By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 6, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
Welcome to Episode One of The Recovering Politician’s CRISIS TV, a weekly roundtable discussion of the highest profile national scandals, with expert analysis from those who’ve served in the arena and suffered through crises themselves.
SPOILER ALERT: Be prepared to laugh — these former pols tend not to take themselves too seriously.
CRISIS TV is hosted by The RP, former Kentucky State Treasurer Jonathan Miller.
This week’s guests include:
Michael Steele, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee and former Lt. Governor of Maryland
Courtney Spritzer, co-founder, SOCIALFLYNY.com, a social media consulting firm.
Click here to order, this week only, for 99 cents
This week’s topic — the Obama Administration’s IRS scandal.
The panelists discuss where all of the President’s men (and women) have gone wrong, how they could have handled the crisis more effectively, and what advice they would share with the White House.
The panelists discuss the lessons they learned from their own crises, detailed in the book they co-authored, The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis. Click here to order, this week only, for only 99 cents.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jun 6, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Some people who claim to always go the “extra mile” –actually often only go a few extra yards. Or feet .
And just hope nobody notices and measures.
I have done that myself a few times. I find it helps to look like I am out of breath, so it will look like I really did go a full extra mile in working on a project
In the future, I think we ought to consider the practical advantages of changing the phrase “going the extra mile” to “going the extra kilometer”
Sure, chalk one up for the metic system but its also much more efficient and realistic . A kilometer is about 6/10th of a mile but is about as much extra a person can go on something without looking like a fool, or martyr.
Once you go a full mile over what is required, you are just trying to show off. But a kilometer is more believable and sends the message you really do try harder.
November 5th, 1994. The MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. A boxing match featuring potentially the future of the sport against an older, heavier, washed-up ex-champion. If you were gambler the smartest money would be on the young lion. However, this is real life and nothing is more dramatic than real life. On that a 45 year old ex-heavyweight champion of the world got lucky or did he? With one punch, George Foreman, knocked out Michael Moorer to capture the world’s heavyweight boxing a title, a title he hadn’t held for 20 years.
So was Foreman lucky or did something else happen? Was a lucky punch that any of us could of landed or was there something else to blame? Fitness and real life are one in the same. What you do for fitness affects every other aspect of your being. We are all given 24 hours in a day and we are all given one life to live as we choose. Ask George Foreman if he was lucky? He will tell you that the thousands of hours, all the blood, sweat and tears and the practice of going against the greatest (Muhammad Ali) prepared him for that moment. He caught lightening in a bottle, one more time. So can you.
A wise person once told me that if you are not doing something to make the world a better place AND making people around better, you are wasting your time. That you have to have an insatiable desire for achievement. Nothing should ever stand in your ways of what you want. I apply this principles to fitness; if you want something go get it. Don’t sit back and let it come to you because it won’t. “Big” George didn’t wait for it to come to him, he took it and made history. History is yours for the taking.
By Michael Steele, on Thu Jun 6, 2013 at 8:15 AM ET
Click here to purchase e-book for ONLY 99 CENTS this week only
The one thing you don’t want in politics or business is to be unpleasantly surprised.
We pride ourselves on seeing every angle and knowing every pitfall; and when we don’t or we can’t, we hire consultants who supposedly do because there’s nothing that will throw you off your game faster than the unknown.
So it was with particular attention to detail that my staff at the Republican National Committee (RNC) planned for me and over thirty members of the RNC’s Site Selection Committee to visit the three cities in the final running to host the 2012 national convention.
It’s no secret that my tenure as RNC Chairman had more than its share of unpleasant surprises. So my instruction to the staff regarding the site visits was simple: “lean, clean and no surprises!”
As the visits got underway, by any measure, they were going exceedingly well. These trips used to be about goodie bags and cocktail parties, but we had resolved to take a decidedly more business-oriented approach – with an emphasis on contracts, bus schedules, fundraising and hotel rooms; and as it turned out, the members preferred that (although they still wanted their cocktail parties).
But as they say, “the best laid plans…”
* * *
The day had already been long with meetings and tours with the Mayor of Salt Lake City, our respective legal teams and members of the Site Selection Committee. As this was the second of our three cities to visit, we had begun to establish a rhythm for the day; and by this point, it was definitely time for one of those cocktails. For most of that afternoon, I observed the courtesy of keeping my cell phone turned off. After all, if my chief of staff – or anyone else for that matter – needed to reach me, there were enough other cell phones nearby.
So when the executive director of the site selection committee, Belinda Cook, handed me the phone with a look of anger: “The office has been trying to reach you for the past hour; your cell is off” – I thought to myself: “Don’t be mad at me; you told me to turn it off!”
