In case either of my readers was wondering, I have not changed my view on the Republican presidential primary; Mitt Romney is still the inevitable nominee. Even when Rick Santorum has his biggest victories, as was the case last Tuesday, Romney still gains more delegates.
The reason that Mitt Romney is the inevitable nominee is that he is the only candidate that is competent to do the job. Newt Gingrich, while both highly intelligent and entertaining, is an egomaniacal loose cannon who does not have the temperament to be leader of the free world. Rick Santorum is the least electable politician in the history of either major party to make it this far in a primary contest. While the Tea Party lunatics get most of the attention in the press, the Republican Party still contains a silent majority of sensible people who want more limited government but don’t agree with Mr. Santorum that people having sex for reasons other than procreation is a problem that politicians should concern themselves with. It is these sensible Republicans that have helped Mitt Romney amass a large lead in delegates. It may sound strange, but the time may have come for these sensible Republicans to reconsider their voting strategy.
The longer this campaign goes on the clearer it is becoming that Mitt Romney, while a smart and decent person, is a terrible campaigner. He actually thought he could endear himself to Nascar fans buy telling them that several of his friends “own Nascar teams”. The focus of his campaign has been on the economic issues, but with the economy improving he is going to have a difficult time winning over swing voters. As this primary has shown, he will not have the luxury of a united Republican base behind him so unless something catastrophic happens to the economy he is likely destined to a respectable but certain defeat at the hands of President Obama in November. If that happens, the lunatic wing of the Republican Party will be even more determined next time around to elect a kindred spirit rather than an electable moderate and we will have to go through this circus again in four years. The best option for the long term health of the Republican Party may actually be to offer up Rick Santorum as a sacrificial lamb to the President in November. While that may allow the President to win every state but Mississippi and Alabama, it would also allow the Party to discredit and purge the pitchfork and torch carrying Tea Partiers.
If Romney loses to Obama, the Tea Partiers will argue that simply nominating the most “electable candidate”, such as Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, is pointless and that if you are going to lose you might as well lose with a candidate you really believe in. The sensible wing of the Party should make a tactical retreat in 2012 and allow Rick Santorum to embarrass the Party in a national election. That way they will be able to unite around an electable conservative candidate in 2016 and have a reasonable chance of winning.
If you are 10,000 feet from the earth, it does not make the likelihood of being splattered all over the ground like an egg any more or less likely. It depends on the direction you’re going in and what is under your feet. If you are in an airplane plane that is taking off, you may soon be at 30,000 feet. If you have just been thrown out of an airplane, 10,000 feet just buys you a few extra seconds before your demise.
Steve Jobs threw RIM out of a plane about 4 years ago. That RIM was in freefall was evident to anyone who understood technology. There are no bronze medals in the technology industry. If you don’t believe me, go to Best Buy and try to buy yourself a Zune. Unfortunately for investors, many stock analysts who cover technology stocks are completely clueless when it comes to technology companies. They are accountants who simply analyse financial statements, which is akin to telling investors how far from the ground they are.
Countless times over the past few years I have listened to stock analysts talk about what a good value RIM has become and how expensive Apple looked. Until recently, the lower RIM’s shares fell, the more value some of these hapless fund managers saw in the stock. They didn’t realize that once a technology company falls into third place in its market, it is heading towards oblivion. It doesn’t matter how strong the balance sheet is or what its growth rate is. Apple and Android phones are the two devices that people now perceive as the leaders and they are the ones that developers will be making apps for. There is virtually nothing RIM can do about that at this point.
A common mistake that many of these analysts make is thinking that a stock is tremendously undervalued when its market capitalization approaches its cash balance; the logic being that the company could simply distribute the cash to shareholders while still have a business with some value. The reality though is that companies on the decline never give up and distribute their cash to shareholders. They spend what money they have trying to turn the company around. Sometimes it works but more often it does not. What a strong balance sheet does do for the company is make it a takeover target. A takeover may now be the only hope for RIM’s shareholders.
In recent weeks Newt Gingrich has surprisingly been able to rally the grass roots of the Republican Party and the tea party movement around his insurgent, anti-establishment campaign. From demolishing a moderator for asking him about his past infidelity to stating that he would strive to build a colony on the moon, Mr. Gingrich showed a level of boldness and candor that stood in stark contrast the caution and measured approach taken by most national politicians. Despite his multiple marriages and reckless rhetoric Mr. Gingrich trounced the establishment candidate, Mitt Romney, in South Carolina and polls had showed him pulling ahead in Florida. And then the Republican Establishment closed ranks and all his former Congressional colleagues started sticking knives in poor Newt’s back, helping Mitt Romney cruise to an easy victory. Thank goodness!
