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by (serious-home-based-business-opportunity) @ Mon, 20 Nov 2006 21:45:00 -0500 My name is Jim Aisner and I am Director of Media Relations at Harvard Business School. This is the first in a series of podcasts for the school's Working Knowledge Web site.
With me today is Richard Tedlow, a noted business historian on the HBS faculty and the MBA class of 1949 Professor of Business Administration.

His latest book ( ) is a biography of Andy Grove, a founding father of Intel, which has gone from startup status in 1968, to a ranking of number 49 on the latest Fortune 500 listing. Anyone with a computer is familiar with the phrase "Intel Inside." With this book, professor Tedlow has taken us inside Andy Grove.

Richard, it's great to have you with us today.
Aisner: You've written about giants of enterprise in several of your previous books: the Watsons of IBM, Sam Walton, for example. What led you to focus this time on Andy Grove?

Tedlow: Having looked at CEO's, as you mentioned, in other books, and really having studied the phenomenon of the chief executive officer all my professional life, I just think that Andy's the most interesting one there is. And so the chance to write about him was an opportunity I didn't want to give up.
Q: HBS is famous for field-based research where faculty members go out into the field and observe a company or workers or whatever.

This book involved a lot of travel for you, time spent in Silicon Valley. Tell us a little bit about the preparation that went into this biography.
A: Well, there was a lot of travel.

I commuted there for a while and I lived in Silicon Valley for fourteen months. Andy was not involved in this book in the following sense: It is not an authorized biography. He did not read a page of it until it came out in the form in which you see it right here.

He was not involved in it financially. I sold it to a publisher myself. However, he was very cooperative.

He gave me access to his notebooks, which he had kept from July of 1968, which is when Intel was founded, and which he never thought anybody would read. They were kept strictly for himself.
Q: So these had never been seen before?

A: No, that's correct. And he also gave me access to his Rolodex, which meant that I was able to get literally dozens of interviews with people whom it would have otherwise difficult to get an interview. I also had a cubicle at Intel in Santa Clara for fourteen months, and I also visited some of their sites including their fabrication facilities, which are incredible manufacturing operations.

Q: So you really immersed yourself in Silicon Valley for quite a while.
A: Very much so. I ate it, I breathed it, I literally lived it for the period during which this book was being written.

Q: Andy lives in Silicon Valley but he was born far away from Silicon Valley in Hungary in 1936. He came to this country about fifty years ago. How did he get here?

Where did he go? Give us a little bit of background.
A: Andy was born on the wrong side of history.

He was born on September 2, 1936 in Budapest. He's of Jewish origin mdash;non-practicing. Nevertheless to be a Jew in Hungary, whether observant or not, the Nazis didn't make those distinctions.

And in fact hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews died in Auschwitz. His father's mother, for example, as well as some of the relatives of his wife Eva, a Viennese Jew. And they lost a number of other relatives, they're not sure whether it was on the Eastern Front or in a prisoner of war camp or what have you.

So the first almost decade of his life, certainly during the Nazi period, he was literally a hunted child. His mother took him away from Budapest. They hid out in a cellar in a hovel in a suburb of Budapest called Kobanya, where his mother was raped by invading Russian soldiers.

He was lucky enough to return to his home on Kiraly Street on the Pest side of Budapest and he then had to endure a Soviet Communist regime from 1945, when the Russians forced the Germans out of Budapest after a lengthy and very destructive siege, until 1956 when the short-lived Hungarian Revolt led to an open border between Austria and Hungary, and he made for the border.
Q: So this was not an easy childhood.
A: It was an extremely difficult childhood although not an unhappy one.

It was a close-knit family group. His father and mother loved one another and they loved him and he loved them. He did very well in school and got a great deal of pleasure out of that.

It really wasn't, I don't believe, until he finally got to the University of Budapest, which was shortly before he escaped, that he began to make gentile friends, close gentile friends. But no, it was extremely difficult.
What was actually happening in this man's life when he was a child was a life and death matter in the most literal sense.

We're not talking about the life and death of a firm. We're talking about the physical survival of a human being and of his parents and of their extended family. That was at risk for a large part of the first two decades of his life.

Q: You spend a lot of time in the book talking about all of this mdash;the impact of these early years on his middle and later years.
A: The child is the father of the man and, you know, Andy Grove is the last CEO who will ever have grown up under both Nazism, Fascism in other words hellip; and Communism. And somehow in this strange brew, you take Nazism, add it to Communism, divide by two and wind up with one of the most important capitalists in American business history.

