After a nice social slaying of a longstanding celebrity talkshow host, one would think Sarah Palin would perhaps quietly retreat back to business-as-usual as Alaska’s governor.

Instead she demonstrated illogic and erratic behavior yesterday as she resigned from her post, giving a litany of non-sensical reasons.

There’s speculation, courtesy of the No Safe Place blog, that this may be the real reason for her resignation. Whatever it is, based on yesterday’s bizarro performance, let’s hope this is the last America sees of her in public service.

Many have had a field day with the David Letterman fiasco regarding his jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter(s). Key to the debate is the point that Letterman and his writers clearly screwed up in their innuendo about Palin’s daughter.

It is obvious the joke in question was meant in reference to Palin’s oldest daughter, age 18, who became pregnant before marriage and while still a teenager. But Letterman and his writers inadvertently were referring to the daughter at the ballgame in question, who is 14, getting “knocked up by Alex Rodriquez.”

Palin rightfully pushed back against the joke. And she continued pushing. While Letterman initially tried to diffuse the situation with more humor, Palin clearly wasn’t satisfied.

She went too far in attempting to reframe the context of the joke, such as suggesting her youngest daughter should stay away from David Letterman. However, the situation was precipitated by Letterman’s inadvertent mistake and Palin was correct to fight back.

As an added touch of grace to the situation, both Letterman’s eventual apology and Palin’s acceptance of it, shows that in such situations a good fight must ensue before a true resolution can be find.

Palin necessarily stood up for herself and her family in order to get to that point. She should be commended.

[EDIT: Jim Lukaszewski just chimed in and he takes Letterman to task. You may read his response here.]

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Nominations to the Supreme Court by the President

This goes for the treatment of Clarence Thomas and Harriet Miers to Samuel Alito, John Roberts and now Sonia Sotomayor. While it’s justified to give critical examinations into records, and yes, even such things as temperament and character, the ultimate test is judicial and decision-making skill. Can the nominee do the job she or he is appointed to do, and can they do it effectively? How well do they think and process incredibly complex problems?

Where critics have gone too far with the current nominee is by assailing her character on the bench — Lindsay Graham (R-SC) called her a bully — without thorough thought given to current Supreme Court justices. It took National Public Radio to point it out.

Nina Totenberg brilliantly digs up the criticisms against Sotomayor and then does a back-to-back comparison of her so-called bullying behavior against that of current judges, in particular Justices John Roberts and Antonin Scalia. Totenberg both read court transcripts and listened to actual questioning by the Sotomayor and then pits them against questioning by Roberts and Scalia.

Totenberg’s complete story is here, but her conclusion bears repeating:

So, if Sotomayor sometimes dominates oral arguments at her court — if she is feisty, even pushy — then she would fit right in at the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Monday we began the journey on how to launch an effective grassroots political campaign. You may read part I here and part II is here. Here are the final steps for a successful campaign!

5. Play the victim. If your antagonist is evil (and by default, he is), you must, by default, be good. When he does something wrong, you are automatically the better person. The best way to convey this is to consistently portray yourself as the victim. Have you ever been criticized? Ignored? Been given the stink eye on a street corner? Then you are a victim. This too is now part of your platform and your victim-hood is usually the fault of your opponents in some way, shape or form. Nothing is more powerful, and can begin you on your path of speaking to the millions who also feel victimized, than being physically and mentally damaged by things like Big Government, bureaucracy, Mexicans, the North Vietnamese and the price of gas.

6. Gain third-party endorsements. This is a time-tested principle, but what experts don’t want you to know is that the best people to tell your story are those who are just like you are and believe the same things that you do. Picking somebody who appears both knowledgeable and on your side is the best person to tell your story for you. If you cannot find a credible third-party endorsement you merely have to cite them in your materials (and quote them regularly) to show that you and that person are on the same page. If necessary, take their statements out of context when it suits your needs and makes you look better.

