John Feehery

Mitt Romney won a big victory, and that win should propel him to the nomination sometime by June, given the vagaries of the proportional delegate system put in place by the Republican National Committee.

But Romney shouldn’t feel that comfortable with his position in the party or with the state of his party at the moment. Sarah Palin can be dismissed as a goofball and an idiot for continuing to embrace Newt Gingrich, despite the former Speaker’s trouncing in the Sunshine State. But she speaks for many of the goofballs and idiots who make up a fairly large chunk of the Republican/Tea Party base.

I think it was my grandmother who once said, “Nobody buys the cow, if they can get the milk for free.”

I thought about Grandma in the context of the Wikipedia protest of the SOPA bill.

In full disclosure, one of my clients is a content company that care deeply that they are being forced to give their milk away for free, thanks to the vagaries of the Internet.

I wrote this last year and thought it was pretty good, so I am reposting it this year.


Barack Obama. Oprah Winfrey. Robert Johnson. Dick Parsons. Bill Cosby. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods.

It goes without saying that all of these individuals owe a great deal to Martin Luther King Jr., who is remembered today on the anniversary of his birth.

Milton Friedman. Friedrich Hayek. Ayn Rand. Adam Smith. Ronald Reagan. Jack Kemp. Arthur Laffer. Dick Armey.

It might be less obvious that this second group owes every bit as big a debt to King’s legacy.

The Chicago Sun-Times’s Lynn Sweet picked out an interesting morsel in Jodi Kantor’s book about the Obama family:

“When Michelle Obama worked in Mayor Daley’s City Hall in the early 1990s, she was 'distressed' by how a small group of 'white Irish Catholic' families — the Daleys, the Hynes and the Madigans — 'locked up' power in Illinois.

"She particularly resented the way power in Illinois was locked up generation after generation by a small group of families, all white Irish Catholic — the Daleys in Chicago, the Hynes and Madigans statewide.”

Obama White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, one of those hated white Irish Catholics, resigned the same weekend the book’s juiciest tidbits leaked out.

Tony Blankley taught me the art of the spin.

He said to me, with his slight British accent, “First, you have a conversation off the record with the reporter, where you establish the facts, and then you give them something on the record which gives them your analysis.”

Blankley was Newt’s press secretary at the time, and I was Tom DeLay’s newly minted communications director, one who had never spoken to a reporter “on the record” before. Tony’s advice was priceless, and I would use it throughout my career on Capitol Hill.

As Republicans continue to fumble all over themselves, President Obama made a bold move to reclaim the white middle class.

Mitt Romney (the only GOP candidate to utter the words “middle class” in any of his stump speeches) wisely decided that the Trump debate was one too many. Newt, the newly anointed front-runner (I will believe it when I see it), will join Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann in what can only be described as the logical extreme.

Why not Trump? You had David Addington, for Christ’s sake, ask a question at the last CNN debate. And Trump will get ratings. And for Newt, Santorum and Bachmann, it is all about the ratings.

All-of-the-above is officially the mantra for Republicans when it comes to energy security.

Republicans understand that electricity generation is extraordinarily important to American progress. Without electricity, we can’t play with our iPads, air-condition our homes, cook our breakfasts, watch television, get money from the ATM, shop for food or do just about anything else we need to do on an hourly basis.

Politicians in Washington rushed Nevada into statehood in 1864 to assure Abraham Lincoln a comfortable margin in his bid for reelection smack-dab in the middle of the Civil War, and ever since then, the Silver State has played a unique role in American political history.  

Nevada is mostly desert, so it has always been a bit creative in how it has looked at its growth potential. In the early 1900s, it went the libertarian route, allowing prostitution and gambling, as a way to draw more settlers from California. It worked, and Nevadans found a formula that has kept it growing for most of its relatively short history. That is, up until the Obama years.

Newt Gingrich had the line of the night toward the end of the debate when he complained that the moderator encouraged a level of bickering that could only make it harder for the GOP to get the White House.

I don’t think Anderson Cooper was really trying to sink the Republican nominee for president in this debate. He was trying to make an eight-person debate interesting for television. But if the byproduct is to make all the candidates look silly, well, mission accomplished.

Wasting away again in Obamaville.
Looking for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim that George Bush is still to blame.
But I know.
It’s Barack Obama’s fault.

In the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, and in the depths of the Great Depression, shantytowns sprang up around America.

Called Hoovervilles, these itinerant communities came to symbolize the failure of the Herbert Hoover administration to deal with the economic calamities of that era.

We are now entering into Day 100 of the so-called Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City, and the movement has spread to other cities.