Bushisms over the years
By The Associated Press

President George W. Bush will leave behind a legacy of Bushisms, the label stamped on the commander in chief's original speaking style. Some of the president's more notable malaprops and mangled statements:
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• "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." — September 2000, explaining his energy policies at an event in Michigan.
• "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?" — January 2000, during a campaign event in South Carolina.
• "They misunderestimated the compassion of our country. I think they misunderestimated the will and determination of the commander in chief, too." — Sept. 26, 2001, in Langley, Va. Bush was referring to the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
• "There's no doubt in my mind, not one doubt in my mind, that we will fail." — Oct. 4, 2001, in Washington. Bush was remarking on a back-to-work plan after the terrorist attacks.
• "It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber." — April 10, 2002, at the White House, as Bush urged Senate passage of a broad ban on cloning.
• "I want to thank the dozens of welfare-to-work stories, the actual examples of people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves." — April 18, 2002, at the White House.
• "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." — Sept. 17, 2002, in Nashville, Tenn.
• "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." — Aug. 5, 2004, at the signing ceremony for a defense spending bill.
• "Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." — Sept. 6, 2004, at a rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo.
• "Our most abundant energy source is coal. We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge." — April 20, 2005, in Washington.
• "We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job." — Sept. 20, 2005, in Gulfport, Miss.
• "I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs." — Sept. 5, 2005, when Bush met with residents of Poplarville, Miss., in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
• "It was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship. After all, 60 years we were at war 60 years ago we were at war." — June 29, 2006, at the White House, where Bush met with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
• "Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." — Dec. 7, 2006, in a joint appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
• "These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved." — June 11, 2007, in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• "Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for your introduction. Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit." — September 2007, in Sydney, Australia, where Bush was attending an APEC summit.
• "Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome speech." April 16, 2008, at a ceremony welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to the White House.
• "The fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place." — May 27, 2008, in Mesa, Ariz.
• "And they have no disregard for human life." — July 15, 2008, at the White House. Bush was referring to enemy fighters in Afghanistan.
• "I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office." — June 26, 2008, during a Rose Garden news briefing.
• "Throughout our history, the words of the Declaration have inspired immigrants from around the world to set sail to our shores. These immigrants have helped transform 13 small colonies into a great and growing nation of more than 300 people." — July 4, 2008 in Virginia.
• "The people in Louisiana must know that all across our country there's a lot of prayer — prayer for those whose lives have been turned upside down. And I'm one of them. It's good to come down here." — Sept. 3, 2008, at an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., after Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast.
• "This thaw — took a while to thaw, it's going to take a while to unthaw." Oct. 20, 2008, in Alexandria, La., as he discussed the economy and frozen credit markets.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090103/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bushisms

