Over the years, I have used various digital platforms. It started when I was in the business and speaking at conferences. Many I needed to become familiar with to learn what the user experience was, some I needed to understand the revenue models, and others were experimenting with technology. After a quarter century, I found I have websites hosted by multiple companies, blogs on two different platforms, and email addresses and digital assets all over the place. I decided.

THE WAITING PLACE by Dr. Seuss Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
or a plane to go or the mail to come,
or the rain to go or the phone to ring,
or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting. ### Excerpt from Oh, The Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss The Waiting Place by Dr. Seuss #waitingplace #TheWaitingPlace #DrSeuss #TheodorSeussGeisel #waitingplaceTheWaitingPlaceDrSeussTheodorSeussGeisel

With the Sequester upon us, I think this is probably the best analysis of the challenges of reducing government spending.  This is NOT a democrat or republican thing – this is a how do you change the way elected officials act, how departments and agencies re-act, and why it is so difficult.  Comments welcome. The Culture of Bureaucracy Firemen First or How to Beat a Budget Cut by Charles Peters Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly. Since parsimony is becoming almost as fashionable among politicians today as patriotism was in the 1940s, a wave of budget-cutting seems likely at all levels of government. The results could be salutary, but might be disastrous. To avoid the latter possibility, it is essential to understand how the Clever Bureaucrat reacts to the threat of fiscal deprivation. The very first thing C. B. does, Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly when threatened with a budget reduction, is to translate it into specific bad news for congressmen powerful enough to restore his budget to its usual plenitude. Thus Amtrak, recently threatened with a budget cut, immediately announced, according to Stephen Aug of The Washington Star, that it would be compelled to drop the following routes: San Francisco Bakersfield, running through Stockton, the home town of Rep. John J. Mcraucnman the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee. St. Louis-Laredo, running through Little Rock, Arkansas, the home of Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Commit tee. Chicago-Seattle, running through the homes of Senator Mike Mansfield, Senate Majority Leader, and Senator Warren Magnuson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. And in a triumphant stroke that netted four birds with one roadbed, Norfolk-Chicago, running through the home states of Senator Birch Bayh, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Transportation subcommittee, Senator Vance Hartke, chairman of the Commerce Surface Transportation. Subcommittee, Rep. Harley Staggers, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, and Senator Robert Byrd, Senate Majority Whip. The effectiveness of this device is suggested by a story that appeared in the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette a few days after Amtrak’s announcement: Continued Rail Service Byrds Aim “Senator Robert C. Byrd, D-WVa, has announced that he intends to make an effort today to assure continued rail passenger service for West Virginia. “Byrd, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he will ‘either introduce an amendment providing sufficient funds to continue the West Virginia route or try to get language adopted which would guarantee funding for the route for Amtrak.’ ” In the Amtrak case, C.B.’s budget cutting enemy was President Ford. Sometimes it is a frugal superior in his own department. C. B.’s initial response is much the same. If, for example, a Secretary of Defense from Massachusetts insists upon eliminating useless and outmoded bases, the Navy’s C. B. will promptly respond with a list of recommended base closings, led by the Boston Navy Yard. Another Bay of Pigs An irate constituency is, of course, a threat to all elected officials and to every other official who dreams of converting his appointive status into one blessed by the voting public. Even a small irritation can suffice. Thus, Mike Causey of The Washington Post tells of a National Park Service C. B. who, confronted with a budget cut, quickly restored congressmen to their senses by eliminating elevator service to the top of the Washington Monument. Every constituent whose children insisted on his walking all the way up was sure to place an outraged call to his congressman’s office. Similarly, a Social Security Administration C. B. faced with a budget cut is certain to announce that the result will be substantial delays in the mailing of social security checks. Whenever possible, a C. B. will assert that the budget cut is certain to result in the loss of jobs. The