The Audacity of Audacity

Less than 24 hours after Barrack Obama appealed for less personal criticism of individuals and more attention to important issues, his campaign saw fit to criticize the experience of John McCain's VP running mate Sarah Palin. And within days of directing speech after speech from Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and others to the concept that judgement was more important than experience, the Obama campaign has chosen to highlight experience in their first attack on Governor Palin before she even made her first appearance as Senator McCain's running mate. That does indeed qualify as audacity squared.

By selecting Governor Sarah Palin, Senator McCain has added executive experience to his ticket. He of course adds military experience and a long career in the U.S. Senate.

In comparison, neither Senator Obama or Biden have any executive experience or military background.

Perhaps the Obama campaign should pay attention to their standard bearer, tone down the audacity, and focus their vitriol on the important issues that America faces?

Highlights of Michelle Obama's Speech at DNC

She loved her father.
She loves her mother.
She loves her brother.
She loves her children.
She loves her husband.

That's nice.

And she loves her country.

Well, better late than never.

Above your pay grade?

Can anyone not be confused by Democratic responses to the question "When does human life begin?"

At the Compassion Forum held on April 13th, 2008, Senator Obama was asked, "Do you personally believe that life begins at conception and if not, when does it begin?" Here is his answer: "You know, I, I ah, this, this is something that I had not, ah, I think come to a firm resolution on, ah I think it's very hard to know what that means, when life begins. Is it when a cell separates? Is it when ah, the soul stirs? Ah, so I don't presume to, to know the answer to that question. Ah, what I know ah, as I've said before is that, ah, there is something extraordinarily powerful about potential life and that, ah, has a moral weight to it that ah, we take into consideration when we're having these debates."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0YxdV3J4Jw

However, in a speech on Father's Day 2008, Senator Obama said "We need fathers to recognize that their responsibility doesn't just end at conception."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG8SZ3uKlxI

A week ago at the Saddleback Church interview, Senator Obama was asked, "At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?" He responded, "Well, you know I, I think that whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or ah, a scientific perspective, ah, answering that question with specificity, ah, you know is, is ah above my pay grade." See his complete answer to this question here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRswgN-Wf6g

Now listen to self-described ardent Catholic and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi during an interview this morning on Meet the Press, as she blathers on with the incredible claim that the Catholic Church over centuries has not answered the question of when life begins. Frankly put, I felt that I needed a shower after listening to this slippery misinformation being spewed by one of the most powerful woman in Congress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM2VqqNLWxQ

Please forgive me for oversimplifying if I put the question this way: If a father becomes a father at conception and has responsibilities beyond conception as stated by Senator Obama, when does a mother become a mother and when does a baby become a baby?

We are talking about live babies here!

Regardless of whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, Senator Obama's vote while a Illinois State Senator cannot be condoned.

Distilled to its simplest form, both pro-choice and pro-life Congressmen and Congresswomen overwhelming voted in favor of the federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act. This act was enacted to protect the life of an infant who was born alive after a failed abortion attempt. It was sparked by a failed abortion, where a live infant was left to die on a stack of soiled bed sheets in a hospital closet. One of the attending nurses, feeling sorry for the baby, held the infant in her arms for 45 minutes until the infant died.

Illinois State Senator Obama refused to vote in favor of two proposed bills that would have instituted similar state laws in Illinois. He had problems with the first bill because it omitted certain language and he feared the omission would have threatened Rowe vs. Wade. He voted present on the second bill, which is always translated as a "No" vote, even though it included language that eliminated the threat to Roe vs. Wade. The most liberal U.S. Senators, including Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton, supported the bill and it was even supported by NARAL Pro-Choice America. Obama was the only Senator to take the floor and actively speak against the bill.

I have included three web sites below that provide much more information. Two of the three argue to excuse Obama for his vote, but please notice the grotesque and grisly language of these arguments. Can you believe that this dialogue is occurring in a Nation that supports human rights for potential terrorists, illegal immigrants, and cop killers?

