January 25, 2016--Governor Who?

Governor Chris Christie has virtually moved to New Hampshire.

It's all-in for him up there. Unless he comes in third in the February 9th primary, he'll be forced to return to New Jersey, tail between his legs, where, it is alleged, he is still the governor.

Actually, he got a preview of life in NJ this past weekend when winter storm Jonas was set to pummel the Jersey Shore. In a deja-vu hallucination that Jonas might pack the wallop of Hurricane Sandy, though he didn't want to leave the cozy town-hallers he was getting nachas from in the Granite State, he had no choice but to return kicking and screaming to Jersey and pretend he cared about his anxious constituents.

His one caveat--no replays of his former post-Sandy bromance with Barack Obama. That was the beginning of the end for him. Closing the GW Bridge also didn't help. But some New Hampshireites were actually beginning to like him--though he is still showing up in NH polls in low single-digits--and for Christie, whose approval rating in the Garden State is almost as low as his standing in the presidential race, he had no choice. Put in an appearance in Jersey--no matter how reluctantly--and live with it.

Though maybe, just maybe, he was hoping, he would get politically lucky and the storm would reach Sandy proportions (fortunately it didn't) and he could get a lot of snow-swept, flooded-out face-time on TV, stomping around as a pretend commander in chief.

And show up in NJ he did. For just 24 hours before racing back to the comforts of New Hampshire, leaving thousands still stranded along the flooded Jersey coast.

On Saturday, the New York Times ran a story about how frequently he's been out of the state the past year--during 2015, Crispy spent 191 days in anyplace but New Jersey, most of it downing free snacks and campaigning.

But, the Times decided not to ask why, if he's at best a part-time governor, he still pulls down a full-time $175,000-a-year salary.

Actually, they could have raised the same question about many of the other candidates.

Just as the Florida Sun Sentinel called for no-show Marco Rubio to resign from the Senate. In addition to being personally underwritten by a fanatical Israel-supporter, South Florida car-dealer billionaire Norman Braham, Rubio, who has the worst attendance record in Congress, shamelessly continues to pocket the $174,000-a-year salary.

Only politicians can get away with this kind of stuff. Though maybe soon they'll be inhibited from doing so as the public continues to sour on their performance and are turning to Bernie Sanders and Donald TRUMP types in the hope that they will be able to do something to fix our festering problems, very much changing the way parasitical public "servants" behave.

I know, dream on.

Christie and Rubio among the contenders are not the only ones feeding at the government trough.

Ted Cruz, who is making quite a living as a federal employee though also not showing up for work, spends his days trashing the very system of which he and his Goldman-Sachs-employed wife are comfortable fixtures.

Then there is Rand Paul who not only ignores his day job but also finagled the Kentucky legislature to pass a special bill to allow him to double-dip--to run in November for both the Senate and the presidency. Though he won't need to worry about the latter since by March he'll no longer be at even the children's debate table but will have to slink back to KY to try to convince folks there that they should send him back to the Senate. He'll need to get on this case post haste as his reelection bid is currently imperiled.

Not to worry--one way or the other, I expect to see son-of-Ron with his own show on Fox News or back to operating on cataracts.

And while I'm at it, among the candidates who are running while on the federal payroll, the candidate who has been chowing down at public expense for the most years, for 34 to be precise, is Bernie the socialist.

I suppose his form of taxpayer-financed socialism doesn't take his decades-long ineffectiveness as a senator into consideration when the Treasury Department sends along to him each year a cool $174K.

And talk about part-time jobs, Rona wondered out loud that Hillary Clinton must be an amazing public speaker to justify her $225,000-a-pop speeches at Goldman Sachs. Too bad they were never broadcast on C-SPAN.

But here's my question--where do I sign up for one of these jobs?

January 15, 2016--TRUMP's "New York Values"

Ted Cruz doesn't handle criticism very well.

Donald TRUMP's public ruminating about Cruz's eligibility for the presidency--he was born in Canada to an American mother and held joint citizenship until a few months ago--is clearly getting under the very junior senator's skin.

Interviewed the other day on the Howie Carr Radio Show, he snapped that TRUMP should stop playing "Born in the USA" at his rallies, a clear swipe at Cruz, and suggested he should "shift in his new rallies to playing 'New York, New York' because Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values."

TRUMP responded immediately, counter-intuitively embracing rather than denying those values. When has it ever been good for a Republican to say anything good about the Big Satan, a favorite conservative slur about the Big Apple?

