Joanna L. Krotz writes about 3 signs of a dysfunctional company over at bcentral. These are worth noting:

1. You’ve got leaders who fake it.

2. You’ve got bosses who like to point fingers.

3. You’ve got a CEO who doesn’t set priorities.

The whole thing is worth reading and applying.

I’ve been for this idea since before 9/11. It’s not that I don’t like Cheney or think that he is essential to the operation of this administration. Rather, it’s that he could function in a role other than vice president and still be influential. This would seem especially true after the 2004 election. If Bush really wants to run with Cheney in 2004, which he seems intent on doing, then I think at some point in the next term, perhaps just before or after the mid-term elections depending on how the Senate shakes out, Cheney should step down “due to health reasons” and let Condi step up. She’d make an excellent candidate in 2008.

I ran across this great post on MetaFilter. It’s an ancestry map based on the 1990 census. I’ve always been fascinated by strange demographic circumstances in which a large population of particular ethnic group is centered in surprising places, like the large amount of Italians in southeast Colorado. Seems like some important ethnic groups, like Asians, Jews, and Middle Easterners are excluded from this map.

From the beginning of the campaign, I’ve always had a soft spot for John Edwards. If the Democrats really want to win this election, then they shouldn’t be wasting their time with Howard Dean or John Kerry. Wesley Clark has fizzled faster than anyone could have imagined, with all his false starts, stumbling, and inexperience. Dick Gephardt simply lacks the charisma to energize this party. The rest are a collection of liberal nutcases, like Al Sharpton.

But John Edwards is silky smooth. He’s got Southern charm and Ivy league eloquence. He oozes middle America. David Brooks, in the NY Times, agrees:

John Edwards has the most persuasive theory. He argues that most voters do not place candidates on a neat left-right continuum. But they are really good at sensing who shares their values. They are really good at knowing who respects them and who doesn’t. Edwards’s theory is that the Democrats’ besetting sin over the past few decades has been snobbery …

His campaign is based on the argument that the Democrats need to nominate a person from Middle America, not from the coastal educated class. “My campaign is a different Democratic campaign,” Edwards said in his announcement speech. “Not only will I run for the real America, I will run in the real America. . . . Democrats too often act like rural America is just someplace to fly over between a fund-raiser in Manhattan and a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills.”

He’s often called “Clinton Lite” — that is, Clinton without all the baggage. A quick look at the last several Democratic presidents will reveal that they all look and sound more like Edwards than Dean.

Edwards lacks the money to make a serious run at this, but he will likely end up as the VP for Dean or Clark or Kerry, which makes him the de facto candidate for 2008, I suppose.

The folks over at Amazon.com announced today that they have made very word in nearly 120,000 books searchable. Talk about bridging the gap between the retail experience and the online experience. Now, much like you might do in the store, you can browse these texts before you buy. But it’s much more that simply browsing. It’s POWER-browsing. You’re able to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for, rather than relying on titles and descriptions to provide you with the extenet of your information. The marketing potential here is simply amazing.

In a stunning move of political strategy, both Joe Lieberman and Wesley Clark are virtually conceding the Iowa caucuses. Both candidates are pulling most of their people out of the state and will instead focus on battlegrounds they think they can win. Iowa has traditionally attracted very liberal and blue collar voters to the caucuses — two groups which Lieberman and Clark figure they wouldn’t fare well with during the caucuses. It looks like they are giving both Dean and Gephardt a HUGE gift. This might even bump Kerry up a bit in Iowa.

One of the consequences of California has to be a re-shuffling of Democratic leadership. Terry McAuliffe has been a miserable failure as DNC chairman. Seriously, ever since he came to the post in 2000, it’s been one failure after another for his party. He tried to spin the post-2000 election mess his way and was only successful enough to alienate people. Then, the 2002 mid-term elections were an undeniable success for the GOP, despite McAuliffe’s assurances to the contrary.

You’d think by 2003, Dems would have figured out that this guy is a loser. But he presses on. I guess it’ll take a defeat in 2004 to finally toss this guy.

I missed the smackdown on FOX News Sunday this week when Tony Snow revealed Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia as the blithering, nonsensical mope that he is. But here are the highlights:

ROCKEFELLER: Tony, if you listen to that as an average American person would, you and — at least myself included, that is talking about the danger of an immediate attack. And, in fact, the intelligence committee, the one thing they did not say was that there was — we were in danger of being attacked in this country.

SNOW: But, Senator…

ROCKEFELLER: They did not say that there was…

SNOW: I’m sorry, I just — I don’t — we’ve done a lot of research on this. And the president never said — and we’ve been looking for it because you and a lot of your colleagues have said that he’s proposed — he talked about imminent threat. And he never did. As a matter of fact, the key argument — was it not? — that you can’t wait for it to become an imminent threat because then it’s too late.

ROCKEFELLER: No, the argument, Tony, was based upon — I was there, and I heard the speech very close, and he was talking about weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclear. And that was more or less signed off on by the intelligence committee, which raises a whole other set of questions.

