Facebook stock is now down 45 percent from what its first buyers paid for it. So if someone bought $10,000 worth of stock it is now worth $5,500. Yikes. If you start adding zeros to those numbers it becomes real money. I almost dared not open my mouth when in a conversation months ago someone was wondering how to get his hands on some Facebook stock once it became public. But I could not refrain, though I said merely that he ought to think about it before investing.
Monthly Archives: August 2012
Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood: Changing Drivers for America’s Future
A recent news report on CNN — followed immediately by a television commercial — put our current state of affairs in bas-relief. The news report headlined Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood. Reporters captured Longoria, the beautifully young and erudite Hispanic or Latina actor most famous for her role in Desperate Housewives, attending a fundraising event for President Obama. In stark and almost desperate contrast, observers recapped the aging Eastwood endorsing Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee. After the news anchor took the viewers to break, up popped a commercial for Cisco touting a computerized robotic arm that fixes broken computer production lines at a factory with not a human worker in sight. The producers of the commercial dispensed with all body parts – not even a face. Only a voice accompanied the ad. Intended to be innocuous, the voice instead must cause viewers to conclude unsettlingly that American manufacturers will need fewer and fewer workers in the future.
Nuns Could Make it Hotter
Temperatures in and around St. Louis have been beyond hot this summer. The temperature gauges augur what a world suffering from climate change will look like: Withered fields and plants, dry rivers and dusty roads and cloudless, empty days that lead to fires, such as those raking Oklahoma. In this stifling environment, representatives of the Catholic nuns of America begin meeting tomorrow by a shrinking Mississippi perhaps to fire back at the Vatican. The leaders of the organization that oversees 80 percent of all nuns are under assault from clueless bishops who are attacking the nuns as not being Catholic enough. The bishops have no idea that the public supports the nuns. The idea that the nuns will accept quietly the criticism that the Vatican leveled against them hopefully is not in the cards. From these kinds of critical moments, leaders can emerge.
Romney’s trip: More than a stumble here and there
So much has been written about Mitt Romney’s trip to England, Israel and Poland. Most pundits reduced the trip to the drip-by-drip harm that his surprisingly error-prone campaign is inflicting on his candidacy. Romney’s travels probably were more of a disaster than most observers and Romney strategists perhaps realize. For a critical and more conservative component of the subgroup of Hispanic or Latino voters that Romney needs to win in November, Romney’s journey was especially worrisome. For HispanicLatino veterans, I would imagine, the trip set off warning bells that most of the know-it-alls opining about such things have any notion about, much less an idea.
What Ted Cruz Has Wrought
My rip-roaring social life allows me to watch Air Disasters, a program on one of those cable channels skipped over by millions. Each episode analyzes and documents the cause behind the tragic destruction of a plane loaded with human life. Each story revolves around a small thing – a screw, a wire, a microscopic air bubble – that over a period of time went unattended and then went on to trigger a series of regrettable, irreversible events. The screw suddenly pops at the wrong time at the wrong place. A wire long-frayed blows. A microscopic air bubble balloons into disaster. Perhaps the very design of the plane itself lends itself to ruin.
Ted Cruz’ win last night to become the nominee of the Texas Republican Party for the Senate was a hard-earned victory that was a very personal triumph for him. But it speaks more to what Texas Democrats did – or did not do – years ago to avert catastrophe, which is what the 41-year-old Cruz is for them. For years, the decision-makers in the party that once dominated political life in Texas began to commit the mistakes that have now caused a historic crash that will reverberate for decades, yes, decades to come. The beatdown that Cruz gave the incumbent lieutenant governor last night is nothing compared to the beatdown Cruz has given to Texas Democrats who believed that demography alone would bring their state back into the blue column.