But I would soon realize that she wasn’t angry about the phone. Rather, a major conservative web site, the Daily Caller, wanted a “comment” on a story it was about to run that a member of the RNC finance staff had spent $2000 at a Los Angeles strip club that featured a sexual-bondage theme. And to make matters worse, the reporter was inferring that I was there.
I’ll spare you the first words I uttered at that moment.
Read the rest of… Former RNC Chair Michael Steele: Sexual Bondage Strip Clubs? Oh, my! — AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT from The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis
By Loranne Ausley, on Wed Jun 5, 2013 at 3:51 PM ET
Click here to read a recent article from The American Prospect about the “Not So Solid” Republican South. This is the first in a 4 part series, which really lays out the case for our collective work in the south.
Stay tuned for some exciting news from The Southern Project in the next few weeks!
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jun 5, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Keep an open mind….don’t jump to conclusions.
If the first thing you think of when letting your mind wander on a Saturday morning while having your coffee is, “Jack Rabbit Slims,” it’s probably worth asking yourself “What did I have for dinner last night?” and making sure you don’t eat that again since it must have caused indigestion that led to disturbing images the next morning.
At least that’s what was my first thought in reaction to the first thing I thought of this morning, which was “Jack Rabbit Slims.”
But it turns out it isn’t such a bad thing after all. I wasn’t thinking of the famous Travolta-Thurman dance scene or the great dialogue scene. I thought of the tracking shot of Travolta-Thurman entering the restaurant and walking to there table.
And I found the video of clip and watched it twice. It turns out that watching (and thinking) about Jack Rabbit Slim the first thing on a Saturday morning while having coffee is a pretty cool way to start the day off after all.
Click here to purchase e-book for ONLY 99 CENTS this week only
The first Correctional Officer (CO) I met was straight out of Deliverance. I came in with a young black guy who mumbled and a middle-aged Chinese man who spoke broken English, but at least I could decipher their words. The CO was harder to understand. Manchester, Kentucky is tucked in an Appalachian mountain hollow, and he had apparently never left. When he sauntered into the austere, concrete holding room and asked the Chinese man his name, the man replied, “Shoi-ming Chung.”
“Sesame Chicken?” replied the CO; laughing uproariously and then repeating it twice as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
He sent me to a heavyset nurse for a battery of questions.
“Height and weight?” she asked.
“5’6”, 120 pounds.”
She examined my slight frame and frowned. “Education level?”
“Ph.D.”
She shot me a skeptical look. “Last profession?”
“State Senator.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, I’ll put it down if ya want. If ya wanna play games, play games. You’ll fit right in – we got ones who think they’re Jesus Christ, too.”
Another guard escorted me to a bathroom without a door. He was morbidly obese and spoke gruffly in a thick Kentucky drawl. “Stree-ip,” he commanded. I did. “Tern’round,” he barked. I did.
“Open up yer prison wallet,” he ordered.
I looked at him quizzically.
“Tern’round and open up yer butt cheeks.”
I did.
“Alright, you’se good to go.”
Read the rest of… Former State Sen. Jeff Smith: From Politics to Prison — AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT from The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis
Michele Bachmann recently told us she was not going to run for re-election in 2014. While some people greeted her announcement with either relief (no more being confused by Minnesota having both legal gay marriage and Bachmann as a representative) or snickers (instead of a press conference, she posted a gauzy, underscored video that bore an eerie resemblance to those short films airplanes use to show you how to buckle a seatbelt.) But there were also many people who were distraught that she would be leaving public life, especially since Fox News is denying rumors that she would simply be moving there.
Of course her loyal followers are upset, but probably not nearly as much as comedians. One basic tenet of good comedy is to say outrageous things as though they were perfectly normal. (A great example of this is George Carlin’s segment in “The Aristocrats,” the cult movie about the world’s dirtiest joke. Carlin’s advice was to deliver off-color content as though one was describing how a carburetor works – the movie is worth watching just for that part!) Ms. Bachmann was a textbook illustration of this principle, maintaining her composure while expounding vehemently, and seriously, about everything from the IRS’s conspiracy to deny Tea Party members any health care, to “The Lion King” serving as a homosexual recruiting tool (convincing kids that they should be gay because a gay composer wrote the music). And facts be damned – when she was criticized for stating that Lexington & Concord were in New Hampshire, she simply explained that New Hampshire had as much right to be proud of “the shot heard round the world” as the actual location. My personal favorite was her claim that there was a suspicious coincidence in flu surges occuring during Democratic presidencies, like an outbreak under Obama and then the big swine flu epidemic in 1976 (which was under Gerald Ford’s watch, not Jimmy Carter’s, but whatever?). Frankly, at times I wondered if she were some sort of giant humor project, like Stephen Colbert’s brief run for president, and the whole thing would be revealed like Joaquin Phoenix’s odd ‘performance art’ on The David Letterman show.
