24March2010
Posted by Connor under: Politics.
Conor Friedersdorf nails it:
If the political blogosphere covered basketball games, we’d not only be told about shots, makes, and misses, but every rotation of the ball on the way to the hoop. “He shoots, the ball appears to be on course, it’s getting closer and still seems like it’ll make it, I give it a 90 percent chance of going in, IT HITS THE BACK RIM, it didn’t make it, it definitely appears as though it may bounce out, it’s going to bounce on the rim a second time, now it’s perched on the lip and may go in or out — an instant poll of the crowd confirms that 75 percent of people think it’ll wind up a miss — my God it’s actually falling into the basket, this moment it is falling through the net, it’s a basket!”
23March2010
Posted by Connor under: Uncategorized.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has announced that it is disembarking the crazy train, at least for now and will not back any health care reform bills.
President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue issued a statement Sunday night saying the bill “ignores the will of the American people” and isn’t real health care reform.
It’s good to see that even the really reactionary top leadership of the CoC realizes that this is a done deal and continuing obstruction and hysterical gibbering is getting to be pretty self-destructive.
22March2010
Posted by Connor under: Obama Administration; Politics.
One week until the deadline for Google Fiber applications due. Editing video and talking to people. And working.
So, yeah. Remember last July when Senator Jim DeMint declared that Republican’s would make health care “Obama’s Waterloo?” How’s your French, Jim? There were two great generals in that battle. I guess Obama gets to be Wellington.
But seriously, this blog has been saying for more than a year that the GOP was playing a dangerous game by betting the farm on absolute opposition to all Democratic initiatives. And now where are they?
Republican David Frum hits the nail on the head:
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
Read the rest of this entry »
13March2010
Posted by Connor under: Clinton; Economic Development.
If one wants to look for a model for Clinton to follow in pursuing economic development, one need only look 50 miles north to Dubuque. Dubuque, which in 1990 had 46,000 people employed in the city by the end of 2009 had grown that to 54,500. Moody’s ranked Dubuque the 22nd city in the nation for job growth between 2005-2006. It was the only midwestern city in the top 25 and one of only six cold-weather cities. Dubuque has been consistently ranked in the top ten as one of the best cities in the country for existing business retention and high-tech job growth.
This week, the Clinton Chamber of Commerce held its annual strategic planning meeting and the guest speakers were Dubuque City Manager, Mike Van Milligen and Rick Dickinson, President of the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation. Van Milligen and Dickinson have been working in Dubuque since the mid-1990’s. And they really did start from scratch. Thinking back to the 1980’s Dubuque had some of the worst unemployment in the nation. Dickinson described his start as inauspicious.
“In the course of a few weeks of my starting in 1995, the Riverboat Casino in East Dubuque left, a foundry in East Dubuque burned to the ground and the Dubuque Packing Plant closed its doors. People were calling me, ‘The Angel of Death.’ ”
“But, the hard times put fire in the belly of the people of Dubuque,” said Van Milligen.
Read the rest of this entry »
3March2010
Posted by Connor under: Uncategorized.
Two amazing stories out of WW II I read today.
Via David Brooks, a tale of scandinavian toughness and community courage:
In 1943, [Jan] Baalsrud was a young instrument maker who was asked to sneak back into Norway to help the anti-Nazi resistance.
He was hunted by about 50 Germans and left a trail in the deep snow. He’d lost one boot and sock, and he was bleeding from where his big toe had been shot off. He scrambled across the island and swam successively across the icy sound to two other islands. On the second, he lay dying of cold and exhaustion on the beach.
Two girls found and led him to their home. And this is the core of the story. During the next months, dozens of Norwegians helped Baalsrud get across to Sweden. Flouting any sense of rational cost-benefit analysis, families and whole villages risked their lives to help one gravely ill man, who happened to drop into their midst.
Baalsrud was clothed and fed and rowed to another island. He showed up at other houses and was taken in. He began walking across the mountain ranges on that island in the general direction of the mainland, hikes of 24, 13 and 28 hours without break.
And it gets worse from there.
And from the London Times, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz
Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the pan-ache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.
