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आप पार्टी बनने के बाद पार्टी मे छिपा भीतरी धमासान भी सामने आया और अरविंद जी यही बोलते रहे कि सब लोग नए है कोई राजनीति भूमि से नही है कोई अनुभव नही है धीरे धीरे समय बीता और पार्टी को सत्ता से जाना पडा. फिर दुबारा पार्टी का धूमधडाके से अगमन हुआ अब पार्टी पर जो  ऎल” या नौसिखिया की मोहर लगी है अब हटेगी या अब भी वैसे ही लगी रहेगी यही बात अरविंद केजरीवाल भी बता रहे है कि ये भी जनता से ही पूछना पडेगा कि “एल” का निशान लगा रहने दें या हटा दें पर जो हो भीतरी धमासान अभी भी जारी है.

The post Cartoon .. Public Opinion appeared first on Monica Gupta.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Howard Dean. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

The year is 1964, the high watermark of Liberalism. Lyndon Johnson takes 61.1 percent of the popular vote in his election contest against Barry Goldwater, an electoral feat that was bigger than Franklin Roosevelt’s 60.8 percent in 1936 and one that has not been surpassed in the years since. The Democratic tsunami sweeps down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, where Democrats would out-number Republicans two to one in the 89th Congress, and in the Senate they take 68 seats – the biggest supermajority held by any party to this day. The era of Liberalism had entered its Golden Age.

Unified by the inspiring memory of John Kennedy, Democrats were able to enact health-care legislation that even Franklin Roosevelt, the father of modern Liberalism did not have the stomach to attempt as part of his New Deal. It would be Lyndon Johnson, not Harry Truman, not FDR, and not his counsin, Theodore Roosevelt (running as the Progressive Party candidate in 1912) who would enact the single biggest health-care legislation in US history, offering single-payer, comprehensive health-care benefits to seniors over the age of 65 (Medicare) and an option for states to finance the health-care of the indigent (Medicaid) in the Social Security Act of 1965.

We remember the New Deal, and perhaps the Fair Deal, but it is the Great Society that is the apotheosis of 20th century Liberalism. And if 1965 is Liberalism’s high water-mark, then those who would stymie health-care reform today because of the lack of a robust (or indeed, any) public option have gravely gotten their decades mixed up.

There was a time when Liberals did not have to call themselves “Progressives.” That was four decades ago, when Lyndon Johnson attacked Barry Goldwater for wanting to roll back social security and openly campaigned for a further expansion of the welfare state. Times have changed. Today’s Progressives must cagily wrap their Liberal agenda with talk of choice, competition, and bending cost curves. And if the era of Liberalism as FDR and Johnson knew it is over, The Age of Reagan lingers on in the Tea Party Movement. Despite his aspiration to build an even Greater Society than Johnson, Barack Obama’s electoral mandate is 18 percent short of what Johnson possessed in 1965; the Democratic majority is the House is much smaller; and, despite the new cloture rules post-1975 in the Senate which has reduced the fraction of votes needed to end debate from 2/3 to 3/5, Joe Lieberman et al remind us every day that the Senate is anything but filibuster-proof.

To Governor Dean and his compatriots, it is 2009, not 1965.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s health care debacle. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As the wise saying goes “if you’ve nothing good to say, don’t say anything.” But President Barack Obama went ahead anyway with a prime time press conference, and as Bill O’Reilly was right to observe on Wednesday night - he said practically nothing specific about what the shape of the health-care bill would look like and viewers were left scratching their heads.

President Obama wanted to let Congress take ownership of the bill, rather than hand them a fait accompli (as Hillary Clinton did back in 1993/4), I hear Democrats chant in his defense. But if Obama wants to stay on the side-lines, then he should do so consistently. Either be genuinely deferential to Congress and stay out of the picture until a consensus emerges, or take complete ownership of the agenda - don’t try to do both. Yet the president is back in the limelight doing prime-time press conferences, and attending town hall meetings in Cleveland and such. Obama should decide which way he wants to go. If he is the salesman-in-chief, then he has to have something to sell, if not his consumers would be left completely befuddled as to why he’s putting on a show for no particular reason at all.

Liberals are mad that Obama didn’t throw a few more punches at Republicans. I think many are unwilling to admit the more pointed fact that he just didn’t do a very good job at all, because he didn’t have much to say.

So Wednesday’s press conference was a squandered opportunity. We are not in 2008 anymore when Barack Obama would announce that he is giving a speech and the whole world would stop to listen. The clock is ticking on his presidential luster, and the next time he says “hey, listen to me,” it’s going to be that much harder.

