Presidential candidate and former Penn senator Rick Santorum arrives on stage to speak to 39th Conservative Political Action Committee Feb 10, 2012 Wash, DC. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty

The Romney campaign crack-up is undeniable even to those in the party who prosper in denial.

Rick Santorum’s boom is fresh and delightful; however the demands of the national campaign and the accompanying scrutiny will drain Rick Santorum of his already limited humor. Am told that Rick Santorum’s nickname in high school was “Rooster.”

Am told that the Romney campaign will now nuke Santorum with the usual facts about his less than consistent voting record for two terms in the Senate. Romney counts on resentment to eliminate his rivals.

The Obama re-elect counts on inertia to secure 270 EV.

My expectation is that the GOP will not rally to Romney because of anger.

Romney needs a plan as straightforward as Ronald Reagan’s: cut taxes for all, permanently, reduce federal spending 5% per year; de-regulate; communicate that Washington is not the solution to any one’s problems. Intrade shows Obama re-elect at 60%, and Romney elect at 30%.

Easy money on POTUS unless — Do not expect to see enthusiasm on either side this summer and fall? Have not seen enthusiasm recently. Suppose we held an election and no one much showed up?

Evan Newmark worries about consumer spending with witty Spencer Jakab.

POTUS re-elect needs the consumer to get involved in the recovery. This will increase the growth of wholesale jobs, transportation and manufacturing jobs, that we saw in the January jobs numbers.

The housing crush remains the unknown. Watching consumer sentiment also, because it moved down for January, from 64 back down to 61. Wrong direction.

The virtuous circle is when the sentiment follows the jobs growth follows the spending follows the Spring.

Spoke to John Avlon and Taegan Goddard re the ABC/WaPo poll that shows Obama gaining again among independents over the likely Romney nomination, 48 to 44. Also shows Obama doing as well with white voters with Romney as he did with McCain in 2008. Doing better with Romney than McCain with college educated white voters.

The GDP is the rival, not the GOP.

Consumer spending? That is the known unknown.

POTUS Obama presents the fog of the campaign early in order to give time for his team to build an alternative narrative that argues a vote for the GOP is a vote for plutocracy.

This infers that a vote for Obama is a vote for democracy. Simple, goofy, paint-by-numbers rhetoric.

The general rules say that the incumbent gets to name the game. The game is Pirates of the GOP. Can the GOP nominee Mitt Romney present American capitalism in some fashion other than as piracy?

Unlikely to the satisfaction of the referees (TV). There is something fun about this game.

Obama is the Federal collective from Heaven, protecting the needy civilians, the self-named 99%. The GOP is the feudal pirate ship from Hades, raiding the shoreline at the bidding of the 1%. What’s the solution to this cartoon contest?

(Whisper: the Q2 GDP has the final vote.)

The facts about Solyndra are trite, tawdry and most unflattering to the Obama White House.

It is fresh to me that the Obama team sees this as a matter of ethics, and that it lays claim to “unprecedented” ethical behavior. (And is it significant that this quote is from April, 2009, during the period that the White House was pushing money into Solyndra?)

It is also odd that Obama is pictured in a field of solar panels that are easy to link to the Solyndra fairy tale of green jobs springing from the massive warehouse at Fremont, California.

Why does POTUS Obama want to wade into the sad-sack timeline of the White House pushing Solyndra with the able assist of a campaign donor who visited the White House many times in 2009?

Why bring this up now with the weight of POTUS face and voice? Unknown. Energy is also not a winning topic just now with the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The best I can figure for all this unhappiness is that the Obama re-elect means to distract the audience from the grim-eyed GDP projections. In any event, a bang-bang start to a soaring year of allegation and hooting. Well done, both teams. Advantage “secretive oil billionaires!”

The DNC does not mention, but I will, that the reason Romney pays as little at 15% is that this is the tax codes of the US as constructed by a thousand thousand hands over the last one hundred years.

The Obama re-elect is putting the IRS code on trial, and of course we all cheer the Obama team for its genius. Guilty! Completely, it becomes more clear each week that the Obama re-elect aims to accuse Mitt Romney of the crime of capitalism …

… and so forth practical practices, such as taking advantage of the 15% capital gains tax that the wealthy folk pay on the income of their investment portfolios.

Does Obama plan to be re-elected as a champion of fairness? Puzzle.

Note that the White House hired a Bain veteran, Jeffrey Vients, to become the new OMB director. Note also that POTUS will give his inspirational acceptance speech next September in the “Bank of America” stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Other smirking tricks will emerge from the Chicago directed Obama re-elect. The IRS to the axe! Wall Street to the axe!

