Author: Matt Margolis

CNN GOP Debate

Matt Margolis104 Comments

Are you watching? What do you think?

UPDATE: I got home late and missed a big chunk of the debate, but from what I saw, I found Rick Perry to be a mediocre debater. Mitt Romney was polished, but isn’t as smart or well spoken as Newt Gingrich was. Herman Cain’s foreign policy weakness’s came through a bit as well.

In the end, I was impressed the most by Newt Gingrich, he’s smart, and he doesn’t allow himself to throw mud. He’s substance, style, and class. Mitt and Perry going at each other bothers me. Republicans shouldn’t attack each other like they are fighting a Democrat.

Rasmussen: Cain Beats Obama

Matt Margolis25 Comments

I still don’t see Cain topping a GOP ticket, but I think he has a great chance of being the VP nominee.

Whether Herman Cain’s surge in the polls is temporary or has staying power, he’s enjoying a big enough bounce to take a very slight lead over President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 matchup. At the moment, the Georgia businessman is the only Republican with a lead of any kind over Obama, although former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has held a similar advantage several times and is currently trailing the president by just two points.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters shows Cain attracting 43% support, while Obama earns 41%. Given such a matchup, eight percent (8%) prefer some other candidate, and another eight percent (8%) are undecided.

Occupy Irony

Matt Margolis122 Comments

By now anyone paying attention to the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and its various local offshoots across the country has seen the hypocritical and absurd demands of a class of people who protest the greed of those who have earned their wealth by expressing their own greed for wealth they did not earn. These unwashed masses come with their smartphones and high-end cameras to document this “movement” that is meant to bring attention to an unjust economic divide or whatever their demand du jour is.

National Review points out an interesting decision of the Occupy “movement” to organize a protest in Detriot, Michigan, a city that has enjoyed the fruits of liberal programs for years.

Detroit, Grand Circus Park — Detroit would seem an odd place for the Occupy movement. After, all, it has already received everything the 99 Percenters are demanding.

Want redistribution of wealth? For 40-odd years, Detroit has gotten tens of billions of dollars in welfare assistance, from the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson’s administration to Barack Obama’s Strong Cities Initiative.

Want good-paying jobs? Michigan is the notorious home of the Big Three automakers, who paid their workers a best-in-the-U.S. wage of $40 an hour — far above the average U.S. manufacturing wage of $15 an hour, resulting in blue-collar workers who often earned six-figure incomes.

Want socialized medicine? Canada is right across the river from Detroit, offering a single-payer, government-run health system.

And yet on Friday, some 500 demonstrators from across Michigan descended on downtown Detroit to protest conditions here. They gathered at the Spirit of Detroit statue at the base of Woodward Avenue. They marched up Detroit’s main street past the gleaming new corporate headquarters of Quicken Loans and Compuware, past a sea of empty storefronts, past the corporate-sponsored sports complexes, to their destination: Grand Circus Park. They held signs reading “Make capitalism extinct” and “The People are too big to fail” and “Eat the rich” while chanting “Good jobs now!” and “Tax the rich!” and “F— the GOP!”

Unwittingly, however, they were protesting a Democratic-run city that represents the failure of their agenda.

You got to appreciate the irony.

Poll: Cain, Romney, Perry all Beat Obama

Matt Margolis38 Comments

Let’s face it, these aren’t the best days for Obama, and even as Republicans seem determined to make the primary process as damaging as possible, we do have candidates that come out on top.

Honestly, I don’t care all that much. There’s plenty of time for all sorts of things to happen, and I never let myself be shocked by the ways the GOP can screw things up. I guess you could say I’m a tad cynical despite the vast number of polls that show that Obama will be heading for unemployment soon, but I’m just not one to take anything for granted. All factors aside, elections in this era still come down within a few points of 50/50. John McCain could have won in 2008 had it not been for an incompetent campaign.

Obama Administration, Meet Accountability

Matt Margolis28 Comments

Hoo-ah!

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a subpoena Wednesday to Attorney General Eric Holder as part of his investigation into the gun trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious.”

“Top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Holder, know more about Operation Fast and Furious than they have publicly acknowledged,” the California Republican said in a statement. “The documents this subpoena demands will provide answers to questions that Justice officials have tried to avoid since this investigation began eight months ago. It’s time we know the whole truth.”

Cain Surging. Will It Last?

Matt Margolis77 Comments

From Gallup

Republicans’ support for Herman Cain has surged to 18%, their support for Rick Perry has sagged to 15%, and their support for Mitt Romney remains relatively stable at 20%. However, Romney’s support is matched by the 20% of Republicans who are unsure which candidate they will back for the Republican nomination in 2012.

So, what do you think? Is Cain just the flavor of the month, or is he on the way to winning the nomination? What about Perry? Is he yesterday’s news?

The Green Thing

Matt Margolis41 Comments

This week an email forward was sent around my office. For those of you who don’t know, I am in architecture, an industry that is being gradually taken over by the green movement, so when I saw the title of the email, I was expecting something different. I think it thought provoking  regardless of what side of the aisle you are on:

The Green Thing

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologized to her and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today.  Your generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over.  So they really were recycled.

But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies

because we didn’t have the throw-away kind.  We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry the clothes.  Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power.  We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances.  And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smartass young person.