Let us be clear why health-care reform has stalled, at least till the Fall. Because the Congress, and in particular the Senate Finance Committee could not agree on a way forward. I don’t see why the President and his advisers thought that a prime time press conference last Wednesday night would have gotten things moving. In fact it probably achieved the exact opposite, when we heard on Thursday morning from Senator Harry Reid that a Senate vote before the August recess would not be possible. The president’s time would have been better spent persuading his former colleagues up on the hill in private conversations to compromise on a bill. When they’ve got a bill and all/most are united, then go out and do the media blitzkrieg, by all means. Wednesday night just wasn’t the time for that.

So it looks like the Permanent Campaign is back. The President has chosen to go back to campaign mode, selling himself. Because without a specific plan to sell, all his public appearances amount to going public for the sake of going public. This strategy belies a serious misunderstanding of American politics. Personal approval ratings do not translate to public support for specific policy proposals (not that they were forthcoming) - the president should have known this by now. They barely even translate into congressional support for presidential policies.

This error - of going public with nothing specific to sell - was compounded, and probably encouraged, by a complete underestimation of the push back from the conservative wing of the Demcoratic party (the “Blue Dogs”) worried about spiraling deficits. These were the people Obama should have been talking to. And given he’s still out town hall-ing and speechifying, I’m not sure he fully understands what came over him.

To make matters worse, Obama had to pour fuel over the fire of the Henry Louis Gates controversy during the press conference, accusing the Cambridge police of of a “stupid” arrest when he had incomplete possession of the facts. Have something to say about anything all the time has become the rhetorical ethic of the modern presidency. Obama’s observance of this ethic was a disastrous distraction to what little point he had to make at his press conference. The news cycles are now spending more time covering the Gates controversy than they are covering the health-care debate.

I’m afraid to say - though this is water under the bridge - that Hillary Clinton would have known better. This week, for the first time in his fledgling presidency, Obama looked like a total novice in Washington. His 4th press conference was a waste of time, and probably the first time since Obama broke onto the national scene in 2004 that his rhetorical wizardry had fallen so flatly on death ears. He seems to have bought the bad conventional advice - whenever you’re in trouble, just go out and give a speech - wholesale. The president should take heed:

1. The public is less attentive between election years and he must have something meaningful to say if he wants to keep their attention.
2. Especially on a complex issue like health-care where there are too many details to cover, the media is much more likely to jump at an opportunity to take the path of least resistance to cover something juicier, like Henry Louis Gates and racial profiling.
2. Just because the public (still) loves Obama doesn’t mean that they will love what he is doing as president (and not as presidential candidate).
3. It is often more important to talk to members of Congress - the people who actually pass legislation - than to deliver speeches around the nation where the only tangible return of applause is a fleeting sense of psychic gratification that one is loved.

President Obama, it’s crunch time. Stop yakking.

I am doing my very first bookstore event this coming weekend. Today was my birthday and we decided to go to Belleville and toot around downtown for a bit, and we came to the bookstore - Greenley's books On Front Street (best bookstore ever), and they were starting to put up a window display of my book (okay, so I knew they were there, and wanted to see, but absolutely did not expect this!) Here are some pics, I am so honoured, and so very glad I am working with these folks, they are warm, friendly - and BOY do they know books. No website that I could find though - bummer.

Ethics, the foundation of a working society, are especially important in a patient/surgeon relationship. In The Ethics of Surgical Practice: Cases, Dilemmas, and Resolutions authors James W. Jones, M.D., Ph.D., M.H.A, Laurence B. McCullough, Ph.D, and Bruce W. Richman, M.A., provide a collection of clinical case studies representing a wide range of the ethical issues surgeons confront today. In the excerpt below the authors ask, how to balance the privacy rights of a famous patient with the public’s right to know?

Fama volat (The rumour has wings)
Virgil (70–19 bc), Aeneid

The governor of your state has had a three-vessel coronary bypass graft at your center. Three weeks later he is returned unconscious to the hospital after suffering a right hemiparetic stroke while catching up on paperwork in his office. An emergency arteriogram reveals embolus to the left internal carotid artery at the bifurcation. As you leave the operating room following an emergency carotid endarterectomy with embolectomy, you are met by the hospital’s public information officer and the governor’s top political aide. They inform you that the press corps is assembled in the auditorium and expects you to provide them with a detailed description of the governor’s condition and prognosis.

You should respond by:
(A) Acknowledging the press’s right to know about a public official and providing an immediate and complete report on the governor’s presenting symptoms, the operation performed, his current condition, and his prognosis.
(B) Requesting advice from the political aide about how the governor would like the situation presented.
(C) Insisting that a report to the press await authorization from the governor or his next-of-kin.
(D) Refusing to meet the press.
(E) Relying upon the public information officer to direct you in implementing the hospital’s disclosure policy on treatment of public figures.