None of this will come to much if the World Bank new estimates of global growth for 2012 and 2013 are accurate. The World Bank lowers its estimates (cruel word: slashes), because of the Euro crisis. The US is in the category that will grow 1.4% at best in 2012.

The public — I learn from Lara Brown of Villanova, on the basis of her reading of the Gallup records of past incumbent president re-elects — will make its decision on the election by Memorial Day, 2012.

Will a 1.4% at best be enough to give Obama another four years? Unknown. The IRS is still guilty of a century of fickleness and farce.

– From the blog for The John Batchelor Show.

New video from North Korea, DPRK, starring Kim Jong Un playing his father in the walk-and-talk-with-the-bosses scenes that serve as a regime opera.

The many faces of military cadres is the best evidence available of who is in charge of the Kim cult. What is striking is how closely KJU imitates his father’s casual haberdashery and regal gestures, as if he is trying out for the role of Big Kim.

Are they now experimenting with doubles and triples in the same rolly-polly format, so that they can send KJU on secret missions while his doubles hold court for cameras? This is bizarre discovery.

The PRC and its PLA cadres are held in check by the play-acting of these unusually dim-witted actors on a stage of severe depravity (famine as a weapon is commonplace in DPRK).

KJU is a stooge to stooges. The KJU cult development proceeds in a separate reality to ours, a parallel performance, and it is testing the audience (us) to learn if the cult is satisfactory.

This may be the best version we will ever get of what the planet would look like if the junta opera cults ever achieved their goals of conquest. For now, it is as if there are cult theme parks, in Tehran, in Pyongyang, in Damascus, in Harare and so forth, where the melodramas struggle in their central casting roles.

– From the blog for the John Batchelor Show.

Bill Daley’s quick exit of the White House underlines what is the reported case for some time, that the Obama administration is a handful of insiders from the Chicago campaign days, and that there is no prospect of a change in weather in the event POTUS is returned in 2013.

The Obama presidency is entirely about the Obama elections.

This is not unprecedented. However, the undermanned state at the White House means that business will wait until POTUS can convince a new Cabinet and a new staff to give him direction.

With the likelihood of a GOP win in the Senate in November, and the GOP continuing comfortably in the House, an Obama return will produce a White House of few ambitions.

Daley was the last hold of the Democratic Party on POTUS Obama. From now till Election Day, POTUS is a lone operator with a fundraising operation to pay for his re-elections staff in Chicago and nationwide.

It is striking that there is so little made of the the Daley jolt. Who is Jacob Lew? Am told he is an observant Jew (Orthodox) and trustworthy.

Will Lew have operating room at the White House? Unlikely Lew will have more success that the previous CoS.

There is one authority at the WH, am told: FLOTUS with her agent Valerie Jarrett. It is not ideology. It is Shakespeare Lite. We look forward to the tell-all from the Obama years, starring FLOTUS.

– From the blog for The John Batchelor Show.

A young Romney with his fellow Bain executives. Larger image below.

Does Romney have the ground game to respond to the blunderbuss charges of greed, gluttony, villainy and a touch of evil?

The assumption is that the Obama re-elect will lavish this scale of condemnation and more on Mr. Romney, and the Romney team is wise to anticipate these waves of fear-mongering. The general election will turn on a handful of states, and specifically will depended upon the vote of the independent professionals in those few states (NV, NM, CO, IA, MI, OH, PA, VA, NC, NH, perhaps FL.)

Does a female professional with children and a mortgage who has voted for both Democrat and Republican candidates in the past concern herself with the fairy tale of Romney the Dark Lord? Perhaps. It is the risk the GOP takes by endorsing a needy 1%er in the land of the lost 99%ers.

A year from now, will we see a narrative that states the reason Romney lost to Barack Obama was that he could not convince Middle America he was worthy because he was too rich to trust?

Does Middle America keep Obama in place because it believes his shortcoming are acceptable? In a debate between them, does Mr. Obama accuse Mr. Romney of greed and pride? How does the Independent vote choose between a president who is amiable and unaccomplished and a rich man who is amiable and accomplished? Unknown.

Mention that Salena Zito, PTR, tells me that the Obama -re-elect in Chicago called her after her warm Romney profile piece on the Romney family values in order to complain that she was too one-sided.

Team Chicago is fretful about the Pittsburgh vote being fooled by this chatter that Old Nick Mitt has a heart.

From the blog for the John Batchelor Show.

Apple’s success derives from the simple fact that the Facebook generation has grown up alongside the single-minded product line.

The video above connects to the first 25 years of Apple, 1976-2000, when it was a cluttered, self-centered cult, imitating grown-up office environments without direction or success. After 1984, it did manage to put its sealed, peculiarly boxy, toylike Macintoshes into numerous primary and secondary schools.