New Impacts on Outsourcing in 2009

By Kathleen Goolsby

New impacts on outsourcing in 2009 include service-oriented architecture (SOA), service provider "DNA," green IT, the changing role of physicians, and what the future holds because of the convergence of technology and business process. This article looks at what you need to know about each of these impacts.
Service-Oriented Architecture
"I'm really excited about SOA," says Gianni Giacomelli, head of BPO Strategy and Marketing, SAP. "Conceptually, it's a revolution in outsourcing that will take it to the next level."
Software implementations today are constrained by yesterday's way of writing code. As Giacomelli explains, software developers wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code that, together, handle a business process (such as finance and accounting). But the code is not clearly segmented into functions or subprocesses (such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, collections, general ledger, and fixed assets). It's often difficult to take out the lines of code for subprocesses and give them to another company. And, at times, companies have to implement an entire system even if they only want to use one segment of the code.
In contrast, SOA makes the code accessible in pieces, so to speak, that are very easy to map to business subprocesses. So if a company only wants to implement a system for collections or a system for the general ledger, for example, SOA enables that option.
"By being able to do that, you enable one simple thing: specialization," explains Giacomelli. He compares it to automobile manufacturers that use subcontractors to build almost of the components that make up a car. "Those components became a natural breeding ground for organizations that are specialized in doing specific things such as making brakes or transmissions. Without specialization, we wouldn't be able to have cars that cost what they do today. Cars were expensive and extremely rudimentary decades ago because there was no specialization in the components in the car."
SOA has the potential to generate that specialization in the outsourcing industry because it enables providers to take much more granular pieces of a process and concentrate on them. "By concentrating only on one piece or on a few pieces, service providers can actually choose the ones in which they are really, really good, the ones in which they really can create significant economies of scale for 100 or 200 customers," says the SAP exec.
That's a value proposition that Giacomelli points out is still sometimes lacking in BPO today. "Many providers are not bringing to the fore significantly different economies of scale that the client can't replicate because many providers have at best only a handful of clients running on the same platform."
What are the implications for buyers of outsourcing services? The risk and difficulty of outsourcing subprocesses will be much lower. "The connection points between the piece the buyer moved out and gave to the provider and the rest of the retained subprocesses are going to be very clear because they are mapped into the software. It's almost like taking a Lego piece out of a structure; it still recombines fairly well with the rest because the connection points are very regular. SOA is also great for making new and improved pieces fit with the rest of the structure; there's less pain with enhancement, upgrades, and ultimately innovation."
The ideal scenario is one where both the buyer and provider have SOA so that they can communicate in the best way and so there is a minimum amount of "stranded assets" on the client side. "But the reality is most clients don't have SOA in their landscape today for most of the processes. It's changing, and there's a wave of adoption today; however, broader adoption will follow the rhythm of upgrades, so it will take 10 years," says Giacomelli. "This said, the fact that the provider is already able to use SOA on its end to build very focused 'droplets' of subfunctions is game-changing."
The big advantage of SOA in outsourcing is a win-win for buyers and providers. Giacomelli points out, "With SOA, the BPO provider needs to implement and run only a specific piece of the entire application landscape (such as the collections piece of the accounts receivable process). Therefore, the implementation will be much less complex, less lengthy (and costly) than traditional implementations."
Provider DNA
"I think that the biggest thing in the outsourcing landscape over the next year or two is going to be the expectation of the customers of a much different DNA in the suppliers that they work with in the outsourcing space." That's the belief of Keith Higgins, vice president of Worldwide Marketing, at Aricent, a global innovation, technology, and outsourcing company focused exclusively on the communications industry.
In an age where user experience and consumer demands dictate product development, companies are under pressure to innovate and get to market a lot faster than ever before.
"We're moving from cost arbitrage to skills arbitrage," claims Higgins. This is different from the DNA required for just being the recipient of a client's to-do list and doing it globally at lower cost. Outsourcing providers are now moving up the value chain and product life cycle all the way to the whiteboard."
As clients ask for innovation, industry domain expertise will be "paramount to selecting the right outsourcing partner." It will enable more streamlined expertise for the buyer. Higgins believes the trillion-dollar outsourcing market will soon fragment into players focused on domain expertise.
"It will be the death of the mile-wide inch-deep outsourcing deals," he says. "You can't be a jack of all trades in the outsourcing space." He predicts that domain expertise will be a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more customers a provider has in one domain, the better the provider "gets it," and the more customers the provider will gain.
Neeraj Bhargava, CEO of WNS Global Services, agrees. "Successful providers are going to have greater industry specialization." He says the DNA of offshore providers will also change. "The successful offshore companies will add more value by combining their talent with technologies." According to Bhargava, offshore providers like WNS have the momentum of growth at 40 percent per year for the past five years. Now they're adding higher value-added areas such as research and analytics to their DNA. "Areas such as financial research, marketing analysis, and procurement analysis are growing rapidly in the offshore market," says Bhargava.