threatened employees are sure to write emotional protests to their congressmen. And, as the National Rifle Association has proven, even a tiny minority, if sufficiently vigorous in its expression of opinion-vigorous meaning that they make clear they will vote against you if you fail to help them can move a legislator to take the desired action in the absence of an equally energetic lobby on the other side. C. B. concern about loss of others’ jobs is a deeply personal one. He knows you can’t be a commander unless you have troops to command. Not long ago Jack Anderson dis covered that the Navy, trying to ad just to less money than it had requested, was depriving the fleet of essential maintenance, while continuing to waste billions on useless super-carriers and transforming small Polaris submarines into giant Tridents. The reason of course is that the more big ships with big crews we have, the more admirals we need. Rank in the civil service is also determined in part by the number of employees one super vises. Thus a threat to reduce the number of one’s employees is a threat not merely to one’s ego but to one’s income as well. In its first flush of victory after the 1960 election, the Kennedy Administration embarked on two ill-fated missions. One was the Bay of Pigs. The other was an effort to fire 150 AID employees, all of whom wrote their congressman, as did their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and in all probability their creditors and the creditors’ relatives. The 150 were, of course, reinstated. If a Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan does become President, he might also ponder the lesson of Gail Parker, who found that to keep Bennington College afloat she would have to deprive teachers of tenure and rehire them each year on the basis of their merit and of what the college could afford. The threatened faculty stirred up such a storm that the Board of Trustees, which had originally backed Gail Parker, deserted her and she had to resign. The tenured employee can even go to court. A recent decision by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that a college that fires a tenured professor because too few students are taking his course to pay for it must find another job for the professor, even if it requires dis missing other more competent but untenured professors. Firemen First On the other hand, there are the teachers we don’t want to fire-those in the public schools, for example, where teacher-pupil ratios of 1 to 40 are common. These are the ones C.B. always says he will have to fire when he is menaced with a budget cut. This tactic is based on .the principle that the public will support C. B.’s valiant fight against the budget reduction only if essential services are en dangered. Thus, C. B. always picks on teachers, policemen, firemen first. In the headquarters bureaucracies of the New York City and the Washington, D. C. school systems there are concentrated some of the most prodigious, do-nothing, time-servers of the modem era. No administrator threatens to fire them. If they are “the fat,” and if he is to fight the budget cut, it would of course damage his cause to admit their existence. He must concentrate on threatening a loss of muscle. Similarly, the Army, when faced with a budget cut, never points the finger at desk-bound lieutenant colonels. The victims are invariably combat troops. This is particularly unfortunate, since in government, as in human beings, fat tends to concentrate at the middle levels, where planning analysts and deputy assistant administrators spend their days at tending meetings, writing memoranda, and reading newspapers. Sometimes, however, the C.B. will be deliberately non-specific about the jobs that might be cut. When the City Council of the District of Columbia recently proposed a $67.2-million cut in the city’s budget, Mayor Washing ton responded with an announcement that he would have to fire 4,000 city employees, but with no indication of exactly where the axe would fall. This tactic is designed to arouse all city employees who don’t want to be among the 4,000-which of course means all city employees-to write the City Council protesting the outrageous cuts. Another approach, which might be called “How Can You Guys Be Such Scrooges,” was tried on the Council by Joseph Yeldell, the director of the city’s Human Resources Administration, who proclaimed that yes, he knew exactly what’ the budget cut would do to his department, it would mean the cancellation of the foster parents program for 2,000 orphans. But such appeals are guaranteed to work only during the Christmas season. The more reliable year-round tactic is to threaten the loss of essential services that affect almost all voters. John Lindsay was a master of this technique. Confronted, for example, with a 1971-72 budget of only $8.6 billion, he said he would have to fire 10,000 policemen, 2,500 firemen, 3,600 garbage workers, 