Daily Archives: 10/01/2011

(Community Matters) reading Frank Rich’s story in Oct 3 New York Magazine while on Amtrak to DC, “In Praise of Extremism.”

“Pew has found that nearly half of independents are in fact either faithful Democrats (21%) or Republicans (26%) who simply don’t want to call themselves Democrats or Republicans. (Can you blame them?) Another 20% are ‘doubting Democrats’ and another 16% are ‘disaffected’ voters, respectively anti-business and anti-government, angry and populist rather than mildly centrist. The remaining 17% are what Pew calls ‘disengaged’-young and uneducated Americans, four fifths of whom don’t vote anyway. There’s nothing about the makeup of any segment of these ‘all important independent voters’ that suggest bipartisan civility has anything whatsoever to do with winning their support” posted from my blackberry

(Community Matters) Thanks to my friend Joe Liemandt, a bunch of us flew to New York yesterday to have dinner with Mr. Buffett.

Warren Buffett, Joe Liemandt, Andy Tobias

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It was beyond a great trip and evening. Warren was completely gracious, warm and candid. He even gave an important stock tip and freely discussed everything from his observations about the economic recovery (businesses are well positioned, consumer spending is returning), doesn’t worry about deflation, Europe a problem (but doesn’t believe high probability/high impact US contagion), monetary policy v Keynesian (we’ve probably done what we can – the housing overhang is taking time), that his taxes this decade have been at the lowest rate ever, and that people will pay a premium to live and work in the USA (taxes).

I love his genie stories (2 of them, ask me). And, he appears to have near perfect recall citing esoteric statistics with ease and a passage from Andy’s book that Andy even had to stop to recall.

Kirk Rudy, Marc Winkelman, Laura & Morris Gottesman, Joe Ross & Walt Penn joined us on the flight & dinner. Jack & Ava McDonald, Andra Liemandt, Erin Driscoll and Wesley Gottesman flew with us to NY. Robert & Marcy Garriott joined us at dinner. After, a few of us had drinks with Austan Goolsbee. Agapi Stassinopoulos joined us at the end – great to catch up with her and talk about her new book.