Week in Review Part IV: Random Musings

Various polls of likely Republican primary voters and/or Republican-leaning

Independents:

USA TODAY/Gallup
Cain 21%
Romney 21%
Gingrich 12%
Perry 11%
Washington Post/ABC News
Romney 24%
Cain 23%
Perry 13%
Gingrich 12%
Wall Street Journal/NBC News
Romney 28%
Cain 27%
Gingrich 13%
Paul 10%
Perry 10%
New York Times/CBS News
Cain 18%
Romney 15%
Gingrich 15%
Perry 8%

A huge 31% in this last one either want someone else or are undecided.

In the Wall Street Journal/NBC survey, President Obama receives a 44% job approval rating for the third consecutive month.

In the Washington Post/ABC poll, 70% say the allegations against Herman Cain make no difference in their vote.

--Editorial / The Economist

“The European Union may seem the epitome of political dysfunction, but America has been running it close. All this year the deadlock between the Republicans in Congress and Mr. Obama has meant that precious little serious legislation has been passed. The president’s jobs bill is stuck; the House of Representatives’ budget plans have been scuppered by the Democrat-controlled Senate. At the end of this year temporary tax cuts and other measures, worth around 2% of GDP, are set to expire – which could push America back into recession….

“The right is mostly to blame. Ronald Reagan, a divorcee who did little for the pro-life lobby and raised taxes when he had to, would never be nominated today. Mr. Romney, like all the Republican presidential candidates, recently pledged to reject tax rises, even as part of a deal where spending cuts would be ten times bigger. Mr. Cain surged briefly to the front of the pack because of a plan that would cut personal taxes to 9%; Mr. Perry lost support for wanting to educate the children of illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, in Congress, the few remaining pragmatic Republican centrists, like Senator Richard Lugar, are being hunted down by tea-party activists.

“Mr. Obama has tried harder to compromise. But he foolishly failed to embrace a long-term budget solution put forward by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission, which he himself appointed. Ever since the furor over the debt ceiling this summer, he has ‘pivoted’ to the left, dabbling in class war, promising his supporters that the budget can be solved by taxing ‘millionaires and billionaires’….

“The divisiveness is hardly new, but it is increasingly structural. As the battle for billions of campaign dollars heats up, neither side dares grant the other any modicum of success, or risk the ire of its donors by appearing to compromise.”

--As part of the above NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, 57% of those who voted for Republican John McCain in 2008 say they are more enthusiastic to vote in the coming election than past elections, compared with 41% of 2008 Obama voters.

--Texas Gov. Rick Perry during Wednesday’s CNBC debate.

“It is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the – what’s the third one there? Let’s see, Commerce and, let’s see. I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”

Perry replied in the media filing center afterwards: “Yeah, I stepped in it, man. Yeah, it was embarrassing. Of course it was.”

John Podhoretz / New York Post

“The Titanic-like campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry crashed into the iceberg of his own brain at 9:18 EST last night.

“Perry, who entered the race as an immediate frontrunner in August and then sank like a stone after a series of wretched debate performances, outdid himself with the most embarrassing single televised minute any important American politician has ever inflicted upon himself.

“Ever. In history….

“We saw a moment of utter blankness, of paralyzed thought, that offered the perfect illustration of why people tell pollsters they fear public speaking more than they fear death….

“It wouldn’t have meant anything if it had happened to Mitt Romney, who is so fluid by now that he sounds like a carnival barker trying to tempt you into seeing the Hall of Wonders. Or to Newt Gingrich, who has been liberated by the ultimate pointlessness of his campaign into a genuinely refreshing devil-may-care looseness.

“Such a moment for either man might have humanized him, might have suggested that they had some commonality with ordinary folk and were not simply Terminator 2012s programmed by Skynet to speak perfect Republican blarney.

“Not Perry. He literally had no margin for error coming into last night’s event in Michigan….

“His only hope of reviving his damaged candidacy was to deliver unexpectedly brilliant performances in public events. Well, he was unexpected last night – we thought he couldn’t possibly have been any more unimpressive than he had been previously. He sure surprised us!”

--As for Herman Cain and the women accusing him of sexual harassment, the AP reported that one of Cain’s accusers, Karen Kraushaar, filed a complaint, not of sexual harassment but of unfair treatment while working as a spokeswoman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, three years after she settled a sexual harassment complaint against Cain with the assistance of the same lawyer, Joel Bennett. It’s complicated, but I want to wait 24 hours when it comes to Kraushaar…and another 24 hours (a week) before commenting further on Cain. Hopefully it takes care of itself and I don’t have to!

--There were few big issues in Tuesday’s elections, but Ohio voters rejected a new law sharply restricting public worker’s collective bargaining rights; important as Ohio is going to once again be a real battleground state in the 2012 presidential election. It was also seen as a referendum on Ohio Rep. Gov. John Kasich.

And Atlanta approved Sunday alcohol sales. No wonder I never seemed to stay in Atlanta on Sundays. I always left at the crack of dawn for another city, come to think of it.

--Editorial / Washington Post…on further looming cuts to the defense budget.

