Red Scare

Amazing how much the world has changed in more than 20 years. Back then if a nest of Russian spies were discovered people would have been outraged, upset, even scared. Now? It seems so archaic, as if from a time long past and even sort of cool. I had to laugh, though, at the NY Post front page. Does the younger generation even still associate "Red" with Communism especially since a "Red" state such as TX means it voted for a Republican? Really, how did we go from having Red mean Communists to meaning Republicans in less than two decades? The headline also struck a personal nerve. I doubt if many under 50 would understand but when I was a redhaired child the other kids would tease me by chanting "I would rather be dead than red in the head". If public opinion is going to bring back "Red" to mean Communist rather than Republican than I am glad that my hair is slowly turning white!

Short Retort - Liberal Clones

This is truly not the least bit politically correct and I should feel ashamed for what I am about to say. But I don't. Because come on folks, hasn't anyone else wondered if maybe the liberals keep cloning the same far-left women to have in their administration? They are giving women a bad name because you wouldn't know that a woman could be smart and good looking or even simply feminine at the same time instead of......

Janet Reno former Attorney General






Janet Napalitano - Homeland Security



and now




Elena Kagan - Candidate for Supreme Court Justice




(If nothing else, you have to wonder if all these women use the same hairdresser?)

General Chaos

So General McChrystal is out. They say that Obama would have looked weak if he had not demanded the General’s resignation but I think this was a big mistake. Admittedly, I have never been in the military but I have worked for large corporations. And this experience tells me there are going to be problems that no one is addressing.

If you’ve read the Rolling Stones article you would learn that it was McChrystal’s teamwho were making sarcastic, impertinent remarks about the Vice President and other White House staff, including one remark about the President himself. So tossing out the General doesn’t address the low morale and “insubordination” of his aides and many of the troops in Afghanistan. In fact it will only serve to increase their anger. I know. I have lived through a similar incident in corporate life.

A few years ago corporate headquarters swooped down on my division and fired my division GM, my boss and two others. The word was that a major reason for the firing was that they had not been cooperating with corporate headquarters. I was immediately tapped to replace my boss and a few weeks later told that in a month my department would no longer be a part of my division but would report to a corporate department which was headquartered in the next state. I knew this would be a disastrous decision on many levels. But was I going to argue with them having just seen my boss fired for not cooperating? Nope. I lightly mentioned my concerns but then immediately shut up since I wanted to keep my job. I knew morale in my department was rock bottom but not much I could do other than sympathize with them and try to find some silver lining. Luckily we were literally saved at the last minute and the decision was cancelled. It only took a few months before the new GM admitted that moving my department would have been a huge mistake. Ironically within three years the “new” GM held corporate in even more contempt then the prior leader so no surprise that corporate eventually asked him to leave, too. Again morale plummeted.

Substitute the White House for corporate headquarters and you have a very similar situation. Our troops are unhappy and are being asked to perform under nearly impossible restrictions. And now the man they served under and, based on all indications, loved, was forced to retire by an administration that the article shows they already disdained. Plus let’s face it, soldiers are not among the most liberal group and now their far-left Commanding Chief, who knows nothing about the military, by the way, has thrown out their General.

I bet there will be a lot of really pissed off soldiers tonight. And yet now they will be afraid to say a word which will further erode morale. You see, one thing McChrystal understood, although it may also have been his downfall, is that sometimes it helps to let a team bitch and moan. Attitude readjustment sessions (also called Martini happy hour) are helpful to the morale of a team. But now you can be sure they won’t utter a word against Obama. And I can only imagine how low our troops morale must be tonight.

Maybe instead of firing McChrystal, Obama should have chewed him out but then bought him a drink and sat and listened to this soldier’s General. Obama might have learned something and come out as the bigger man.