12,000 hospital workers, and 10,800 teachers. In the end, he didn’t have to fire anyone. Abe Beame was not so lucky. He threatened to fire 67,000 similar ly essential employees, and-when the bastards actually cut his budget found that he really had to drop 35,000. There’s the rub. If we really cut the budget of the C.B. who has bluffed by saying that he will have to fire essential employees, he may-to preserve his credibility-actually have to fire them, instead of the middle level newspaper-readers who are the real fat. We could end up with a government of planning analysts, friends of congressmen, and trains running to Bakersfield via Stockton. Original article published in the The Washington MonthIy/March 1976 (credit to my friend J. Ellis for the original posting of this article — it appears that the only place on the Web that it appears was in a scanned format and very difficult to read, so I converted it here to share – please excuse any typos that may have occurred) #CharlesPeters #budgetcuts #sequester #TheWashingtonMonthly #governmentspending #TheCultureofBureaucracy #FiremenFirst #FiremenFirstorHowtoBeataBudgetCut

Love this effort by Dan Hosek. The Life Cube Project Friend created this logo for The Life Cube Project. View original post

Civil Air Patrol honors members at ceremony June 11, 2009 More than 130 area members of Civil Air Patrol gathered to congratulate New York state’s first General Carl A. Spaatz Award recipient since 2005. Cadet Natasha Cohen of Dobbs Ferry was honored in a ceremony at Wing Headquarters at the Westchester County Airport. Named for the first Air Force chief of staff, the award is Civil Air Patrol’s highest cadet honor. The evening also celebrated the lengthy career of White Plains resident Lt. Col. Johnnie Pantanelli as a local leader of influence in this volunteer organization. The evening culminated in the renaming of the North Castle Composite Squadron in her honor. The General Carl A. Spaatz Award is a rare national honor, presented to cadets who have demonstrated excellence in leadership, character, fitness and aerospace education. http://www.lohud.com/article/20090611/NEWS02/906110339/1216/NEWS0204

My friend Steven took me to Shopsin’s many years ago when it was located down end of Houston Street.  A wonderful article about one of those NY hide-a-ways. Source:  NYT Magazine The Way We Eat – Flipping the Bird by CHRISTINE MUHLKE Larry FinkPhoto:  Kenny Shopsin and his daughter Tamara on the brunch shift. Right: Counter culture. Published: October 9, 2008 AS THE LEGENDARY bon vivant Ludwig Bemelmans once noted of restaurateurs: “The most strenuous customer-versus-proprietor battles occur in the smart restaurants of Paris and New York. This kind of restaurant, as a rule, is small. It is benefited by a certain type of guest and injured by another, and the latter must be discouraged from coming. In a man confronted daily with the task of separating the wanted from the unwanted, a degree of arrogance is indispensable.” Add photos Lars Klove for The New York Times & A Shopsin’s specialty: Mac ‘n’ cheese pancakes. Confronted daily with the task of deciding who gets to eat at Shopsin’s General Store, his 20-seat restaurant in New York’s Essex Street Market, the cook and owner Kenny Shopsin separates the wanted from the unwanted with a degree of foulmouthed eloquence that makes Lenny Bruce look like Sirio Maccioni. This is food politics in its rawest form. “We have a really wonderful relationship with our customers for the most part,” he said. “We kick [expletive] out. Regularly.” Up to three times a day. Order off the menu? Out. Cellphone call? Beat it. Sometimes people don’t even make it into a seat, as in the case of the infamous no-parties-bigger-than-four rule. Or maybe Shopsin simply doesn’t like you. (Let’s just say that years ago, when I took Alain Ducasse to dinner at Shopsin’s — I ate there weekly for eight years, until I lost it in the divorce — I knew better than to introduce him to the cook whose food he was praising. I waited weeks to tell Shopsin, who softened and got borderline misty for a second before bellowing: “I’m glad you didn’t tell me. I would’ve kicked the” you-know-what “out.”) It’s not the most Danny Meyer-like approach to cultivating clientele, but after 28 years behind the stove, Shopsin wants only to cook for people he likes. “I’m not a very mature person,” he says after a lunch shift, his white hair kept at bay by an appropriately McEnroesque headband. “Sometimes my mind works a bit too fast, and I come to the conclusion of a relationship with customers faster than they get there. The abruptness of my understanding the essence of what’s happening is really upsetting to them and makes them vindictive and angry.” (One man, refused service at the original Bedford Street grocery-turned-restaurant, ripped a toilet out of the floor.) Shopsin’s menu is another ejector seat. With more than 900 items — including 