• Del.icio.us Links

    links for 2008-11-30

    • First, let’s go back to the principle of saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

      Second, our loyalties need to be to ideas, not to individuals.

      Finally, we need to look toward the states for answers, rather than toward Washington.

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      Add some technology and you have it. Gotta rebuild the brand as #1

    • Republicans will soon be ushered out of power after controlling Congress, the White House, or both for 14 years. Here's a further chilling thought: Since 1896, with only one exception, when a party has taken over the White House, it has held it for at least eight years. The exception is the Jimmy Carter Democrats, retired after a single term in 1981. And it would be churlish to hope that Barack Obama will recapitulate the ineptitude and foolishness of the Nobel laureate from Plains.

      So it could be eight years on the outside of the White House looking in for the GOP. It certainly looks like at least four years out of power in Congress as well, given the sizable Democratic margins. And the fact that Republicans will be blamed for an economy in free fall, and won't get the credit they deserve for successes in Iraq and the broader war on terror, hardly helps the GOP's prospects for a quick comeback.
      Can Bush do anything in his last weeks to change this dynamic?
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      No, just go!

    • Never again should our EDs [executive directors] run our political campaigns! Next time, let’s engage our community’s nonprofit leaders as grass roots leaders, mobilizing their membership, staff and constituencies, and NOT as professional political campaign operatives….

      Believe me, the skill-set of a nonprofit executive is NOT the same as that required to run a political campaign. We need to hire the best, toughest political campaign consultant and let them go, not constrain them with a web of bureaucracy: No on 8 had a big committee of 93, then a smaller committee of 25 and, finally, an “executive committee” of seven representatives of nonprofit groups. The tragedy is that this unwieldy structure precluded BOTH a topflight political campaign and a powerful grassroots campaign…
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      Then, there is the issue of secular non-profits involving themselves in politics and then afterwards attacking organized religion. Hummmmmmm

    • The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Mr. Rangel helped preserve a valuable tax loophole for an oil and gas drilling company while the company's chief executive, Eugene M. Isenberg, was pledging $1 million to the Charles B. Rangel School of Public Service at City College of New York. Mr. Rangel insists that the mutual favors were entirely coincidental. And quite a coincidence it seems to have been. On Feb. 12, 2007, the Times reported, the day the tax legislation was being considered in his committee, Mr. Rangel met in New York City with Mr. Isenberg to discuss the businessman's support of the Rangel School. Then Mr. Isenberg escorted Mr. Rangel across the room to his lobbyist, Kenneth J. Kies, who wanted to make sure Mr. Rangel would not close the loophole.
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      Old school politics. Come on….what else is new?