The High Cost of Experience

Experience. How necessary is experience? How much does experience really count? I always thought experience counted for something but I never realized just how important it is. That is until I recently watched two sporting events. Sunday afternoon I turned on the US Open where I learned that a young golfer had been playing the games of his life. Dustin Johnson walked up to the first tee at the famed Pebble Beach Country Club going in to this last day with a 3 under par. He was the leader in one of the most prestigious golf tournament of the year. It turns out that he didn’t even have to par the course on Sunday and he would be holding the trophy at the end of the day.

Dustin had in fact won other tournaments played at Pebble Beach. So he did have experience with winning on this golf course but not with playing the US Open. Long story short – he choked and did it big time on national TV. On the second hole he shot a triple bogey then followed by a double bogey and a bogey. Luckily halfway through the tournament they stopped showing him on TV for it was truly painful to watch. By the end of the day he was 11 over par and had dropped from a 3 under par to a 5 over par. Ouch. So it was Graeme McDowell who was seen kissing that US Open trophy instead.

The other tale of experience occurred Monday morning or more accurately Monday afternoon in England. It was the first day of the two-week Wimbledon tournament. Roger Federer, the six time champion of Wimbledon was up against an unseeded player Alejandro Fallah. I turned it on thinking it would be a quick match. To everyone’s horror the champion lost the first two sets and was a game away from losing the match. Fallah was playing unbelievably and the unthinkable was about to occur – a first seed player was going to lose in the first round. And then it happened. Experience kicked in. Federer took back control of the match and won the third set, fought hard against Fallah to win the fourth set and then pretty much played by himself as Fallah faded during the fifth 5-0 set to give Federer the win. Roger would now move forward to the next round while Fallah's Wimbledon try was over for this year.

After watching these two sporting events I couldn’t help but wonder about our inexperienced President. He does ok when reading from a script and he has strong arming Congress down to a science. But when something unexpected happens or he even speaks off script he chokes. He totally mishandled the Christmas bomber, Fort Hood shooting, and now the Gulf Oil Spill. It took him about two months with hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf before he finally took action. And what was that action? To form committees to investigate it. Great.

But what if one of these inept bombers get it right and manage to blow up a part of America and killing hundreds or thousands Americans. Hasn't it occurred to anyone else that the radical muslims might be planning something big next year on the 10th anniversary of 9-11? What then? Why should we expect this inexperienced president to suddenly show leadership skills if a life and death situation should occur?

I realize that people have been asking these questions ever since Obama won. And I heard them but the value of experience never really sunk in until it was unquestionably demonstrated over the past two days. Dustin Johnson might have been experienced playing Pebble Beach but the pressure of being the leader of the US Open was beyond anything he had ever encountered. The pressure, the crowds, the TVs, and again the expectations that came with being the leader brought him to his knees. On the other hand, there is Roger Federer who I am sure was shocked to find himself a game away from losing in the first round of Wimbledon. Lesser players would probably have succumbed. Not Federer. His experience allowed him to dig in and turn around his game. By the fifth set he was in such command that it was Fallah who gave up.

Which is President Obama going to be when he is faced with a major crisis? Will he totally choke as the golfer Dustin did or will he emulate Federer and find some inner strength from his years of experience to not only face the crisis but turn it to our country’s advantage so that we come out a winner? I am afraid that we all know the answer.

Taking the drama out of schools

I am sitting here watching the Tony’s on TV and yet I must admit that I have no sympathy for the constant complaints about cutting the arts from schools. I’m sorry but I just don’t get it. The arts, to me, are filled with egotistical people who display themselves or their work in public, be it via drama, music, art or literature (get that – literature, never simply “books”) in the hopes of getting applauds and adulation. How sad is that when you think about it. Yet they have done a marvelous job of brainwashing us that these arts must be included in school. I now feel like the child about to point out that the emperor has no clothes but why are their professions of such importance that they must be taught in school? We use to teach children how to cook, do woodwork and even basic car mechanics. So why aren’t chefs demanding that cooking classes be added back into the curriculum or mechanics requiring that their skills continue to be taught in middle school? It seems to me that knowing how to change a tire and make a decent meal would be a lot more useful for a child to learn than art appreciation.