300 soups — it sends the indecisive, the health-conscious and the humorless running. It’s a window-slash-rabbit-hole into the 66-year-old’s mind: 75 riffs on pancakes, from Post Modern to Lemon Ricotta; 100 made-to-order soups, from Cream of Any Vegetable to Cheeseburger; and countless other dishes, like the Nuclear Melt Down sandwich and burgers with mac-’n’-cheese sauce. “I dedicate myself to consuming all sorts of ideas,” says Shopsin, an avid reader and Internet crawler. “Eventually something inside me, probably skewed by my erotic feelings about breasts and things like that, assembles a product and just shoots it up.” For example, a recent item on the food blog Serious Eats about foods on a stick led to the State Fair combo plate: corn-dog sausage, s’mores pancakes and chicken-fried eggs. New dishes are printed on the menu the same day: “I spent almost $3,000 on toner in the last three months,” Shopsin says. Unlike other restaurateurs, Shopsin has refused publicity. (Whenever I tried to write about him, he would tell the fact checkers that Shopsin’s was a shoe store or out of business or insist that they do something uncheckable to themselves.) But two regulars, a Knopf editor and a literary agent, persuaded him to write a cookbook. “Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin” blends recipes with his uncensored thoughts on cooking (“The only explanation I can give for . . . how I came to this method of cooking is that it’s a product of a lot of psychotherapy, drugs and making chicken potpies”) and running a restaurant (“My approach . . . is the exact opposite of ‘the customer is always right’ ”). Like the restaurant, where three of his four children work, the book is a family affair, designed by his daughter Tamara and photographed by his son-in-law, Jason Fulford. Shopsin is dreading the attention “Eat Me” will attract, claiming it will draw the wrong people for the wrong reasons. “The brilliance of my restaurant is that the customer base is soooo special,” he says. “They do not hesitate to engage the stranger at the next table, as opposed to just observing the dwellers of the zoo.” They know that the real reason Shopsin’s has been successful for so long — despite the fact that the owner is a self-confessed “[expletive]” who serves mind-bending food in a very funky environment — is that it has such a huge heart. “I was thinking I could learn to be insincere,” he says in book mode. “But the first day I really go off, I’ll probably just close for a month.” A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2008, on page MM89 of the New York edition. Related Recipes: Lemon Ricotta Pancake (October 12, 2008) Recipes: Mac ’n’ Cheese Pancakes (October 12, 2008) Recipes: Pancake Batter (October 12, 2008) Recipes: Pumpkin Pancakes (October 12, 2008)

Besides the poor customer service we all talk about – long lines at security, planes sitting on runways, and delayed flights.  Let’s talk about their CRM.  I fly business class.  I have done it for business and personal travel.  I am a member of various airline frequent flyer programs at different levels of status.  I also have opted in to receive their special offers.  Why do they send me stuff i have no interest in?  If they want to do one to one instead of mass marketing (the power of interactive marketing)  we have all talked about, why are they mailing me offers if I fly out from cities other than in the NYC area?  Why do they send me offers to fly coach at some fabulous discount?  Can’t they look at my profile and email offers that I might really be interested in?  Please share your ideas, input, or experiences.

Below is the email sent to Redgee Capili, Sr. Director of Client Services and Chief Privacy Officer and Ben Golub, President and Chief Executive Officer at PLAXO.  Let’s see what type of response we get.  I think it may be worth contacting Linkin too. Gentleman – I have decided to tackle updating my contacts for the first time in almost 7 years.  The number of contacts in outlook is over x0,000.  In addition, I would like to search inbox and sent mail for additional contacts.  This includes over xx0,000 emails. The challenges are: 1. Large volume 2. Need to de-dup 3. Need to avoid Sp-am emails 4. Would like to notify all contacts of my current contact info 5. Prefer to export clean list and email BCC or send via a mail solution so we don’t overload my mailbox with bounced email addresses 6. Security – no hack-ing into my contacts 7. Prefer not to send via Plaxo first time through 8. Need to know what draw on my email service provider servers are 9. Other issues? I originally tried to deal with your Premier Support via online CHAT.  I also tried to call your Premium Tel Support – but these are both directing me to India call centers.  I would hope that based on the unusual size of the contacts and task at hand, you have someone that can assist in this process.  Please call or email me at ….