But now she’s leaving – and while there will still be plenty of loony conspiracy theorists around, none of them will make writing comedy as easy as Ms. Bachmann has, because what she actually said needs no embroidering to be funny. (I discovered the truth of the axiom that real life is funnier than anything I can write when my kids started asking me about the facts of life . . . when I explained the whole thing to my younger son and asked if he had any questions, he said with great concern, “What if it gets stuck?” I told him that wouldn’t happen, not as long as he was 18 and she was Jewish . . . . Sadly, now that they’re older teenagers with cars, they’re not home enough to provide me with material. But I digress . . . )
I’d actually planned on doing a song for Ms. Bachmann during the 2012 election, but she dropped out before I got to her, so I’m grabbing this opportunity just in case she vanishes from public life and devotes her life to combating the scourge of gay liberal Disney-movie propaganda . . .
It’s a good time to revisit a point that I made a year or so ago on George Stephanopolous’ “This Week” program. The new health-care law, for all of its moral claims about making medical coverage universal, will end up falling about six million people short of that goal, and the individuals left out of the equation will be the very low income uninsured who are touted as the primary beneficiaries of Obamacare. The New York Times has just summarized the reasons. While the law substantially expands Medicaid eligibility beyond its current focus on children and low wage families, the Supreme Court’s rewrite of the statute last summer has permitted states to opt out of the expansion with no penalty, and to date, 25 states have done just that. Under the new law, there are no provisions to capture the sizable pool of people whose states decline to raise their eligibility standards and who don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid: that is, low income but able bodied adults with no children, and adults with children but whose income is between 32% and 100% of the federal poverty level (which translates to between $6,250 and $19,530 for a family of three). And Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for lower middle income families were allotted exclusively for individuals or families earning above the poverty line.
The political blame has rested primarily with the Republican governors who have not been moved to accept the strings and, post 2018, new financial obligations that come with growing their Medicaid program, despite the large numbers of working, uninsured poor who live in many of their states. But there is nothing unpredictable about cash starved states with a low tax base, or states whose voters are overwhelmingly hostile to the new healthcare law, refusing to assume responsibilities that will be unpopular in the short term and costly in the long term. Nor is there any huge surprise that the component of Obamacare which was supposed to avoid this dilemma, a draconian demand that states accept the expansion or risk their whole federal Medicaid match, would face a severe legal fight. In fact, the same Supreme Court that sharply split over the constitutionality of the insurance mandates in the Affordable Care Act agreed 6-2 that the “take it or risk your whole program” threat was illegal.
Given those realities, one of the centrist criticisms of Obamacare—the argument that it is needlessly ambitious and overshoots the aim of extending insurance to Americans who couldn’t afford healthcare—seems to have been borne out. There were any number of viable ways the White House and congressional architects could have avoided this trap, ranging from taking then Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s advice to shelve broad-based reform for a more targeted version that would have shored up Medicaid and picked up 100% of the tab, to establishing a pool for catastrophic coverage for low wage earners facing medical emergencies. Or, in other words, abandoning the expensive and complex array of reforms in service delivery and doctor reimbursement that have muddled the law without building its popularity, in favor of a straightforward low-income assistance program.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Another Thing Obamacare Got Wrong
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jun 4, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
My first and last Beiber rant.
I just watched a video clip of two people reacting to the reaction of several commentators who offered their opinions on the reactions of two other people to an event that I personally didn’t find important enough for anyone to form an opinion on in the first place.
And now I feel the need to add my two cents to the two people reacting to the several commentators… reaction to the two people who originally reacted to an event that doesn’t seem very important in the first place.
My commentary is this:
If an event isn’t that important–or involves the name Justin Bieber– it’s probably not worth the time to form a full opinion about it. And certainly not worth the time to form an opinion and publicly express it.
And if someone does do those two things, it’s not really worth the time for a commentator (or group of commentators) to comment about further because that will only lead to more people, or at least two, who will feel compelled to comment publicly about their disagreement with the commentators commentary about the original two people’s reaction to the unimportant event.
And then, dammit, I’ll feel compelled to get involved and suggest that maybe, at the end of the day, when it’s all said and done, whatever I think about Justin Bieber, I should just keep to myself. And maybe other people should do the same.
Let’s all just agree that Justin Beiber seems like a nice enough fella and sings well and has the same hair like of a lot of young people we know. And leave it at that.
It just saves everybody time and energy to talk about more important things.