Passionately, with his New York accent dialed up, TRUMP said that he does in fact embrace those values and feels proud to do so. Also to Carr, in his words, he said--

One thing it means is energy. You know, when the World Trade Center got hit, we rebuilt that World Trade Center and we got through and very few places in this world could have gotten through what we went through. I mean, I was so proud of New York, the World Trade Center, these two massive, 110 story buildings came down. Thousands of people killed. I've never seen anything like it in my life.

He added--"Anyone who attacks New York City will have to go through me."

If TRUMP and others, including some constitutional scholars such as Lawrence Tribe, are discombobulating Cruz by questioning if he is a "natural born citizen," how will he explain away yesterday's reports in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that he failed to report more than a million dollars in very-low-interest loans to his 2012 senatorial campaign, loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs where his wife, Heidi, at the latter is a managing director after serving on the National Security Council under Condi Rice?

Failure to report loans of this kind, not incidentally, are not just careless mistakes, as Cruz claims, but violate federal law.

And it will not be so easy for the Princeton and Harvard-educated Supreme Court clerk Ted Cruz to point fingers at the establishment of which he and his wife have been such comfortable members.

It will also not be easy to counter his former Harvard Law School professor, Laurence Tribe, who in an op ed piece in The Boston Globe, "Under Ted Cruz's Own Logic, He's Ineligible for the White House," wrote that maybe, in spite of Cruz's assertion that his eligibility is "settled law," that it may not be after all.

Nor will it be easy for Cruz to explain why he jettisoned his Latino name, Raphael, for the more waspy Ted.

Above all, will it be hypocrisy for Cruz to continue to slip into New York City as frequently as in the past unless he learns the words to "New York, New York"?

February 19, 2014--The $44.2 Million Man

In this land of plenty, salaries are outrageous. Especially at the low end.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and hour, which means that if you have a 40-hour-a-week minimum-wage job you make $15,080 a year. Well below the poverty level of $23,550 for a family of four.

At the other end of the spectrum, they are even more outrageous.

Corporate CEOs are among the most extravagantly paid.

Jamie Diamond of JPMorgan Chase, in spite of the fact that on his watch the bank agreed to settle federal lawsuits for $20.0 billion, in 2013 was paid $20.0 million in salary and bonuses. That comes to a neat $9,615 an hour.

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, in spite of the fact that Goldman was successful sued by the Feds for upwards of $1.0 billion, was paid $14.7 million last year.

Michael Duke, CEO of Walmart, with thousands of stores and hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide, with annual sales topping $470 billion, was paid $20 million in 2013.

The new CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, will earn $14.4 million this year, partly because GM doesn't want to be accused of sexism if they paid her anything less.

At the higher end of the CEO scale, Tim Cook of Apple, netted a cool $40 million in 2013.

Turning to sports, LeBron James of the Miami Heat is earning earned $19.1 million from the team and will bank much more than that from his various endorsements and TV commercials.

If Alex Rodriquez were permitted to play this year for the New York Yankees, he would have taken home a cool $25 million. Instead, he is suspended for the season because of illegal drug use and will take home zilch. But not to worry, after 2014, the Yanks will still owe him $61 million, whether or not he ever plays another game.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig made less than A-Rod. "Only" about $18 million.

Gary Bettman, National Hockey League commissioner made a measly $8.3 million in 2012, the last year figures were published.

Then there is the $44.2 million dollar man--Roger Goodell, commissioner of the National Football League, where star quarterback Payton Manning makes "just" $18.0 million per.

Not a bad deal for a league that plays a 16-week season and then a month of playoffs, culminating in the Super Bowl.

What does the NFL commissioner do to justify receiving such an annual fortune? How many auto plants around the world is he responsible for? How many trillions in investments does he manage? And for that matter, how many touchdown passes did Goodell complete? How many quarterback sacks? And has he ever had any concussions?

And what are we talking about? Over-steroided post-adolecents running up and down a field in shoulder pads and helmets. To oversee this they give the commissioner more than $40 million a year? How we have lost our way.

To top off the Goodell story, as reported in the New York Times, there is a part of the NFL that is set up as a not-for-profit. All well and good if that is to fund charitable activities; but it also appears that it is a cover-operation to slip tens of millions to Goodell, whose on-the-books, for-profit salary last year was a paltry $3.5. The rest, nearly $40 million, came from the non-profit organization.

As I said--outrageous.