“True, the Pentagon brass are known for pushing hard for their funding. But they rarely speak in such apocalyptic tones – and there is good reason to take their warnings seriously. Under President Obama’s budget plan, $465 billion is already due to be cut from military spending over the next decade, from an annual budget now of about $700 billion. That will already require a downsizing of the Army and Marines, the reduction or cancellation of more weapons systems and a shrinking of the Navy to its lowest size in decades. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a lifelong budget hawk, is rightly concerned that such cuts may go too far.

“If the additional sequestration goes forward, the total reduction could come to $1 trillion. This, Gen. Odierno said, would ‘almost eliminate our modernization programs’ in the Army, including new armored vehicles. Adm. Greenert said it could force the two U.S. companies that build Navy ships out of business. The Air Force would have to retire some 1,000 aircraft. In all, about 1 million military and civilian jobs would be lost….

“In the meantime, a bad and even dangerous message would be sent to U.S. allies and adversaries. ‘We’ll have those who attempt to exploit our vulnerabilities,’ Gen. Odierno said. ‘We might lose our credibility in terms of our ability to deter.’

“Congress set this bomb in place when it agreed in the summer that half of $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts would be assessed to defense if a debt reduction plan failed to pass this year. Now it has heard from senior commanders just how much damage its explosion would cause. It would be an unconscionable act of political irresponsibility to allow their predictions to come true.”

--I have a nephew who this year had a choice between going to Pitt or Penn State and thankfully chose the former. Otherwise, I have little to add here in the hideous case of Jerry Sandusky, having already commented exclusively in another column I do for the site, except to say that aside from wanting to know what Joe Paterno really knew all these years, like you I’m trying to figure out how assistant coach (then graduate assistant) Mike McQueary lived with himself all this time after witnessing what he did back in 2002. I also just want to put in my two cents when it comes to Penn State’s students. Think twice, kids, before you act like an idiot. These days it follows you everywhere, as opposed to the time of my own youth when we could get away with a lot of stuff with nothing more than personal memories as opposed to photos splashed on the Internet for all future employers to see.

--The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project surveyed 800 children between the ages of 12 and 17 and while eight in 10 teenagers said they have developed positive feelings about themselves and forged better friendships on social networking sites, nine in 10 say they have witnessed cruelty by their peers on the same networks.

Pew concludes, though, that online bullying is not as common as what takes place on the schoolyard or in the hallway.

--According to Air Force officials, for years the Dover Air Force Base mortuary disposed of portions of troops’ remains by cremating them and dumping the ashes in a landfill. The practice was abandoned in favor of burial at sea. Officials acknowledged the practice to the Washington Post, saying “the procedure was limited to fragments or portions of body parts that were unable to be identified at first or were later recovered from the battlefield, and which family members had said could be disposed of by the military.”

Said Gari-Lynn Smith, “portions of whose husband’s remains were disposed of in the landfill after his 2006 death in Iraq, she was ‘appalled and disgusted’ by the way the Air Force had acted. She learned of the landfill disposal earlier this spring in a letter from a senior official at the Dover mortuary.
“ ‘My only peace of mind in losing my husband was that he was taken to Dover and that he was handled with dignity, love, respect and honor,’ Smith said. ‘That was completely shattered for me when I was told that he was thrown in the trash.’”

The Dover mortuary changed its policy in 2008. No officials have been fired over their past actions.

Each week there is yet another example (or two this time, including the Penn State debacle) where you see how America is falling short. It has to stop.
--I was reading some stories on the latest pilgrimage for the hajj, an estimated 2.5 million strong this year with no major incidents. Back in 1990, 1,426 died in stampedes, but the Saudis have spent $billions on infrastructure projects to ease the congestion. I just have trouble that only Muslims are allowed to attend, in looking at the bigger picture. It speaks volumes. Every other church welcomes visitors to its holiest shrines. Open up…Muslims. You’d get my tourist dollars, for one.

--The U.S. is relying on Russia to give us a lift into space these days with the retirement of the shuttle program, so it’s more than a bit disturbing that a Russian space probe sent to collect rocks and such from a Martian moon veered off course within minutes of the launch of its 33-month mission. The craft was then stuck in an Earth orbit and as of this writing could crash back to Earth after its batteries run out, assuming Russian engineers are unable to correct the fault. The venture is also carrying China’s first Mars satellite, a failure that China will now file away for 1,000 years for future use.
--Last week I railed on social networking and how I can’t wait for the day when I have the guts to get off it. So the Nov. 7 issue of Barron’s had the following, courtesy of social-email software provider harmon.ie:

57%: share for whom the majority of work interruptions involve a social-networking tool
15 minutes: maximum time that 45% of workers go without being interrupted
$10,375: total per-person loss of annual productivity for all types of distractions
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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 $1788
Oil, $98.99

Returns for the week 11/7-11/11

Dow Jones +1.4% [12153]
S&P 500 +0.8% [1263]
S&P MidCap -0.8%
Russell 2000 -0.2%
Nasdaq -0.3% [2678]

Returns for the period 1/1/11-11/11/11

Dow Jones +5.0%
S&P 500 +0.5%
S&P MidCap -1.7%
Russell 2000 -5.0%
Nasdaq +1.0%

Bulls 44.2
Bears 34.7 [Source: Chartcraft / Investors Intelligence]
Have a great week. I appreciate your support.