Donal has written a number of amazing blogs on solar energy projects in his area. Those blogs convinced me it would be a good time to try talk to my husband about investing in a solar electric system for our house.  He agreed immediately thinking it was an excellent idea so in the next three months we are going solar by day. We signed the contract yesterday.

I spent the better part of a decade commuting to work in an executive recruiting firm in Manhattan.  We focused on senior management assignments, including in the finance industry. In ten years I had lived the corporate suite vicariously and any yearnings I might have had to play the executive role were well sated.  After I left I spent fifteen years in artistic and teaching pursuits and then founded a small manufacturing services business which today keeps me off the streets.

One seldom hears about the really fine executives. But somewhere along the line the top tier began to be confused with actors and are essentially loudmouths---encompassing three prototypes: The flamboyant; the super hero; and those who are simply boorish and full of themselves. Trump, Dimon and Romney.

Actually there is a fourth type, the seedy. In my former lifetime we once introduced an uptown candidate with a public persona of squeaky clean, upstanding family man. Nice guy, really. But he wasn't right, either for L.A. (his wife would never have moved) or for a job in Hollywood. The Chairman who interviewed him was a cigar chomping, crude individual (think casino magnate). When our candidate asked about benefits the Chairman's face screwed up and he chewed half way through his cigar. "The benefits are a pension program, health plan and all the show girls you can eat." Seedy doesn't quite nail it, does it?

One of the advantages of a business guy like Willard Romney running for President is that despite the rude public dissection of his career, an ordinary member of the rank and file such as myself can learn business methods which would normally be kept in secret files. If Romney loses the election, and because he no longer has any active involvement in any of his businesses, he will most likely write a book and advertise it on Bloomberg---something like, "Business is a Fiscal Cliff---How to walk right up to the edge without going to Jail!". I'm not waiting for Romney's chapter on Retirement. I retroactively retired over the weekend.

I emailed my stock broker to retroactively withdraw the sale order for a thousand shares of Apple Computer I gave him in March, 2002, when Apple shares dropped from $25 to $23 in one day. I expect that my broker will change his records appropriately, will so inform the registrars of Apple common shares, and I look forward to seeing that $600,000 appear on my July statement. I can't wait to show the wife that statement because if she's said it once, she's said it a hundred times, "...if you just hadn't sold that Apple stock when you did, we could be retired by now."  Well, now we are retired and maybe she'll shut up about Apple.

Israel astounded international observers this week as former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy announced in effect: "Israel never occupied nobody!" Imagine a President Romney asking Justice Scalia to provide a definitive interpretation of the Obamacare decision. The results could hardly be more unsurprising.

Fox, meet chicken coop. Chicken coop, meet fox. With Netanyahu assembling / stacking this committee of like-minded thinkers to come up with a way to prove their settlements were legal, they creatively fell back on familiar ground: the West Bank was already Israel's so they could build wherever they want anyway.

Administrations are invariably criticized for things they do right, for things they do wrong, and for things they fail to do at all. They are invariably criticized for doing too much and criticized for doing too little. Conservative critics of the current Administration tend to do the former. Liberal, by contrast, would do well to focus on the latter. For thus far, this Administration’s failures – in domestic policy at least – are more the product of doing too little too late, than of doing too much too soon. Nowhere is that failure clearer than in the Administration’s inept handling of the home foreclosure crisis.[1]

The Obama Administration did not invent or create the foreclosure crisis. It inherited it, just as it inherited a major financial crisis and a looming recession. But unlike the financial meltdown, the home foreclosure problem inherited by the Obama Administration was in its infancy as the new president took office. The housing crisis then played itself out predominantly on Obama’s own watch; with the numbers of foreclosures soaring as they did only because the Administration failed to act with a speed and an effectiveness appropriate to the occasion. It is a failure that may yet bring a heavy electoral price.

tmmcarthy recently did a nice blog on FactCheck and facts.

Here, I present the FactCheck.org Greatest Hits, then and now:

(1) FactCheck September 23, 2004: "Kerry Exaggerates Cost of Iraq War" in pre-election ad. FactCheck says the war cost 'is still under $120 billion' whereas Kerry said it was $200 billion. Important information for the public from FactCheck....? By 2008 the cost of the war was extimated to exceed $3,000 billion ($3 trillion) and beyond by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist. Thanks for that fact check, FactCheck, it helped us a lot.