So because of its very distinctiveness, it sets a lot of what it means to be a businessperson in sharp focus, and we're able to see it, illustrate it, through his life.
His experience in Hungary became a how-not-to-do at university. You can look at Intel and Intel culture under Andy Grove as the opposite of a great deal of what he experienced in Hungary.

I went back to Budapest myself. He's never gone back to Hungary. I did go to Budapest.

I went to his apartment and sent him an e-mail from there because I felt it was important to do so.
Q: One of the most important capitalists of the century, I think you said. And in the book you put him in the company of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Why do you think Andy Grove is in that triumvirate?
A: I believe that Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, and Bill Gates are the three people who put a computer on everybody's desk.
Q: We'll segue a little bit into him as a manager.

He was a highly trained engineer. First in his class at City College of New York. Ph.

D. from Berkeley. But you say in the book that he was also a natural leader.

That he was blessed with management skills, which he honed to a very fine point. What were some of the management principles that made him such a success story?
A: Well, let me, if I may, go back to the beginning of your statement and then move on.

It's noteworthy that he was educated at public universities. There was no tuition at CCNY, City College of New York.
Q: And he was penniless when he came.

A: He came here with nothing but the shirt on his back. He literally crawled out of Hungary. He left his parents on a street corner.

There couldn't be a demonstration of affection because the Russians would think, gee, is this one making for the border? You didn't know whether you were going to get across the border or not. There was no Internet to give you border conditions that day.

So by the time he gets here, which is almost fifty years ago to the day, it was December 7, 1956. He starts at City College almost immediately in January of 1957. He had to go to City College because he didn't have any money.

Then he went to Berkeley, also a public institution, because they didn't have any money. hellip; That's worth noting. Andy, in his philanthropy, has been very focused on giving back.

As far as his management principles hellip; Intel developed under Andy Grove a set of principles, a culture, which is extremely strong and remains extremely strong to this day [and was] with him certainly during the period in which he was CEO from 1987 to 1998, when its market capitalization increased 4,500 percent from about 4 billion to about 197 billion. The sense of, as they say at Intel, of bleeding blue.
Q: An Intel way.

A: Yes. Oh, very much so, there was an Intel way. They had their own language.

They have at Intel something called the TLA. TLA is a three-letter acronym for Three Letter Acronym. If somebody says to you, "That was BKM" mdash;you don't know what that means, do you?

Q: Not at the moment.
A: It means Best Known Method. And fortunately there is a dictionary of TLAs at Intel.

There are over 1,150 of them.
Q: A dictionary to get you through.
A: Yes.

Like any strong culture, Harvard Business School, for example, strong cultures have their defects and their virtues. But let's talk about their virtues first. Andy, in constructing Intel culture mdash;I don't think he did this purposely or consciously mdash;but it's turning Hungary on its head.

For example, one of the tenants of Intel culture is knowledge power, not position power. It's what you know and what you can contribute, not what your title is or where you are in the organization that matters. Contrast that with what, in the old days mdash;you and I are old enough to remember Soviet Communism when Kremlinologists would take a look at who's standing on the Kremlin Wall.

Q: There's a pecking order there.
A: Right. And they would try to decode who has power by literally seeing where they were standing.

That didn't matter to him. To him it was a question of what you knew, not who you were. He believed that the heart of a corporation was its middle management, because he felt that there are Darwinian aspects to his beliefs and if you are in top management, that's because you were very good at something 10 years ago or 15 years ago, or 20 years ago.

Maybe not today.
Whereas middle management is actually out there on the front lines. It's middle management, especially salespeople, who, if a sale is lost, they feel it in their pocketbook or in their wallet right away.

If you listen to those people, you're not buffered by being at the home office.
If you've got bright middle management willing to mdash;and this is another part of Intel culture mdash;constructively confront you and your suppositions and your assumptions and the suppositions and the assumptions of the whole firm, you've got eyes and ears all over the country, all over the world, that give you a competitive edge.
So these are all parts of Intel culture.

Disagree and then commit. In other words, we'll listen to you. Let chaos reign and then reign in chaos.

In other words, get as many ideas as you can mdash;but once you do, come to a decision and create what Andy the engineer calls a strategy vector. For him it was "The PC is it" in the late 1980s and that's what made Intel, Intel. Get everybody behind it.

Another part of Intel culture: We argue specifically over principles or over proposals or over issues, not over the people who propose them. And therefore you're going to be heard. The issues are going to be heard.

