Week in Review Part IV: Random Musings

Republican presidential primary/caucus results, going back to last weekend:

Kansas…Mitt Romney 51%, Rick Santorum 21%
Wyoming (ongoing process)…Romney 44, Santorum 27
Mississippi…Santorum 33, Newt Gingrich 31, Romney 30
Alabama…Santorum 35, Gingrich 29, Romney 29
Hawaii…Romney 45, Santorum 25

Delegates [AP]

Romney 494
Santorum 252
Gingrich 131
Ron Paul 48

Next up…Missouri (today, Saturday); Illinois, March 20

A Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll of Illinois Republican voters had Romney with 35% and Santorum at 31%.

Jennifer Rubin / Washington Post

“Mitt Romney would have dearly loved to have won either Alabama or Mississippi. It would have shut down talk of his ‘failure to close.’ And it would have increased the pressure on Rick Santorum and/or Newt Gingrich to get out of the race. The night was Santorum’s with a win in Alabama and a narrow victory in Mississippi, although he may have inadvertently moved the bar higher than he can clear….

“Santorum, though failing to gain significant ground in the delegate race, will claim underdog wins (as he did in Minnesota and Colorado) and enjoy renewed optimism that he can battle on. The wins may give him a boost going into Saturday’s contest in Missouri.

“In his victory remarks, an obviously elated Santorum spoke emotionally about ‘defying the odds,’ like America itself. But his speech lacked a clear message, as he rambled on about his travels in Mississippi, the Constitution, gas prices, oil drilling, being outspent, and his coal miner grandparents. In there, too, was a line about free markets and the ‘centrality of faith in our lives.’ He apparently feels compelled to wing these things and thereby fails to maximize his moments.

“He then uttered a line he may come to regret. He declared that he ‘will win the nomination before the convention.’ In light of the delegate gap, that strained credulity, and moreover, cast him in the role of the party-wrecker and chaos-maker. Expect the Romney team to drive home the message that Santorum isn’t gaining in the delegate race.”

Steve Peoples / AP:

“Santorum’s success and Romney’s failure exposed deep divisions within a party torn between a conservative base that’s looking for a candidate who is pure on GOP orthodoxy and the rest of the party, which is looking for a nominee able to beat President Barack Obama. Tuesday’s outcomes also virtually ensure the increasingly nasty slog toward the Republican presidential nomination will consume even more of Romney’s time, energy and money when he’d rather be focused solely on the general election, and Obama….

“Despite his losing streak, Gingrich vowed to fight on until his party’s nomination in August – and crowed about Romney’s weaknesses.

“ ‘The fact is, in both states, the conservative candidates got nearly 70 percent of the vote. And if you’re the frontrunner – if you’re the frontrunner and you keep coming in third, you’re not much of a frontrunner,' Gingrich said."

But in the Washington Post/ABC News poll this week, among likely Republican voters, 74 percent think Romney will capture the nomination.

As for President Obama and his reelection bid, the Wall Street Journal points out that in six of 10 states identified as key to victory for both parties, six of them have an unemployment rate below the national average, such as in Colorado and Ohio, 7.8% and 7.7%, respectively.

In the New York Times/CBS News poll cited in the opening, despite Obama’s 41% approval rating, he still beats Romney, 47-44, and Santorum, 48-44.

In the Washington Post/ABC News survey, 69% of Americans want to outlaw super PACs [70% of Democrats, 55% of Republicans…and 8 in 10 Independents.]

Bloomberg News reported that 91% of the ads running in Mississippi and Alabama in the past month were paid for by super PACs, far and away the biggest being Restore Our Future, the group behind Mitt Romney.

Daniel Henninger / Wall Street Journal
“Don’t get too distracted by the Republicans’ road-tour version of the 2012 presidential election as it hits theaters in the likes of Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii and Illinois. The best show in town still plays daily at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If maestro Barack Obama wins reelection this fall, we will have watched one of the greatest magic acts in American history.

“The new Obama magic show debuted in the State of the Union speech. Standing before Congress, Mr. Obama brought forth ‘An Economy Built to Last.’ Not the real one we have now, but the one he’s going to conjure after he’s reelected.

“The way this works is the president breaks economic history into two parts. In his right hand are the awful policy mistakes someone else made before January 2009. In his left hand is the economy he’ll bring to life after November. In between is nothing. You think you’re looking at the Obama years from 2009 to 2012 – 8% unemployment, low growth, low investment – when whoa, it’s gone! Never happened.

“The best was yet to come. The president of the United States is making the world itself and all its troubles…vanish.

“Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea – one by one, Mr. Obama and his lovely assistants have methodically taken them all off the table. If he can make the world’s problems seem to go away until he gets reelected, it will constitute his presidency’s greatest illusion.”

Henninger goes on to dissect them all, as I do every week.