So Rockefeller is arguing that Americans were duped into supporting the war because the threat was “imminent”. Bush’s point in the SOTU was that it isn’t imminent and that we can’t wait for it to be so. Rockefeller seems to have heard something different.

SNOW: All right, Senator, let me read to you a quote from another speech you attended. As a matter of fact, you gave it a year and two days ago.

You said this: “There’s been some debate over how imminent a threat Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat.” That’s what you said.

“But I also believe that after September 11th, the question is increasingly outdated. It is in the nature of these weapons and the way they are targeted against civilian populations, the documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get. To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? We cannot.”

What made you change your mind?

ROCKEFELLER: That’s correct. And that is what I felt at the time that I cast that vote, based upon the intelligence community’s analysis of the situation, particularly weapons of mass destruction, and what the president said in his speech.

Maybe he suffers from multiple personality disorder. Or maybe he just doesn’t care about things he once said, because no one else does.

SNOW: This is your speech from October 10th, 2002.

ROCKEFELLER: Right.

SNOW: You said, “But this isn’t just a future threat. Saddam’s existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America now. Saddam has used chemical weapons before. He is working to develop delivery systems like missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles that could bring these deadly weapons against U.S. forces and U.S. facilities in the Middle East.”

And that indeed is what David Kay reported to Congress last week, is it not?

Snow kept after him:

ROCKEFELLER: I just go back to — I understand, Tony, that you’re giving me what I said when I made that vote, because when I made that vote, I wanted to, you know, give the president the authorization to go to the United Nations. I fully felt that he would be able to get help from the United Nations. And it turned out that he didn’t really make that much of an effort and hasn’t since.

SNOW: Whoa, whoa, whoa.

ROCKEFELLER: He has another chance…

SNOW: What do you mean, he hasn’t made an effort? I mean, this was a president — you got United Nations Resolution 1441. The resolution that you adopted in the United States Congress mentions 11 different United Nations resolutions, and also mentions the fact that the United Nations had not made good on them, and supported the president in using force.

You also said that the threat of force had made it possible at least for the U.N. to act, and you said the U.N. would not have acted in the absence of such a threat.

What makes you think the United Nations has been helpful on this?

Game, set, match. Snow is an excellent interviewer. Easily as good as Russert, who is also a bulldog. I may have to start watching the Sunday morning talk shows again.

With the announcement last week that Rush Limbaugh would be heading to rehab for a month to try to shake his addiction to pain pills, the media has decided to jump all over this guy. I expect it from the smarmy liberal types like Al Franken and Bill Maher, but to read it in mainstream news magazines simply reinforces the perceived liberal media bias so many conservatives have:

But Limbaugh’s story owes more to the “Wizard of Oz” than “The Scarlet Letter.” The man behind the curtain is not the God of Family Values but a childless, twice-divorced, thrice-married schlub whose idea of a good time is to lie on his couch and watch football endlessly.

“Schlub”? Everything else in the sentence is pretty objective. But to punctuate a description of a person with a word like “schlub” seems to be out of bounds, if you ask me. I had to look the word up, myself, just to see what it means: “A person regarded as clumsy, stupid, or unattractive.” I guess my Yiddish isn’t what it should be. I don’t know how any honest, objective reporter could use that word in a NEWS story.

The other disgusting thing I’ve read is that Don Imus, of all people, has decided to ridicule Rush. Imus has his own history of substance abuse, and he thinks it’s fair to make fun of those who are currently suffering through it:

“Rush is a fat, pill-popping loser and an undisciplined slob who was turning his maid into a drug pusher, and she’s the one who’s gonna go to prison, and - as soon as he gets caught - he starts whining,” Imus ranted yesterday on his WFAN wake-up show.

“He’s going to rehab because he can’t get any more pills and he’s gonna go to prison,” Imus said.

Wonderful. Rush hasn’t always been the most compassionate guy, but I think he deserves some compassion despite that fact. Perhaps he will emerge from this a changed man, willing to extend grace and compassion to those who suffer like he is suffering now.

Some interesting interal debate amongst the Clark supporters:

The Clark movement must now show that it can follow the precepts that it preaches, and support - rather than thwart - attempts to bring out into the light the problems the campaign has and repair them.

Also, Clark is getting more criticism from military peers:

Retired Gen. Dennis Reimer, a former Army chief of staff, describes Clark as an intelligent, “hardworking, ambitious individual who really applies himself hard.”

But, Reimer said, “Some of us were concerned about the fact that he was focused too much upward and not down on the soldiers. I’ve always believed you ought to be looking down toward your soldiers and not up at how to please your boss. … I just didn’t see enough of that in Wes.”

Clark, for his part, acknowledges he had conflicts with former Defense Secretary William Cohen and some top Pentagon officials. He attributes that in his memoir to pushing relentlessly against the military’s “innate conservatism” to accomplish his assigned missions, particularly in Bosnia and during the 1999 Kosovo campaign.

Ret. Army Brig. Gen. David Grange, the U.S. commander in Bosnia at that time, says Clark was so focused on succeeding that “he would maybe not be cognizant of some of the feelings or concerns of some of the people around him.”

“There’s no question that General Clark is for General Clark,” said Grange, who added nonetheless that Clark had always treated him well personally.