But if your side loses, you disagree and then commit. Once again this is very different from Hungary where you're stapled to the idea that you're holding onto, and during the Soviet era, for example, if you're holding onto the wrong idea it's worth your life.
Q: This is all the overhang from his youth that we were talking about earlier.

A: In my opinion. I'm not trying to be amateur psychiatrist. If you just read about his early life, it slaps you in the face.

I don't believe this point's been made elsewhere. But as his biographer I'm telling you something I believe.
This set of principles mdash;constructive confrontation, disagree and then commit, knowledge power not position power, put common sense on a pedestal, let chaos reign and reign in chaos mdash;these are all parts of Intel culture that helped make that company work as well as it has.

Q: You mentioned his three management books, all highly regarded. In Only the Paranoid Survive he has this concept of the strategic inflection point. What is that all about?

A: Let me once again back up for a moment if you'll permit me and say something about his writing. Andy's written dozens and dozens of articles for refereed journals. He was tenurable as a chemical engineer at any major university anywhere in the world in his early thirties.

He also wrote a textbook called Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices, which was widely adopted and widely praised. Andy has written six books. One of these books is a casebook coauthored with his long-time colleague at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Robert Burgelman hellip;
As a matter of fact, he's written an enormous amount.

I don't think there's another CEO in American business history who has this kind of written output. It's unthinkable that he would have a ghostwriter, and there's only one of these six books that's coauthored and that's the casebook, which is Strategic Dynamics.
High Output Management is a book that's gone through at least two editions.

It's a book people still refer to, originally published in '83, republished in '95. Only the Paranoid Survive is his signature phrase, if you will, and a book in which he introduces the idea of strategic inflection points. The basic idea of the strategic inflection point is that companies come to basically a turning point.

If you think of their arc, they're going like this. And they can either then go off into the stratosphere hellip;
Q: Or head south.
A: Or head south.

It reminds me of the old Civil War hymn: "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side." You've got to make the right decision at that moment. And if you do, you're going to go off to the stratosphere.

In other words, there do come key strategic inflection points and they're very hard to decode. It's hard to do this right especially in a tech world.
Q: Let me go back to strategic inflection point.

He and his colleagues at Intel faced a number of situations where they literally, it seems to me, bet the company, changed its direction to keep it going up. In the mid '80s with the Japanese coming into the market with very cheap memory chips.
A: They were inexpensive hellip; but of high quality.

Q: Very fine point. There were other moments when, as you just said, they decided that the future of the company lay with the PC. There were alliances down the road with IBM and Microsoft.

So could you elaborate a little bit on some of those?
A: Well, there were some key moments where they had to make key decisions. They had to get out of the memory business because they couldn't compete against the Japanese.

And the device mdash;
Q: This was in the '80s, the mid-'80s.
A: This was in '80 mdash;it took three years hellip; took a long time. And it was very difficult because they were the memory company hellip; If you look at the first ten years of their history as a public company, they did fantastically well.

So the thought of no longer being the memory company was extremely difficult for them to take and they were very emotionally caught up in this.
At one memorable moment, a key moment in the history of that company, Andy Grove is talking to his boss, Gordon Moore, and they're looking out the window at the Great America Amusement Park, which you can see from their cubicles on the fifth floor of the Robert Noyce Building in Santa Clara. And Andy looks at Gordon and says, "If the board should kick us out and bring in new management, what do you think the new management would do?

" And Gordon answers immediately, "Get us out of memories." Andy then says, "Why don't we walk through the revolving doors, come back in, and do it ourselves?" That's a very important moment.

Why? Because Andy is able to use a device that gets him away from the legacy [in memories]. I believe it was Stephen Dedalus mdash;I could be wrong mdash;in Ulysses who says, "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.

" The domestic automobile companies never had this device and they're suffering from that reality as we speak. Legacy costs is all you hear from those folks. Andy was able to abstract himself from this and look at it as if there were no legacy, and also the emotion that came with it.

So if you take that out and you look at the reality, it's an easy decision. So he made that decision along with Gordon Moore and they got out of the memory business.
Now another very important decision that was taken at the same time was to sole source the 386.

Intel had a series of microprocessors. The microprocessor is the central processing unit. It is the most important piece of hardware in your computer.

If it says Intel Inside, that's what's inside that matters. There was an 8086; there was an 8186, which had a very brief history. There was the 8286.

IBM, which was the king of the industry, always insisted that there be multiple sources. The excuse for this was that in case something went wrong with your fabrication facilities, we'd be able to source from somebody else. But the real truth behind it was they wanted price competition.