Debra Kops, chief marketing officer, WNS Global Services, also lists the changing provider DNA as a new impact on outsourcing in the coming year. "What's driving the increased focus on vertical domain expertise is the need for the provider to understand the buyer's industry challenges and changes in business volumes. An example is knowing the context of billing in the utilities industry along with conversion rates and need for accuracy of meter reading."
Changing role of physicians
Look for a new spin on clinical help desks next year. New opportunities for outsourcing are developing in the physician community, according to Greg Baugh, senior director of operations, Siemens. Business processes in hospitals are changing, and physicians' roles are changing, requiring them to do more things in hospitals. For instance, in an effort to reduce medical errors, hospitals are implementing systems that require physicians to take accountability and place their orders themselves instead of having other clinicians do it for them.
"Outsourcers will need to change the way they provide help desk services and on-site services to physicians. We need to help the physicians do what's now being required of them. Physicians can't delay their work while they're held up with IT issues. They need support right away and expect answers immediately."
Physicians are also getting more involved with the electronic medical records (EMR). As companies sell them ambulatory products to handle the EMR, it will create new opportunities for outsourcing services in support of those products.
Green IT
"Companies are really taking up the charge of responsibility to the environment and to society at large," says Arthur Mazor, senior vice president, Offering Management & Marketing, Fidelity HR Services. Fidelity is finding that most companies seeking to create outsourcing engagements are now including interest in and requirements around environmental sustainability contributions in their evaluation criteria for service providers.
"We're finding that this is a significant impact on the way that outsourcing providers must think about and execute their business strategies, solutions, infrastructure footprint, and usage of resources that are environmentally friendly."
According to Mazor, many buyers' RFIs, RFPs, and questions from analysts and sourcing advisors guiding clients are now requiring providers to demonstrate their positions and environmental contributions. The environmental issue is starting to manifest itself in companies requiring electronic distribution and collection of RFPs.
Mazor says the "big question" is to what degree companies will weight the RFP questions related to environmental sustainability compared to the rest of the provider evaluation. "I think that's something that companies are wresting with," he says.
Bob Pryor, senior vice president, Sales and Marketing, HP Outsourcing Services, agrees that the influence of environmentalism in terms of "green" IT is a significant trend shaping the industry today. He ties it together with pressures on data centers for reducing costs of energy and cooling. "These two issues are tightly connected now."
"We're seeing very significant trends in this past year about what customers are asking for and the issues they are facing regarding their data centers not being able to handle the higher demands for power and cooling, especially in higher density environments," says Pryor. Customers are asking about solutions for energy management, conservation, preservation, and alternative energy sources as well as seeking understanding on whether they should build solutions with their own capital, outsource, or do a combination of both.
Convergence of technology and business process
"Although it's happening in pockets, the trend around the convergence of technology and business process hasn't quite taken hold yet. But it's ultimately the new area in outsourcing," predicts Pryor.
In this emerging model, customers move away from doing everything in an isolated pocket (for example, buy an application from one company, outsource computing capacity from another, and outsource accounting to another company). In the model Pryor favors, customers demand and expect that one company "could provide them all of their business process services with all of the people, expertise, and enabling technology and all bundled back to them at a price however they want it (per customer, per volume, per certain service units, the way they bill their customers, etc.)."
"Combining all of these pieces is an early step in offering on-demand services over the Internet," says Pryor. While cloud computing (including the SaaS model as one component) is "a profound trend in the marketplace today," he believes it will take a while before suppliers can deliver everything as a service from an outsourcing standpoint.
"I think you'll see aspects or components of it in outsourcing within the next three to five years," predicts Pryor. The question is, how prominent will that be? The answer depends on how advanced the enabling network and computing environments become." Building the model will shift the risk to providers, along with the significant capital investment.
"It won't be a small undertaking for providers," he adds. "So we'll see it first in niche kinds of services and with early adopters. But as the demand grows, you'll see the investment and the growth curve that says it's truly a big trend in the industry."
Lessons from the Outsourcing Journal:
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) will enable outsourcing service providers to specialize in certain processes and thus create more significant economies of scale for the buyers' benefit; this will create a value proposition that is often still lacking in BPO to date.
SOA will reduce the complexity, time, and costs involved in traditional software implementations.
The outsourcing market is beginning to fragment into providers focused on domain expertise, enabling them to better meet buyer's needs around industry challenges and changes in business volumes.
The influence of environmentalism in terms of "green" IT is now tightly connected with pressures to reduce energy and cooling costs in data centers. Many companies are now starting to include requirements around environmental sustainability contributions in their evaluation criteria for service providers.
Physicians' roles in hospitals are changing as is their use of IT. Accordingly, service providers need to change the way they provide help desk and on-site services to physicians.
Outsourcing will begin moving away from doing work in isolated pockets (buying an application from one provider, computing capacity from another, and outsourcing a business process to another) and move toward providers that can deliver all such aspects in one bundled offering at a pricing structure that suits the buyer's needs. Combining all these aspects is necessary for offering on-demand outsourced services. This movement is beginning to happen now and will increase in niche areas over the next three to five years.

