are sentient human beings who do, in fact, work (57.7% of those over 16), or want to. And they do, in fact, worry that there will be no recognizable nation left if we don’t get serious about the debt and deficit in ways that don’t split the country into warring factions of haves and have-nots. Nothing like using women to emotionalize and distract from the hard work of governance.

“Women and men should be angry, all right, but not at Ann Romney or Hilary Rosen, who are entitled to both their opinions and their choices without fear of censure or condemnation. Anger is better directed at those who take tiny utterances and inflate them into phony distractions. Visitors to preschool playgrounds have witnessed disagreements of greater import.”
--Thomas Friedman / New York Times

“I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal.

“And that is why I still hope Michael Bloomberg will reconsider running for president as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs….

“After his mayoral term is over in 2013, Bloomberg will apparently spend more time running his foundation. That’s commendable. But the single greatest act of philanthropy he could do for the country is right now: run for president as an independent…If he doesn’t, and this turns into a presidential race to the bottom, he could donate every dollar he has to fix things in America and they’d be wasted, or, more accurately, overwhelmed by our mounting problems. The most patriotic thing Bloomberg could do is become an unpaid lobbyist for the country – and for the next generation of Americans.”

--It’s really amazing how the Secret Service scandal in Cartagena could have gone down, and how these supposed professionals could have allowed themselves to be vulnerable to blackmail and thus risk the security of the president and others they are charged with protecting. And as we learn more about these clowns that we grew up once respecting, it’s amazing that you have the guy who had been responsible for vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s security actually commenting on her physical appearance on his Facebook page.
Republican Congressman Darrell Issa (Calif.):

“Things like this don’t happen once if they didn’t happen before…

“We have got to ask, ‘where are the systems in place to prevent this in the future?’ It’s the reason that the investigation will not be about the 11 to 20 or more involved. It will be about how did this happen and how often has this happened before?...

“It’s not about whether the president was in danger this time. It’s whether or not you need to make changes so the American people can have confidence in their (entire) workforce.”
President Obama:

“We’re representing the people of the United States, and when we travel to another country, I expect us to observe the highest standards, because we’re not just representing ourselves, we’re here on behalf of our people.”

--George Zimmerman’s bail was set at $150,000 and he could be free in a few days. He’ll be required to wear a GPS device. In a hearing, he told Trayvon Martin’s parents, “I wanted to say I am sorry for the loss of your son.”

--Two years after the BP oil spill, there is no doubt some prized fish such as grouper and red snapper are diseased, which kind of sucks.

--Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water, but now scientists say they have discovered the volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount on the surface, according to BBC News. Some of the largest underground water sources are said to be in Libya, Algeria and Chad. The scientists disagree on the best ways of accessing the supply; with some saying large-scale borehole developments could actually rapidly deplete the resource. Emphasis, instead, should be placed on slower means of extraction to support drinking and community irrigation.

--A report out of Yale University and George Mason University finds that 69% of Americans agree that global warming is affecting weather in the United States. 70% or more believe it was responsible for the unusually warm 2011-2012 winter and the record high temperatures in 2011.

Separately, Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University, had some of the following in an op-ed for USA TODAY.

“Out in the climate, the dice are being loaded to favor some unusual events. We can’t prove that global warming caused any single new record, just as we can’t prove that the weighted dice caused a run of double-sixes. But for many extreme weather events such as record heat, it is much harder to prove that our CO2 is innocent, just as it is very hard to prove that loaded dice didn’t affect the game.

“Science doesn’t have a good understanding of warming’s impact on the occurrence and strength of small, fierce storms such as tornadoes, so it would be very difficult to show a human fingerprint in the severity of the recent outbreaks. But extra heat and water vapor are up there, so it could be harder to show that we haven’t boosted the destructive power.

“More important, if we continue to burn fossil fuels and release the CO2 to the air, we’re loading the dice more and more….Today’s youngsters might live to see so much warming that the hottest summer now on record becomes commonplace or even cool in many places….

“Even so, the best science is clear. We get many benefits from burning fossil fuels, but the CO2 is projected to change the climate in costly ways. As the easy fossil fuels are exhausted, more and more we will want sustainable alternatives.

“Careful lottery players check the jackpot and their cash reserves before buying the next ticket. But though the scientific community is working to calculate the odds in the climate game, society is still rolling the increasingly loaded dice through accelerating fossil-fuel burning.”

--That was pretty cool to learn that Antarctica has twice as many emperor penguins as once thought after an extensive British and U.S. study using satellite imaging. As in there are 595,000 living in 46 colonies along the coast of the place, compared with previous estimates of 270,000 to 350,000.

Maybe they’ll band together and attack worthless Argentina.
--Charles Krauthammer / Washington Post

“As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.

“The shuttle was being carried – its pallbearer, a 747 – because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.

“Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement – beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate – but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on – the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon – was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China….

“Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or inspiring the young – legacies of NASA – when we are in economic distress? Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation – what President Obama insists are the keys to ‘an economy built to last’ – why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?

“We lament the decline of American manufacturing, yet we stop production of the most complex machine ever made by man – and cancel the successor meant to return us to orbit. The result? Abolition of thousands of the most highly advanced aerospace jobs anywhere – its workforce abruptly unemployed and drifting away from space flight, never to be reconstituted….

“There are always excuses for putting off strenuous national endeavors; deficits, joblessness, poverty, whatever. But they shall always be with us. We’ve had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea’s is today….

