Sure, this public admission and act of contrition is certainly admirable….but it is also too late to undo the harm done already—in fact, about 30 years too late.
Kudos for finally acknowled…ging this soul-stirring error of judgment.
But the fact that you can never completely undo the damage of this “executive decision” means the rest of us will have to continue living with the consequences.
And by the way, genuine acts of public contrition require a heartfelt apology and desire to make whole those harmed. It does not include trying to artfully dodge responsibility by blaming bad acts on others—like IBM.
I am starting to think it would have been better if you’d just said nothing at all about this topic instead of this embarrassing half-baked apology.
And obviously not reading Jonathan Miller’s book and taking to heart advice on crisis management
By Jason Atkinson, on Fri Sep 27, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
An annual pilgrimage begins this week. Thousands of Americans are excitedly unpacking boxes from Cabelas and Orvis and planning to leave the office early. Fox News skipped over for the Weather Channel. The stock market turned off, topo maps unfurled. Politics and the center-right’s distrust of the federal government put aside while a battery of American-made trucks and SUVs head out onto public lands for the start of hunting season.
In the West, the federal government is the single largest non-tax-paying landowner. This includes 53 percent of Oregon, 84 percent of Nevada, 45 percent of California, all owned and managed by the Feds — a landmass larger than much of the eastern seaboard. For decades, local counties with struggling schools, understaffed sheriffs departments and closing libraries have posed the question the federal government either prove they own the land or pay taxes. These sagebrush rebellions flare their heads every few years but rarely go anywhere, because circuit courts are packed by urban lawyers who have no idea what the modern West is really about. But the fact is simple, rural places adjust to federal land policy, whether on fire or not.
This time of year, those of us in rural America, and those who have romantic visions of joining us, lay down our politics in order to pick up our fly rods, our bows, shotguns and rifles. Elk hunters to pheasant hunters, waterfowlers to steelheaders, we all head out to Uncle Sam’s tree farm. While our Uncle is not going to gift this land to the states any time soon, those hunting and angling, family traditions that are a higher priority than Sunday church in the fall, are as important to conservation as any federal policy.
Public lands need to stay in public hands. And the folks who live and hunt on public lands are the long-term key to environmental protection. Caretakers in their own right, the hook-and-bullet community is active in protecting and managing herds, raising money to restore fish habitat, and changing the ethic from use-and-abuse to natural restoration. Just yesterday, in a school parking lot in southern Oregon, picking up my 5th-grader, Grandpa Skip Rheault told me: “We waited 37 years to draw that unit (a wildlife lottery system), and that was probably the best hunt the boys and I’ll ever have in our lives.” I didn’t have a chance to ask about his success before he stopped me, smiling broadly, adding, “We didn’t even take an elk. Saw a lot of cows and spikes, but we only wanted a 6-point or better. Just seeing those healthy elk was worth the wait.”
Read the rest of… Jason Atkinson: This Land was Made for You and Me
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Sep 25, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
My inner gansta raises its ugly head.
Because it can.
And to remind me I am a dangeorous man.
Last week I took four free mints instead of one when leaving a restaurant.
The week before I went through the Express Lane with 11 items.
Next week?
Who’s to say?
I don’t even want to think about it.
(Note: after snapping this pic I got nervous and immediately re-parked. But strutted to the Thorton’s entrance. Because I could. And to remind myself that I am a dangerous man.)
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For some people….and I suspect I am one of them.
If you really don’t watch us to touch something because of wet paint I recommend changing the sign from:
By Jason Atkinson, on Wed Sep 25, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
The Northwest’s rivers are swollen and unfishable except for one. Contributing RP Jason Atkinson and Shawn Miller rush to catch steelhead before a big storm hits. Here’s Jason’s latest short film chronicling the adventure, “Before the Storm”:
Crisis management and scandal recovery have captured the moment, from big-league sports to New York City’s recent political silly season. PR firms are rebranding themselves as crisis advisers. Ex-White House aides are peddling their bona fides. While the public sees scandal through a tabloid lens, at its heart are flawed human beings making mistakes, acting emotionally, and trying to preserve their reputations and careers. “Recovering politicians” who suffered highly publicized scandals share their stories, offer guidance, and comment on the latest attempts to launch second acts.