Have the women of this nation turned so far in the direction of "fun at any cost" that they have lost all maternal instincts and now give support to a presidential candidate who refuses to protect newborn babies? Did his political aspirations mean so much to Senator Obama that he found it necessary, in order to appeal to the far-left, to support infanticide? I urge you to consider these questions even if you believe the Senator had a legal basis for his decision.

Why? Because we are talking about live babies here.

Be sure to read the note at the very end of the article

http://writ.lp.findlaw.com/colb/20080813.html

This is the Right to Life argument

http://www.nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/ObamaCoverup.html

This is the blatantly pro-Obama Huffington Post argument

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/04/the-next-smear-against-ob_n_116891.html

Two Scandals for the Price of One

The John Edwards scandal has finally been exposed and it is a tragic situation for his family. While many thought Edwards was a "Ken doll", it turns out that he is as typically a human as anyone else, capable of making terrible mistakes, and then covering them up. He states that he confessed everything to his wife back in 2006 and she has apparently forgiven him, judging by her continued support during his primary campaign. Unfortunately, there may be additional issues regarding paternity and use of campaign funds.

However don't count on reading about those issues in the New York Times. Those of us who regularly read the Times can now do away with any lingering doubts about whether this newspaper has a significant bias to Democrats. Compare their absolute silence on the Edwards story, which was first reported a year ago by the National Enquirer, with their rush to judgment on page one regarding alleged marital infidelity by John McCain. Further investigation about the basis of that story revealed that the Times had no facts and based the story on pure speculation. To this day, they refuse to apologize to the McCain family for their total lack of journalistic professionalism.

Nevertheless, I have to confess that I love the Times.

The Monday Metro section has a page 2 column about wonderful "only in New York City" stories.

On Tuesday, their Science section can't be beat for interesting and informative articles about the latest scientific breakthroughs.

Wednesday is the best - The dining section, chuck full of recipes and a great wine column.

Don't miss the Circuits section each Thursday which will keep you up-to-date on all things electronic.

And for you theater and movie buffs, reviews galore every Friday.

As far as the front page section one, not to worry. I use it to wrap up all those things in the fridge that are no longer edible. I think it's a good fit, wrapping up the inedible with the unreadable. After all, if you can't trust the accuracy of the reporting, what's the point?

So if you are wondering whether there is anything that could possibly be sadder than the Edwards story, rest assured there is. Nothing could be worse than a national newspaper losing its soul.

Where's the Beef?

The most frequently heard concern about Barrack Obama is his lack of experience. However, his speeches are so well-crafted, his message so strong, and his commitments so progressive that fans of his seem to disregard his inexperience and the lack of detail in his proposals.

For those who are not totally mesmerized by his masterful rhetoric, here is the short and sweet of it:

• McCain: 26 years in Congress, 22 years in the military
  

• Obama: 143 days in Congress, 0 days in the military

Can it really take so little experience to lead the United States of America?

If IBM, HP, or GE were looking for a CEO, would they accept similar credentials?

Once we're in, we're in!

I spent most of my career competing against Fortune 100 companies. When selling devices that cost upwards of several hundred thousand dollars, you can be sure that competition is fierce. Much like the Olympics, if you don't win, it may be several years before you get another shot at competing again. With that kind of pressure, it's easy to get into a "win at any cost" frame of mind.

When tough competition leads to innovative solutions and creative proposals, it's a good thing. When it leads to over commitment, false promises, and misinformation, it's unethical and dishonest. One tactic employed by one of my largest competitors was to promise anything and worry about delivering later. "Once we're in, we're in!"

This tactic is starting to resemble some of the statements and promises of the Obama campaign. Let's look at an example:

Obama says that if elected he will eliminate the need for foreign oil in ten years. He follows with another commitment by saying that he would have one million, 150 mpg electric vehicles on the road in six years. There are about 200 million vehicles on the road today in the U.S. However, most experts say that both commitments are extremely difficult to achieve if not impossible.

Time to ask ourselves some common sense questions:

• Obama is against additional drilling, nuclear power, and natural gas exploration. That pretty much leaves wind turbines, biofuels, more attention to proper tire inflation, and major investment in development of more energy efficient devices including automobiles. But will the combination of these tactics eliminate the need for foreign oil in ten years? The experts say it is nothing more than a fantasy.

