Seriously, are we fooling anyone? I wonder if the call would go any worse even if the support answered with “my name is Nandakumar but you can call me Tim”.

As we come out of a presidential election season the topic of authenticity is near and dear to me. The classic joke is “how can you tell when a politician is lying… his lips are moving”. In many ways the election became referendum against an unpopular president, a war and a financial meltdown. But I also wonder if authenticity played a part. Sometimes when I listen to a candidate I am not even convinced that he or she believes what they are saying. My young college age kids are particularly cynical to what they see and hear. They heard in Obama someone who they could believe. In part, because they believed he at least believed what he was saying.

Authenticity is unfortunately and unnecessarily rare both in politics and corporate messages. Who do you believe?

Tags: WarrenBuffet, Ed Dale, Internet Marketing, Economy

Who cares who becomes president. I am ready to vote for Warren Buffet for Secretary of the Treasury. Buffet has been warning for some time about some of the problems that we are now dealing with in the financial sector. He will make money in this crisis because he is a smart guy. This is kind of guy we need to listen to.

An actual letter to the passport office

Dear Bureaucrats:

I’m in the process of renewing my passport, and still cannot believe this. How is it that Radio Shack has my address and telephone number and knows that I bought a t.v. cable from them back in 1997, and yet, the Federal Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date? For Christ sakes, do you guys do this by hand? My birth date you have on my social security card, and it is on all the income tax forms I’ve filed for the past 30 years. It is on my health insurance card, my driver’s license, on the last eight passports I’ve had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I’ve had to fill out before being allowed off the planes over the last 30 years, and all those insufferable census forms that are done at electi on times. Would somebody please take note, once and for all, that my mother’s name is Mary Anne, my father’s name is Robert and I’d be absolutely astounded if that ever changed between now and when I die!!!!!! !

I apologize; I’m just really pissed off this morning. Between you an’ me, I’ve had enough of this bullshit – just look at the incredible lack of common sense here! You send the application to my house, then you ask me for my address!?! . What is going on? You must have a gang of Neanderthal ass holes working’ there! Look at my damn picture. Do I look like Bin Laden? I don’t want to dig up Yasser Arafat, for Christ sakes. I just want to go and park my ass on a sandy beach.

And would someone please tell me, why would you give a crap whether I plan on visiting a farm in the next 15 days? If I ever got the urge to do something weird to a c hicken or a g oat, believe you me, I’d sure as hell not want to tell anyone! Well, I have to go now, ’cause I have to go to the other end of the city and get another copy of my birth certificate, to the tune of $60.

And that brings up another point. Would it be so complicated to have all the services in the same spot to assist in the issuance of a new passport the same day?? Nooooo, that’d be too damn easy and maybe makes sense. You’d rather have us running all over the place like chickens with our heads cut off, then find some ass hole to confirm that it’s really me on the picture – you know, the one where we’re not allowed to smile?! ( morons) Hey, you know why we can’t smile? We’re totally pissed off!

Signed – An Irate Citizen.

P.S. Remember what I said above about the picture and getting someone to confirm that it’s me? Well, my family has been in this country since 1776 . I have served in the military for something over 30 years and have had security clearances up the ying yang. However, I have to get someone ‘important’ to verify who I am – you know, someone like my doctor WHO WAS BORN AND RAISED IN COMMUNIST CHINA!

Sincerely,

You Sure In The Hell Should Know Who.

I actually doubt this is a real letter but it has spread like wildfire on the Internet because it highlights the kind of frustrations that normal citizens have working with government bureaucracy. I have seen interactions like this in a whole new light after conversations with my wife. She is studying for a masters in public administration and one of the things that they studied was why bureaucracies were setup in the first place and what the advantages of them are. “What?” you say. “They have advantages?”

The idea is that a government bureaucracy is a solution to cronyism. You may get bad service when you go to the passport office or the DMV, but you get the same bad service as everyone else. You don’t have to know someone, or slip someone a bribe to get service. The bureaucracy, when it works as designed, is indifferent to you and who you are or who you know.

When a company provides bad service people will move their business over time to a competitor that provides better service. When you are frustrated with the line at the DMV or filling out your tax forms, people seldom decide that they will move to a different state or a different country where they might get better service. This lack of competition clearly removes some incentive for service and I think we all know that. We also see in industries with less competition where customers have fewer options we also tend to have poorer service. Think of your telephone company or cable provider.

But the situation is more complicated than that. When a company provides good service and steals business from their competition they get more business and therefore more money. When a government bureaucracy is more efficient at best it only gets more work. An agency that can figure out how to do more work with fewer people will probably get their budget slashed and will indeed end up with fewer people. It will not end up with more money coming in and fewer people as it might in a private sector company which could translate to higher profits or salaries or both.

So how do we change these fundamental rules? How would we provide incentives for government employees other than seniority. While getting older may be an accomplishment, it is should not be the only thing we value. If you have ideas… please take a number and wait in line 3 over there.

“Is it cynical of me to characterize the election as choosing between hope (with no specifics) over fear (with no answers)?”

It looks like other’s had that a similar thought today. From Seth Godin’s blog:

It’s too easy to criticize hope

And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy.

If you have been paying attention to the Democratic primaries you may have noticed that Barak Obama has to date won more delegates in the various primaries and caucuses than has Hillary Clinton. So you might be surprised that as of today Obama has 158 delegates and Clinton has 232. What? How can that be? The answer is “super delegates”.

In 1972 George McGovern lost in a landslide election tot Richard Nixon. In response to that the Democratic party changed the nomination process so that 842 delegates in 2008 will not be chosen by voters but instead by party leaders.

This surprisingly undemocratic process was created to prevent a candidate from being nominated who is out of sync with the rest of the party. Either this process should be updated or perhaps the party needs to change its name. But “not quite democratic party” does not have a great ring.

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.At first blush, the spoof seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan’s thinness.But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” – listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old – they found the movie didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.

ABC News: Al Gore YouTube Spoof Not So Amateurish

My first reaction was how sleasy, but my second was how funny and clever. I think all of those apply.

During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.

But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D’s in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

Bush on the other hand did seem to have the better photographer. Ouch John, you should have burned that one.

I was reminded of this by this articleby David Horowitz in response to quote about Mr Horowitz in Al Franken’s recent book. In the book, Mr Franken refers to Mr Horowitz as a “guest racist” on the show Hannity & Colmes.

The “guest racist” bit, of course, was entirely gratuitous, It was casually interjected as though it referred to an obvious and widely recognized fact. This is typical fairness for Franken.

As it happens I marched in my first civil rights protest in 1948 before Al Franken was born. For more than fifty years I have supported minorities and defended their civil rights in public word and deed, and raised millions of dollars to help inner city minorities whom racism has scarred. In fact there is no single cause – except America’s wars against totalitarian foes – to which I have devoted myself more consistently that than that of racial equality. Not a shred of evidence exists to the contrary. I have written more than a million words on racial and political matters — all of them public record. There is not a single sentence, or phrase, or comment of mine that could be cited to justify Franken’s attack.

I write not in defense of any opinion Horowitz may have expressed on the show. I would not be surprised to find out that his politics are more conservative than mine as I am certain that Franken’s are more liberal. But I was sensitive to the libel in the accusation (not legally libel as it falls in what the courts consider opinion). I have also heard the accusation raised against President Bush recently as if it were a well known fact that he is a racist. Now, I did not vote for Bush in the last election as i have mentioned previously, but I don’t find the accusation consistent with either his appointments nor with the personal stories I hear from those who know him. Can there ever be a day when we can disagree with people without assuming they are stupid or bigoted or unpatriotic?