The Theodore Roosevelt quote The Man In The Arena is one of my favorites. It is from the speech “Citizenship In A Republic” delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on April 23, 1910. Cadillac just used this quote in an Academy Awards advertisement without attribution. #daregreatly is their twitter tag.  So not cool.  Let’s not even talk about why this quote is appropriate or not for Cadillac – but to use it without attribution is just plain wrong.  Advertising Agency: Publicis why did you do this?? “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt Source: The Man In The Arena speech “Citizenship In a Republic” delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on April 23, 1910. The full speech can be found at http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/maninthearena.pdf Cadillac Ad Dare Greatly is also video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_fm3O5h9Bg TAGS: #TheodoreRoosevelt #TeddyRoosevelt #TheodoreRooseveltquote #ManInTheArena #daregreatly #Cadillac #Advertising #caradvertising #cadillacad #cadillacroosevelt #rooseveltcadillac #Publicis #AcademyAwards #AcademyAwardsAdvertising #AcademyAwardsCadillac #Publicis #TeddyRoosevelt #TheodoreRooseveltTeddyRooseveltTheodoreRooseveltquoteManInTheArenadaregreatlyCadillacAdvertisingcaradvertisingcadillacadcadillacrooseveltrooseveltcadillacPublicisAcademyAward #ManInTheArena #TheodoreRooseveltquote #Cadillac #AcademyAwardsCadillac #TheodoreRoosevelt #cadillacad #rooseveltcadillac #AcademyAwardsAdvertising #daregreatly #caradvertising #advertising

Not sure of this guys politics, or if you think he is right.  This is the first time I have seen a good article that talks about the fact the next bad thing to happen to the ecconomy is election year 2012. Think this economy is bad? Wait for 2012. By Greg Ip, Washington Post Sunday, October 24, 2010 We’re barely two years past the banking crisis, still weathering the mortgage crisis and nervously watching Europe struggle with its sovereign debt crisis. Yet every economic seer has a favorite prediction about what part of the economy the next crisis will come from: Municipal bonds? Hedge funds? Derivatives? The federal debt? I, for one, have no idea what will cause the next economic disaster. But I do have an idea of when it will begin: 2012. Yes, an election year. Economic crises have a habit of erupting just when politicians face the voters. The reason is simple: They are born of long-festering problems such as lax lending, excessive deficits or an overvalued currency, and these are precisely the sort of problems that politicians try to ignore, hide or even double down on during campaign season, hoping to delay the reckoning until after the polls close or a new government takes office. Perversely, this only worsens the underlying imbalances, making the mess worse and the cost to the economy — in lost income and jobs — much higher. Election-year prevarication has a storied history in the United States. In the summer of 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in hopes of suppressing inflation pressure until after the 1972 election. He succeeded, but the result was even worse inflation in 1973 and a deep recession starting that fall. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Vice President George H.W. Bush and Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis largely ignored the mounting losses in the nation’s insolvent thrifts for fear of admitting to taxpayers the price of cleaning them up. The delay allowed the losses and the price tag to grow, and the burden of bad loans hamstrung the economy into the early 1990s. Go back to 1932 for an even more dramatic example: After defeating Herbert Hoover that year, Franklin D. Roosevelt refused during the four-month transition to say whether he’d support the lame-duck administration’s policy for fixing the banks and keeping the dollar linked to gold. Depositors fled banks and investors dumped the dollar, resulting in another wave of bank failures that vastly worsened the Depression. But perhaps the most poignant example of election-year myopia came in 2008. After agreeing to an ad hoc bailout of Bear Stearns that March, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson knew he needed authority and money to deal with such situations. But he didn’t ask Congress for either, reasoning that lawmakers would never approve something so contentious just months from a presidential election. (He was probably right.) So when Lehman Brothers foundered that fall, Paulson, with no orderly way to wind the company down, let it fail. He then proposed the Troubled Assets Relief Program to deal with the resulting chaos, but the House, gripped by an election-year aversion to bailouts, voted it down. The defeat sent markets into a tailspin. Lawmakers changed their minds and passed the TARP, but the intervening panic worsened the economic pain. Elections are even more of a trigger for crises in other countries. When Greece’s national election campaign began in September 2009, the government claimed that the budget deficit was more than 6 percent of gross domestic product, high but manageable. Yet shortly after the socialist government took power, it revealed that the deficit was in fact closer to 12.5 percent. The previous government, it turned out, had been issuing optimistic forecasts and hiding some of its spending. As foreign investors’ confidence in Greece evaporated, interest rates on its debt soared. To avoid default, it was forced to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. The Greek economy will probably shrink at least 3 percent both this year and next. Mexico’s financial crises regularly coincide with presidential elections. In early 1982, the government knew that its deficit was too large and that its currency was overvalued. Investors were pulling their money out, draining the nation’s foreign currency reserves. Government officials hoped to postpone action until after the July election, and the Federal Reserve helped by making short-term dollar loans to Mexico designed solely to make its reserves appear larger. “We were trying to buy time until the election and new government. We failed,” recalls Ted Truman, a Fed official at the time. Money continued to flee, and a month after the election, Mexico announced it couldn’t repay its bank loans, triggering the Latin American debt crisis, a severe recession and what many called the region’s “lost decade.” A similar dynamic brought on Mexico’s election-year “tequila crisis” of 1994, which forced a massive and sudden devaluation of the peso and required tens of billions of dollars in international assistance. Even when a government tries to do the right thing, electoral politics make it difficult. