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In a surprise move today, the seven major Republican candidates for president (who are not named "Mitt Romney") decided to merge their campaigns, and run as a single corporate "person" they are now calling "Anybody But Romney, Incorporated."
There will be no Friday Talking Points column today.
Happy Veterans' Day to all, and have yourselves a good weekend.
-- Chris Weigant
Herman Cain is, if he can be believed, convinced that a conspiracy from the Left is responsible for the accusations of sexual harassment against him. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous.
Every so often, I am so impressed by a comment to one of my columns that I offer to just turn my column over to the author, and let them have my soapbox. This doesn't happen often, usually around once per year.
I've written a few columns so far about the Occupy Wall Street protest, [...]
The author's basic premise is that Romney is a flip-flopper who can't be trusted by conservatives. He'll win the Republican nomination, and then go on to lose to Obama next year. The article (and the hundreds of comments) make fascinating reading.
While the subject of which American politician's sex scandal came first is a debatable one (such as: did Benjamin Franklin's dalliances in Paris count?), most agree that the sex-and-blackmail scandal of Alexander Hamilton was the first with any impact, from George Washington's time onwards.
Like many Americans, I watched the events unfold in Oakland this week with some trepidation. Occupy Oakland tried two new tactics in protesting, and both were very successful at achieving a key goal -- that of getting your message across. Both the general strike and the temporary port shutdown were successful, in this regard. Later in the night, however, a group of jerks came close to ruining all this, by their criminal behavior.
Barack Obama's job approval poll numbers in October were flat. Very flat. So flat, in fact, that he tied his own "flattest month ever" record, which he initially set back in November of last year. Obama's change in approval and disapproval combined last month totaled only a single tenth of a percent -- which is almost as flat as numerically possible.
This was, to put it mildly, completely unacceptable to a large swath of the Republican base. Cain hastily backtracked, and is now as "pro-life" as he can humanly be, stating that abortion should be illegal in every single case -- no matter what the extenuating circumstances.
This is not only a victory for consumers (and the Occupy Wall Street folks, incidentally), but a triumph of mathematics and economics. Because it is ridiculous that big banks should even contemplate these fees in the first place.