• The price of regular gasoline in Germany is over $8.00 a gallon. Germany is the home of two of the world's most advanced automobile companies. If it were possible to engineer itself into energy independence, why isn't Germany doing that?

• If drilling does not make sense as part of a multifaceted energy strategy because it would take 5-10 years to deliver more energy, why do electric cars, wind turbine farms, and development of energy-efficient devices make sense when it is likely that it will take several years before they deliver more energy?

Is Obama just putting out feel-good commitments that he can't keep just to win the election?

This reminds me of a joke that's popular with people who sell for a living:

A decent man died and was immediately transported to the Gates of Heaven. St. Peter was waiting with a sign-in book and as the decent man was about to sign, the Devil, who was standing a few feet away, got his attention and waved him over.

"Hey, before you sign, let me show you what you will be missing out on." He led the decent man over to the Gates of Hell and swung open the huge doors. The decent man could hardly believe his eyes because spread out before him was the most beautiful view he had ever seen. Rolling hills and perfect weather, cascading water falls, sparkling lakes, prestine white-sand beaches, emerald golf courses, spectacular mansions, and beautiful people. After a few minutes, the devil swung the doors closed and asked the decent man to sign the admission book. The decent man, liking everything he saw, promptly signed.

The devil then swung open the doors again and much to the decent man's horror, flames leapt out and the screams of the inhabitants could be clearly heard. "What happened to the beautiful view, the waterfalls, the golf courses, the beaches?", our decent man asked the Devil. "Oh", the Devil responded, "That was just the demo."

Let's hope that this funny joke does not become our sad reality.

That's progress?

US Airways recently announced that it will begin charging for bottled water and just about every other snack item. Things being what they are in the airline industry, there's a good change that their competitors will soon do likewise. So I thought you might like to be reminded of the way it used to be, based on a recent NY Times article:

Air France - Paris to NY, 1964

Fresh caviar

Haunch of Roe Deer Grand Veneur
Breast of chicken coq hardy

Mashed Chestnuts
Steamed baby string beans with butter

Green salad

Selection of Cheeses

Bombe ice cream
Petits fours

Basket of fresh fruit

B.O.A.C. London to Johannesburg, 1964 (lunch)

Seafood canape

Roast duck - Begarrade Sauce
Minted Garden Peas
Noisette Potatoes

Fruit Gateau

Cheese - Cream Crackers

Graf Zeppelin, Rio to NY, 1930 (breakfast)

Poached eggs on toast, sauce bresillenne
Cream porridge
Coffee - Fruit & Berries

Pan Am Clipper, 1966 (dinner)

Selected delicacies from various countries

Roast Sirlion of Beef au jus
Oriental Lamb Shishkabab
Poached Turbot Diepoise
Chicken Curry

Great wines of Burgandy
Great wines of Bordeaux
Specially selected Champagne

It looks like an almost unlimited variety of goodies with the exception of cherries flambe on the Graf Zeppelin. Times of changed.

This is not an attack!

In the interest of setting the record straight about sleaziness in this presidential campaign, let's examine in detail an issue that sprang into view over the last two days: Injection of race into the presidential campaign.

This past Wednesday, Mr. Obama remarked that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he "doesn't look like those other presidents on the dollar bills." You may recall that this is not the first time he made this kind of a statement.

Referring to this remark the following day, Rick Davis, Mr. McCain's campaign manager said, "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck."

In an interview on Friday with the St. Petersburg Times, Obama responded, "I was in Union, Mo. which is 98% white, a rural conservative, and what I said was what I think everyone knows, which is that I don't look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates. There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race into this."

Obama's formidable network of grass-roots activists and the campaign Web sites crafted to give them "talking points" to carry into battle against the Republicans remained uncharacteristically quiet on the matter. However the Obama campaign's chief strategist, David Axelrod, blamed the Republicans for misconstruing Mr. Obama's words as an attack.

Now it should be obvious that what Obama said Friday and what he said two days earlier were not the same words and more importantly, did not have the same context. Suggesting that your opponents will use racial bias against you is a serious charge. Pointing out the racial difference between yourself and prior presidents is, as Mr. Obama himself stated, something everyone already knows. Nevertheless, both comments inject race into the campaign.