“It’s an amazing feat. At home and overseas, Barack Obama has just erased three years of rough spots from the hard disc of politics. It will be more remarkable still if the Republicans, amid a war-weary public, go along with the illusion. The world, alas, may not. For America’s onlooking competitors and adversaries in Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang and Waziristan, a U.S. president’s magic act is for them a very real opportunity.”

Kyle Smith / New York Post

“In his latest State of the Union, Obama said of our armed forces, ‘They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences…They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.’

“Except if we followed their example, we’d all have to salute and say, ‘Yes, sir’ to everything. That’s not democracy. Generals who say the mission failed because the troops didn’t follow orders shouldn’t be surprised when the troops start to mock them. Blame deflection isn’t leadership.

“And that’s why both (Jimmy) Carter and Obama came to seem so tired, dull, repetitive, scolding, inept and irrelevant. Carter’s poll numbers went up immediately after the malaise speech but retreated after a few days. His words gave him an anti-halo – the shadow of a whiner.

“ ‘You can’t castigate the American people,’ his vice president, Walter Mondale, told Carter, ‘or they will turn you off once and for all.’

“In his State of the Union, President Obama expressed wonderment that everything doesn’t work like the Navy SEAL raid that got bin Laden. ‘No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves…This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.’ Obama sounded as if he was pleading with us to get his back.

“ ‘Carter, Clinton and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks,’ Obama told Ron Suskind in the book ‘Confidence Men.’ He sounded as if he was pleading that he was too smart for the American people.

“ ‘For all of us to succeed, we have to have an investment in each other’s success,’ he said last month in Bellevue, Wash. It sounded as if he was pleading for us to accept the bill for his failures.

“Mondale was right: If Americans think their president is blaming them, they’ll turn him off once and for all.”
Kathleen Parker / Washington Post
“Introducing her husband on Super Tuesday night, Ann Romney said that women this election season are interested in jobs, the economy and the debt.

“Translation: So could we shut up already about contraception?

“Republicans might wish nothing more than to stuff birth control pills back into the bottle, but Democrats aren’t about to let them. The narrative already has a title: ‘The Republican War on Women.’ Cue theme from ‘Psycho.’

“One can hardly blame Democrats for taking advantage of a perfect storm of stupefying proportions. The only thing Republicans failed to do was put a bow on this mess….
“War has been declared, and there’s hardly any way to change the impression among a growing percentage of women that the GOP is the party of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. It’s a smart move for Democrats to keep replaying the message, but is it fair – and is it true?....

“(Republicans) are waging war on women only if you believe that the morality of abortion should never be questioned or if you believe the federal government can order people to pay for something that violates their conscience. These issues are not so simple, nor are Republicans simpletons for trying to protect the unborn or challenging what they view as government overreach.

“Unfortunately, the conservative governing principles that traditionally attracted level heads to the right side of the aisle have been incrementally subsumed by social issues – a bull’s-eye for Democrats and a black eye for Republicans. Inasmuch as women are the ones who most urgently require access to family planning, any opposition can be conflated to be anti-woman. Hence. Ann Romney’s well-placed remarks.

“She is right, of course, but the problem she was implicitly trying to address is not short-term. The GOP long ago made its bed with social conservatives, a large percentage of them Southern evangelicals, and now must sleep with them. After marriage, of course. In Laurens County, S.C., where the local GOP recently tried to create a purity tribunal to screen and monitor aspiring Republican candidates, this is more than a punch line.

“Although the state party ruled the county initiative inconsistent with state laws, the Laurens mind-set burbles just beneath the surface of the once-Grand Old Party. And that is a problem only Democrats could love.”

Nice space program. According to NASA chief Charles Bolden, “Given current funding levels, we anticipate the need to purchase [Russian] crew transportation and rescue capabilities into 2017.” Seems our hoped for space taxis won’t be in service by early 2016 as planned. Pathetic. We can be so overrated at times.

Investigators looking into the horrific bus crash that claimed 28 lives in Switzerland, 22 of whom were children, believe the driver of the coach may have been trying to load a DVD when he inexplicably crashed into a tunnel wall. Survivors told their parents this was the case. The children had watched “Avatar” on their outward journey. The head of the bus company denies the DVD theory.

Bye-bye Encyclopedia Britannica, at least the print edition, after 244 years. It was first published in Edinburgh, 1786. Explorer Ernest Shackleton took a volume on his doomed expedition to Antarctica and is said to have burned it page by page to keep warm. Sales of Britannica dived from a peak of 120,000 volumes sold in 1990, to just 8,500 volumes of the 2010 edition.

Growing up at the Trumbore household, we were a World Book family, which was cheaper and thus a major reason why I didn’t do as well in school…..just kidding, Mom and Dad!

So you know that Jason Russell character, director and narrator of “Kony 2012” who appeared on all the morning and network news shows in his 15 minutes of fame. You won’t believe what happened.

