Month: March 2016

I believe the Republican Party of Ohio, as an enduring institution, is among the most effective state parties in the country, and has been for very long time.  And Ohio is a Midland state, a balance of political forces that does not produce extremes.  And John Kasich is a true Buckeye, a graduate of Ohio State, and a popular and effective governor.  Rubio and Kasich have stayed out of Ohio, in deference to him.  And while the antics of the Trump Circus endear him to his base, they scare a lot of other people.  He has to be taken seriously, and I think people will turn out simply to vote against him.

If Kasich wins Ohio, Trump almost certainly won’t get to 1237.  And unless he comes to Cleveland with a majority, he will not be allowed to win the nomination.

If Rubio or Kasich stays in the race, they’re in for a rude awakening one week from today, when Utah and Arizona go big for Cruz.  Ten days later the 28 delegates from North Dakota will be elected at the State Convention.

In many ways, North Dakota is an oddball state.  The North Dakota Mill, one of the largest grain millers in the country, is owned by the State of North Dakota.  Socialism, pure and simple.  But that’s the way the people of North Dakota want it.  They have peculiar rules in their state legislature.  Bills which are introduced must be voted on. They can’t simply be killed by legislative leadership.  Odd.  The 28 delegates to Cleveland will be hand picked by the leaders of the North Dakota Republican Party.  The RNC told them that if that had a Presidential preference vote at their precinct caucuses, that vote would have to be honored in delegate selection.  So they said to heck with that, and the voters of North Dakota will have no say in picking those 28 delegates.  The Party picks them, based on their past contributions, monetary and otherwise, to the Republican Party of North Dakota.

Most Republican Party activists are not Trump people.  Anything but.  They are the establishment, and they’re just fine with that.  I very much doubt Trump gets one delegate in North Dakota.  I made a few calls back there today, and there seems to be a lot of support for Cruz.  In sum, and in reality, North Dakota is a Cruz win.  That’s three in a row.

Next up is Wisconsin, 42 delegates, and, apparently, winner take all.  This primary, on April 5th, could be  the one that proves, beyond doubt, that Trump has no path to a majority.  It should be one on one by that time, and with Gov. Scott Walker and the entire Republican Party of Wisconsin behind him, Cruz should win easily, and establish himself, once and for all, as the last man standing, the one who gets to deliver the much anticipated knockout blow.  In delivering the death blow to Trumpism, Cruz will unite the party behind him.  The Trump cultists will be all pissed off.  But how many of them will vote for Hillary?

And, to tell you the truth, even if Trump goes third party, I still think Cruz wins.  Hillary and Bernie are unelectable.  As general election candidates, they’re both jokes.  Harry Truman won in 1948, despite Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace both running third party against him.

If Ohio goes for Trump, I know even less than I think I do.  But that won’t mean it’s over.  Not by a long shot.

 

Putin is announcing he’s getting out of Syria.  Mission accomplished.  He saved Assad, demonstrated that his military is capable of intervening in, and controlling, events in the Middle East.  Iran certainly took notice, and their decision to play ball on controlling world oil production is bullish for oil, over the long term.

Putin has to get the price of oil up.  The Russian economy depends on it.  Everyone in the Mideast wants higher oil prices as well.  The Russians will work with anyone to get the price up, and have shown they’re willing to act.

So I think we’ll see oil settle into a $35-40 range.  On that basis I got back into COP this morning, on a dip.  I’m going to stick with it this time, as long as it doesn’t break sharply down.  The people at Fox Business were talking about the makeup of a Trump cabinet.  They think he’s really the favorite for the nomination, but they’re wrong.  An institution like the Republican Party, which has been around for 150 years, has ways to prevent hostile takeovers.  Goldwater did it in ’64, and McGovern did it for the D’s in 1972.  But Trump is an alien, a pure opportunist, and potentially dangerous.  There are ways to deal with him.  A political party controls its own rules, and can change them if necessary.  For instance, there’s nothing to stop the Convention from adopting a rule requiring a 60% majority of delegates to nominate.  The D’s used to require 2/3.