A conversation with: Krystal Ball, co-host, MSNBC’s “The Cycle;” former Virginia congressional candidate Jonathan Miller, Daily Beast columnist; No Labels co-founder; former Kentucky state treasurer Michael Steele, co-chairman, Purple Nation Strategies; former Republican National Committee chairman
Moderated by: Jeff Smith, assistant professor of politics and advocacy, The New School; former Missouri state senator
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2013 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Theresa Lang Community & Student Center, Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th Street (between Fifth and Sixth avenues), 2nd Floor
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Sep 24, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
So I was at a stop sign and waiting for the sign to change….
And after several minutes lost in thought I realized that the wait was starting to irritate me.
As well as irritate the driver behind me who gave a short honk which I recognized from hearing a few seconds earlier but it never occuring that the first honk was intended for me.
But realizing all of a sudden that it was at the same time I suddenly remembered that stop signs don’t change colors.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Sep 24, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Molly Redden’s essay in the New Republic about the waning of Democratic centrists may be off-base in its examples—Christine Quinn’s deficiencies as a candidate competed with her ideological positioning as a source of her troubles, and Bill Daley’s withdrawal from the Illinois Governors’ race can hardly be attributed to a leftist backlash when he was running ahead in the polls—but her premise is certainly not one an expatriate former Democrat like myself would argue. In fact, I will use her observations to go one step further: the declining appeal of centrism in Democratic politics is not only tactically relevant to candidates, it is about to become just as culpable from a policy shaping standpoint as the much more heralded implosion of the old governing “establishment” wing of the Republican Party.
To be sure, Redden and her like-minded colleague Noam Scheiber aren’t spending much anxiety on the erosion of Democratic social conservatism, but they are highlighting that essentially one economic world view is tenable within internal Democratic fights. The tenets are that the inequitable distribution of wealth is the dominant economic threat; an aggressively regulated marketplace promotes fairness in a manner that overshadows any costs to innovation or growth; and the only adequate response to more systemic conditions like high unemployment and poverty is an assertive infusion of public dollars. In practical campaign terms, this means a candidate with a record of alliances with corporate institutions will need to spend time disgorging any rhetoric that helped forge those ties (for example, the Cory Booker who 16 months ago was defending private equity’s capacity to invest in underserved neighborhoods has morphed into the soon to be senator whose stump speech laments the failure to hand down prison sentences to Lehman executives); and a Bill de Blasio will have a built-in advantage over a more pro growth oriented message even without the special circumstances of identity politics around his mayoral nomination in New York City.
But the demise of the corporatist sensibility in Democratic politics has arguably spilled into an aversion to the reform minded brand of politics that was until recently an underpinning of both the party’s strategic and policy framework. This plays out most decisively in the context of entitlements. There is a near universal consensus among Democratic politicians and elites that the current entitlement structure is morally and fiscally sound enough that a genuine overhaul is neither desirable nor necessary: a sharp movement from the Simpson Bowles approach a notable number of Democratic thought leaders praised in 2011 and a lifetime of difference from some of the thought experiments of the late Clinton era.
The same antipathy to reform surfaces in the disappearance of the old Robert Kennedy critique of bureaucratic anti-poverty institutions, and in the field of education reform, where accountability and strengthened teacher standards are about as unpopular among today’s Democrats as vouchers or parental choice; that is to say, almost toxic. And, as fellow right-leaning reformers like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat might point out, there is no meaningful discussion in contemporary liberalism of the kind of pro family tax reform that would advantage major portions of the Democratic Party’s low wage base; and it is conservative pundits who are churning out proposals to make the earned income tax credit more flexible or to permanently reduce FICA taxation on the working poor.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Those Fading Democratic Centrists
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Sep 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
I wonder if Stick People know that other people think of them as Stick People?Even if they do know they don’t seem to be bothered by it.
I wish I could be more like Stick People in that way.
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When life gives us lemons, try responding “Wow! Free lemons! How cool is that?”And then start a lemonade business.
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We are not our woundsWe are not even the story we tell ourselves and others about our wounds.
We are whatever we do to overcome our wounds. That, it seems to me, is what ultimately defines us most.
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Do we parents really raise our children.
Or do they secretly really raise us?
Some days I feel like Rod Serling will step out from the next room and start explaining this entire hoax — that all along our children have patiently and lovingly been guiding us into adulthood. And as the youngest approaches age 18, facing the horrifying feeling that you are not ready for her to leave because you are not yet fully an adult.
And by the way, genuine acts of public contrition require a heartfelt apology and desire to make whole those harmed. It does not include trying to artfully dodge responsibility by blaming bad acts on others—like IBM.