Russell was detained by police in San Diego on Thursday afternoon “after he was found having ‘kind of a meltdown,’ according to San Diego police officer Thomas Broxtermann.

“Mr. Broxtermann said police responded to multiple complaints variously describing a white male ‘running around the street in his underwear,’ ‘naked and [leaving this part out] and screaming’ and ‘banging his hands on the ground and screaming incoherently.’” [Wall Street Journal]

OK…none of this should be a surprise but there was further confirmation on the food front concerning what is good or bad for you. To wit:

According to the journal “Archives of Internal Medicine,” data from 121,342 men and women taking part in two large U.S. health and lifestyle investigations revealed that red meat can be lethal…at least regularly eating it, especially the processed variety. As reported by John von Radowitz of the Irish Independent:

“Each additional daily serving of processed red meat, equivalent to one hot dog or two rashers of bacon, raised the chances of dying by a fifth.

“Conversely, replacing red meat with fish, poultry, or plant-based protein foods contributed to a longer life.”

Out of the data base, monitored for more than 20 years, “scientists documented 23,926 deaths including 5,910 from heart disease and 9,364 from cancer.”
“A striking association was seen between consumption of red meat and premature death.

“Each daily serving of unprocessed red meat, equivalent to a helping of beef, lamb or pork about the size of a deck of cards, raised the risk of death by 13%, while processed meat increased it by 20%.

“Eating red meat increased the chances of heart disease by 16% and cancer by 10%. Processed red meat raised the risk of heart disease and cancer by 21% and 16%, respectively.

“Replacing one serving of red meat with an equivalent serving of fish reduced mortality risk by 7%. For poultry an even bigger risk reduction of 14% was seen. Legumes and low-fat dairy products lowered the risk by 10%, whole grains by 14% and nuts by 19%.”

So join me for Salmon Sunday...with nuts and beer for happy hour.

Meanwhile, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the American Meat Institute Foundation and the National Pork Board said that red meat is a healthy part of a well-balanced diet. After all, cave men ate meat and they lived to be about 17. Oops, who’s writing their copy?

Now I must defend the Pork Board, having eaten pork on a stick at the Iowa State Fair last summer. I would gladly give up 14-16 months of my life if I could have that juicy treat every lunch time the rest of my days.

But here’s another one that will have you reaching for the good taste of beer.

A can of sugary soft drink a day increases a man’s risk of heart disease by 20%, as noted in the Hewalth Professionals Follow-Up Study, a major health and lifestyle investigation in the U.S., published in the journal “Circulation.”

43,000 men took part and those who drank a 12-ounce of can of sugar were screwed, as opposed to the control group, consisting of moi, who drank Coors Light (or Stella Artois if the portfolio was doing well).

No mystery that with the warm winter, bugs are going to have a field day in 2012. It’s a year the bug community will long remember, and I suspect humans will as well. Darryl Fears of the Washington Post notes:

“Awakened from hibernation underground, in rotting wood and the cracks of your house, bugs are on the rise. Ants, termites, mosquitoes, ladybugs and ticks are up early and looking for breakfast.”

Now what we need is one last cold blast that catches the suckers off guard. “Where’s your coat, Bobby?” asked Betty Aphid of her son. “Oh, Mom….” “You’ll be sorry!” Bobby Aphid died an hour later as temps dropped five degrees in 20 minutes and he forgot where he lived so he couldn’t get his coat.

Bobby was stupid, but as Greg Baumann of Orkin told the Post’s Fears, “Always bet on the bug. They’ve been around for millions of years.”

Think the aphid tale is far-fetched? Check this out. From Elizabeth Lopatto of Bloomberg:

“Male fruit flies become barflies when rejected by females, choosing alcohol-spiked food more often than their successful brothers in a study that suggest it may be due to a brain chemical also found in humans.

“The spurned flies had lower levels of a molecule in their brains called neuropeptide F than the males who were allowed to mate, according to findings published today in the journal Science.”

I’d get into the specifics of the experiment but this is a family website and, frankly, it’s quite racy.

Finally, congratulations to players, students, fans and alum of both Norfolk State and Lehigh for their stirring upsets in the NCAA basketball tournament on Friday…the first No. 15 seeds to win in eleven years.

Pray for the men and women of our armed forces…and all the fallen.
God bless America.
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Gold closed at $1655
Oil, $107.06

Returns for the week 3/12-3/16


Dow Jones +2.4% [13232]
S&P 500 +2.4% [1404]
S&P MidCap +1.6%
Russell 2000 +1.6%
Nasdaq +2.2% [3055]

Returns for the period 1/1/12-3/16/12

Dow Jones +8.3%
S&P 500 +11.6%
S&P MidCap +13.8%
Russell 2000 +12.0%
Nasdaq +17.3%

Bulls 43.6
Bears 26.6 [Source: Investors Intelligence]