I’m sorry…WHAT…?!

From The Huffington Post

Chris Matthews Had the Guts to Apologize for Hillary Loathe, Don’t Bet the Others Will do the Same

MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews did something that I thought would be as likely as a blizzard in the Sahara in August. He had the guts to take back some of the sewer assassination of Hillary Clinton. Matthews like so many other yakking heads has gorged off the Hillary loathe industry. The industry has been by far the biggest growth industry in recent American politics. The motley assemblage of Hillary loathe profiteers includes the hundreds of swift boat like stop Hillary websites, the gaggle of shock jock hosts, ultra conservative and Christian fundamentalist political hatchet men, grudge holding Democrats, vendetta driven self-styled progressives, and all-or-none feminists that claim Hillary is a corporate shill in a skirt.

Then there are the pollsters that were so blinded…Click for more

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From The Huffington Post

For the last 2 1/2 years I have focused all my passion and energy on ending the war in Iraq. My main argument is that our troops and innocent Iraqi people continue to be killed on a daily basis for reasons we all know never existed to serve as a justification for war. The needless sacrifice of human life will continue to serve as my ultimate motivation for my anti-war efforts; however, up until now, I have not fully addressed the monetary debt that this war has cost the American people.

It is has been widely argued that the war in Iraq will cost American taxpayers over 1 trillion dollars that will take decades to pay off (numerous sources have cited this incredible figure for quite some time now). Some estimates are projected to surpass 2 trillion dollars. All of this money is being carelessly spent on the president’s war of choice while he proposes cuts in domestic spending that are beneficial to our people here at home — probably to a lot of the families of troops currently serving in Iraq.

How could this administration ask so much of our brave men and women in uniform and ask nothing of the wealthiest of Americans? Or any sacrifice from Americans in general? All while we borrow money from China and Saudi Arabia to pay for a war putting us further into debt.
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From The Huffington Post

Read Part I here.
Read Part II here.

But you can only crunch the numbers so much. After that, everything else is just a feeling. Here are my feelings about why best picture nominees and box office have diverged in this decade.

It feels like we’ve rarely been more divided as a country, and we’re generally divided between those who believe in absolutism/nationalism and those who believe in relativism/internationalism, and the Academy, by aligning itself with the latter (Brokeback, Munich, Babel) is antagonizing the former.

It feels like after 9/11 we all got touchy in a hurry and the Internet allowed us to disseminate that touchiness as quickly and widely as possible (so Munich is attacked by neo-cons, Brokeback by homophobes, and Million Dollar Baby by Michael Medved), and it feels like the very fact of the Internet, the fact that anyone’s opinions can get on it, is undercutting the authority of various aesthetic tastemakers, such as the Academy, so that, for some moviegoers, it’s become less a matter of seeing a film when the Academy nominates it and more a matter of refusing to see it because of that nomination.

It also feels like the Internet has sped up the trend towards specialized, niche interests that cable TV enhanced, so now we all have our own food channels and sports channels, and right and left-wing Web sites, and these are our meeting places. It feels like we no longer have a national meeting place — even a technological one — to hash out the differences in our national story that would allow us to create a national cinema that the Academy could honor.

It feels, in other words, like we’ve been divided and conquered for both political and business reasons. And in that division, it feels like everyone’s talking and no one’s listening.

Is the Academy even listening?

Once upon a time, the voting members of the Academy nominated some popular but pretty fluffy films for best picture. In the 1970s they tapped popular romance (Love Story), horror (The Exorcist) disaster flicks (The Towering Inferno) and sci-fi (Star Wars). Apparently they’ve stopped doing this. Last year, when the Brits nominated Casino Royale for their best picture, the Academy went after smaller, more uneven efforts, such as Babel. In 2004, why couldn’t the Academy nominate Spider-Man 2 over, say, Ray or Finding Neverland? Is nominating a great superhero flick dumber than nominating a great musical? Who knows — maybe if moviemakers think they have a shot at an Academy Award nomination, they might actually make better superhero flicks. At the least, such a nomination would create a reality that didn’t exist before. It would open possibilities and destroy barriers. It would mess with the minds of those who would divide and conquer us as a business model.

Let me put my cards on the table. I rarely agree with the Academy’s choices — who does? — but I think they matter. I rarely agree with box office choices but I think they matter. The stories we watch matter; the stories we lionize matter. They say something about us. They give clues to future generations about who we are.

