I am not a fan of soccer.  Several years ago I went to a World Cup soccer match between Cameroon and Brazil at Stanford University.  To soccer fans, this was the greatest event in history.  To me it was really boring.  It looked like some people kicking the ball back and forth in the center of the field for no apparent reason until someone accidentally scored.  However this year the U.S. women were in the World Cup finals and they had pulled off a couple of genuine miracles to get there.  So I decided to watch the game.  The U.S. was doing great and had even pulled ahead with just a few minutes left.  Suddenly the announcers started talking excitedly about how Barack Obama was a huge fan and that he, Michelle and the girls were watching the game in the White House.  They gushed about how he could congratulate the great victory. (Obama even sent Chelsea Clinton over to Germany, at tax payer expense, to help celebrate the expected win.)  Now perhaps it was a coincidence, but as soon as the announcers started talking about Obama, everything went south for the U.S.   Japan scored a miraculous last minute goal, and the U.S. fell apart during the penalty kick contest.  In the course of about 5 minutes the announcers when from celebrating a great victory to trying to absorb a mind numbing loss.

This reminded me of earlier this year when Obama started bragging about how things were looking up.  (No one else was very impressed.)  He bragged about creating 268,000 new jobs, ignoring the fact that over 60,000 of them were at McDonalds.  The same McDonalds Michelle Obama is trying to shut down.  No sooner did Obama start bragging about things getting better when we got hit with all those tornadoes.  This year has already been one of the worst storm years in U.S. history.  State Farm is reporting losses of $1.75 billion.  Allstate is reporting losses of $2 billion and Travelers is reporting losses of $1 billion.  Based on industry reports, it appears that the U.S. insurance industry incurred more losses in April and May of this year than in all of 2010.  The net result is going to have a significant impact on the entire insurance industry.  This does not even count all the floods and the Japan tsunami didn’t exactly help.

So, when Obama had a sliver of better economic news to gloat about, we got hit with these storms.  Then the U.S. soccer team took it on the chin just after it became obvious Obama was going to bask in their celebration.  I have to admit it caused me to ask a simple question:  “does God vote?”   Just saying!

TDM