Still seems to be snowing out there, and the temperature keeps dropping. We wound up getting more snow yesterday than I’s thought. Not sure what the “official” total was, but, judging by our back deck, I’d say we got in the neighborhood of a foot. Of course we get a bit more out here in God’s Country. Looks quite beautiful.
Not much in the works for today. Have to take a trip into Pixley to go to Tractor Supply. Probably need to plow the driveway (as soon as I fix my plow, which I broke yesterday), and then there’s some kind of a basketball game on the teevee later on. I guess the #1 team in the nation is playing, so I should probably watch some of that. Though I’ve got bad vibes on this one.
Watching basketball makes me drink an awful lot of beer. Nice to hear how good it is for you, though I’ve long suspected it was the only thing keeping me alive. Ironically, it’ll probably be what kills me, in the end.
Oh well, one more cuppa joe, and then I reckon I ought to put some clothes on and put some pellets in the pellet stoves.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: January 13, 2012
Back in the late-1950s there was a TV show called “The Millionaire†about a mysterious rich man, named John Beresford Tipton, who would anonymously give checks for $1 million to total strangers.
Usually, the recipient was a poor schlub who was over the top with joy until it turned out that the money didn’t buy happiness. Clearly, we were all better off in our humble homes, clustered around our 14-inch TVs.
I am bringing this up because the current presidential race has demonstrated that a million dollars is nothing — nothing — these days. Nothing! A million dollars is what they give you for designing the best pantsuit on a reality TV show.
Now, if you want to impress people, you have to be a billionaire, for sure. There are about 400 billionaires in the United States, and, while some of them are famous, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, many have profiles so low that their own families may not recognize them. Really, it could be the guy living down the block, if your block happened to contain a 30,000-square-foot Tudor with 10 bathrooms.
But even the humblest billionaire wants to be on the campaign trail this year. They’re everywhere. Rick Santorum has Foster Friess, a mutual fund manager who likes the fact that Santorum starts the day with 50 push-ups. (“That’s the kind of energy level that the Republican Party needs right now.â€) Friess has vowed to give Santorum’s super-sized political action committee at least a million. Which certainly is the least he could do for all that exercise.
Newt Gingrich’s “super PAC†got $5 million from billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a casino owner, in what Adelson’s associates said was an act of friendship. I certainly hope so, since giving money to the Gingrich-for-president effort at this point is like betting that the New York Jets will win the Super Bowl. You would think that a casino owner would know what futile acts of desperation look like.
Jon Huntsman’s dad is a billionaire, which didn’t seem to help as much as you would think. (Once again: not buying happiness.) Mitt Romney is probably only a quarter-of-a-billionaire, which, in this company, is kind of the equivalent of playing the harmonica for lunch money on the street.
But it’s hard to be sure about Mitt’s wealth because he has refused to release his tax returns. This is something every major presidential candidate in recent history has done, but so what? If every major presidential candidate in recent history jumped off the roof, would you expect Mitt to do that? How many other major presidential candidates in recent history came from the business sector? How many drove to Canada with their family dog strapped to the roof of the car? So, really, stop with the sweeping generalizations.
Romney does appear to have more billionaire pals than anybody — 10 percent of all the billionaires in the country are already giving money to Mitt, including Sam Zell, Destroyer of Great Newspapers, and John Paulson, a hedge fund operator who made a killing in 2007 by betting against the housing market. Forbes, which put Paulson at No. 17 on its list of richest people in America in 2011, said he had made $4.9 billion in the preceding year.
People, how much TV time do you think a person like that could buy if he put his mind to it? Seriously, by September we could be seeing entire networks devoted to nothing but Mitt Romney. Every week, Mitt will solve crimes, save patients with extremely rare diseases, build a house for a deserving family, help Zooey Deschanel with her dating problems and win bids for abandoned storage lockers all around the country.
Not that President Obama won’t have enough money to buy a channel of his own, if he wants one. So far, the president is behind Mitt in the billionaire donor sweepstakes, but he is still doing fine, thank you very much. So well, in fact, that a spokesman for the re-election campaign has been forced to denounce the idea that Obama will raise $1 billion. There’s that number again.
All these billionaires would not be so worrisome if the Supreme Court had not totally unleashed their donation-making power in the Citizens United case. Gingrich, who loved that decision, was furious when Mitt’s rich friends chipped in to run anti-Newt ads in Iowa.
He declined to acknowledge that the two things had any connection whatsoever.
“In fact, this particular approach, I think, has nothing to do with the Citizens United case. It has to do with a bunch of millionaires getting together to run a negative campaign, and Governor Romney refusing to call them off and refusing to be honest about it,†he told MSNBC.
Except for the part where the law that the court overturned had to do with keeping a bunch of millionaires from getting together to run a negative campaign. But, really, if they’re only millionaires, how much harm could they do?
I know I’ve said this before, but, David Frum is a dick.