I watched as my children were trained in a so-called computer lab with rows of Macs, simple, icon-based, hard to break, easy to learn. No laptop to speak of in the Apple line until the late 90s. What was happening? Conditioning.

These years, Apple promotes itself as a software company. The IPhone dominates the streets and subways of NY in the hands of the young and no longer young.

I favor the notion that what Steve Jobs and Apple achieved was to listen to the practical needs of the Millenniums, who are restless, connected, socially skilled, and relentless consumers of cultural intelligence.

Apple did not get out front. Apple developed a product line from what was extant, and then it connected the products to each other. Apple responded to the least among the consumers, the children who couldn’t choose their own products but who lived with what their parents and school boards considered child appropriate, the 1-20 year-olds of 1999, who are the dominant players of the next business cycle.

Apple didn’t sell the young; it harvested them.

– From The John Batchelor Show’s blog.

The EU begins the year in a recession with the expectation of a flat to negative year. The US economy begins the year sluggish with the expectation of a 1.5% GDP for the year.

The American people begin the year cautious, hopeful, suspicious, watchful. The political actors in Washington are a non-factor for the economy at best, and a drain on the morale of the investors and operators.

[Text continues below video.]

The unknowns for the year are the leadership crisis in China; the suicide cult in Iran that can pull Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut into the conflagration versus Ankara, Amman, Riyadh and Cairo; the face-off between NATO and Russia over Syria; the collapse of Egypt’s economy; the disorder in Pakistan that can drag in Delhi.

China sticks out as an immediate threat, because it is non-transparent and false about its debt load and non-performing loans. Then again, the Obama administration is ill-equipped for any of these fails.

Expectations for rogue states to seek to take advantage of the America reluctance and incoherence.

Will POTUS Obama win re-elect? Probability is affirmative.

POTUS is out-classed by Beijing and Moscow. NATO is not a support system, it is a talking point. What do I expect? Chaos of the rogues. Iran makes the first move, what will the UN try?

A U.S. naval ship, CVN-74 USS Stennis, is pictured during the Velayat-90 war game on the Sea of Oman, near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran December 29, 2011

– From The John Batchelor Show’s blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is a theory that the supervolcano Toba in what is now Sumatra Island, Indonesia (below: remains of the crater, now a vast lake), and the following nuclear winter lasted perhaps a thousand years of ecological defeat, reducing Homo Sapiens worldwide population to under 100,000, perhaps as low as 3,000 Homo Sapiens and 3,000 Neanderthals. This is a deep irony, … that we are just 70,000 years from the near end, and only 60,000 years from the theory that the Homo Sapiens remnant, boosted in intellectual property by language, emerged from out of Africa.

We are fragile, fleeting, accidental, unprotected from the violent whims of planetary physics. Watching the new Rise of the Planet of the Apes later on iTunes, and how much fun it is to consider that our political culture springs from the family unit and is only as nimble as the family unit.

What I enjoy about the Silverback ape scenes above from Uganda is the family of the gigantic, self-confident family man; the much smaller, secure, watchful females, and the curious, secure infants.

Our instincts to survive and prosper derive from this drama, and the vagaries of climate are not an unanswerable threat. The nuclear winter would have damaged the numbers, but not the concept of the unit, just as our climate change, perhaps a warming, perhaps drought, will not change the fundamental unit.

– From the blog for the John Batchelor Show.

In 2008, POTUS achieved 365 Electoral College votes. The thinking in Chicago is that they can give up a lot of territory and win the bare minimum 270 plus a handful. The West scenario, winning CO, NM, NV and IA, is surprising to me, as it gives up OH, NC and VA. The Florida scenario gives up everything including OH. The New South scenario wins VA and NC while giving up OH and the West.

Oddest of all is the Midwest scenario, where they win with just OH and IA. The planning is routinely defeatist, defensive, cautious — more resembling a worst-elect briefing.

Also, note that PA and NH are in the Obama re-elect camp in each scenario except the so-called “expansion path,” which puts PA and NH in the Red and presumes VA and AZ along with IA, NM, CO, and NV.

Strange brew, like some idle game on an iPhone hanging around O’Hare.

What I focus on is how they take PA and NH for granted. The Electoral College is so tight, the loss of NH wrecks that re-elect game. Odd that Messina doesn’t focus on NH? At 4 EC votes, it would seem available to POTUS, with heavy Boston TV exposure and a sympathetic, college-educated urban electorate; but no special mention.

With Mitt Romney the primary candidate that the Obama team most expects in the general, with his home in toney, splendid Wolfeboro, NH (below, the oldest summer resort on Lake Winnipesaukee), the autumn campaigning will be in a headwind for POTUS. Why no Wolfeboro worrying in Chicago?

– From the blog for the John Batchelor Show.

