Here’s a picture of a note that President Bush wrote to Condoleeza Rice during a meeting at the UN on September 14, 2005 (Photo is sourced from Reuters via Yahoo News; click on the picture to see an enlarged version):
I’ve been a long-time reader of Micro Persuasion which is the blog of Steve Rubel, a honcho at PR firm CooperKatz.
One of his clients is Vespa and they have a nice little blog called Vespaway. I have to say they’ve done a nice job, at least from the posts I’ve read. The blogger has a good voice, seems to be a genuine fan of the product and seems to have a tongue-in-cheek tone appropriate for the company.
Compare this to the piece of crap that Juicy Fruit has put out there and labeled a blog and you have a good case study for the right and wrong ways to use blogs for business.
Somebody had a little time on their hands and decided to have some fun with Google Maps. If you go to this site and pick a place on the map it will tell you where you would end up if you dug a hole straight through the Earth. If I started in my back yard I’d end up drowned like a wet rat in the Indian Ocean west of Australia.
Okay, the headline is a sweeping generalization about the legislative branch of the US government, but these folks are intent on reinforcing this image of themselves.
Today’s story involves Rep. William Jefferson, D-La. who’s district includes New Orleans. ABC News reported that the Congressman decided to tour his district on September 2 during the height of the post-Katrina chaos. While on this excursion the Congressman and his National Guard escorts stopped at his house and the guard members waited around for an hour until the Congressman "Jefferson emerged with a laptop computer, three suitcases, and a box
about the size of a small refrigerator, which the enlisted men loaded
up into the truck."
Here are some excerpts from the story followed by my own comments:
On Sept. 2 — five days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast — Rep. William
Jefferson, D-La., who represents New Orleans and is a senior member of
the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was allowed through the military
blockades set up around the city to reach the Superdome, where
thousands of evacuees had been taken.
How admirable that he was making an effort to be on the ground with the people he represents. Or could there be another motivation? Keep reading.
The Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News the truck became stuck as it waited for Jefferson to retrieve his belongings.
Two weeks later, the vehicle’s tire tracks were still visible on the lawn.
The soldiers signaled to helicopters in the air for aid.
Military sources say a Coast Guard helicopter pilot saw the signal and
flew to Jefferson’s home. The chopper was already carrying four rescued
New Orleans residents at the time.A rescue diver descended from the helicopter, but the
congressman decided against going up in the helicopter, sources say.
The pilot sent the diver down again, but Jefferson again declined to go
up the helicopter.After spending approximately 45 minutes with Jefferson, the
helicopter went on to rescue three additional New Orleans residents
before it ran low on fuel and was forced to end its mission."Forty-five minutes can be an eternity to somebody that is
drowning, to somebody that is sitting in a roof, and it needs to be
used its primary purpose during an emergency," said Hauer.Coast Guard Commander Brendan McPherson told ABC News, "We
did have an aircraft that responded to a signal of distress where the
congressman was located. The congressman did decline rescue at the time
so the helicopter picked up three other people.
Rep. Jefferson claims that he didn’t ask for the escort from the National Guard but they insisted because of his safety. At this point did it not occur to him that maybe the tour could wait until it was safer and he wouldn’t be diverting valuable resources from their core mission of search and rescue? Again, maybe there was another motivation for him to visit his district. Read on.
Jefferson insisted the expedition did not distract from rescue efforts.
"They actually picked up a lot of people while we were
there," he said. "The young soldier said, ‘It’s a good thing we came up
here because a lot of people would not have been rescued had we not
been in the neighborhood.’"
With all due respect to the Congressman, he’s full of it. Still, I ask, was there another motivation for getting to his house?
In an unrelated matter, authorities recently searched Jefferson’s
property as part of a federal investigation into the finances of a
high-tech firm. Last month FBI officials raided Jefferson’s house as
well as his home in Washington, D.C., his car and his accountant’s
house…Jefferson has not commented on that matter, except to say he is cooperating with the investigation…
Last week, Jefferson set up a special trust fund for contributions to
his legal defense in light of the FBI investigation. A senior federal
law enforcement source tells ABC News that investigators are interested
in learning if Jefferson moved any materials relevant to the
investigation. Jefferson says he did not.
Why is it that the Ways and Means Committee seems to attract these guys
(Dan Rostenkowski, anyone?) in disproportionate numbers? Oh, right. Money.
After reading the last segment of the report I actually find it easier to believe that the Congressman didn’t want a National Guard escort after all. I mean who needs witnesses? Of course you have to wonder how he might have gotten around without them, but I suspect he would have found himself right at home in the sewage that was flowing around his house.
