Monthly Archives: August 2008

(Community Matters) The diet of the winningest Olympic athlete ever

Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.

Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.

Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.

here

(Community Matters) Matt Cooper rates Condi Rice

Is there a lesson here for business folks? I think it’s that the appearance of competence and executive authority can be misleading. rest here

(Community Matters) Funny and real

(Community Matters) From John Thornton’s Insomniactive

George Schultz: “If they are too big to fail, make them smaller”

(Community Matters) Sat for a long interview yesterday with Carol & Jack of Delta Associates to discuss an organization they’re helping with. Was enlightening to reflect back 12 – 15 years and to see two evolutionary stages of an organization while contemplating needs for a third. What allowed you to arrive where you are and what will it take to get to where you want to go? Heck, where even do you want to go?!? And, WHY? Is it furthering the original mission or has the mission changed, or does it need to change? What was and what is the vision? Are we talking about strategy, objectives or tactics? Realizing I get a mental picture of the vision in my head, like the jaws of a bulldog. Also realizing, I have to build that mental vision or risk being a flapper.

(Community Matters) Our good friend, Thinkwell CEO Carl Tyson sent me a note yesterday (for which I’m very grateful) about NetSquared.org. I hadn’t heard of this site. Their mission:

to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There’s a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as “Web 2.0”; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

(Community Matters) If you haven’t read this WSJ article on Obama’s tax plan, you should. here

Written by Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, economic policy director and senior economic adviser to Obama, respectively, they discuss tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 and a roll back of tax rates for those making more than $250,000 BUT at no higher capital gains or ordinary income rates than those of the 1990s. As well, there are tax cuts for small businesses.

Compare and contrast to extended tax cuts in McCain’s plans for the very wealthiest Americans and corporations, tax cuts which further enlarge the national deficit and do nothing to relieve the burden on middle income families.

(Community Matters) Regrettably, Nangini was found floating in the pond this morning, not alive. I fished her out. No obvious signs of injury. No idea what caused her death. We had Steven’s cousins and their three young children over last night for a swimming and pizza party. We looked for her and couldn’t find her. Hadn’t seen her in a few weeks. bummed.

(Community Matters) I’m so with Pelosi on this one. Lieberman left the party, he doesn’t even need to be kicked out. As for chairing the Senate committee, we need +2 then the alliance should be completely done.

(Community Matters) Today’s Ben Sargent cartoon is eery, anyhow . .

Mikhail Gorbachev argues that Russia’s invasion of Georgia is the fault of Georgia for upsetting autonomy and mounting an unprovoked military attack against the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

Asmus & Holbrooke argue that Georgia was responding to repeated attacks from separatists funded and controlled by the Kremlin.

Bush is sending aid to Georgia and demanding withdraw of Russian troops. Does the pipeline constitute our national interest or is it European interests?

(Community Matters) So, no surprise I am against windfall profits taxes. Nevertheless, I am not a defender of oil & gas companies. I’ve heard the rhetoric that the oil companies pay an extraordinary amount of taxes. After reading this morning’s letter to the editor citing that Exxon Mobil paid as much as the bottom half of all Americans in income taxes last year, I had to check out the numbers.

So what I learned reviewing their 2007 annual report: their financial statements report $30B in income tax expense. And, if I’m reading the cash flow statement correctly, I only show $124 million deferred and in credits. Thus, it would appear Exxon did in fact pay 43% of its net earnings in income taxes (7% of $403B in revenues). Expenses included $1.5B for exploration and $12B in depreciation and depletion (the formulas for depletion are another form of questionable tax break frankly).

Also during the year, Exxon Mobil spent $15B investing in plant, property & equipment, paid $8B in dividends to shareholders and $33B buying back its own stock (effectively another dividend to shareholders). They ended the year with $34B in cash.

Tax credits and special allowances: I don’t know enough about these. Yet intuitively it pisses me off that while oil was selling for $60/barrel, Congress passed tax credits and tax breaks totaling $1.6B (July ’05 Bloomberg here) including waiving certain royalties for deep water holes. When Democrats tried to rescind oil company tax breaks & redirect these incentives to alternative energy earlier this year, Republicans blocked the legislation and Bush threatened a veto. Even though I oppose a windfall profits tax, the GOP and O&G interests might see it as a not-surprising populist response to lavish government treatment over the years & its insidious opposition to green house gas consciousness.

(Community Matters) I hadn’t heard of Senator Byrd’s new book, Letter to a New President: Common Sense Lessons for our Next President until reading this excellent blog posting this morning.