So with the 386 hellip; Andy was convinced that we have a device here that is very special, it took us a lot to develop. He said we're going to sole source it mdash;and that was a bet-the-company decision. He was very worried that IBM wasn't going to adopt it.

And if it didn't, they're your biggest customer, they're a million times your size. What's going to happen?
In fact IBM didn't adopt it immediately.

But by then [IBM PC] clones were around and Compaq adopted it first. That was the Compaq DeskPro 386. And after Compaq adopted it, IBM had no choice, and that made Intel an independent company.

As of that moment IBM lost control of that industry. Basically, the industry from then on was driven by Wintel mdash;the Microsoft-Intel duopoly.
Q: Now, you just mentioned that Andy has this ability to pull back and that helps him make these decisions.

But he is human and he has made some mistakes. Probably the most famous one would have been the Pentium chip incident. What went wrong there?

A: What happened was that under certain circumstances, the Pentium did not perform. There was a flaw. There was a floating-point flaw in the Pentium chip.

Q: And when this happened, what did he do that wasn't quite right?
A: Well, Andy allowed himself, in my opinion, to lose that magical ability to say if new management were to come in, what would they do, or what have you. He believed too much in the product.

He fell in love with the product and forgot about the customer. Something else very important happened to the company from 1990 on mdash;the Intel Inside program had reached directly out to the consumer.
So Andy, who grew up as an engineer, selling to engineers at IBM, at Compaq hellip; he didn't realize that a brand is co-created.

It's not just a company that creates it. It's also the customer. He was not able to look at the world through the customer's eyes.

He kept saying this is a problem that's going to recur once every 27,000 times. It's a non-problem. We have specifications for when we have product recalls; this reaches none of them.

That was all irrelevant. He was dealing in the world of perceptions. That's what mattered.

And he was dealing in the world of the Internet.
This was one of the earliest times when something took off through the Internet, was out of control of everybody. Andy was finally forced, against his will, to acknowledge that this is a problem and they wound up having to take a very large write-off and promised to replace anybody's Pentium who wanted it replaced.

A lot of the story of Andy's success is point of view, and this was one time where he was not able to get outside of himself and adopt a different point of view.
Q: What do you think is his definition of leadership? A: Andy's very suspicious of the word leadership.

The subtitle of the book is The Life and Times of an American, and Andy would not have liked it, I can absolutely guarantee you, if it had been called The Life and Times of an American Leader. The reason that he's suspicious of it is because if you take 1,000 MBA students, for example, and said to those 1,000 MBA students, "Would you rather be a leader or a manager?" they'd all choose leader.

Andy came up the hard way in an industry producing products that were so demanding that the slightest error would throw off a whole batch and cost a fortune hellip; Andy was the one who had to do the managing and he has a great deal of respect for execution.
One of his books is High Output Management. There is no book High Output Leadership.

He's more than a little suspicious of charisma, and his view of management and leadership basically is, you're running a company and most of that is management. But when leadership is called for, whatever that may be, there are a million different definitions of it. It's transformational as opposed to transactional, etc.

, etc. You play the role of leader if that's what the company needs of you.
His own analogy is to a tennis player.

A tennis player has a backhand and a forehand. You're a manager when you need to manage. You're a leader when you need to lead.

To be a successful business executive at the top, you need both.
Q: This is a good way to segue perhaps into a specific situation. We're talking about charismatic or lack of charismatic leadership.

Hewlett-Packard has been in the news lately. Serious problems there with the board and elsewhere. How do you think he might have handled a situation like that?

A: I think it depends on what point in time you're talking about. I don't believe that if Andy had been the chairman of HP five, six years ago, say, the situation would have developed. I don't believe the particular cast of characters that wound up turning the HP board into a train wreck would have been assembled.

Now, Andy does have a special talent in getting people who don't like one another very much to work together. But that board was too far gone. The interpersonal conflict was just too great.

I think he wouldn't have allowed it to develop.
Q: Finally, Grove is now a senior advisor to Intel, but beyond that, what is he doing?
A: Right now he's a man with a mission in healthcare.

He believes that technology can do an enormous amount to cut healthcare costs. He believes there are technological solutions, not to every healthcare problem, but certainly to some of them, that can cut costs.
Q: And his work on prostate cancer is well known from the Fortune magazine article.

[Grove's article described his own battle with prostate cancer. -ed.]
A: He's also very concerned with Parkinson's disease, which he in fact does have.

But with the healthcare system in general, he believes technology is not the answer to everything hellip; but it can fix a lot. And a lot more can be done than is being done and he's a crusader on that issue.
Q: Well, an amazing man and an insightful book.

