Janus, being ferocious.
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| From Animals |
At the suggestion of Wanton Frolicking, I’m now using Google Chrome as my “looking for work” browser, and firefox for my “everything else” browser. So far, so good…
I was chatting with Harold Goldstein* a couple days ago. He, like many liberals, is sort of terrified that if Obama is successful at getting a liberal agenda passed, there will be a backlash, causing us to lose power.
This may be true. We liberals got our agenda passed in 1964 and “[lost] the south for a generation”. In 1932, we created a whole “New Deal”, which conservatives have been running against for 70 years.
The thing is, most of the Liberal Agenda is pretty popular. We’re offering people Health Care and an end to the war. If we can get just those 2 things, there can’t be a backlash powerful enough to actually matter. The point of “power” is not some mindless holding of the same, but rather it’s the ability to achieve things. Obama has the ability to achieve things that would really make the world a better place.
We should not fear the backlash. We should fear children dying because the richest country on Earth cannot properly allocate resources. If we save lives and lose elections, it’s a small price to pay…
*around my family, we call him “Uncle Harold”, since my father had the good sense to marry his sister a decade or so ago.
This rather good article in the Politico about Pelosi gives me a good excuse to mention a few thoughts about what the Rahm Emmanuel pick means for the Obama Whitehouse
Until a few months ago, there were basically 2 centers of power within the Democratic Party. Howard Dean’s office and Pelosi’s Office. Reid, near as I can tell, was a non-player. Rahm Emmanuel was Pelosi’s Chief rival. Near as I can tell, he was trying to take credit for the 2006 election since roughly 5 minutes before any results came in.
Now: Obama wins the Whitehouse. Suddenly there are 3 people who can claim to be the power in the Democratic party. This is going to be trouble for everyone. Dean announces that he is going to step down– as he had always intended to do. And Obama takes Pelosi’s biggest rival and makes him Whitehouse Chief of Staff. This removes a sore spot in Pelosi’s leadership team, and puts a major power player on the Obama Staff.
What does this tell us about an Obama administration? He’s a shrewd, shrewd man who will do what it takes to get his agenda passed…
29 March 2007
Circuit City said yesterday that it had fired 3,400 of its highest-paid sales staff and will replace them with lower-paid workers, a risky strategy to cut costs that goes beyond the layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes commonly used by struggling companies.
-Via
3 March 08
(AP) Circuit City Stores Inc. said Monday it is closing about 20 percent of its U.S. stores and cutting thousands of jobs in an effort to return to profitability as it finds consumers reluctant to spend and its vendors less eager to give it credit.
-via
Perhaps this is a bit of post-hoc reasoning, but it seems to me that when you fire your most experienced and most loyal employees, this has cascading moral and competency effects. You no longer have solid base of informal training which can help new folks get up to speed much more quickly. It causes your medium term employees start looking over their shoulder, wondering if they should jump ship. Also, you take an immediate hit to your customer service ability. Not to mention the PR disaster– I’ll never shop at a Circuit City again.
Lesson: A company may be screwed if they treat their employees well, but they are definitely screwed if they treat their employees like interchangeable cogs…
[From Phoenix mission ops: Phoenix is no longer communicating with Earth. We'll continue to listen, but it's likely its mission has ended.]
-Via
Thank you, brave little robot, for expanding our knowledge. Someday we might set foot on Mars, and you will have been responsible
As you may know, 2/3 of this blog headed out to Ohio to work for Obama. As you damned well better know we turned Ohio blue. Now that the media blackout has been lifted, we can resume blogging.
“I have a dream that one day, [...] little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”