And this decade? Generally, the Academy Award’s best picture nominees feel small, timid and dry (the dull descendants of Europe’s New Wave), while the box office smashes feel big, bold and dopey (the brain-dead descendants of Star Wars). There’s got to be some kind of middle ground. We used to be able to find it. Even a decade ago we found it. Every year in the 1990s at least one of the best picture nominees was among the top five most popular films of the year: Ghost and Dances with Wolves in 1990, Beauty and the Beast and Silence of the Lambs in 1991, A Few Good Men in 1992, The Fugitive in 1993, Forrest Gump in 1994, Apollo 13 in 1995, Jerry Maguire in 1996, Titanic in 1997, Saving Private Ryan in 1998 and The Sixth Sense in 1999.

Even in the most divisive of times, we found the middle ground. 1970 wasn’t exactly a year for national unity but the Academy and the box office were never more united: The top four box office films were all nominated for best picture, while the fifth nominee wasn’t far back in 11th place. And what a motley crew! It included both the respectful World War II film Patton and the disrespectful Korean War film M*A*S*H. It included both young people in love (Love Story), in aimless rebellion (Five Easy Pieces), and old people on a plane (Airport).

Sure, it’s surprising that two of these films (Love Story and Airport) were nominated for best picture but that’s exactly the point. Sure, it’s shocking that two of these films (M*A*S*H and Five Easy Pieces) did so well at the box office, but that’s exactly the point. We used to be able to do this.

Now? These are the five films we plopped down the most money for in 2007: Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

And the movies bandied about for best picture? As of January 17, American Gangster is at no. 18 in box office grosses, Juno is at 34, No Country for Old Men at 54, Sweeney Todd at 56, Michael Clayton at 65, Zodiac at 78, Atonement at 87 and Into the Wild at 115. There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly have yet to open wide enough to land in the top 150.

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From The Huffington Post

Professional circumstances have given me a monster backstage pass to see how innovation really works in many countries around the world, as well as in our own. I want to bring this knowledge home to fuel a national conversation on these important issues. And so with these words I am pleased to launch “Innovation Nation” as my offering to the blogosphere.

I begin my first HuffPost with some puzzlement. It is January 18, 2008, the presidential campaign has been in full swing for longer than most of us would like to admit, and the “innovation” issue is still conspicuously MIA from discourse and debate.

We’ve had the Iraq “frame,” and now the recession and change “frames.” But what about the Innovation “frame?” Are we just not getting the importance of innovation? Vannevar Bush, presidential science advisor, said it best in 1947, “A nation that loses its science and technology will lose control of its destiny.” More recently the National Academy of Science referred to the problem as a “gathering storm.” And in my own recent book, Innovation Nation, I state that America is losing its innovation edge with profound implications for our security and prosperity as a nation.

Is anybody listening out there in leader-land?

History will show America’s current innovation melt-down to have been an egregious self-inflicted wound. I would need ten times this space just to recite a list of dismal facts about how poorly our national innovation system is performing. Some headlines: our young scientists are abandoning their careers with increasing frequency, talent is increasingly not coming to our storied shores, our public education and R & D are showing significant erosion, we’re strapped for cash, other countries are leading us in a growing number of scientific fields, and nobody seems to care.

The innovation frame in national politics has been conspicuous by its absence. Instead, we have heard increasingly frequent (and tedious) calls for change. But change is driven by innovation, which is the wellspring of progress. Change has to be about something or it is just novelty. In other words, if change is the answer we seek, what is the question? And, it is a multitude of changes - driven by innovation capability and harnessed to a compelling national idea - that leads to transformation. Otherwise, change is just…change.

Wise corporate leaders have always known that change is galvanized in the presence of a set of big ideas that set the vector and allow countless instances of innovation to drive it. We need to have a sense of where we are going if we are to arrive at a meaningful destination.

I have three hypotheses about why we haven’t heard more about innovation.

1) It’s hard to define. True enough - most people still have a hard enough time distinguishing between creativity and innovation, let alone defining the role of entrepreneurship in innovation. Many policy makers will make the elementary mistake of equating innovation with science and high tech, when it fact it has to do with a broader array of business model and process innovation that can be driven by design and the arts.