7. Refuse to answer questions. By now, if you have followed these steps in order, you should be generating some attention. This is good, but some key points remain, and the most important one is to not answer questions. Remember, your campaign is about what THEY are doing wrong. It has nothing to do with YOU. If pressed about what YOU believe, always defer to the issue you are concerned about –what THEY are doing wrong and how corrupt THEY are. If pressed further, saying “no comment” almost always stifles further questions and ensures that you will be viewed with a higher level of integrity. It also says to your questioners, “My knowledge is too important to share with you at this time.” People like that.

8. Shoot the messengers. If you do not like questions that you receive about your platform – or just don’t like ANY particular question – and they won’t stop asking them, remember that the person asking the question is most likely in bed with your enemy in some way, shape or form simply because they have to nerve to challenge you. These people are not on your side and should be crushed without mercy (think Stalin). At any given opportunity, be sure to let your true supporters know just how wrong it is that people such as members of the News Media Elite dare to question and criticize. By doing so, these people are showing that they, too, are part of the problem and not The Solution. The Solution, in fact, happens to be you.

9. Appear unintelligent. Finally, the last point for success in this series is the importance of appearing like the rest. Nothing gravitates the masses toward their master if he comes across as just one of the guys who just happens to have The Answer. If you speak their language, and dress like a commoner, they will like you. Remember, it was Mark Twain who said that if you consider the average intelligence of people, you will realize that 50 percent are even dumber. You must always use this to your advantage.

Good luck!

Yesterday we began the journey on how to launch an effective grassroots political campaign. You may read part I here. Here are the next two steps in the process, which will help lay the foundation for successful campaigns.

3. Build your social networking presence.

a. Start with a website. Do not get too fancy. Nothing stinks more of special interest money than a well-designed website. Build your own HTML-coded pages, even if you don’t know what that means. Alternatively, use GoDaddy’s free blog platforms as your new website when you purchase your domain name from GoDaddy (NOTE: Always use GoDaddy.). Leave the GoDaddy advertisements at the top of the page so that your constituents know just how independent, in-touch and down-to-earth you, in fact, are.
b. Enable the God named Youtube. Create some do-it-yourself, self-made videos. Be sure to use an inexpensive video camera (never use a tripod) – or, better yet, no camera at all. Take photographs from other websites and insert those into a video with you narrating your platform – which is, you’ll remember, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM – interspersed with quotes from your enemies. Be sure to take your enemy’s quotes out of context so that everyone knows just how corrupt and dysfunctional they are.
c. Take your campaign to Twitter. Because Twitter is new, that means that it is automatically better than doing time consuming things such as walking door-to-door to spread your message. Twitter has plenty of benefits like gaining 16,000 new followers just by clicking a single link. These new followers will most likely translate into 16,000 new “Yes!” votes for you come election time. Also, because Twitter limits your “tweets” to a mere 140 characters, you have less opportunity to explain yourself but can easily link to examples pointing toward corruption by your enemies.

4. Exploit wrongdoing (or invent it)*. Look carefully at your enemies. Bought by special interests? Late night, discreet trysts with transsexual prostitutes that involve latex undergarments, ball gags and artifically flavored fruit popsicles? Bushels of methamphetamine in frozen caskets buried deep beneath organic or floral gardens? Whatever it is, find it and exploit it. NOTE: Sources for political wrongdoings are best found in two places:

A) Opinion columns and pundits broadcasting on TV or radio (this is the least credible source);

B) Anonymously written blogs (this is the most credible). Because bloggers can write and post anonymously, they are more likely to tell the real truth than if they use their real names. People who use real names will often censor themselves and therefore won’t print anything truthful. This is the problem with newspapers.

Other sources for information that are not very credible but can potentially help your platform are organizations that have names containing words like “institute,” “research,” “independent” and/or “policy.” The problem with such entities is that although they can provide intelligent sounding source material, and they don’t always have to publicly disclose their funding sources, their literature, especially if they are called institutes, think tanks and the like, may be too confusing for the common man.

The main point, though, is that even if you find marginal examples of wrongdoing, you can easily make it wrong by simply saying it is wrong or by creating a reason for why it should be wrong. Always demean your opponent to make yourself look better and strengthen your campaign.