Forget about Trump.  It’s Cruz.  When people wake up to that, COP’s going to look pretty damn good.  And I’m betting on it.

My little article about Elizabeth Jackson is up at American Thinker.  I’ve lost my ability to link to it.  My ignorance of computers annoys me.

 

Lew Uhler and I applied to be Cruz delegates from our shared Congressional District, CA-4. Three names will be selected as delegates from this district by the Cruz campaign in California.  I asked Joseph Semprevivo to put in a good word for us, but he’s up to his ass in alligators right now, so we’ll see.

I snuck into the ’64 Convention in San Francisco, and decided to go to the one in ’96, for Dole.  My son Brendan was 20 then, and I got him a job as an usher or something.  It was in San Diego, and he really didn’t have anything to do, so he mainly screwed around on the beach.

I saw my best friend from high school there, Jack McClenahan.  Jack was living in Ojai with his high school sweetheart, Jane, a wonderful woman.  I believe at this time he was raising money for the National Park Foundation.  The money was somewhat sporadic, I believe, but Jane had a good job, somehow connected to Disney.

So Jack and I palled around the Convention, without accomplishing anything.  The one thing I remember is when Jack Kemp was introduced to us as the Vice Presidential candidate.  I was probably 25 feet away from him, standing with Jack, and Kemp was all fired up.  This was the break he’d been waiting, and working on, for a very long time.  I’d never seen a guy as jacked up as he was.  I was looking at him, hard, trying to figure out what the hell made this guy tick.  I’d never seen him in person before.  He noticed me looking at him, and kept looking back at me a few times while he spoke.

Jack thought that was pretty cool.  We went to see Dole’s acceptance speech, the opening part of which is poetic.  Written by Mark Halperin.  Apparently he had an entire speech full of this beautiful language, but the old pros wouldn’t have it.  He got the hell out of San Diego, and politics.

So going to Cleveland with Lew and his lovely wife, I’m sure Babbie will be made to feel right at home.  I won’t go without her.

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr Murdoch?

I’m not willing to bet on this, yet, but I think FBI Director Comey is going to recommend that Hillary be indicted.  If not that, then some of her underlings will be, like Huma Abedin.  This is just a hunch on my part.  I don’t have any inside knowledge or special insight.  It’s just which way the wind seems to be blowing.

If so, I don’t think Bernie can be prevented from getting the nomination.

We’ve had one Jewish American Presidential candidate before, Barry Goldwater.  But he was such an assimilated Jew that nobody even thought about it.  He was a candidate of the Far West, my part of the country, and his views reflected that.  His Jewishness was an afterthought.

Bernie’s a born and bred Brooklyn Jew, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union.  He’s a professional political activist.  That’s always how he’s earned his living.  Like Goldwater, he’s not running to win, but to start a movement by taking over a political party.  He’s like a left wing George McGovern.

1920 ain’t in it.

From a market perspective, 1920 was the beginning of the Roaring 20’s.  Everybody did well.  This could happen again.  The greatest bull market in American history lasted from 1982 to 2000.  I call it the Reagan Rally.  I caught it in 1993 or so, and rode it all the way to January of 2000.  I listened to Bob Brinker’s “Money Talk” on KENI, and he finally, at long last, put out a sell recommendation sometime in January.  He said sell 60%, and keep 40% in the market.  So I did that, and a week later sold the other 40%, so I was all in cash.

Two months later the bubble popped.  I think the NASDAQ was at 5,000, and it fell like a rock.  Babbie had made a lot of money in our law practice, and I doubled it in seven years.  We paid a big capital gains tax, but there was no way around that.  If you stay in the market to avoid paying a capital gains tax you’re a fool.

I’ve got Fox Business on mute, and it seems tomorrow is unfolding as hoped.  Kasich should win Ohio,  Florida is a lost cause, but I’m counting on the Republican machine in Ohio to deliver.  They’ve been around a long time, and they know Ohio a lot better than Trump.