RUTHFULLY YOURS

Forget North Korea, Russia, Syria, ISIS, Unenployment…those are all on reset….Does she know this? In Aceh,Indonesia, where two lesbians have been “detained” the criminal code, which went into effect in September 2014, prohibits lesbianism and sodomy. The Acehnese by-laws extend Sharia, or Islamic law, to non-Muslims, and the criminal code permits punishments of 100 lashes and 100 months in prison for consensual same-sex sex acts. rsk

In one of the strongest statements ever from a presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton on Saturday pledged to defend gay and lesbian Americans against efforts to deny them of their rights.

Speaking to the nation’s largest gay rights group, the New York Democrat told an enthusiastic audience of activists, donors and operatives that, if elected President, she would link arms with them. The former Secretary of State’s remarks to the Human Rights Campaign were remarkable for their intensity and for their tone.

“Our work is not finished until every single person is treated with equal rights and dignity that they deserve, no matter how old they are, no matter where they live, whether it is New York or Wyoming or anywhere else,” Clinton said.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies at the Yale School of Management and Lester Crown Professor of Management Practice and co-author of FIRING BACK (Harvard Business School Press).

She’s running for President on her track record as CEO of HP, but if that’s the case, Fiorina might want to rethink her strategy.

Fresh from strong debate quips, Carly Fiorina has improbably raced from 14th to fifth place in the New Hampshire Republican primary polls and now enjoys a 70% favorability rating in Iowa, ahead of such career politicians as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, George Pataki, and Lindsay Graham.

It is time to take her candidacy seriously and examine her leadership record. Having never held elected office, she has staked her reputation on her business career.

Fiorina is eager to be seen as the answer to Democratic slogans of a Republican war on women. She’s often been erroneously referred to as the first woman to lead a Fortune 500 firm, Hewlett-Packard HPQ 2.84% . That title actually belongs to The Washington Post Company’s Katharine Graham. Then there are the many other trailblazing women leaders preceding Fiorina, including Beechcraft’s Olive Ann Beech, Mattel’s Ruth Handler, Beatrice Food’s Loida Nicolas-Lewis, the Body Shop’s Anita Roddick, Martha Stewart, and Oprah Winfrey.

Still, with a scant 5% of Fortune 500 firms employing women CEOs, her leadership of a huge global enterprise in the macho field of IT is impressive. But how did she do?

The answer in short is: Pretty badly.

In 1999, a dysfunctional HP board committee, filled with its own poisoned politics, hired her with no CEO experience, nor interviews with the full board. Fired in 2005, after six years in office, several leading publications titled her one of the worst technology CEOs of all time. In fact, the stock popped 10% on the news of her firing and closed the day up 7%.

Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP’s founder, commented when discouraging voters from supporting Fiorina in her 2010 senatorial run, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”

Sent by DPS e-pal and friend whose opinions I value…He knows and admires the author….I know and admire DPS…..rsk

As you requested, here’s my current thinking on Carly. Remember, you asked for it!

I remember well when she took over HP because I was then neck deep in the tech industry as CEO of a circuit board manufacturer. Her appointment to head HP was a big surprise because she was not only an outsider but from a company with a very different culture and structure, Lucent Technologies, the former manufacturing arm of AT&T (and a big customer of the company I was running at the time) but also her reviews from her stint at Lucent were decidedly mixed.

When she led HP through a bitter battle to buy Compaq in 2002, which itself had just gobbled up DEC shortly before, I thought it was a very risky move. Computer hardware was rapidly turning into a commodity manufacturing business, with Dell and the Chinese crushing older, highly integrated and high cost companies like DEC and Compaq, and HP was facing its own problems against lower cost competitors. Buying the combined Compaq/DEC looked daft. And it quickly proved to be a disaster, costing Carly her job.

I then watched Carly run against Boxer in ’10 and was really pulling for her, because the Senate control could have hung in the balance. Boxer, who was terribly weak at the time and thought to be easy to knock off, crushed her. One of the big and highly effective points she used against Carly was the HP fiasco. Bear in mind that HP was a Silicon Valley icon and hence closely followed and well understood in CA. It was very hard for Carly to hide what happened from that electorate.

http://www.patcondell.net/the-invasion-of-europe/

Any lingering doubt about the lethal weakness of America and the West has been brutally shot down in the skies above Syria.

Russia’s President Putin sent in his warplanes ostensibly to bomb ISIS but actually, it seems, to bomb more moderate opponents of Syria’s President Assad, including CIA-trained rebels.

Putin thus well and truly rubbed President Obama’s nose in American impotence. The Russian leader is now making the immensely dangerous running in Syria. Blindsided America is reduced to scrabbling frantically in his slipstream.

