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How did four entrepreneurs achieve great success? Bluewater Productions will examine the lives and careers of Brooklyn Nets team owner Mikhail Prokhorov, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, former General Electric chairman Jack Welch, and business executive Herman Cain in a graphic novel entitled Tycoon: Rising to the Top.

Rafael Cordeiro designed the cover. Tony Laplume, C.W. Cooke, Marc Shapiro, and Jim Beard worked on the writing. Miky Ruiz, Angel Bernuyl, David T. Cabrera, and Kurt Belcher created the interior artwork.

Publisher Darren G. Davis gave this statement in the press release: “Some of the most of the interesting stories don’t come from Hollywood but from the business world. People like Schultz, and Welch created unique cultural touchstones that have more entertainment value than the latest single from a pop star. Their stories are America’s myths.”

It began with John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. The choice of this incompetent, unqualified, inexperienced, and stupid person as a vice presidential candidate called McCain’s judgment into serious question. Had the old war hero turned senile? How could he have put such a person a heartbeat from the Presidency? The mere thought of Palin in the White House was frightening. But McCain’s choice was far more than a scare—it insulted America and unleashed a wave of violence and racism that continues.

Never forget the crosshairs map Palin posted on her Facebook page. She urged her Twitter followers, “Don’t retreat, reload.” Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ face was in one of the crosshairs. On January 8, 2011, Congresswoman Giffords was shot in the head outside a Tucson Safeway supermarket. Fortunately she survived and is making a remarkable recovery. But America is still coping with the incivility and insults initiated by Palin and taken up by the Tea Party and Congressional Republicans.

The insults continued after President Obama was elected and took office. With exhortations to “take back our country,” the Tea Party, overwhelmingly made up of whites, spread its unsubtle racist message. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “take back our country” meant take it back from the black guy who’s President.

Four days before the President was inaugurated, the tone was set by radio talk show bloviator Rush Limbaugh. On January 16, 2010, Linbaugh said, “I hope Obama fails.”

During the President’s first term, Congressional Republicans took up Limbaugh’s mantra, deciding to do everything in their power to destroy the Obama presidency by holding up, blocking, weakening, misrepresenting, and voting against everything the President and Democrats wanted to accomplish.

Republican senator Mitch McConnell stated the Republicans’ position quite clearly: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell told Major Garrett in an interview published in the National Review in October 2010. A month later, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, he repeated his position: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” In another time, such a call of opposition to a sitting President would have been considered treason. But over the past two years, Republicans have, like obedient little soldiers, followed McConnell’s marching orders, turning their backs on their country and the people who elected them and abandoning their responsibility to participate in government.

Despite repeated attempts by the President to work in a bipartisan fashion, Republicans refused, becoming the “Party of No.” No to health care for all Americans. No to the President’s job creation bill. No to restoring regulations of the banks whose fraudulent practices caused the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. No to repealing the Bush tax cuts that added billions of dollars to the deficit. No to taxing millionaires and billionaires so they pay their fair share. Last summer, Republicans’ political brinksmanship with the debt ceiling resulted in the first downgrade in the national credit rating in U.S. history. In carrying out Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell’s dictum to bring about failure of the Obama administration, Republicans have made Congress dysfunctional and the economic recovery slower than it might have been had they spent more time working with the President instead of working against him. That President Obama has been able to accomplish so much despite Republicans’ intransigence is a tribute to his political skill, patience and intelligence.

Now we come to this election year and the line-up of potential Republican presidential candidates who are as insultingly unqualified as Sarah Palin. All celebr

By Elvin Lim

Mitt Romney must be the happiest Republican in the world. His political rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Herman Cain and Rick Perry, seem to be trying to out-do the other in terms of whose campaign can implode faster.

Let’s start with Rick Perry’s campaign. Now we know why his campaign advisors were telling him to skip upcoming debates. Perry’s “oops” moment in Wednesday’s debate will enter into the political hall of infamy because that was the moment when his sponsors will realize that he is just a bad investment. If Perry cannot think just one sentence faster than he can talk, he will be demolished by a law professor when they debate next year.

Perry’s gaffe’s was probably a godsend to Herman Cain, but it would be little relief in the worst week of his campaign yet. It doesn’t matter if the accusations of sexual harassment are true because they are now distractions to Cain’s message, which he was already struggling to explain. And then he had to go call former Speaker Pelosi “Princess Nancy.”

Sarah Palin wasn’t an aberration in a line of competent Republican candidates from Eisenhower to Nixon. She is the new rule. The thing about modern conservatism is that it has become so anti-establishment that it now happily accepts any political outsider as a potential candidate for the highest office in the land. Political outsiders aren’t tainted by politics, by Washington, so we are told. But, by the same token, they can therefore also make terrible candidates.

The irony, of course, is that the slew of debates being held this year was meant to give voters greater choice and knowledge of the candidates’ positions. But all this is doing is reinforcing the front-runner status of the establishment candidate. There is a reason why Mitt Romney and his perfect haircut has coasted through the debate without any oops moments. He’s a professional politician! Tea Partiers are going to have to come to the uncomfortable realization that it takes one professional politician to beat another.

One relatively unmentioned reason why Mitt Romney is still hovering at 25 per cent is because in 2010 the Republican party changed the nomination rules away from winner-takes-all so that states (except the first four) would allocate their delegates proportionately to the candidates at the national convention. This has the effect of giving less-known candidates more of a chance of lasting longer in the race than they normally would, but the unintended consequence is that Republican voters will have to watch their candidates battle it out, and even suffer the potentially demoralizing conclusion that in choosing their candidate, they must follow their mind, not their hearts.

It is far from clear, then, that 2012 will be a Republican year. Conservatives have yet to explain away a fundamental puzzle: if government is so unnecessary, so inefficient, and so corrupt, why seek an office in it? This is possibly why the very brightest and savviest would-be candidates are in Wall Street, and can’t be bothered with an address change to Pennsylvania Avenue. Except Rick Perry and Herman Cain, of course.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual

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In this week’s episode of “5 Things You Need to Know This Week,” Herman Cain sings about sexual harassment, Justin Bieber has a baby with Kate Middleton (I think I have that right), and nobody seems to know the whereabouts of Matt Lauer. Plus, we debut the 1st annual “Where in the World is ‘Five Things You Need to Know This Week?’”

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