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korea negotiated a $55 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and others to avoid defaulting on its private bank loans; in return, it promised reforms such as closing weak banks. But confidence evaporated and the currency plunged when the leading opposition candidate in that year’s presidential election attacked the agreement. A similar situation occurred in the election to succeed Brazil’s President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had brought stability to his country during the 1990s after decades of inflation and default. When it became apparent that his handpicked successor would lose in 2002 to leftist challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s stock markets and currency plunged, and the government lost the ability to issue long-term bonds. Inflation and interest rates shot up, hammering the economy. These countries actually offer an uplifting lesson: The damage wrought by the crises helped build support for solutions. In Korea in 1997 and Brazil in 2002, populist challengers ultimately embraced their predecessors’ reform plans. Greece’s socialists campaigned last year promising to raise public salaries, invest in infrastructure and help small businesses. But they are now undertaking painful reforms, such as raising retirement ages and injecting more competition into protected industries such as trucking. Of course, these countries are relatively young democracies with legacies of economic mismanagement. It couldn’t happen here anymore, right? Think again. Yes, this year the United States passed the sweeping Dodd-Frank Act, seeking to make financial crises a thing of the past. But there are countless problems that can develop into disasters (think Foreclosure-Gate). And Dodd-Frank is useless if the next crisis involves our tattered government finances. Which brings us to 2012. Let me take a stab at what the next crisis will be. Our deficit, as a share of GDP, is at a peacetime record, and the debt is climbing toward a post-World War II record. Thoughtful economists agree on the response: Combine stimulus for our fragile economy now with a plan to slash the deficit and stabilize the debt when the recovery is more entrenched. Yet the approaching November midterms have made it impossible to advance a serious proposal for doing that. Congress has been unable to pass a budget, and the government is operating on a short-term “continuing resolution.” President Obama’s plan for reining in the national debt consists of appointing a bipartisan commission that won’t report until after the midterms. Even if the commission can agree on a realistic plan to chop the deficit, the polarized state of Congress suggests slim odds of adoption. With neither party able to muster the support to get serious about reducing the deficit, both may prefer to kick the problem down the road to after 2012, in hopes that the election hands one of them a clear mandate. For now, there’s enough risk of Japanese-style stagnation and deflation that U.S. interest rates could remain very low for a while yet. But if that risk fades, investors in U.S. Treasury bonds will want to know how we’ll get our deficits and debt under control — and could demand higher interest rates to compensate for the uncertainty. By then, though, the 2012 campaign may be upon us. The Republican nominee will assail Obama’s fiscal record and promise a determined assault on the debt. Obama will respond by blaming George W. Bush and promising to unveil his own plan once he’s reelected. Neither will commit political suicide by specifying which taxes they’ll raise or which entitlements they’ll cut. Will investors trust them, or will they start to worry that the endgame is either inflation or default, two tried-and-true ways other countries have escaped their debts? If it’s the latter, we’ll face a vicious circle of rising interest rates and budget deficits, squeezing the economy and potentially forcing abrupt and painful austerity measures. And if, instead, the markets continue to give us the benefit of the doubt, relieving our politicians of the need to act: Circle 2016 on your calendar. Greg Ip is U.S. economics editor of the Economist and the author of “The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World.” Greg Ip #ThinkthiseconomyisbadWaitfor2012GregIp

Jeff Zucker amended his famous quote "analog dollars to digital pennies" to "analog dollars to digital dimes"- Good we have a dimestore!  Heard at Media Summit NY Mar 18, 2009. News: Apart from taking on Jon Stewart, Zucker also touched on why Hulu pulled its content from CBS’ TV.com video site, the changing model of TV in general and progress the company has made on the digital front. How much progress? Well, Zucker updated his conference line about analog dollars being turned into digital pennies as TV programming migrates online, saying that now, the network is able to wring "digital dimes" out of its web video. Still, he was naturally short on specifics in terms of how many digital dimes NBCU has been counting. – Source:   David Kaplan at PaidContent.org