And why are the arts so respected by educators while occupations that deal with making a profit are considered to be crass? Again, learning how to write a resume or how to fill in a W2 form would be more useful to a young person then how to distinguish a Monet from Manet. It is ridiculous to think that most of society has a greater respect for adults who spend their time playing make believe than they do for people who make products we need and services we use.

To make the topic even more ludicrous is the fact that when the arts are taught then understanding and critiquing a poem, song or play is purely subjective. Who’s to say if it is good or horrible? Impressionable children are pretty much at the mercy of their arts, music and drama teachers. The Oscars awards for best movie clearly shows a deep divide between what those in the arts profession admire and what the general population actually goes to see. They had to increase the nominees for Best Movie recently because in prior years no one other than actors and actresses had seen the handful of movies that had been nominated.

Speaking of which, when did actresses decide they wanted to be called actors? If they were so determined to deny their womanhood and be seen on par with men then it seems to me that they should have a Best Actor Oscar, period, and let them compete with men for the one award. But no, as usual, women want the best of both worlds. They want to be called actors and yet they still want to have their Best Actress Award. Makes no sense to me.

Finally, there is one other well kept secret when it comes to the arts – if you aren’t that interested in the arts you are not that alone. In spite of what you are led to believe there are a lot of people who are not the least bit interested in the arts. Of course the artsy folks would denigrate the nonartsy people, using terms such as philistines and unsophisticated. This is especially true if the nonartsy person is {gasp}a sports lovers. Yet why are sports always portrayed so dismally? It takes great strength, grace even for an outfielder to leap for a catch, or the exquisite timing needed for a full court press or the acting to bluff for the fake end run. There is more skill, passion and excitement in a good sporting event than in a Surrealism painting or an off off off Broadway show. Yet no one has ever fought to include educational sports in school, not simply PE but teaching the finer points of basketball and football. Imagine what that would do to male-female relationships every Sunday afternoon in the fall!

Seriously, this summer most towns will be battling over budget cuts. One of the major issues will be if arts should be retained in schools. This is why you hear ads with Broadway and Hollywood stars and musicians passionately arguing that the arts must be kept in the schools. They insinuate that you should be ashamed if you try to get rid of arts from the curriculum because we are a civilized nation that knows the importance of the arts, right? Don’t let them fool you. There isn’t anything more special about art skills than about cooking or mechanics or fashion designing yet no one is arguing to have these in our schools. It was a great con all these years but now with limited funds we must end the farce of institutionalizing arts in school and concentrate on the basics first.

A Proponent of Profiling - Part 1

I have absolutely no sympathy for the people who are protesting the use of profiling. In fact I think the whole anti profiling ideology is a bit insane. Arizona borders Mexico. Mexicans are illegally crossing that border. And yet the Arizona police can’t actively look for these illegal Mexicans because that would be profiling which is illegal. As I said, this is insane.

When it comes to profiling, I should admit that I am a bit prejudiced because I made my career by profiling in the private industry. I worked for two seemingly opposite industries – casinos and banks. But in both cases the same rule applied, studying past behavior can predict future behavior. Before technology changed things, both industries would send out mass mailings to all their customers offering the same product or service. Not only was this expensive but it resulted in a low rate of people actually buying that product or service.

Starting in the late 80’s companies began to get the hardware and software needed to computerize customer information. A lot of data was now being generated and for some reason I had a knack in analyzing all of this data on past behavior and demographics. I was in at the start of Harrah's famed players club and then at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. In these casinos, I would profile their customers using information gathered from their member’s card, put players into segments based on their gaming and where they lived and then determined what offer was needed to generate the most profits from each segment. Thanks to profiling I helped casinos make a lot of money.

