March 6, 2011

Sunday School 3/6/11: A mixed bag

On Fox News Sunday, the daughter of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church (who is also the lawyer who successfully argued their First Amendment case), told Chris Wallace that we could call her church a cult or anything else we wanted to, as long as we talked about them.  In a fun exchange, she advised that she has ‘no objective indicator otherwise’ that the Supreme Court Justices - all nine of them – are going to hell.  When Wallace asked if the president was going to hell, her response was “Absolutely on the president. That’s a big 10-4…he is most likely the Beast spoken of in the revelation.”  

On CNN’s State of the Union, former Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM) related the story of how his campaign manager outlined the steps taken before Richardson made his run for President in 2008. “Three out of the six were can we raise the money to do it” he said. The others? Paraphrasing, can you stand the personal and professional intrusion and scrutiny, what’s the theme of your candidacy, and finally, where do you fit in with the other candidates, what’s your niche, and is your family behind you. 

Regarding the specific candidates in the Republican circles, a recent poll showed The Donald (Trump) had a 26% favorable rating, compared to Mitt Romney’s 25%. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), another once-candidate, thought that poll said more about the media than it did about Trump, who in Alexander’s opinion is “famous for being famous.” He agreed with Richardson’s assessment – there may be 14 Reps thinking about it, but when all’s said and done there’ll be two or three, the ones who are ‘willing to start and finish.’

Local boy David Muir, the weekend anchor on ABC News, joined Christiane Amanpour and Diane Sawyer on This Week to talk about goods made in America.  In a pretty interesting segment, they replayed a story from earlier in the week where a family agreed to have everything in their house that was not made in America removed, then replaced with homegrown goods. And they pretty much managed to do it.

Remarkably, according to the report, if everyone would spend just 1% more on American-made products (about 18 cents a day), it would create 200,000 jobs.  In the roundtable related to this segment, they focused on how America is a place of ideas, but then our ideas end up getting built in some other country. But they missed the one thing that always gets missed in this kind of discussion:  we have lost American jobs because we wanted the huge profits we got on Wall Street when all of our jobs were outsourced.  Folks didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that the nice profits and dividends we earned in our pensions, our 401(k)s, and our investment accounts were in part driven by all the savings companies realized by having our ideas built in foreign countries.    If you ask me, greed got us into this mess.  It’ll be interesting to see what gets us out.

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