Source: http://www.outsourcing-journal.com/nov2008-outsourcing.html

Sarcasm finds medical use in dementia detection
by Julie Shingleton Julie Shingleton

SYDNEY (AFP) – Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but Australian scientists are using it to diagnose dementia, according to research published on Friday.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic.
The study, described by its authors as groundbreaking, helps explain why patients with the condition behave the way they do and why, for example, they are unable to pick up their caregivers' moods, the research showed.
"This is significant because if care-givers are angry, sad or depressed, the patient won't pick this up. It is often very upsetting for family members," said John Hodges, the senior author of the paper published in "Brain".
"(FTD) patients present changes in personality and behaviour. They find it difficult to interact with people, they don't pick up on social cues, they lack empathy, they make bad judgements," he told AFP.
"People with FTD become very gullible and they often part with large amounts of money," he said, adding that one in 4,000 people around the world are afflicted with the condition.
Researchers began studying the role of sarcasm in detecting FTD because it requires a patient to spot discrepancies between a person's words and the tone of their voice, Hodges said.
"One of the things about FTD patients is that they don't detect humour -- they are very bad at double meaning and a lot of humour (other than sarcasm) is based on double meaning," he said.
The research, conducted in 2006-07, put 26 sufferers of FTD and 19 Alzheimer's patients through a test in which actors acted out different scenarios using exactly the same words.
While in one scenario, the actors would deliver the lines sincerely, in others they would introduce a thick layer of sarcasm. Patients were then asked if they got the joke, Hodges said.
For example, said Hodges, if a couple were discussing a weekend away and the wife suggested bringing her mother, the husband might say: "Well, that's great, you know how much I like your mother, that will really make it a great weekend."
When the same words were delivered sarcastically and then in a neutral tone, the joke was lost on FTD patients, while the Alzheimer's patients got it.
"The patients with FTD are very literal and they take what is being said as genuine and sincere," said Hodges.
FTD, often referred to as Pick's disease, is similar to Alzheimer's in that it involves a progressive decline in mental powers over a number of years, but FTD affects different regions of the brain.
"It can be very difficult to diagnose in early stages and to separate from depression or, later on, schizophrenia or personality disorders," Hodges said.
The sarcasm test could replace some more expensive and less widely available tests for dementia, he said.
When questioned about the applicability of the test to people from countries not renowned for their appreciation of sarcasm or irony, Hodges said the test could be modified.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081212/ts_afp/healthaustraliadementia

When the Emperor Was Dying

by Deepak Chopra

When Barack Obama's remarkable eloquence was dismissed as "just words" during the primary campaign, he survived the criticism. Telling the truth and offering inspiration aren't just words. They are incredibly important in keeping a society together. Now Obama faces another challenge where words can make a difference over whether the economy recovers. Injections of billions of dollars have done little good to the financial system so far. What we need is an injection of confidence.
I was reminded of Japan's aging Emperor Hirohito, who went in for surgery on his pancreas in the fall of 1987. He recovered well until a year later when he suddenly collapsed, and from that time onward, his health steadily deteriorated until he died the following spring. What he didn't know is that his surgeons had discovered cancer of the duodenum during the original operation. No one told the emperor he was dying, because in Japan the news of a fatal diagnosis is traditionally kept from the patient.
The connection with the economy is this: When is too much news worse than none? Full disclosure can harm the patient, whether you are talking about a sick emperor or a sick economy. The words "You are dying" have a devastating effect, and I'd say the same is true of the words "worst crisis since the Great Depression." It's a firm belief among doctors that some patients die from their diagnosis; they go into sudden, rapid decline despite assurances that their condition is treatable. There's even a term for this, the nocebo effect, which is the opposite of the placebo effect (where patients get better because they are told they will).
The American public took the news of economic crisis harder than anyone expected. Consumer confidence and spending nose-dived, and much of it was due to "just words." It wasn't just ordinary citizens who reacted this way; sophisticated financial institutions panicked as well.
Which brings up an ethical dilemma. For decades in this country it was standard practice not to frighten patients by telling them that they had a fatal illness. Sometimes even the family wasn't told (the emperor's family wasn't, as I understand it). Then ethics changed, and now we have the opposite practice: full disclosure. Is that an improvement? Nobody knows, really. Most patients demand full disclosure as their right, just as market analysts demand full disclosure from companies. A lot of the current crisis, we are told, was brought on by lying. Banks were doing their best to keep secret their astoundingly foolish risks.
Fortunately, the U.S. economy isn't dying. But it has collapsed, just like Hirohito, when the official press report was that things were just fine. Now we are going through a weird phase in which happy talk is foisted on us, alternating with dire warnings. It's like telling the emperor, "You're dying, but the outlook is rosy." The great economist John Maynard Keynes realized almost a century ago that all markets are psychological. The current crisis is proving how right he was, and how tricky a role "just words" play in the ongoing drama. As a master of words, Obama needs to give us some we can believe.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/when-the-emperor-was-dyin_b_147589.html