So I suffered through the debate from Arizona last night, or at least part of it. The more I watch these ten candidates, the more I really WANT a strong contender to emerge so that this election can begin to develop a personality. However, now more than ever, I think all of these candidates simply don’t have what it takes.

Wesley Clark certainly looks and sounds presidential, but I think he’s trying too hard to make up for lost time. He tries to use every chance he has to speak to answer eight different questions. He also seems to lack the specificity about his plans that other candidates thrive on. So far, he’s relied on the buzz his candidacy has generated to remain high in the polls. That won’t carry him far enough. He needs to get his campaign together, answer some of the charges being made by fellow Democrats, and stake out some moral high ground to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack. I think he’s electable, but I don’t know if he’ll survive the primaries.

Howard Dean should own this race. He has the grassroots, the money, and all the whacky left wing ideas that Democrats lap up like warm milk at this stage of the race. But he just doesn’t come off well in these debate settings. Dean is like that freaky kid in high school that would sit in class and not say anything for mose of the semester. Then, one day he’s called on to speak, and he gets up and spends ten minutes telling everyone else why he’s smarter than them. Dean is like Al Gore crossed with Ross Perot. He’s got an answer for everything and wants to explain it to you to prove that he’s right. Plus, he just looks goofy sitting there looking like something out of a Mary Shelley novel.

The best performance I saw last night was John Edwards. This guy could be a real powerhouse in the future if he doesn’t get the nod this time around. He has charisma and displays tremendous empathy for people when he speaks. As many people have said, he’s like Bill Clinton lite. I really think if he had the organization he needed to raise the money, Edwards would be leading this pack. He’ll likely cause a stir in the southern primaries, which is why I think a Dean / Edwards ticket seems likely.

By far the worst performance last night was that of Dennis Kucinich. This guy comes off like an angry lawn gnome. He jumps up at every opportunity to spew his answer at the audience like he’s demanding a refund at the customer service window at Wal-Mart the day after Christmas. He just seems angry that the electric razor his wife got for him doesn’t work. Plus I think reporters are hesitant to write about him because they’re never sure if they’ve spelled his name correctly. Besides, if I was going to vote for a candidate from Cleveland, I’d prefer Drew Carrey before this guy.

John Kerry, Joe Liebermanm, and Dick Gephardt sure tried hard last night. But they spent more time beating up on each other than making much progress establishing themselves as viable candidates. They all bore me and none of them looks or sounds presidential. Although, Gephardt does sound like John Wayne.

By the way, did anyone notice that Bob Graham ended his campaign this week? I sure didn’t. Then again, I guess I didn’t really notice that he had begun a campaign. I guess his campaign for the vice-presidency begins now. I think his motto should be, “I can lose Florida AND my home state at the same time!”

Carol Mosley-Braun should follow Graham’s lead. She has nothing to offer this campaign. She almost fell on her face last night, which would have been funny.

Lastly, Al Sharpton sounds good and knows how to control a room, but there is no way in hell he’d get elected. He scares white people. Seriously, it’s not a racist thing at all, but the thought of Al Sharpton having the nuclear codes just plain scares me. I do like his hair, though.

All in all, none of these candidates seems all that exciting at this point. There may actually be an interesting primary season if most of them stay in the hunt. Clark and Dean are leading this pack, with Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman, and Edwards trailing behind. That could all change quickly.

Well, the impossible has happened. In the course of just over two months, California’s political universe has been turned upside down. Just a couple of observations …

First, the Democratic Party in California reflects the national party so well. They simply don’t have a message. The best they could do is try to smear Arnold in the last hours of the campaign and hope that it worked. Shameful and ultimately worthless. I think Davis could have stayed in power if he’d simply chosen a message an stuck to it. But that presumes that he has a workable agenda, which from all accounts, he does not. I’ll be curious to see if Arnold gives Bush a bounce in California in 2004. In the meantime, Democrats need to get a clue.

Second, the huge turnout in California bodes well for Republicans. If they can mobilize these same voters in a year, then Bush might have a shot. I think the turnout also makes an argument for shorter election cycles and more candidates. Also, having an election in October rather than November might be a good idea for some parts of this country as well.

The most pathetic sight seen on Fox News Tuesday night was Jesse Jackson rambling on about voting fraud and disenfranchised voters. This man is just sad. He’s forfeited any civil rights moral high ground that he once had in his ongoing need to stroke his own ego. This man just needs to feel like has power and meaning. He’s totally irrelevant. Anyway, despite his whining, there have been no reports of problems at the polls. I guess he’s getting warmed up for 2004.

Lastly, looking at some numbers from last night … Nearly 8 million voters turned out for this election. Of that 8 million, 4.4 million voted to recall Gray Davis. Of that 8 million, 4.75 million voted for either Arnold or Tom McClintock. What that means for Republicans is that California, despite all its liberal tendencies, is a very winnable state in 2004. Arnold is clearly a moderate while McClintock is a conservative. If Bush can position himself somewhere in between, then he should be able to capture these votes. Do any of the Democrats running for president look less liberal than Gray Davis? Hardly.