Many of us have been involved in or observed the frenzy of activity generated by hospitalization of a celebrity or prominent public official, particularly when emergency treatment for a life-threatening condition is involved. The convergence of news media places extraordinary demands upon the hospital, and the institution’s staff and management naturally want to be favorably represented by these highly influential opinion-makers. Representatives of the press will often assert the public’s right to know important information about highranking government officials or entertainment figures who experience medical crises, cite the press freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution, and insist upon your full cooperation in describing the patient’s condition and medical care. Nevertheless, neither the public nor the press have a statutory entitlement that outweighs a patient’s right to confidentiality in seeking or receiving medical care, and patients do not relinquish that right when they become public figures. The American College of Surgeons’ Statement on Principles requires that “the surgeon should maintain the confidentiality of information from and about the patient, except as such information must be communicated for the patient’s proper care or as is required by law.” The United States Constitution’s guarantee of a free press imposes an obligation upon government to refrain from interfering with the gathering and dissemination of information; it does not require individuals or nongovernmental institutions, such as physicians or hospitals, to satisfy the demands of journalists. The “public’s right to know” is an artificial concept promoted by the press, not a constitutional or moral right. Option (A) is inconsistent with your ethical obligation to insure confidentiality in the doctor-patient relationship.

Option (B), accepting guidance from the governor’s aide about the manner and degree of information to be disclosed about the governor’s condition, is unacceptable because the aide has no authority as next-of-kin or legal surrogate to speak for the governor in personal matters. Although the political adviser may speak with great authority and in the expectation that you and other members of the hospital staff will respond obediently to his directives, his opinions and desire to control the flow of information are irrelevant to your professional relationship with your patient.

Option (D), refusing to meet with the assembled press, is certain to project an unnecessary attitude of arrogance and hostility that will poorly serve the fine hospital in which you practice, and which values the community’s good will. Your refusal will also insure that some other member of the hospital staff, one who does not share your special fiduciary relationship with the patient, will be sent to the press room and probably discuss the governor’s condition and your case management in a manner neither you nor your patient is likely to approve of. You may visit the press room and advise the assembled journalists that until your awake and alert patient, his next-of-kin, or legally designated surrogate authorizes you to release medical information, you are prevented by rules of confidentiality from doing so. You may apologize for any inconvenience to the group, ask that they respect the patient’s right to privacy in his medical care, and assure them that appropriate information will be made available at such time as the patient’s permission is received.

Option (E), permitting the hospital’s public relations officer to interpret the hospital’s disclosure policy and direct your actions, surrenders your fiduciary role. Maintaining confidentiality in the physician-patient relationship is your responsibility, and it should not be ceded to a nonprofessional whose primary goals may not entirely reflect your ethical values. Even assuming no unethical or misguided motives in the public relation’s officer’s recommendations, you the attending physician should not permit yourself to be governed by support staff who do not share your responsibilities.

Option (C), declining to disclose sensitive medical information about your well-known patient until he or an appropriate surrogate authorizes such disclosures, insures that the physician-patient privilege is protected. Although your patient is an important political figure upon whom the public depends for the complete and efficient operation of state government, the physician’s relationship with him is identical to that of a patient who does not reside in the public arena. Famous patients are entitled to all the consideration the medical profession affords private citizens, including personal respect and confidentiality. Even when, and if, the patient, spouse, or legal surrogate authorizes public release of medical information, the patient maintains the authority to control how and how much material will be made publicly available. The patient, not the physician, not the hospital, and not the press, is the owner of his medical information, and only he and his designated surrogates should decide upon the form and content of its disclosure.

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Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America.  In this article, Zelinsky argues that Senators Obama and McCain have confirmed the malfunction of campaign finance reform, that this is a healthy development for American democracy, and that the current system of campaign finance reform should be replaced by a simplified disclosure regime.

The most important event of the 2008 presidential campaign may already have occurred: The major party nominees have publicly confirmed the malfunction of campaign finance reform. Such reform has imposed increasingly complex and stringent limitations on the contributions of political donors and on the expenditures of political campaigns.

Senator Obama had been an outspoken apostle of campaign finance reform. At the outset of his presidential effort, Senator Obama had proclaimed his commitment to accept public financing and its accompanying expenditure restrictions for his general election campaign. He has now turned 180 degrees. Senator Obama will now eschew public financing and its attendant limits and will instead fund his general election effort with private donations to escape those limits.