We appreciate your being here.
James Aisner is director of Media Relations and a senior editor for Harvard Business School.

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Original post: by Copyright © 2006 Microsoft. All rights reserved. These XML results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner or for any purpose other than rendering MSN Search results within an RSS aggregator for your personal, non-commercial use.

Any other use of these results requires express written permission from Microsoft Corporation. By accessing this web page or using these results in any manner whatsoever, you agree to be bound by the foregoing restrictions. at by (serious-home-based-business-opportunity) @ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 07:42:45 -0500 - Gannon linked to male prostitution - Washington Post - NBC Nightly News , video - CNN's Reliable Sources, video and transcript - NY Daily News - The Daily Show , video - Bill Maher , video - Gannon on CNN's 360, video and transcript - CNN's Aaron Brown , video gannon360 video Contribute to AMERICAblog (Why?

Here's why ) We prefer online contributions via the yellow donate box in the left-hand column, but you can also use snail mail: John Aravosis, PO Box 21336, Wash, DC 20009. Make checks payable to John Aravosis. Contributions are NOT tax-deductible.

check to have links open new windows Monday, March 06, 2006 Open Thread by Joe in DC - 3/06/2006 05:47:00 PM You know it's a slow news day when the ABC Breaking News email is that NASCAR picked the site for their Hall of Fame. The Governor of South Dakota signed the abortion bill setting the court challenge in motion. Congressman Bill Thomas (R-CA) is retiring.

Let's hope he starts a trend for the GOP. And tomorrow is primary day in Texas. Comment Permanent Link And if you believe this one.

.. US military and intelligence officials have suddenly found evidence of Iran arming the insurgents in Iraq by John in DC - 3/06/2006 05:45:00 PM You have got to be kidding .

Suddenly after 3 years we conveniently find evidence of Iran arming the Iraqi insurgents, only a mere weeks after Bush starts laying the groundwork for attacking Iran. Gee, how convenient is that. This is EXACTLY how they led us into Iraq under false pretenses.

And it's rather disturbing that ABC News reports this as an exclusive, yet doesn't bother mentioning that critics worry that this may be another ploy to get the US to attack a country in the region based on faulty or doctored intelligence. Comment Permanent Link New report: Religious right harms gay teens by John in DC - 3/06/2006 03:57:00 PM The report is right . These people are destroying kids lives.

It's time they were regulated, sued, and thrown in jail. Comment Permanent Link Poll shows majority in five Southern states disapproves of President Bush by John in DC - 3/06/2006 02:40:00 PM From AP : A majority of adults in five key Southern states disapproves of President Bush's job performance and says the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, according to an Elon University poll released Friday. In the survey, 52 percent of respondents said they disapproved or strongly disapproved of Bush's job performance, compared to 43 percent who said they approved or strongly approved.

Asked whether the war with Iraq was worth fighting, a slim majority _ 51 percent _ said no, while just 44 percent said yes. All five of the states polled _ Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida _ went to Bush in the 2004 presidential election by margins ranging from 58 percent in South Carolina and Georgia to 52 percent in Florida. Less than 18 months later, Bush isn't even close to majority approval in any of those states.

Comment Permanent Link Conservative Jews voting to end their ban on gay rabbis and same sex unions by Joe in DC - 3/06/2006 11:26:00 AM This is an interesting -- and hopefully, profound -- development . It's significant that this group is even considering lifting the ban: In a closed-door meeting this week in an undisclosed site near Baltimore, a committee of Jewish legal experts who set policy for Conservative Judaism will consider whether to lift their movement's ban on gay rabbis and same-sex unions. There seem to be many reasons for the Conservative Jews to consider this action.

First, they know more gays: Conservative Jewish leaders say, they have watched as relatives, congregation members and even fellow rabbis publicly revealed their homosexuality. Second, they don't want to look out of touch: There are those who are saying, don't change the halacha because the paradigm model of the heterosexual family has to be maintained, said Rabbi Meyers, a stance he said he shared. On the other hand is a group within the movement who say, look, we will lose thoughtful younger people if we don't make this change, and the movement will look stodgy and behind the times.

And, bottom line, the change will happen eventually anyway: Many students at the seminary say they find the gay ban offensive and would welcome a change, said Daniel Klein, a rabbinical student who helps lead Keshet, a gay rights group on campus. It's part of the tradition to change, so we're entirely within tradition, he said. Mr.