*NOTE: Finding where the enemy goes wrong may be difficult (which is why you must invent reasons on occasion), but it’s far more challenging to find out anything wrong with your own party and its members; even less so, with yourself. Obviously, since you are running for office, you must be a good person with good ideas or, at the very least, much better than what currently is running the show. Note that the same does not apply to your competition (read: the enemy with a checkered past, dull wit and various conflicts of interest). Moreover, since you are most likely the member of a political party, that means that your party, or the one most ideologically aligned to it, must inherently be more saintly than the opposing party. Evidence will support this supposition if you look for it selectively.

Part III, the final steps, will be posted tomorrow morning.

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With campaign finance reform, never-ending political corruption and the emergence of the increased power of the citizenry using online technology, this means politics is due for a grassroots-based upheaval.

If not, it should be.

With that in mind, this step-by-step guide to launching a grass roots political campaign is a surefire way to find success in the political arena. Whether you’re aiming small – city or county government – or large, like the U.S. Senate and beyond, this guide has specific points you must follow to launch your way to the top like a shooting star.

1.  Build a platform. Your platform should be about what is wrong with your competition, the people you are campaigning against in the upcoming election. NEVER, EVER base a campaign on what is right with you. Your platform is always stronger – and resonates more with the rational and sane-minded – if it is based on WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM. More on this later in the series.
2. Create a name for yourself. In the marketing world, this is called branding. So-called marketing “experts” will try to claim that everything you say and do is what constitutes your “brand.” Ignore this high-priced advice. Instead, the best way to build your brand is to simply rename yourself something related to your platform. Two examples: A. “Bloviator Bob: He Speaks To You AND For You”; or B. “Reach-around Ryan: He Knows What’s Right” (Yes, this is Ryan Jerz’ upcoming Nevada State Senate campaign brand.). IMPORTANT NOTE: Find a word to associate with your new name that begins with the same letter as your (new) first name. We like to call this alliteration, but you don’t need to know that.

Steps 3 and 4 will be posted tomorrow morning.

Read Part I and Part II.

Important facts about CEO salaries tend to be ignored by the news media. The back-story, the realities of CEO compensation, are far more complex than what can fit into a 30-second series of sound-bites on the evening news, and the complexities are often overlooked in even the more in-depth written stories.

Yet these points are a key to understanding why it is that CEOs make the money they do. Nobody understands this perhaps better than Thomas Sowell, who has taught economics at institutions such as Cornell, UCLA and Amherst. He is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Sowell provides provides a thoughtful context for CEO salaries.

“Among the bountiful supply of fallacies about income and wealth are the following:

1. Except for the rich, the incomes of Americans have stagnated for years.
2. The American middle class is growing smaller.
3. Over the years, the poor have been getting poorer.
4. Corporate executives are overpaid, at the expense of both stockholders and consumers (pg. 124).”

“The high pay of corporate executives in general, and of chief executive officers in particular, has attracted much popular, media, and political attention – much more so than the similar or higher pay of professional athletes, movie stars, media celebrities, and others in very high income brackets. While the top ten corporate executives earned an average of $59 million each in 2004, the top 10 celebrities earned an average of $119 million each that same year – twice as much. Yet it is rare – almost unheard of – to hear criticisms of the incomes of sports, movie, or media stars, much less hear heated denunciations of them for ‘greed.’*

“One of the most popular – and most fallacious – explanations of the very high salaries of corporate executives is ‘greed.’ But when your salary depends on what other people are willing to pay you, you can be the greediest person on earth and that will not raise your pay by a dime” (pg. 141).

So why is it that corporate CEOs make so much money? Sowell says that the simple answer is the basic principle of supply and demand. Further, there’s a sound economic reason for high CEO compensation packages, namely the impact CEOs have on high-stakes corporate decisions.