Senator McCain’s change of heart is more complex but even more dramatic. Senator McCain was the prime Republican sponsor of the most recent tightening of federal restrictions on campaigns and donors, the eponymous McCain-Feingold Act. While he will accept public financing in the fall, Senator McCain’s supporters are actively and openly exploiting every legal loophole they can find to permit private contributors to assist his candidacy beyond the restrictions imposed by that Act. The irony is palpable. Senator McCain’s supporters are now assiduously seeking to erode the very constraints on donors and campaigns which Senator McCain had championed.

It is easy to criticize Senators Obama and McCain for their inconsistency. I suggest, however, that there is a broader significance to these events. Senators Obama and McCain have confirmed the malfunction of campaign finance reform. We should now kill this complex and unfair regulatory scheme. American democracy will be healthier without the myriad restrictions which limit Americans’ ability to contribute to the candidates of their choice.

The fundamental premises upon which campaign finance reform rests are false: Money in politics is a bad thing which can and ought to be limited legislatively. On the contrary, for many Americans, a financial contribution is today the only meaningful way, besides voting, they can assist the candidates they support. In any event, campaign contributions cannot be controlled fairly and effectively. Another form of Prohibition has failed.

Consider the simpler era in which I grew up. Working on political campaigns along with other volunteers, my friends and I would meet at local party headquarters and fan out to distribute bumper stickers and campaign buttons to our neighbors. It seems quaint because, in retrospect, it was.

Contrast this low budget, Ozzie-and-Harriet world with the consultant-driven, TV-saturated campaigns which constituted primary season 2008. In these campaigns, the citizen-volunteers have largely been subordinated to the full-time, paid, professional operatives who ran these campaigns. In this environment, a financial contribution is, besides voting, the most meaningful form of support many, probably most, Americans can make to the candidate they support.

Moreover, the attempt to limit the influence of money by law, propounded as a means of leveling the political playing field, has instead reinforced the political power of the celebrities in our celebrity-based culture. During the 2008 primary campaign, both Oprah Winfrey and Chuck Norris provided enormously valuable assistance to the Obama and Huckabee campaigns, generating publicity worth hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars for the candidates they supported. None of this celebrity assistance is capped by McCain-Feingold, despite the obvious value of that assistance.

In contrast, if a non-celebrity citizen favoring a competing candidate sought to counteract celebrity-generated publicity by donating equivalent funds to purchase offsetting advertising, that citizen would have violated the law. If, for example, a supporter of Governor Romney sought to counteract Mr. Norris’s efforts via a campaign donation of $2,500 (a tiny fraction of Mr. Norris’s effective but unregulated contribution to Governor Huckabee), that Romney supporter broke the law which limited him to a $2,300 contribution. Campaign finance reform, it turns out, is just for the little people.

It is unsurprising that this system is now in disarray. The current system, with its complex contribution limits, is overly-complicated and unfair. These complex and inequitable rules should be replaced by a simplified regime which permits all campaign contributions without limit but which requires contributions to be immediately and accurately disclosed.

Whether one believes that campaign finance reform like McCain-Feingold was a noble idea which failed or was an unwise approach from the beginning, Senators Obama and McCain have confirmed the malfunction of that approach. We should now move from the currently dysfunctional system to a simplified regime which permits contributions without limit, which requires complete and accurate disclosure of those contributions, and which no longer puts our political life in the hands of Oprah and Chuck.

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Amos N. Guiora is a Professor of Law at the S. J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, where he teaches criminal law, global perspectives on counterterrorism, religion and terrorism, and national security law. He served for nineteen years in the Israel Defense Forces.  Recently he testified before the House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommitee about the importance of sharing information in preventing terrorism.  You can watch the video here and download the transcript here.

On May 15, 2008 I testified before the House Of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment. The Subcommittee, chaired by Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Cal) was particularly interested in the subject of resilience—that is whether government and business alike are prepared for a terrorist attack on two different levels: preparing for an attack and ensuring continuity in the aftermath of the attack.

The two issues—before and after—are the essence of counter-terrorism preparation. For them to be truly implementable, government must engage in information sharing on all three levels (state, local and federal) and also with the business community. While the idea of information sharing with the business community raises important –and legitimate—questions within the law enforcement community, it is an absolute requirement.

During the course of my testimony, the Members of the Subcommittee were particularly interested in the difference between the American and Israeli cultures—in particular how Israelis respond to terrorism and understand that attacks are, in a sense, inevitable and how that understanding enables society to more quickly “rebound” in the aftermath of an attack. Furthermore, Members inquired as to the nature of the information sharing relationships and whether this did not raise important legal and constitutional issues.