Team of Rivals

Asked why he had retained controversial FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, President Lyndon Johnson famously said it was probably better "to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

A century earlier, for similar reasons, Abraham Lincoln surprisingly chose his chief rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination for the top positions in his administration. This experiment was explained in detail in a book called Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. This book has become a sensation now as it has been cited as the most influential book by Barrack Obama & Hillary Clinton. This concept, first practiced by Abraham Lincoln, is now being tried valiantly by Obama as he tries to fill his top cabinet positions with people that called him names, actively worked against him, have ideologies that are really different etc.

The article below is about the same topic, the real dangers of surrounding oneself only with likeminded people & the critical ability to put aside past grudges for the sake of the country in times of need - very interesting!
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Defeat Your Opponents. Then Hire Them.
By DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
Concord, Mass.
ON the campaign trail, Barack Obama has applauded Abraham Lincoln’s decision to bring his three main rivals for the Republican nomination into his cabinet, suggesting that he might also invite his opponents to join his administration, if it would help create “the best possible government.” Lincoln understood, Mr. Obama said, that personal feelings mattered less than the issue of “How can we get this country through this time of crisis?” John McCain, too, has embraced the idea of moving beyond partisanship: “We belong to different parties,” he has said, “not different countries.”
Certainly, if the next president were to bring former adversaries into his inner circle, in the No. 2 slot or as members of his administration, he would display that rare combination of humility and confidence required to perform wisely at the highest level. But could a president really create a team of rivals today, and would that team actually be able to get anything done? While Lincoln’s model may be more appealing and more needed than ever before, several factors in our current political climate make it considerably more difficult to bring about.
First, our interminable campaigns pit rivals against one another for so many contentious debates, personal attacks and counterattacks, that feelings harden, not only between candidates, but also their staff members, who come to regard opponents as enemies.
To be sure, negative attacks have been a part of our politics from the earliest days, but in Lincoln’s day, and indeed, until the end of the 19th century, those attacks were delivered mainly through the partisan press rather than on television, where distorted words and images are replayed again and again, creating permanent grudges. Back then, it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to take the stump, much less debate in person. And, of course, their election cycles were far shorter.
Second, our 24-hour news cycle significantly lessens the possibility of containing dissenting opinions within the president’s official circle. Lincoln’s cabinet meetings were fiery affairs. Members openly feuded with one another as well as with the president. Yet this information rarely appeared in the newspapers; we know about it mainly through diaries and letters. We learn from the diary of Attorney General Edward Bates that Montgomery Blair, the conservative postmaster general, castigated William Seward, the moderate secretary of state, as “an unprincipled liar,” and called Edwin Stanton, the radical secretary of war, “a great scoundrel.” Stanton refused for a time to sit in cabinet meetings if Blair was present.
If similar feuds were reported by the nightly news, magnified day after day by the cable shows, dissected by countless political blogs, and made fodder for late-night comedy, a team of rivals would collapse.
Third, party lines are now so rigidly drawn that if a sitting Republican or Democratic senator were to accept a top post in the opposite party’s cabinet, he would be viewed with grave suspicion by members of both parties. It wasn’t always this way. Once, politicians in Washington of both parties routinely gathered together on weekends for relaxing nights of poker, drinking and conversation. Today such friendships are less common given the need for constant fund-raising, the convenience of flights home and the numerous distractions of modern life. Four decades ago, when Lyndon Johnson needed to break a filibuster and bring the historic Civil Rights Bill to the Senate floor, he reached out to the Republican minority leader, Everett Dirksen, knowing he could rely on their personal relationship, built over years of companionship in the Senate.
Yet, while these factors make it more difficult to construct a 21st-century team of rivals, the scale of the challenges faced by the next president makes such a diverse inner circle all the more necessary. When Lincoln was asked why he had chosen a cabinet made up of rivals and opponents, his answer was simple. The country was in peril. “We needed the strongest men,” he said. “These were the very strongest men. I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”