“Given the billions of dollars at stake in corporate decisions, $59 million a year can be a bargain for someone who can reduce mistakes by 10 percent and thereby save the corporation $100 million…. For example, the director of the company that publishes the Washington Post assessed the recommendations of one member of his board of directors this way: ‘Mr. Buffet’s recommendations to management have been worth – no question – billions’” (pp. 142-143).

It should now be obvious why corporate leaders receive what are dubbed golden parachutes upon termination. Simply, if CEO decision making is faulty and is in fact costing the company money, a “lucrative” severance package may in fact be a cost-saving investment for the company. Again, Sowell explains:

“…Putting an end to a relationship may be just as valuable, or even more valuable, than the initial beginning of the relationship once seemed. As with the original hiring decision, neither stockholders nor consumers nor other employees are worse off for the payment of a large severance package, if that cuts losses that would have been bigger if the failed CEO stayed on” (pp. 144-155).

At the least, the next time a story airs that mentions leadership salaries in contexts deemed negative, it is likely that only a sliver of the picture is being revealed. To adequately understand the myths and realities of CEO compensation requires truer objectivity and a more thorough understanding of corporate trends beyond what headlines and charged storylines procure.

 —————————————–

*Activist filmmaker Michael Moore, who frequently attacks corporations in his films, said on Larry King Live in November:

“… [W]e’ve allowed a few people at the top to get filthy rich…. The Ford chairman is making something like $22 million a year and his company lost $2 billion last year. The G.M. chairman is making $15 million a year. His company lost $39 billion last year. And he’s rewarded with a $15 million payout. I mean this is — this is just absolutely insane….”

Moore himself is said to be worth more than $50 million.

Read Part I here.

The reason for such outcry about CEO behavior is not because what CEOs do is arrogant – it just appears that way. It is not because their salaries are out of line – if that were the case, celebrities’ salaries, which are higher on average than CEO salaries, should also lead to outcry. The reason for the hysteria is more because of public ignorance and allegations made by the news media starting about 20 years ago.

“Although the business press had followed CEO pay for decades, CEO pay did not really become a public ‘issue’ until 1991. Feature stories on CEO pay aired on the nightly news broadcasts of the three major networks in the Spring of 1991, and CNN, 60 minutes and Nightline devoted segments to CEO pay. The controversy heightened with the November 1991 introduction of Graef Crystal’s (1991) expose on CEO pay, In Search of Excess, and exploded following President George Bush’s ill-timed pilgrimage to Japan in January 1992, accompanied by an entourage of highly paid U.S. executives…. By the mid-1990s, media and political attention focused on the growing disparity between CEO pay and average worker pay, and on escalating CEO pay in downsizing companies. Newsweek ran a February 1996 cover story on ‘Corporate Killers: The Hitmen,’ which identified CEOs both by their salaries and by how many employees had been fired in recent restructurings…” (source, pp. 50-51).

The problem with such news media created invective is that most people do not understand how businesses operate and why CEOs make the money that they do. Most people, who in America earn a middle-class income, simply cannot fathom the amount of money some of these CEOs take home, not to mention the perceived lucrative packages received when CEOs are fired.

Because we are used to our own meager salaries, and typically, living paycheck-to-paycheck, the world of multi-million dollar salaries appears foreign. It is therefore easy to generate assumptions about such salaries.

CEO compensation has been climbing steadily in the past two decades, and the perception that goes along with astronomical compensation packages is often negative. Kevin Murphy of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, wrote a paper in 1999 that outlined emerging trends in CEO compensation, as well as the “populist attack on wealth that followed the so-called ‘excesses of the 1980s” (pg. 1). Murphy provides a background on the reality of CEO salaries, and it is important to understand the four key components of executive pay packages:

1. Base salary
2. Annual bonuses tied to accounting performance
3. Stock options, and
4. Long-term incentive plans (pg. 3)

So Alan Mulally of Ford and other CEOs may forego their salaries as a symbolic public relations gesture – and to appease grandstanding politicians – but they’re still getting along just fine. And the public and news media remain uninformed of just how complex the issue of CEO compensation really is, while compelling headlines about alleged corporate malfeasance continue to be written.