To ensure a resilient homeland in a post-9/11 society, the United States must have a homeland security strategy that (1) understands the threat, (2) effectively counters the threat while preserving American values, (3) establishes a system of accountability, and (4) creates public-private and federal-state partnerships facilitating intelligence sharing and the continuity of society in the aftermath of an attack.

It is necessary to work with clear definitions of the terms and concepts that frame this strategy for resiliency. As I have previously articulated, “one of the greatest hindrances to a cogent discussion of terrorism and counterterrorism has been that the terms lack clear, universal definitions.” For this reason, I provide clear, concrete definitions of terrorism, counterterrorism, homeland security, effectiveness, accountability, and resiliency—the key terms in articulating the strategy for a resilient homeland. In addition to these definitions, I include two critical matrices for: Determining Effectiveness and Implementing Accountability.

The central focus of this testimony examines the dire consequences of the break-down in communications following both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, which suggests that in order to realize resiliency in the future, it is paramount that there is clear cooperation and coordination between the public sector and the private sector. Effective resiliency will ultimately be tied to establishing public-private partnerships.

In establishing these partnerships, they must be based upon three critical components: (1) clearly defined roles and responsibilities; (2) articulating a coordinated prevention-response plan; and (3) repeated training and/or simulation exercises using the prevention-response plan against realistic disaster/terror scenarios. By strategically strengthening security, sharing intelligence, and creating plans for post-attack procedures (such as evacuation plans, transportation plans, establishing places of refuge, and having basic supplies available to aid first-responders) private partners become the key to a secure and resilient homeland.

The importance of information before, during and after a disaster or attack is vital to resilience. Information sharing is, perhaps, the single most important aspect of successful resilience. Information sharing requires government agencies (federal, state and local) to share information both amongst themselves and with the private sector. Furthermore, it requires that the private sector—subject to existing legal and constitutional limits—share information with the public sector. Successful information sharing requires cooperation and coordination both internally (within sectors) and cross sectors (between public-private entities).

The lessons of 9/11 and Katrina speak for themselves. Resilience in the aftermath of either disaster or attack requires federal, state and local government agencies to understand that information sharing is vital to the nation’s homeland security. That information sharing process must include the private sector. Otherwise, the mistakes of yesterday will inevitably re-occur.

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Digital framez, spelled with a hanging z, is an online electronic store that sells portable DIVX compatible DVD players and digital photo frames. Their categories include all the different sized photo frames available in addition to the "portable 10 inch DVD player." The information rich site also has section on how the site works. Digital Framez specializes in my favorite product on the site, which is the 10-inch high quality portable DVD player

The portable 10-inch DVD player is an attractive mini-entertainment system that provides a way for users to listen to CD’s, watch movies, and view pictures from wherever they happen to be! For example, owners of the 10 inch portable DVD players are provided a means of instant entertainment for many occasions, such as picnics, long family trips, and boring meetings at the office.

Well, obviously the end of that sentence is a joke, the point of which was to show that the ways in which the portable 10-inch DVD player can be used, is limited only by the user’s imagination.

In addition as afore mentioned the player is DIVX compatible, with built in surround sound effects, stereo speakers, and Dolby Digital decoding. A Great Christmas present for all ages, and a must have for all families. Be sure to click on the words portable DVD player located in the top paragraph and check out the site; the 10 inch DVD portable player is posted on the main page.

This post is sponsored by Smorty

I have been thinking for awhile now about starting an ecommerce store to sell some of my artwork. I looked around at quite a few places to find the right ecommerce software and ran across one named ashop commerce. It seems like a good solution. They have a 10 day free trial so I think I will try it out and see how it goes! It has a shopping cart for your customers and they are award winning! Another big plus is no installation is required. I personally think the best features are that its fully customisable AND affordable! woohoo!

A long time ago I remember thinking to myself... wow technology is amazing.. I bet someday in the future there will be picture frames hanging on peoples walls that are digital!!! Well guess what? My prediction came true!! There REALLY is a digital frames site now!! I really want to buy a digital photo frame from the site.. and I just might! It would be a really great way for me to show off my artwork. Digitalframez is awesome! Technology will never cease to amaze me :)

Have you ever heard of Smorty? Its a place that connects blog advertisers with bloggers.. a great way for both to make some extra cash! I just signed up for it and was accepted today. So now I will get paid to blog!! Im so happy! What else could be better? I love blogging! :) So if you are a blog advertiser or a blogger who wants to get paid for blogging about stuff then check out smorty.. its a great idea!