“The Establishment” has become a pejorative term in recent years as everyone seems to want to paint themselves as anti-establishment and a force for change. There is no doubt that change can be good a times, but if this election has taught us anything, it is that we need powerful cigar smoking fat cats in back rooms looking out for the status quo. I may never get to elected to office with that message, but it is an important fact nonetheless. People get a little crazy sometimes, particularly those who have to face the tremendous stress of trying to hold on to a decent job and raise a family in today’s economic environment. That is why having a bunch of rich and comfortable people unencumbered with the ordinary person’s concerns who can put the brakes on when we get a little nuts is such a good thing. When you’re mad at the President you want to elect a bomb thrower like Newt who will tear into Obama during the debate, even though deep down you know the President would be happy if you did.
To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, Mitt Romney is the type of candidate that no one believes in but no one objects to. While he seems a decent human being, he has not demonstrated any consistent core beliefs over the years and has been completely unable to generate any enthusiasm among the Republican base. If there was any other remotely viable candidate in this race the Republicans would be wise to vote for him or her, but there is not. Even Ann Coulter believes that Obama would beat Gingrich in a landslide. Romney may well lose the election, but at least he would make the President work for it. I don’t have any allegiance to either party, but democracies need competitive elections and Mitt Romney is the only Republican Candidate who can ensure that.
I have lost count of all the debates and surprise surges from fringe candidates. It is time to get this Republican Primary over with. It seems almost every candidate in the race except Mitt Romney has had a surprise “surge” at some point in the past six months. If John Huntsman can hang on until we get to the China primary he might even have a chance for one of his own. Mitt Romney is the only one so far with an actual primary wins, the first of which came in the state he had the worst chance of winning. With his win tonight in New Hampshire he will head to South Carolina with his opponents as divided and hapless as ever. If the Massachusetts liberal flip-flopper can pull out a victory in the last state to fly the Confederate flag over its statehouse in a few weeks, the other candidates might as well pack up and go apply for a job on Fox. Whatever the result in South Carolina, he will almost certainly win big in Florida, even if he continues to publicly profess his love of firing people.
Republicans find voting for Mitt Romney a little like going to the dentist; you hate doing it but you know you have to. It must be hard for a conservative to vote for someone who is essentially John Kerry without the military service and rich heiress wife. But if they want a chance of knocking off the president they suspect is secretly a Muslim, they are going to have to hold their nose and vote for the candidate they know is a Mormon.
No doubt many South Carolina conservatives would feel a lot better about themselves voting for Rick Santorum, someone who equates homosexuality with having sex with animals, but Khalid Sheik Mohammed has as good a chance of becoming president. To give you an idea of how unelectable Mr. Santorum is; he is against birth control. Not just abortion and sex education – birth control. You read that right. Count up all of the conservative Republicans that you know. Now count up the number of Republicans you know with 7 children. That will tell you how out of touch he is with most conservatives, let alone the general electorate. The Republicans are stuck with Mitt Romney so they might as well accept it and start closing ranks before Newt Gingrich’s attack ads provide much more ammunition President Obama.
A few days ago I read a column by a Washington Post columnist that went through all of the things he got right and wrong in 2011. He pointed out how wrong he was when he said last spring that Newt Gingrich’s campaign for the Republican nomination was all but over and it reminded me of a post I made last fall in which I claimed that it was a forgone conclusion that Mitt Romney would win the nomination.
While Speaker Gingrich’s recent rise in the polls have caused some political commentators to question their prior dismissal of his chances in the race, the only thing I would have done differently is to include him in my list of candidates who are more motivated in raising their public profile. At the time of the article he was so invisible that I neglected to mention him as either a serious or attention seeking candidate. Speaker Gingrich has made a healthy income from his speaking engagements and his asking price will no doubt go up significantly after the primaries.
Predicting political outcomes is as difficult as picking winners and losers in the stock market, which is why I often buy index funds and rarely make political predictions. I will say though that I am as convinced as ever that Mitt Romney is a sure thing to win the Republican nomination. The Gingrich “surge” is no different than those of Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry or Herman Cain. If the voting didn’t start for another few months John Huntsman would probably even have a day in the sun. These “surges” are merely the result of the fact that Republicans really don’t like Mitt Romney and political writers need something to write about.