Klein said that even if the law committee did not lift the ban this week, change would come eventually. Imagine what will happen 10 years from now when some of my colleagues are on the law committee, when people from my generation are on the law committee, he said. It's not going to be a close vote.

This last point is key. The right wing knows that change is coming..

.that's why they want to enshrine hate in the constitution. Comment Permanent Link Washington Post corrects itself over Katrina by John in DC - 3/06/2006 10:02:00 AM You never know if these things are indicative of a response to a concern we raised, or whether it's just a coincidence, but the blogs complained a few days ago about the Washington Post's reporting on the new Katrina video.

The Post reported on the video, but failed to even mention potentially the most important part of the video, that it contradicts Bush's claim that no one could have imagined the levees breaching (in fact, Bush was briefed about this very possibility in the video, a briefing that happened BEFORE the storm hit). The Post didn't mention this, but on Friday, two days ago, they wrote a front page story on this very issue. Whether or not the Post responded to the concerns we all raised, the point is they did the right thing, they wrote the story that needed to be written - needed to be written as dictated by the very facts of the story - and they get kudos for that.

Here's the article . It's good. Comment Permanent Link Bad polls numbers on Iraq by Joe in DC - 3/06/2006 08:52:00 AM If you were President, you'd probably start to worry about these new numbers from the Washington Post-ABC News poll .

They show that, as John Murtha says, the American people are way ahead of the politicians on Iraq: An overwhelming majority of the public believe fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq will lead to civil war and half say the U.S. should begin withdrawing its forces from that violence-torn country, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey found that 80 percent believed that recent sectarian violence made civil war in Iraq likely, and more than a third said such a conflict was very likely to occur. Expectations for an all-out sectarian war in Iraq extended beyond party lines. More than seven in 10 Republicans and eight in 10 Democrats and political independents believe civil war was likely.

In the face of the continuing violence, fully half--52 percent--of those surveyed said the United States should begin withdrawing forces. But only one in six favored immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq. The Post will have the rest of the poll at 5 PM today.

Comment Permanent Link Monday Morning Open Thread by Joe in DC - 3/06/2006 07:54:00 AM Here we go again. What new horrors will unfold from team Bush this week? Comment Permanent Link Homeland Security not so secure by Chris in Paris - 3/06/2006 04:00:00 AM Chertoff really is as bad as Brownie says .

Sounds like Chertoff is priming himself for a Congressional Medal of Honor at this pace. Did the hazard training team come from Chernobyl? Thank goodness this is the team that is responsible for protecting America.

For instance, when an envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at Homeland Security Department headquarters, guards said they watched in amazement as superiors carried it by the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff's window without evacuating people nearby. I had never previously been given training ..

. describing how to respond to a possible chemical attack, Daniels told The Associated Press. I wouldn't feel safe nowhere on this compound as an officer.

If the allegations brought forward by the whistleblowers are correct, they represent both a security threat and a waste of taxpayer dollars, Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote. It would be ironic, to say the least, if DHS were unable to secure its own headquarters.

Comment Permanent Link Another step closer to Big Brother by Chris in Paris - 3/06/2006 03:51:00 AM Just say no to more government surveillance . I don't trust this administration (or others for that matter) to have any more power to track and monitor Americans. If any government could show that they can resist the temptation to abuse information, perhaps, but in the mean time this proposed national ID card-like program is a bad idea.

I don't buy into the pitch that it will help stop illegal immigration or illegal workers because it won't. I really wish politicians would quite playing the 9/11 card as well and debate facts and not emotion for something so serious. Comment Permanent Link Sunday, March 05, 2006 Wesley Clark cuts to the point on port security by John in DC - 3/05/2006 11:26:00 PM The bottom line is that Bush still isn't inspecting cargo coming into the US, and if Osama wanted to just ship a nuke in, he could.

And after it goes off, Bush is going to say that no one could have imagined it. We have a president who is incapable of running our country during a time of war. Former Democratic presidential candidate Gen.

Wesley Clark, however, called for an overall strengthening of port security on This Week. It's weak, and it doesn't matter who owns it, Clark said. We're not inspecting the containers that are coming in.

We don't have the right radiation monitors out there. We don't know who's in the ports ..

. Comment Permanent Link What he said by John in DC - 3/05/2006 09:54:00 PM And finally, I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing.

We're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters.

I'm proud to be a part of this Academy. Proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch. George Clooney, at the Academy Awards Comment Permanent Link Oscare update thread by John in DC - 3/05/2006 09:28:00 PM Hmmmm, a bit overdone, that song.