John Batchelor, writing below about Lawrence Lessig’s new book, “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It,” reflects: “POTUS Obama pulled textbook bait and switch with his ‘change’ campaign that delivered him to Washington as just another one of the gang.”

If it is to be Mitt Romney who outlasts the GOP circus acts in Iowa, NH, SC and FL, then with the victory comes the long-anticipated match-up with POTUS Obama.

An honest concern is that with these two leading the tickets, how can you sustain the dinner party conversation on the election? You may not. You may change the subject to dessert, or to baseball season, or to the unusual weather (if it can be found anywhere).

The Election could quickly become the topic no one will speak. The table killer. This will alarm the cables that depend upon alienation and desperation. The two men are harmless as personalities. The two men can present themselves as leaders for the Brave New Normal, but no one over 40 is going to believe it for long.

Suppose they held an Election and no one listened? I will have to dig to find something credible to say about either man, because at this time they have labored for decades in order to appear pleasant blanks.

They will be what we say they are for as long as it takes them to get to the next poll. The plain-dressed pursuit of campaign money to feed their needy ops is their business.

Reading “Republic, Lost” by law professor Lawrence Lessig, who despairs that our representative democracy is in tatters because of the dominating demands of the rich and potent lobbies that lease Congress for a pittance and direct the state willy-nilly. Less a conspiracy than a broken toy for the super rich and the well-oragnized (Big Law, Big Labor, Big Air, Big Pharma, etc).

Lessig proposes dramatic turns to banish cash, such as direct financing of amateur primary candidates by voucher system, such as campaigning for 34 states to call for a Constitutional Convention.

Lessig sounds defeated. Lessig, who identifies with Progressive Democrats of the academic flavor, writes that POTUS Obama pulled textbook bait and switch with his “change” campaign that delivered him to Washington as just another one of the gang.

Is Romney a “change” candidate? Nah. Romney doesn’t even pretend to be be other than routinely competent at managing ineffective or antique systems for profit. It is a semi-mystery why he wants to be president. To accomplish what? To win what?

It will be a challenge to speak of these men as more than stand-ins. Am trusting the weather will improve for the young just leaving school. It is their planet more than Romney’s or Obama’s. Both major parties have lost their point of view. It is all either of them can do to villainize the other. What daring dullards.

– From the blog for The John Batchelor Show.

Speaking Ali Soufan, author, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda,” re the fail of the CIA and FBI from the WTC 1993 onward, and especially af the Cole attack, October 2000.

The warrants support the general finding of the 9-11 Commission that the failure to share specific logical information permitted the ops al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar to enter the US and prepare from July 2001. Soufan also documents how he was denied an opportunity to knot together the clues that would have led the the so-called courier Abu Ahmed who was the final connection to Bin Laden’s hiding hole in Abbottabad.

It is a stunning tale of paper chasing fools and bullies who withheld information without common sense.

No one has yet explained why al-Mihdhar and al-Hamzi were permitted to enter, leave, re-enter, and use their real names to initiate credit cards, rentals, tickets — despite the fact that they could be linked to characters who were linked to the Cole attack.

It is maddening to see how the CIA fought hard to keep the FBI ignorant or misdirected.

There is also the ridiculous, such as how in September 2002, Soufan was permitted only 45 minutes to interrogate major AlQ op Binalshibh (below, captured by Pakistanis is 2002), despite the fact that Soufan and his colleagues had critical information that could interpret the Al Q twisted infrastructure.

Why did it take so long to solve the Bin Laden hideout? Soufan argues that EIT (torture) and rendition hardened the sources who had the most critical information and let false information cloud the path.

The center of the Al Q plans was a group of Yemenis (Bin Laden family hails from Yemen). The cluttered pattern of the CIA paper storm kept the FBI from focusing on the Yemen connections evident since Cole.

– From the blog for the John Batchelor Show.

Ron Paul’s iconoclasm and awkward determination get ambushed by CNN video archive. The newsletter Ron Paul makes reference to in August of 1988 is an execrable mish-mash of textbook phobias about Jews, homosexuals, non-whites, and there are specific slanders against Martin Luther King and Bill Clinton, a stew of bile and dimwitted obsession about race and sex.

Ron Paul asserts that, “I didn’t read them at the time, and I disavow them.” Will this blanket denial stand up to the attack gotcha from CNN and so forth? Unlikely, since the repetition of the facts of the pamphlet is the damage.

The pamphlet asserts that the 1993 WTC attack was “a set-up by the Israeli Mossad.” And that is one of the more intellectual delusions. These old videos on YouTube remind that the tools of the trade these days include everything politicians have ever said on video anywhere. What Iowa looks like is the last man standing from the gamut of the usual oppo feeding the usual reporter class.

From the blog for the John Batchelor Show.