A while ago I wrote a post saying that President Bush could take a lesson in leadership from Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Basically I was impressed by the guts that Cuban exhibited when he took responsibility for some of the bad personnel moves made by the team over the last few years. To paraphrase he said, "I was wrong and I’m going to learn from my mistakes."
According to an article on the Washington Post website, today at a press conference the president made the following comments:
"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all
levels of government," Bush said at a joint White House news conference
with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. "To the extent the federal
government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility."Bush’s comments came in response to a reporter’s question as
to whether the United States was capable of handling another terrorist
attack in light of its sluggish and inadequate response to a natural
disaster like Katrina, which unlike a terrorist attack came with some
warning."Are we capable of dealing with a severe
attack? That’s a very important question and it’s in the national
interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond," Bush
said. He repeated his earlier assertions that he wanted to know both
what went right and went wrong with the federal response to the
disaster.
That’s a big step for the president in that it’s the first time I can recall him publicly admitting that he or his administration has made a mistake. Now hopefully he can follow it up with even more leadership, like:
I’m not holding my breath, but today’s press conference does show that anything’s possible.
The elected representative to the US Congress from my home district is Virginia Foxx, who won a hotly contested Republican primary last year by defeating Winston-Salem’s blogging city councilman Vernon Robinson. Until now I’d say that’s been the most newsworthy part of her political career.
Well now she’s done gone and made a name for herself. She’s one of just 11 US Representatives who voted against the $52 billion emergency-appropriation bill for Katrina victims. In an article in the Winston-Salem Journal she’s quoted as saying:
"I want to know that
there are safeguards and that there won’t be abuses, and I have to do
what I think is the right thing to do," she said…Foxx argued that it
would be better to allocate the money in stages. The government’s
approach to spending on Katrina sets a bad precedent for how it deals
with future disasters, she said.
In a sign that voting her conscience might have also been a shrewd political move for Foxx, all 12 of the comments that the story garnered on the paper’s website (as of 5:48 p.m., September 13, 2005) were in support of Foxx’s vote.
Me thinks Ms. Foxx might be getting a call for advice from some of her Republican counterparts in the near future.
There’s a quote from a professor in an article in the Arizona Republic titled "iPod Era of Personal Media Choices May Be Turning Us Into an iSolation Nation that I think highlights the dangers of listening to an academic make pronouncements about the cultural impact of, well, anything related to the real world. Here it is:
"What concerns me is that we are developing an information
segregation," said Jeffrey McCall, a communications professor and media
watcher at DePauw University in Indiana "People are ending up exposing
themselves only to the ideas, issues and entertainment that suits them.
And I don’t think that’s healthy in the long run."
What universe is this guy from? People have always segregated themselves and they have always segregated their information, no matter the medium.
To give you just one example take the newspaper scene in Washington, DC. For years there have been two papers, The Washington Post and The Washington Times. Ask any native of DC and they’ll tell you that the average Post reader is likely to be liberal and perhaps a little elitist. On the other hand they’ll tell you that the average Times reader is either a staunch conservative, black or both.
Look at TV news. We haven’t always had the "conservative" media like Fox, but we have had choices. Back in the day you could often be classified by the broadcast news you watched. Were you a Cronkite guy or a Brinkley gal?
All we have with the new media is a lot more variety, more complexity and perhaps more defined segments to choose from. So what if you TiVo your TV programming now? That just means that instead of going to the fridge during a commercial you fast forward through it. So what if you listen to your iPod instead of the radio? That just means you find your music through avenues other than the 50 or 60 songs being rotated ad nauseum on the radio.
Sounds to me that Mr. McCall is a member of the camp who feels that we need to be nannied to death. We can’t possibly enlighten ourselves, we must rely on someone else to do it for us. But that ignores the other great human trait we all share and that is curiosity.
As I said people have always segregated themselves but we’ve also always been a curious lot. Anyone who argues that just because we can choose what we want to hear or read and thus will never find "new" music or ideas has obviously never been stuck in their car listening to the same mix CD for a few hours on end. We’re human, we get bored and we’re constantly on the hunt for something new.
The almost infinite number of choices at our disposal are a great thing. We now have an idea of how much we don’t know, the scope of what we may be missing. I’d argue that with our curiosity piqued we will actually broaden our horizons. Sure we’ll still be looking for those pundits we agree with and for the music we already know we like, but in the process we’ll more than likely discover something new that we like more than we ever expected. What could be better than that?