In selecting Stanton as his secretary of war, Lincoln revealed a critical ability to put aside past grudges. He and Stanton had first met when they worked together on a trial in Cincinnati in the 1850s. At first sight of the ungainly Lincoln, with his disheveled hair and ill-fitting clothes, Stanton dubbed him a “long-armed ape” and remarked that “he does not know anything and can do you no good.” For the rest of the trial, Stanton ignored Lincoln and refused even to open the brief his colleague Lincoln had painstakingly prepared. Lincoln was humiliated.
Yet, six years later, as president, he determined that Stanton’s bluntness and single-minded intensity were precisely the qualities needed to galvanize the War Department.
Similarly, Lincoln refused to fire Salmon Chase, whose open criticisms of the president never ceased, for he believed that Chase was the best man to run the Treasury. “We have stood together in the time of trial,” he later told friends who could not understand his forbearance, “and I should despise myself if I allowed personal differences to affect my judgment of his fitness for the office.”
By building dissent into his inner circle, a president is also more likely to question his own assumptions and to weigh various consequences, leading ultimately to more farsighted decisions.
The story of the Emancipation Proclamation is a case in point. In the months before Lincoln issued his historic proclamation, he listened intently to the arguments within his cabinet over what to do about slavery. The more radical members wanted Lincoln to move quickly. The conservative members feared that emancipation would “intensify the struggle” with the Confederacy, that the border states would no longer support the Union, that it would cause such an outcry in the North that the Republicans would lose the midterm elections.
Lincoln bided his time, realizing that any assault on slavery would have to await a change in public attitudes. Gradually, he began to see a shift in newspaper editorials, in conversations throughout the North and, most tellingly, in the opinions of his cabinet colleagues, even those who represented the more conservative point of view.
Although he knew that opposition would still be fierce, he came to believe it was no longer “strong enough to defeat the purpose.” He told his cabinet that the time for debate was over, and emancipation was declared in 1863. “It is my conviction,” Lincoln later said, “that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.” Because of the heated discussions within his cabinet, his timing was perfect.
Nor is Lincoln alone in reaching out to his rivals. In 1940, after much of Europe had fallen to Nazi Germany, Franklin Roosevelt decided that the time had come for a coalition cabinet.
For secretary of war, he selected a Republican conservative, Henry Stimson, who had held top posts under previous Republican presidents. He chose as Navy secretary Frank Knox, who had been Alf Landon’s running mate on the Republican ticket in 1936. Both men were unsparing critics of the New Deal, but their domestic views were far less important to the president than their willingness to stand against the isolationist tendencies of their party and aid the Allies against Hitler.
There is also the story of a meeting in Roosevelt’s office during which the president advanced a pet proposal. Everyone nodded in approval except a junior brigadier general, George Marshall. “Don’t you think so, George?” the president asked. Marshall replied: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with you at all.” The president looked stunned, and Marshall’s friends predicted that his tour in Washington would soon come to an end. A few months later, reaching down 34 names on the list of senior generals, the president asked Marshall to be chief of staff of the United States Army.
Inviting such in-house dissent may indeed pose greater challenges today than in earlier times, but it’s hard to see that we have any other choice. Polls show that Americans wish to move beyond the combination of extreme partisanship and ideological rigidity that has for decades prevented Washington from addressing the serious problems facing our country. They have seen the damage caused by the creation of like-minded “echo chambers” in Washington. Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain would do well to keep this in mind as they choose their vice president and cabinet members.
History, after all, reveals how dangerous it can be for a president to surround himself with like-minded people. Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, deliberately chose men for his cabinet who thought as he did and, with the agreement of those around him, did nothing to prevent the secession of the Confederate states. He is now considered among the worst of our presidents.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author, most recently, of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/opinion/03goodwin.html?pagewanted=all

Upside Down - ¡uʍop ǝpısdn!

¿ǝɔuǝʇuǝs sıɥʇ pǝdʎʇ ı ʍoɥ ʍouʞ oʇ ʇuɐʍ noʎ op

/ɯoɔ˙ǝlʇıʇdılɟ//:dʇʇɥ ʇnoʞɔǝɥɔ

Spellcheck from Brain

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.