2) It’s hard to talk about. If we can’t define it, how can we hope to have a meaningful conversation about it?

3) We don’t have the right national narrative for innovation. This gets to the heart of the matter. Talking about innovation feels a little like talking about preventive medicine: we know it’s important, but it never seems to reach the highest priority level. On the other hand, throw in a little chest pain and it’s time to call 911. That’s why I have called our present situation a Silent Sputnik. Unlike the original Sputnik in 1957 that galvanized our country into action with its first (and sadly last) national innovation drive, our present situation lacks urgency and therefore it’s no surprise that we’re not taking needed action.

Which brings us to the presidential election. Whether the agenda is innovation or change - it must start at the top. There is no company that has succeeded at a large-scale change or innovation effort without involvement and advocacy from the CEO. Well, we are voting for the equivalent of a CEO of this country in November and I think we deserve to hear from the candidates as to how they view innovation in much greater detail. We need answers from them to such questions as:

• What they plan to do about our innovation “problem” in all its many-headed glory: from science policy to education, strategic investment and the formation of new kinds of global alliances.
• How they see the process of developing a meaningful national strategy for innovation.
• How they plan to allocate stewardship and responsibility for executing that strategy.
• What kind of metrics they plan to use and how they will define success.
• What they plan to invest in.
• Perhaps most importantly, what is their point of view. How do they connect the dots into a diagnosis of our innovation “problem” is and how do they frame our innovation challenge in light of a larger national narrative?

We urgently need a robust national conversation on these issues. As a nation, we deserve it. And if I have anything to do about it, we will get one.

In posts to come, I’m going to cover such topics as how innovation “works” in other countries such as Finland and China that are racing for a new innovation high ground. I’m going to document what’s going on in this country - both the hopeful signs as well as the dismal facts. And in doing so, I hope to enlist you in helping to build Innovation Nation right here in the United States of America.

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From The Huffington Post

The national media thinks John McCain is under siege again, and his campaign is only too happy to help reporters file their stories.

At a rally Thursday, outside McCain’s headquarters just down the street from the state capitol here, the candidate and a key local supporter, Sen. Lindsey Graham, are explaining that sorcerers of the dark political arts are at work.

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From The Huffington Post

Thank God for Republican aides who were good enough to take a moment off from rubber-stamping no-bid Iraq contracts and aiming to get corporate tax breaks for oil companies to dig into frankly what is the most shocking example of blatant corruption in the history of the United States Congress.

Here’s what we know for sure, and more details are emerging hourly.

Speaker Pelosi as part of her “greening the Capitol” and I frankly am also in favor of keeping the buildings all white, but I’ll let Rush fight that battle, so Nancy decided to make the food at the cafeteria a little healthier, a little lighter.

Let’s stop right there.

Who does she think she is? With obesity rates soaring across the country, why should Capitol Hill be any different? And with Dennis Hastert leaving, our GPPC index is dipping like the Dow - that’s Gross Pounds Per Congressman for you outside the beltway types.

Anyway, it gets worse.

Not only is the Speaker General forcing health food down the yaps of Congressmen and their staffers, she figured out a way to, and I quote, “line the pockets of…Gary Hirshberg, a significant player in Democratic politics.”

Makes me sick.

I have seen this Hirshberg character at work, I once went to his house and off the record, the fridge in his kitchen is literally stocked with Stonyfield yogurt products, he calls them samples, but you and I know what they are - corruption, plain and simple.

With shame, I can tell you that he forced his graft on me and it was all I could do to carry the strawberry smoothies to my car.

Here’s more of the story:

Republican aides have raised questions about why the cafeterias now stock Stonyfield Farm yogurt, speculating that the move would line the pockets of the company’s CEO, Gary Hirshberg, a significant player in Democratic politics.

Sick isn’t it? There’s more here but I frankly, it’s for adults only.

Can you imagine? They might be selling hundreds of those little yogurt cups a month, Gary personally pockets, you better be sitting down, as much as a penny a cup, my god, over the course of forty or fifty thousand years, he could literally make like $10,000 off this deal

My advice for Speaker Pelosi is to resign in shame,

As for you Mr. Hirshberg, get that yogurt classified as a bio-chemical weapon in the war on terror, and call those Republican aides back. That’s where the serious coin is.

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