To be clear, the reason why Mitt Romney will win is not that he is such a fantastic candidate; he isn’t. It is that he is up against the weakest field of candidates in the history of American politics. That Herman Cain, whose actual interviews were more absurd than any SNL political impersonation, could have been considered by anyone to have a chance at winning shows the appalling lack of depth in the field. Even Rick Perry, who I once considered a serious candidate, delivered a debate performance that was worse than any parody of Dan Quale.
While I am willing to predict the Republican nomination, I will avoid making any bold predictions about the general election. The continuing economic and struggles should make Barack Obama vulnerable, but Mitt Romney’s blatant lack of sincerity and the fact that the President’s controversial health care bill was modeled after Mitt Romney’s health care plan in Massachusetts may mean that the economy may have to deteriorate even further to give Mr. Romney a decent chance at winning the election. The odds may be against him, but he is the only Republican candidate right now with any chance at all.
This is a book for bitter slackers who hate their job and resent the way their more successful and harder working co-workers look down on them and talk about them when they are not around. The authors never actually come out and say this; rather, they talk about having a results-oriented workplace where employees are judged based on their results and not just on the time they spend at work.
The reality is that most successful growing companies are results oriented these days. Woody Allen said that 90% of life is just showing up, but I don’t know of many people who were able to climb the corporate ladder simply by showing up early, playing Solitaire and checking sports scores until 6 every day. In my experience, most people find professional success by being part of successful projects and creating value for the organizations they work for. There is no doubt people get promotions based on perceived work ethic, but the higher you rise in an organization, and the more money you make, the more attention that gets paid to actual results. An incompetent person who gets promoted by merely showing up will soon find himself demoted or booted out the door.
The authors would have you believe that the people who work 40 hours a week and attend meetings are an anvil around the neck of their company while the people who sleep in until 9 and head to the park at 3 are carrying the company on their shoulders. While the fundamental point of their argument, that results are more important than hours worked, is valid (and widely accepted at least 10 years before they wrote their book), their arguments are comical in their absurdity.
Even if you agree with everything the authors say the fact is that there is only a very specific type of employee who could have the type of freedom they espouse. It would have to be someone who works almost entirely on narrow projects that can be done independently without any requirement for collaboration. As the authors acknowledge, many commissioned salespeople have long enjoyed the types of freedom and flexibility described in the book. What they do not acknowledge is that they are one of the few types of employees for whom complete flexibility makes sense.
One of the more ridiculous arguments in the book is that people are very productive on the weekends when they are working on their own chores without having to spend a set amount of time on them. Anyone who has seen their neighbor’s Christmas lights still on their house in April knows that most people are far less productive on their own time then they are at work. If most people had a manager following them around on the weekends their homes would look like Martha Stewart’s. The same goes for all those New Year’s resolutions to go the gym 4 times a week. Nobody is looking over your shoulder about going to the gym and that’s why come March you’re eating nachos and watching Survivor instead of running on the treadmill.
Some seemingly intelligent journalists have recently been writing some surprisingly simple-minded columns about how the “do-nothing” Congress and the failure by the bi-partisan debt committee to come up with an agreement to cut the deficit. Commentators on both the left and right have been accusing the other side of failing to compromise; the Republicans refusing to budge on taxes and the Democrats refusing to make any meaningful cuts to spending. The ratings agency Fitch even joined in on the charade by downgrading the country’s debt outlook. The stock market, which knows political bullshit when it sees it, reacted by having one of its best days of the year.
The reality is that the Democrats and Republicans have compromised, but that compromise occurred when debt ceiling agreement was reached last summer and the debt committee was formed. At that time, under the guise of creating an incentive to get a deal done, large cuts in spending would be triggered and the Bush tax cuts would expire without a debt deal. What every congressman knows is that those negative consequences were in fact the debt deal. Neither party expected or wanted the debt committee to reach a deal.
Most Republicans congressmen realize the tax rate can’t be cut much lower, so they actually welcome the expiry of the Bush tax cuts so they can then go out and win some modest future tax cuts that will satisfy their constituents without driving the country further into debt. The result is that taxes will be higher than they are today but they will be able to fool their voters into believing they’ve lowered their taxes.
It is an unfortunate fact that most politicians are much smarter than most voters. The vast majority of voters prefer the comfort of a white lie to the cold hard truth. John Crosbie, a long-time Canadian cabinet minister, when once asked why politicians always lie, responded with the most honest statement ever uttered by a politician: “If we told you the truth you wouldn’t vote for us.”
As most people know, about 70 years ago Germany tried to take over Europe and in the process killed millions of people and attempted to exterminate several segments of the human population. Because of the immense damage and human suffering caused by this ill-fated endeavor, the notion of Germany seizing control of Europe became a somewhat of a taboo, one only advocated by small, extremist groups.