Avey was a troublesome prisoner. In the summer of 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, in Poland, and interned in a small PoW camp on the periphery of the IG Farben factory. The main Jewish camps were several miles to the west. “I’d lost my liberty, but none of my spirit,” he says. “I was still determined to give as good as I got.”
But he knew immediately that this was a different order of prison. “The Stripeys — that’s what we called the Jewish prisoners — were in a terrible state. Within months they were reduced to waifs and then they disappeared. The stench from the crematoria was appalling, civilians from as far away as Katowice were complaining. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew.”
Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.
“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”
They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls — and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”
The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.” Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”
A lot of people of a certain political straind have a tendency to those throw around labels like “evil” and “heroes” with abandon in relation to our current situation here in the United States and abroad. Stories like Baalsrud’s and Avey’s remind us of the true meaning of both of those words.
3March2010
Posted by Connor under: Clinton.
Over at Google4Clinton I’ll be posting a series on why the Google Fiber for Community initiative is important. Part 1 is A Brief History of the Internet, ’cause how can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.
During the period of explosive growth in the Dot-Com era right through to today the one thing that makes the Internet special is its blind simplicity. At the end of the day, all it is is a network of very fast little virtual mail-room clerks shifting packets to and from their destinations. The network does not care at all what is inside that packet. It can be part of a credit card transaction, a video, a love letter, a chat text, a blog post, literally anything that can be reduced to digital bits can be moved over the Internet.
The Internet’s strength and its value as a tremendous generator of innovation, progress and freedom in the world is directly linked to its OPENNESS. The fact that it is a dumb network that just moves packets means that anyone who can think of an interesting thing to do by moving little chunks of information, can go right ahead and do it, EVEN IF ITS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. THEY DON’T NEED PERMISSION. IF IT FOLLOWS THE PROTOCOLS IT GETS ACCEPTED.
2March2010
Posted by Connor under: Politics.
The hockey game was EPIC. Since I have friend and family ties to Canada, I can’t get too worked up about the result, especially since it was well-won.
But come on! This is just gloating!
2March2010
Posted by Connor under: Economics.
You know, in light of the man’s massive success and the success of his philosophy of business, it really is a wonder that Warren Buffet’s approach to business management and shareholder communications is not thought of as the default approach to running a business.
From his latest letter to Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders, Buffet lays down the smack on Wall Street, financial regulators and Congress:
It’s my job to keep Berkshire far away from such problems. Charlie and I believe that a CEO must not delegate risk control. It’s simply too important. At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books, with the exception of operations-related contracts at a few of our subsidiaries, such as MidAmerican, and the minor runoff contracts at General Re. If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of misjudgments made by a Risk Committee or Chief Risk Officer.
In my view a board of directors of a huge financial institution is derelict if it does not insist that its CEO bear full responsibility for risk control. If he’s incapable of handling that job, he should look for other employment. And if he fails at it – with the government thereupon required to step in with funds or guarantees – the financial consequences for him and his board should be severe.
It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country’s largest financial
institutions. Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been “bailed out” is to make a mockery of the term.
The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style. It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed: If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price – one not reimbursable by the companies they’ve damaged nor by insurance. CEOs and, in many cases, directors have long benefitted from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well.
24February2010
Posted by Connor under: Clinton; Internet.
Basically spent the day getting the ball rolling on this initiative. Our Facebook page, Bring Google Fiber to Clinton, Iowa started taking off, getting 100 new fans yesterday, 247 since it was set up Sunday.
We’ve got a web site up and running, google4clinton.org. There’s nothing there yet, but we’ll have some content up later today.
Yesterday afternoon we met with officials from the Clinton Regional Development Corporation, the Chamber of Commerce and City Aldermen and agreed that this is worth pursuing and divided up responsibilities for collecting the information required by the Government application.
We’re moving forward. Most of my efforts will be consumed by work and this initiative for a couple of weeks so do check back but don’t expect much posting here.
23February2010
Posted by Connor under: Clinton; Internet.
Yes, we are moving on an application for this. Check out the Facebook page for now. Hopefully sometime this week we’ll get up a web site and blog.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, start here.
Posting will be light while I add this to the to-do list.