Putin is ruthless and focused. Allying with Assad and the Iranian regime that pulls his strings, the Russian leader can pose – however preposterously – as the potential savior of the world from the Islamist specter that terrifies the West.

Unlike other government decisions – say tax rates or defining the nature of marriage – those affecting immigration are both irreversible and profound. In that light, today marks a half-century since the passage of one of the least heralded but most significant pieces of legislation in American history.

That would be the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act, which ended the highly restrictive terms of the prior 1924 legislation, opening the United States to larger and more varied immigration.

Pew’s percentages of the U.S. population.

Put in numerical terms, according to the Pew Research Center, the United States was 84 percent white, 11 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent Asian in 1965; today, it is 62 percent white, 12 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian, and 2 percent other. The center projects that in 2065, the population will be 46 percent white, 13 percent black, 24 percent Hispanics, 14 percent Asian, and 3 percent other.

The Reform Movement’s Moment of Truth
Israel’s existence is at stake, but Reform Judaism, relatively safe in the United States, continues its toxic messages on Israel and supports the Iran deal.

Despite widespread opposition in the Jewish community to President Obama’s deal with Iran, a petition by 340 Reform/Reconstructionist “progressive rabbis” (and some from the Conservative Movement) supports the deal.

Although support for Obama’s deal by American Jews might be considered an expression of their primary loyalty, the response from Israeli Reform leaders is stunning. A survey which I conducted of two dozen Israeli Reform leaders regarding Obama’s deal and the supporting petition elicited only two responses.

Uri Regev, head of Hiddush and former executive director of the Reform Movement’s Israel Religious Action Center and President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism wrote: it’s “political;” “I don’t deal with it.”

In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution — perhaps the most important historical event of the 20th century — five British writers were on the scene and sucked into the violence. Closely watched by the secret police, who did not respect judicial niceties once a suspect was arrested, these significant eye-witnesses were exposed to danger and risked their lives. They wrote about their exciting experiences in letters, diaries, dispatches, articles, memoirs and novels. Somerset Maugham was in his forties; Arthur Ransome, Hugh Walpole and Robert Bruce Lockhart were in their thirties; William Gerhardie was in his twenties. Gerhardie went to Russia as a soldier, Ransome as a foreign correspondent, Walpole as a Red Cross volunteer, Lockhart as a diplomat, Maugham as a spy.

In the hermetic foreign community of Russia the five writers knew each other and had various degrees of experience and expertise. Gerhardie was a native speaker of Russian; Lockhart spoke it fluently, with an excellent accent, and was sometimes mistaken for a Russian; Ransome, Walpole and Maugham learned to read and speak the language. In their different ways, they were supposed to carry out the official policy of the British government: support the moderate socialist regime of Alexander Kerensky and keep Russia in the war against Germany; oppose Lenin and the Bolsheviks and prevent them making a separate peace that would free massive numbers of German troops to fight against Britain and France on the Western front. Ransome and Lockhart eventually contravened British policy by supporting the Bolsheviks and opposing British military intervention in the civil war that followed the Revolution.

The Institute of Supply Management issued a study warning that American manufacturing growth had come to a standstill in September, and the Labor Department’s latest employment figures, the worst jobs report of the year, tell the same story from another perspective: unemployment rate stagnant, wages stagnant, hours worked down, number of new jobs far below forecast, previous reports revised downward, labor-participation rate at 38-year low, with nearly 95 million eligible American workers sidelined.

That the Obama administration is foundering from an economic-policy point of view is not news. Barack Obama & Co. represent the very freshest and most imaginative thinking of the 1930s — stimulus, public works, monkeying with the minimum wage, political favoritism for union constituencies, the ancient superstition that simply putting money in somebody’s pocket makes the nation richer through the miraculous power of the economic multiplier, etc.

“Get ready for the new normal,” writes Scott Sumner. “3.0 percent NGDP growth — it’s coming soon.”

Fifty years ago Saturday, Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law. Though it has been modified since then, the bill — known as the Hart-Celler Act after its sponsors — established the paradigm for today’s immigration system.

All the supporters’ confident claims about the bill’s impact were proven incorrect, some within just a few years. President Johnson said, “This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy wrote that, “It would increase the amount of authorized immigration by only a fraction.” Senator Claiborne Pell said, “Contrary to the opinions of some of the misinformed, this legislation does not open the floodgates.”

Senator Ted Kennedy’s assurances are so absurdly off-base that they should be carved into the marble of the U.S. Capitol as a caution to anyone making claims about the future effects of grand legislation on any subject:

The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.