“NASA will tell you that it’s got a new program to go way beyond low-Earth orbit and, as per Obama’s instructions, land on an asteroid by the mid-2020s. Considering that Constellation did not last even five years between birth and cancellation, don’t hold your breath for the asteroid landing.

“Nor for the private sector to get us back into orbit, as Obama assumes it will. True, hauling MREs up and trash back down could be done by private vehicles. But manned flight is infinitely more complex and risky, requiring massive redundancy and inevitably larger expenditures. Can private entities really handle that? And within the next lost decade or two?....

“Neil Armstrong, James Lovell and Gene Cernan…called Obama’s cancellation of Constellation a ‘devastating’ decision that ‘destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.’

“ ‘Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides,’ they warned, ‘the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity.’ This, from ‘the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century.’….

“(Today) we can’t even do what John Glenn did in 1962, let alone fly a circa-1980 shuttle.”

--Finally, I’m in Johnson City, Tenn., for no other reason than I needed a decent place to bang out a column and the Carnegie Hotel where I’m staying is one of the more pleasant surprises of my recent travels.

I’ve done a lot of history sightseeing this week, particularly Lexington, Virginia; Appomattox and Bedford, Va., the last one where the National D-Day memorial resides.

Lexington is home to Washington & Lee University and VMI, as well as the final resting place for Robert E. Lee (president of W&L the last five years of his life) and Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, who taught at VMI before he was called into service.

But George Washington was the original benefactor of W&L and among his many firsts, call him the first education president. In 1784, he said:

“…the best means of forming a manly, virtuous and happy people, will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.”
In 1790, Washington said:

“Knowledge is in every Country the surest basis of public happiness.”

VMI was also where George C. Marshall went to school and there is an excellent museum to honor one of the Greatest Americans of all time. I didn’t realize he was born on West Main Street in Uniontown, PA (being familiar with the area). He lived near George Washington’s Ft. Necessity, so Marshall’s father, George Sr., would take him there often which instilled in his boy a love and respect for history.

But in touring the Marshall museum, I was struck by this one quote of his.

“Discouraged people are in sore need of the inspiration of Great Principles. Such leadership can be the rallying point against intolerance, against distrust, against that fatal insecurity that leads to war. It is to be hoped that democratic nations can provide the necessary leadership.”
Lord, oh how we need such leadership today.

Lastly, as we roll through the 150th anniversary of the Civil War from 2011-2015, I hope many of you get to go to Appomattox. Leave enough time to walk the historic trail and visit the cemetery about a ½-mile from McLean House (where the surrender took place).

For ten years I’ve had an essay written by the late Dr. Joseph Harsh, who was a Professor of History at George Mason University. He used to teach a summer course that ended with his students sitting around Stonewall Jackson’s tomb in Lexington, a beautiful spot where 144 Confederate veterans are also buried. Here is just some of what he would tell those students, as published in Hallowed Ground, summer 2002.

They are all gone now.

The dewy cheeked boys, who left home before their first shave; their older brothers, who marched away from young wives clutching infants in their arms; and their grizzled fathers, whose gray streaked hair and beards belied arms as stout as their hearts.

They are all gone.

The men who discovered at Bull Run that war was not a lark, but a vulture; who crept through the Bloody Cornfield and knelt in the Bloody Lane; who crawled through the snows on Marye’s Heights; who would not yield on Little Round top and who climbed the post-and-rail fence on the Emmittsburg Pike amidst a hail of bullets; they who lay among the burning trees of the Wilderness; and who endured the dank, stinking trenches of Petersburg.

They who surrendered at Appomattox, and they who did not jeer the vanquished there.

They are all gone….

We who are their great, and great-great, and great-great-great-grandchildren can never know them now. We can never see them, or hear them, or touch them.

We can know them only through the ancient photographs of faded brown and white, where they stand mute, unmoving, mysterious to our gaze….

And the least that we can do – and, sadly, the most that we can do – to reach back through fast receding years and thank them for the pain, the suffering, the sacrifice, to thank them for our United States, is to preserve, to protect, and to defend the ground they hallowed.

But our obligation is much greater than to thank them. Our most sacred duty, our ultimate loyalty, is to remember, to keep alive, and to pass on their willingness to sacrifice, their love of country, their devotion to freedom.

We are the future now, but ultimately we are only a link between the past and the future. This generation may never be called upon to make huge, soul-wrenching sacrifices of life and fortune.

But someday – and it is as inevitable as the rising of the sun – a future generation will again be touched by fire and will be summoned to defend our country and our freedom.

If your children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, when that call comes, are too soft, too lazy, too uncaring to meet the challenge, not only will they fail, but we fail also, and so will fail every generation which has preceded us.

Antietam, Gettysburg and Appomattox will have been in vain.

Yes, they are all gone now.

And soon – in a blink of the cosmic eye of time – we also will all be gone. But we are all connected.

The Civil War is not a closed book.

It is a continuing story that never ends.
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Pray for the men and women of our armed forces…and all the fallen.
God bless America.
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Gold closed at $1642
Oil, $103.88

Returns for the week 4/16-4/20

Dow Jones +1.4% [13029]
S&P 500 +0.6% [1378]
S&P MidCap +1.2%
Russell 2000 +1.0%
Nasdaq -0.4% [3000]

Returns for the period 1/1/12-4/20/12

Dow Jones +6.6%
S&P 500 +9.6%
S&P MidCap +11.0%
Russell 2000 +8.5%
Nasdaq +15.2%

Bulls 44.1
Bears 23.7 [Source: Investors Intelligence]