In banking you could go a step further and predict behavior based on a customer’s demographics. It is just common sense. But then again so much of profiling is just that, common sense. Anybody would figure out that a 25 year old probably doesn’t have the money for CDs but would need car loans or mortgages. On the other hand an 82 year old probably isn’t interested in on-line banking or a car loan. As I said, simple common sense is a big part of profiling. Demographics however could not help predict how much a person would gamble, if at all. Perhaps the only indicators that were ever used were to exclude nearly everyone who lived in Utah as Mormons didn't gamble but target people in Chinatown to visit when the casino was empty at Christmas. Otherwise neither age, income, race nor any other demographic indicator helped in explaining gaming habits. Luckily, demographic data does help in profiling almost every other kind of company.

It’s not just banking and casino who profile their customers. Every sophisticated industry has been doing this for years. Why do you think so many businesses now offer some kind of membership card that you show when making a purchase? This is used to collect data on your behavior and many companies will also include your demographics in their profiling of customers. How do they know your age, income, education etc? They send their customer file of names and addresses to outside companies who specialize in obtaining specific information about everybody. This data is retrieved from a variety of sources including all that information you provide when filling out warranty cards for example.

The company I once used to provide demographic data on bank customers guaranteed an 80% match. They could provide a bank with detailed information such as age, home value, race, marital status and even type of car you owned on up to 80% of every customer. Combining demographic information with your buying habits allowed us to accurately profile you. Based on that profile you will be sent offers that are targeted specifically for you.

So is this profiling a bad thing or is it simply good marketing? The truth is, for the most part, people love it. If CVS knows I frequently buy Coke then why would I be upset if they often give me coupons for Coke? It’s a win-win situation. You get offers for products you actually use and need and the company makes money. Everybody is happy – thanks to profiling. There is, however, one major drawback.

When profiling their customers, businesses often use outside companies that specialize in this. In fact that consulting team I managed was with a company that specialized in the financial industry. Now in order to profile First Federal Bank’s customers we needed two types of data – past behavior and demographics. Past behavior was obtained by having First Federal send in their computer files with all of their customer’s information. That’s right. Your banking data (name, address, SS, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, how much you had in your accounts, loan info etc.) could very well be sitting in some third party business office or worse on somebody’s laptop that they take home. And you would never know. Of course these third party businesses are supposed to follow tight security rules but I could walk through my old offices on any given day and see tapes or CDs with bank data sitting openly on people desks or PC's with bank data on the monitor and no one at the desk.

But it gets worse. In order to get that demographic data the company I worked for had to then send the names and addresses to yet another company. Granted, we never sent anything other than just name and address but nonetheless this information was being passed around and when returned contained specific demographic information about each customer. Shortly before I retired there was a scare when this demographic provider was hacked. There were also frequent news stories about other companies which had been hacked or worse, a laptop with all the customer data was lost or stolen. This is a serious problem but it is a security problem, not a profiling problem. Tighter security or providing companies with a means to profile their customers in-house will resolve this issue.

Profiling in the business sector is a win-win for everybody. Companies send offers targeted to you specifically and in doing so reduce their expenses and increase their profits. Everybody wins. So why is profiling considered to be atrocious in the public sector? Since I got rather carried away talking about business profiling I will tackle this question in my next blog.

Thank You James Carville

I never imagined that I would say this but here goes: “Thank you James Carville”. Probably for the first and only time I am in agreement with the outspoken Democrat strategist, who, as you know, taped a gut wrenching appeal to Obama to do something about the oil spill. Not sure which was the bigger story, his plea to stop the oil spill or the fact that a loyal Democrat was actually attacking Obama.