To highlight the stark contrast between the two comments, let's put Obama's Wednesday remarks into a more familiar scenario. Let's say that you are a black employee competing with a white employee in your company for a higher level position. You sit before the person he will decide the promotion and say, "My opponent will try to win the position by scaring you about my race." Is that not an attack on the white person? Is that not an injection of race into the decision making process?

No surprise that nowhere in the article did the New York Times find it reasonable to criticize Obama for the remarks. Instead, it focused on the restraint of the Obama campaign in not "punching back". Is it any wonder that the circulation of New York Times for both their daily and Sunday editions is at the lowest point in the last ten years? It is simply no longer a legitimate source of accurate and balanced information.

Cash for Clunkers

How to kill four birds with one stone? Alan Blinder writes in the Sunday, July 27, 2008 New York Times Sunday Money section that "Cash for Clunkers" might just do the trick. Alan suggests that the government pay a premium to buy the oldest, most polluting vehicles and then scraps them. The idea brings four beneficial results:

• Improves air quality in the nation by taking the worst polluting vehicles off the road. A California study estimates that cars 13 years or older account for 25% of miles driven and 75% of all pollution from cars.

• Provides additional cash to low-income people since it's a good bet they own the majority of older cars.

• Stimulates the economy in general since those low-income folks will no doubt find good use for the additional cash.

• Stimulates the auto industry in particular since some of those clunkers will need to be replaced with newer cars.

Alan goes into some detail in how to target the program including restrictions to avoid people gaming the program but his idea sounds promising. In fact, why not extend the program beyond cars to home appliances. Here again, older appliances like refrigerators, washers and dryers are not as energy efficient as newer models, and finding a way to scrap these models would no doubt result in lower energy use. This addition to Cash for Clunkers would offer similar benefits to scraping old autos, the difference being energy saving vs. lower pollution and stimulus of the retail vs. auto industry.

Of course there is a cost to taxpayers for such a program but Alan argues that the bill would be significantly lower than other programs that only provide one or two of the benefits of Cash for Clunkers.

Read the Alan's entire column at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/business/27view.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Cash%20for%20clunkers&st=cse&oref=slogin

If you see the merits, write your congressperson.

Gimmick or a Good Idea?

Barrack Obama referred to John McCain's Battery Contest as another gimmick designed to continue America’s dependence on oil, “But in this campaign, John McCain offering the same old gimmicks that will provide almost no short-term relief to folks who are struggling with high gas prices; gimmicks that will only increase our oil addiction for another four years.”

McCain proposed that the government offers a $300 million prize for whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.

However according to a recent New York Times article, McCain's idea is not a gimmick nor is it new. One company involved in this approach is InnoCentive, a company that links organizations with problems (challenges) to people all over the world (solvers) who win cash prizes for resolving them.

The idea of offering prizes for scientific achievements is hardly new. “It has been around for centuries,” said Karim R. Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied InnoCentive. One early example was the work of John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker who, in response to a prize offered by the British Parliament, solved the problem of determining longitude at sea by inventing a clock that would keep good time even in heavy weather.

But, Dr. Lakhani said, “most laboratories, most R & D endeavors still work on the premise ‘we can accumulate and make sense of all the knowledge that is relevant.’ The open-source models and a model like InnoCentive show that other approaches can help.”

Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said in an interview that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.

“Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our network,” Mr. Spradlin said. “Procter & Gamble has products that were innovated on the InnoCentive network.”

One recent example is John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., who knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid. Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska, paid him $20,000 for his idea. The chemist and the institute came together through InnoCentive.

Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said in an interview that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.

“Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our network,” Mr. Spradlin said. “Procter & Gamble has products that were innovated on the InnoCentive network.”

The company says solvers come from 175 countries. More than a third have doctorates, Mr. Spradlin said, and while motivated by money, they also have a desire to solve “problems that matter.”

Surely, Mr. Obama will agree that finding an alternative to fossil fuels is a problem that matters.

The full text of the Times article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22inno.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Innocentive&st=cse&oref=slogin