With the Euro zone melting down economically, it may be time to revisit the idea of Germany taking over Europe. Germany appears to be one of the few countries that has actually been able to maintain a healthy economy and relatively sane public finances. Coincidentally, a couple of its allies 70 years ago, Finland and Austria, have also been able to avoid economic meltdowns. Perhaps these countries could again assist Germany in taking over Europe this time around, although Germany may want to take over these countries as well, just be on the safe side.
Many of the Euro zone countries have proven themselves to be completely incompetent when it comes to running their own affairs and are now lining up cap in hand to beg Germany for bailout money. The problem is that if these countries are permitted to continue governing themselves, it will only be a matter of time before they waste the bailout money and are lining up for more. The solution seems to be to cede all of the decision-making authority to Germany. As the old proverb says, “Give a man a fish, and you can feed him for a day. Enslave a man and force him to work on your fishing boat and you can feed him for a lifetime.”
Recently, the German people have been becoming frustrated at seeing their tax dollars being used to allow their southern neighbors to continue to bankrupt their countries while spending their time working 30 hours a week, sipping red wine, and lying around nude on their beaches. If Germany were to own the southern wineries and beaches they may soften their attitude to towards their neighbors. It may also be helpful if the other EU countries learned German and substituted their red wine and olives with bratwurst and pilsner. The Germans have shown that they are much more accepting of those who speak and act like them. European countries can take great comfort in the fact that Germany once went so far as to welcome a German speaking foreigner as their leader.
The world’s population recently reached 7 billion people. Greece has a population of 11 million people. For those of you keeping score at home, that is 0.15% of the world’s population. As I have sat back and watched the international stock markets surge and plummet based on what is going on with the Greek national debt, I have been thinking of what a completely f****d up world we are living in when a country that small, dysfunctional, and unproductive can have such an impact on the global economy.
The concept behind free trade and globalization is that while we may share in some of the difficulties of other countries, we also share in the economic benefits. Does anyone really believe that the benefits of we have received or will ever receive from being economically linked to Greece will ever come remotely close the economic pummeling we have taken from their debt crisis?
I have no plans to stop washing and go live in a tent in Oakland, but I can’t help thinking that there needs to be some structural changes to the world economy when the global economy can be destroyed by a tiny portion of the population. It is particularly galling that this tiny portion of the population is disproportionately unproductive. I accept that in a globalized world we will all be in trouble if China or Japan slips into crisis but Greece? What is the world coming to?
If Hitler were alive today, he would have a much easier time destroying Europe. All he would have to do would be to throw a bunch of benefits at the German public service and not pay its debt.
In case you needed any further evidence of the decline in modern of modern civilization, you need look no further than Happy Valley Pennsylvania, where Penn State University students recently staged a passionate, and at times violent, rally in support sexual abuse of children by lecherous old men. There was a time when idealist young men and women at college campuses around the United States once protested against things like war and segregation. The times, as Bob Dylan said, are most definitely a changing.
In case you missed it, Joe Paterno, the coach of the Penn State football team, was told by one of his assistants that his former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, had sexually abused a boy of around 10 years of age in the team’s shower. Mr. Paterno did not call the police, but rather reported the incident to one of his superiors (10 days later) and then went about his business. He did not report the incident to police. He did not even bother to find out who the victim or make sure he got help. It apparently didn’t bother Mr. Paterno that Mr. Sandusky ran a charity for underprivileged children and was therefore constantly surrounded by vulnerable children. There have also been reports that Mr. Paterno was made aware of similar allegations when Mr. Sandusky was still working for the football team in the late 90s. The police were not called then either, and Mr. Sandusky was simply told to stop bringing young boys to work.
The students at Penn State believe that we have all been brainwashed by the left wing media into thinking the child rapists should be reported the police. Much like the Vatican, they believe that the sexual abuse of children is best dealt with looking the other way and asking the abusers to carry out their abuse in another location. The students at Penn State believe that pedophiles are merely misunderstood, and should be protected from the unenlightened police who blindly focus on only the negative aspects of the raping of children.
I admit that I may have been a little harsh on Penn State students and tarred them all with the same brush. I should point out that there is a group of students that acknowledge that Joe Paterno may have made a little slip-up in allowing a pedophile to prey on innocent children for many years, but believe that we should also take into account that he won a lot of college football games as a coach. I myself will certainly agree that of all the people who have enabled the sexual abuse of children, Joe Paterno was definitely the best at coaching college football.
by Blindfolded Monkey
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