WARNING PERSONAL OPINION AND POLITICS

I listen to the radio to and from work and try to listen mainly to news…unfortunately…news is hard to find.  What I do hear concerns me a fair bit.

Spin

What bothers me is people who believe that Talk Radio is news or that Talk Radio gives the straight news.  The “No Spin” zone, had a lot of spin.  For full disclosure, I consider myself center left but certainly also like the concept of fiscal discipline.  Such a thing is possible, or at least, I hope it to be so.

In particular, these days I am concerned about extreme spin.  It seems like words like communist, comparisons to Hitler and Stalin, etc are very much in vogue.  Two of the biggest culprits in this are Glen Beck and Michael Savage.

Today I heard Glen Beck go off on a comment made in speech to a group of gifted 12 year olds.  I am guessing the speaker was Al Gore from Glen’s comments but can’t be sure.  Apparently, the speaker said something like: “You know things that your parents don’t know”, and Glen responded by drawing analogies to the Hitler youth movement and that our kids are being taught to disregard their parents.  He even played part of the speech to illustrate his point.  I was decidedly unimpressed, Kids do know things that there parents don’t or have forgotten

• Optimism
• Hope
• openness

I would guess my nephews certainly know more about MySpace, twitter, and some other topics that I know very little of.  More-over, I think the speaker was coming from a good place and think that Glen took the comment in a very extreme direction.

Savage does the same thing all the time.  Most recently I had him go off against a politician who was trying to put controls on Talk Radio.  I buy his argument that she was being partisan and do think she was guilty of some level of spin in hiding her intent behind the concept of standards (which I would agree too, how about a rule that prohibited from opinion shows calling themselves news show, probably would not work but is intriguing).  However, he went extreme in his response and certainly set a low bar by calling her the “Beast from Michigan”.  That is just not appropriate.

Bailout

I am not a big fan of the bailout.  I understand how difficult it is to not do anything, especially to the people who just lost their jobs but I am not optimistic that we can spend our way out.  Certainly there has been no fiscal discipline for the last 8 years, so I am not adverse to some stimulus plan but have some major concerns:

• The Tarp was huge at ~700 billion.  Unfortunately, anything less than this appears to be considered chump change. 
• The concept with aligning the Presidents agenda with the need to do stimulus is a good one, but it falls apart if taken to the point where every democratic program is now a stimulus.  Obama should be very aggressive in keeping the stimulus as lean and as targeted as possible.  I am getting the impression this is not happening.
• Nancy Pelosi appears to be extremely partisan.  Perhaps this makes her a good match against her republican counterparts but not the type of person I wish was in power.  To me she comes across as business as usual and I wish there was a way for voters to send her a message that this is not what they want.
• What is the success criteria, or more importantly, how long do we wait before further action is deemed necessary.  My fear is that we will just continue doing more and more stimulus which will create more and more debt…

My wife loves the Bachelor and thus I have been watching it too.  At first, there were too many people to keep track of but after a while you get favorites and unfavorites (contestants that just annoy you) so it draws you in.  One thing that surprised me was that both PSU and OSU had advertisements on the Bachelor last night.  What target market were they driving for?  What drove them to suddenly advertize on TV and why this show?  

They say leading engineers is like herding cats, I would not be surprised if this is a general truth of leadership, and the greater the size of organization, the tougher the job of leadership is.  Watching Obama is a great schooling on leadership.  In particular, his stimulus plan appears to consist of the things he wanted to do anyway but now they are aligned with the need to do a some sort of stimulus package.  This concept of alignment is a powerful one.   Books on selling your ideas tend to focus on the importance of executive time (the time of executives and management) and how quickly you need to make your pitch.  Thus a powerful key is to understand their goals and the goals of the organization and to align your ideas with it.  The stronger the alignment, the easier it should be to sell your idea.

I am really eyeing those netbooks.  I was a skeptic but they are getting good reviews and the price seems pretty nice.  Plus, the in-laws talk about a computer for simple tasks so it sounds perfect for them although I could not recommend it without trying one.

I looked at the Dell Mini 9 but it seems hard to commit too knowing the mini 10 is on the way.  I like the idea of playing with multi-touch on the touch pad and an integrated GPS sounds like a great way to replace two gadgets with one ( I currently do not have a GPS but am tempted …).

Too bad it is not out yet…on the other hand…waiting for the next shiny new thing is a great way to save money as long as there is always something shinier on the way…

Looks like the website is up and running…

The home page needs more work and certainly could be prettier.  I will probably spend some time understanding DasBlog and then try to blend it in better with the look and feel of the DasBlog portion of the site.

I still really like the concept of pointers to my scattered web identity.  I could see it get even more interesting as that identity continues to expand.  For example, I did check out Googles document, blogging and sharing tools along with Microsoft's.  Neither of them was particularly compelling. 

Just getting things going here.  I’ve switched from the linux option to the windows option and then went to DasBlog based on Scott Hanselman’s use of it.  The goal is to have:

• a home page that provides links to my web-presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, etc
• a blog site based on DasBlog
• a gallery for sharing photos with people that don’t want to join facebook

So stay tuned…

PS, I am using Windows Live Writer to try this post…lets see how that works…

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