.. Comment Permanent Link Murtha calls Chairman of the Jt.

Chiefs a liar (or an ignormaous) by John in DC - 3/05/2006 09:17:00 PM Good for Murtha. There's no other way to characterize what Murtha said this morning about the head of the US military, and he's right. The war in Iraq is not going very, very well.

At some point, our military leaders need to stop acting like they're running some banana republic, and start acting like they care about our troops and our nation. That war is a disaster, and George Bush is in over his head. From Meet the Press Murtha expressed skepticism of assurances given by Gen.

Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on NBC's ?Meet the Press? on Sunday.

Pace said the war in Iraq was going ?very, very well. ?

Why would I believe him?? said Murtha, D-Pa.

?This administration, including the president, has mischaracterized this war for the last two years ..

. So why would I believe the chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he says things are going well??

And isn't it funny that the Joint Chiefs had no problem challenging Bill Clinton over gays in the military, they have no problem getting together and challenging the Washington Post over a cartoon that didn't even do what they said it did, but when George Bush is running our military and this country into the ground, where are the Joint Chiefs? Comment Permanent Link Oscar open thread by John in DC - 3/05/2006 08:26:00 PM George Clooney got best supporting actor for Syriana, the rather confusing movie. Thoughts about other Oscars?

Comment Permanent Link Colorado Republican House member Marilyn Musgrave facilitates violation of military rules by John in DC - 3/05/2006 06:41:00 PM (Note the uniformed military service member behind Musgrave at the GOP event.) Josh Marshall informs us that the White House now has a plan to use, and is already using, active-duty US servicemen for partisan political purposes - which is kind of a big deal in a democracy where the military doesn't run the country, and where the war in Iraq and the war on terror are supposedly not political stunts. You can find Josh's accounts here and here .

Well, conservative Republican House member Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado (the lead force behind amending the US Constitution to take away the rights of gay Americans), actively facilitated the use of our servicemembers, IN UNIFORM , at a partisan Republican political function. Musgrave's use of uniformed military service personnel at partisan political events which is a direct violation of US military rules. Not to mention, you'd think our uniformed service members have better things to do (oh, I don't know, how about win in Iraq?

) than appear as props at Republican political events. Then again, Musgrave has already had her share of ethics violations, and has been ranked as one of the 13 most corrupt members of Congress. So it's perhaps no surprise she's breaking the rules again.

More from Josh: The existence of this ban and the enforcement of it are hugely important both to good order and discipline within the military and to preserving our democratic republic. The military can't be made into an arm of one or the other political party. Nor can the executive be allowed to enlist members of the armed forces, either individually or en masse, willingly or not, as soldiers in his domestic political battles.

This is about preserving a professional military and preserving our system of government. It's a big deal. We need to find out a few more specifics about what happened at the Musgrave event.

Perhaps the newspaper account is deeply misleading about what actually happened. But if this thing that looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is a duck, then it needs to be nipped in the bud. Comment Permanent Link Beautiful Sunday open thread by John in DC - 3/05/2006 04:07:00 PM It's sunny and warm, somewhere.

.. Comment Permanent Link If Ann Coulter were her fans' daughter, they'd call her a slut by John in DC - 3/05/2006 02:55:00 PM It's funny how Ann Coulter gets away with being such a conservative cultural marm when she lives the life of such a skank.

The woman lived in New York City, then moved to Palm Beach, dresses like a slut, and hangs out with gay men like Matt Drudge (a conservative closet case who lives in South Beach, where he moved from Hollywood). I'm sorry, but such is not the lifestyle of a raging conservative who has any credibility attacking liberal lifestyles. Ann lives the liberal lifestyle I can only dream of (except the tight slutty clothing).

And the real irony is that while conservatives love Coulter's rants against liberal morality, if she were their daughter and dressed the way she does, they'd ground her. Thus we lead into Ann's Oscar predictions. They're not really predictions, per se, the article is just another chance for Ann to launch bigoted attacks - this time calling gays homos and suggesting that Ang Lee will win an Academy Award for being Asian.

But the most atrocious and dangerous part of Coulter's article is her, once again, defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy. You see, Ann thinks Senator McCarthy, the guy who launched anti-communist witch hunts against so many innocent Americans based on no evidence whatsoever, well that Senator McCarthy got a bum rup in history, according to Ann. Here's an excerpt from her most recently article, that I won't be linking to: The best original screenplay will be Good Night, and Good Luck as Hollywood's final tribute to the old Stalinists (Hollywood's version of The Greatest Generation ).