Of course the main villain in this horrible situation is BP. There is talk of investigating BP and the responsible government department. I agree that should be done, but not right now. We are in the middle of a major crisis and need to focus all of our resources on plugging the hole and cleaning up the Gulf and our marshes. Once that is done then we can play the blame game but sending down the Attorney General will only slow down the already slow process of fixing this mess. I also disagree with people who say that BP should be put out of business and everyone arrested. I think BP needs to continue to function as a viable company. I want them to keep making profits so that they will have the money to ensure that the Gulf Coast is eventually put back to the way it was before the spill and the fishermen compensated for their losses.

Then there is our president who has totally mishandled the oil spill crises. Perhaps Obama and his team were unaware of the enormity of the problem in the first few weeks. BP did lie to them about that. Yet after those initial lies Obama should not have been surprised if they continued to lie. Instead, the first thing Obama should have done is to have set up a shadow team, a group of experts who stayed with the top BP execs. This would eliminate Obama’s team from being continuously surprised by BP decisions and outcomes. It makes sense but I still don’t think this is being done.

Press Secretary Rober Gibbs, who only does what Obama tells him to do, added to the problems with either a surprisingly inept move or else a dangerously arrogant attempt to censor reporters. Gibbs had the gall to gather a handpicked group of journalists into a closed room and tell them to stop writing critical stories about the president's handling of the oil spill! You couldn't make up this kind of stuff. Luckily, it backfired but I shudder to think if it had worked...
Thanks to the pressure from Carville and the journalists, Obama finally gave in and held his first press conference in over 300 days. His last press conference was when Obama said the Boston police were stupid. No wonder the president has shied away from doing any since then. But this latest press conference was more of a farce than a success. In watching it I heard and saw a number of things that really bothered me. For instance, it ticked me off to hear Obama’s continuous assurance that they were on top of the oil spill since day one. Bull. Talk about BP lying to the public...

Through out his speech, Obama promised that he has experts meeting to determine the best course of action. Wrong! This is not what he should be doing. Obama isn’t in college or teaching or in a law firm where you have time to sit around discussing all sides of a plan and brainstorming on ideas. We need action now. We don’t have time to sit in committees talking it to death. Literally.

It also really maddened me when the president talked about the EPA reviewing proposed plans to see if they might negatively impact the environment. Excuse me? If they don’t do something now there won’t be an environment left. Besides it was the environmentalists who stopped any off shore drilling near coasts which then forced the oil companies to go further out to deep water to get the oil we need. Anyway, we don’t have time to meet with every Czar and committee that Obama throws at the problem to find the best solution. In times of emergencies a leader knows that we need to quickly decide on a plan which may be the second or third or even tenth best but can at least be enacted quickly to save our Gulf. Of course in an ideal world, BP would already have these plans for these worst case scenarios. Shame on them for being so unprepared and shame on us and what is turning out to be a very corrupt government department that was supposedly overseeing BP.

Another thing that angered me was the stage managing of the press conference. Obama held it on a pristine beach surrounded by a bunch of “cleaners” who had been shipped in for the day. The President’s staged walk down the empty beach was totally ridiculous. If they were trying to show that they were cleaning up beaches it backfired. In fact the entire thing was preposterous.

But what infuriated me the most about Obama’s visit to the Gulf was his complete lack of interaction with any of the Gulf Coast residents. Once again, Obama kept totally isolated from people. In comparison, I can easily imagine Bush or Clinton sitting in that local café talking to the fishermen, hugging teary eyed women or joking with a child. Not Obama. Is it because he is afraid of talking candidly since that always gets him in trouble? Or does he think he is above everyone else? Or does he share the common liberal view that southerners are dumb and basically unimportant so why bother to talk to them. (I do, though, wonder if he might have deigned to talk to them if they were African American.)

Whatever the reason, this entire situation shows Obama in a very negative light. He comes off as cold and distant when we need a caring, compassionate president. Obama’s indecisiveness shows the president to be weak when we need a commanding leader willing to take action. The one bright spot in this entire mess is that thanks to Carville's lead in pointing out that the emperer had no clothes on some journalists are actually reporting on the real Obama instead of fawning all over him. It's about time.