Ah yes, the McCarthy years. The real crime was all the Stalinist liberals that the poor Senator had to root out. Coulter would be pathetic if she weren't so widely admired by Republicans.

She goes to their dinners and gets paid a pretty sum to spew her venomous bigotry. And the Republicans have no problem with it. Personally, Coulter can be as skanky as she wants, that's her business (well, if America were the way Coulter and her buddies on the far-right want it to be, she'd probably be stoned for the way she dressed and talk).

But if she's going to pretend to be a culture marm, while continuing to use her column and her pulpit to promote bigotry and, of all things, McCarthyism, then someone should let the papers that run Coulter's un-American bile know exactly what kind of filth they're distributing in good family newspapers. Comment Permanent Link GOP style DeLay bashing by Joe in DC - 3/05/2006 01:44:00 PM Tom DeLay has his GOP primary on Tuesday, March 7th. It hasn't been that much fun for him.

...

it's always good sport to watch the GOPers turn on each other : Campbell has gone straight for DeLay's ethics jugular. In one television ad, he contends DeLay was distracted by his legal troubles. In another, residents of DeLay's district repeatedly describe Campbell using the word integrity.

Mr. DeLay is unelectable and Republicans in our district have a choice. They can either elect a conservative that doesn't carry the baggage Mr.

DeLay carries or one that Nick Lampson has the ability to beat, Campbell said. It's time for Mr. DeLay to come home.

Comment Permanent Link Lead gay activists ask Oscar winners to speak out in favor of equal marriage rights for gays by John in DC - 3/05/2006 12:19:00 PM N E W S R E L EA S E For Immediate Release: March 5, 2006 Can Oscar Marry Oscar? Same-Sex Couples Suing for California Equal Marriage Rights Ask Academy Awards Recipients to Come Out in Support When They Receive Their Oscars Los Angeles - Robin Tyler, with her partner, Diane Olson, and The Reverend Dr. Troy D.

Perry and his husband, Phillip Ray De Blieck, the first couples to file suit in California for equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians, today called on actors, producers, directors and anyone who accepts awards based on gay, transgender, or progressive-themed movies, to come out publicly in support of same-sex marriage during the 78th Annual Academy Awards on Sunday, March 5, 2006.. The Hollywood community has given us a tremendous gift by nominating great achievements such as Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Felicity Hoffman in TransAmerica.

Despite the cultural recognition, gay people are still second-class citizens in the United States. We ask the tremendously talented people involved in these movies to come out in support of same-sex marriage to the tens of millions who will be watching the Awards, Tyler and Perry said in a joint statement today. Nobody will be hurt if Thelma gets to marry Louise, or Oscar holds hands with Oscar, said Robin Tyler, plaintiff in the lawsuit Tyler vs.

County of Los Angeles. In the United States, the L word means 'Lesbians' -- but it also means 'Less' rights. The Reverend Dr.

Troy D. Perry, the first openly gay member of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and founder of the 43,000 member Metropolitan Community Churches, said, The Hollywood community has a great Academy Awards' tradition of speaking out for social justice issues. This year's Oscar recipients have an opportunity to honor movies with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes by speaking out for full legal equality, including marriage equality, for LGBT people.

Perry's Metropolitan Community Churches perform more than 6000 same-gender marriages each year. These marriages are blessed by God and our communities, but are still denied recognition by our government. (END) For Additional Information or Press Interviews, Contact: Robin Tyler (818) 893-4075 The Reverend Dr.

Troy Perry (310) 625-4177 Comment Permanent Link Archive 04/01/2004 - 04/30/2004 05/01/2004 - 05/31/2004 06/01/2004 - 06/30/2004 07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004 08/01/2004 - 08/31/2004 09/01/2004 - 09/30/2004 10/01/2004 - 10/31/2004 11/01/2004 - 11/30/2004 12/01/2004 - 12/31/2004 01/01/2005 - 01/31/2005 02/01/2005 - 02/28/2005 03/01/2005 - 03/31/2005 04/01/2005 - 04/30/2005 05/01/2005 - 05/31/2005 06/01/2005 - 06/30/2005 07/01/2005 - 07/31/2005 08/01/2005 - 08/31/2005 09/01/2005 - 09/30/2005 10/01/2005 - 10/31/2005 11/01/2005 - 11/30/2005 12/01/2005 - 12/31/2005 01/01/2006 - 01/31/2006 02/01/2006 - 02/28/2006 03/01/2006 - 03/31/2006 AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth ...

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