Read Part III, the conclusion, tomorrow.

There’s nothing quite like a news story in which a corporate CEO is photographed in handcuffs. As the perceived pinnacle of global malfeasance, today’s CEO is widely vilified, and often for good reason. Or so it is assumed.

Nothing illustrated the wide disconnect between CEOs and the masses than Alan Mulally’s testimony in front of Congress where, after flying to the hearings in a corporate jet about the desperate situations Ford Motor Co. and other major car manufactures are in, he was asked to relinquish his salary. His reply:

“I think I’m OK where I am.”

Where he was, was at about $13.6 million, which was a 37% pay cut from 2007, when he earned about $21.7 million.

His response ended as public relations disaster that resulted in Ford Motor Co. and crew later driving to Washington in hybrid vehicles and Mulally eventually agreeing to a $1 a year salary.

Such actions, though, are window dressing and serve only public relations and political purposes, not actual corporate or operational improvement. Mulally’s salary is a mere drop in the bucket for what is needed in order for Ford to survive the economic crisis, and his later trip to Washington in a hybrid was nonsensical from a resource and policy perspective.

From a public relations standpoint, it was a no-win situation for Mulally. Jason Vines, a former Chrysler spokesperson, said: “If you do what people think is the right thing, then they’re just going to be reminded that you came in corporate jets before.”

The problem is that from an efficiency standpoint, Mulally should have been in a jet from the get-go, and he should have remained so. As someone whose time is more valuable that most of us can fathom, sitting in a cramped car for a nine-hour trip to Washington is more wasteful of Ford’s resources than flying.

The PR backpedaling may have helped to kill the story line, and the public perception was perhaps mildly satiated by this maneuver – meaning, Ford’s approach was most probably the right thing to do from a PR standpoint – but it’s a structurally unsound way to conduct business and in fact may violate company policy.

“According to Ford’s proxy, Mr. Mulally was required to use Ford aircraft for all business and personal air travel in 2007 for security reasons and his family and guests were allowed to accompany him.

“The arrangement also covers travel by Mr. Mulally’s wife, children and guests on company aircraft for personal reasons without him at company expense upon his request to ‘ease the burden’ of moving to Michigan and away from family in Seattle, according to the proxy.

“Ford’s proxy said the only other person allowed to use corporate aircraft for personal reasons is Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr” (source).

In other words, Mulally got in trouble for following the rules.

Read Part II tomorrow.

It is astounding to stop and reflect on the amount of misinformation around us. It goes beyond our ingrained tendencies toward misperception, misunderstanding and the difficulty in shifting our beliefs when confronted with contrary evidence. Each of these traits is natural and we are subject to these tendencies even when aware of them. So we must be somewhat forgiving of ourselves and others when we spot these faults in action.

It’s another thing altogether, though, to deliberately twist – or invent – information to suit one’s needs. This is where advocacy groups come in, often with fancy sounding names and grand intentions. I write about this topic often, but a local example has me confounded more than normal. In a series on government agencies and salaries, the local daily recently quoted a Nevada “think-tank” on how to make higher education more accountable. Here’s a direct portion of the article:

Professors’ pay should be tied to whether they produce graduates who can land good-paying careers, said Patrick Gibbons of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a Las Vegas-based private, nonprofit government research organization.

“That’s the only way they can justify their salaries,” said Gibbons.

“If these professors are turning kids into Einsteins who are graduating and getting high-paid jobs, they deserve a lot of money,” he said. “But if they fail to educate and graduate students who are leaving in droves, perhaps they don’t deserve the salaries they’re getting. It’s hard to evaluate.”

Not all high school graduates need to go to UNR to get a high-paying job, either, said Gibbons, who is not related to the governor.

“We have a kind of elitist attitude in America that you have to get a college degree, but then students graduate and they’re left with debt and disappointment,” he said.

What Gibbons says is profound. This is a subject I have studied all semester – broadly, what constitutes educational success. My course dealt specifically with streamlining P-16 efforts; however, my doctoral studies are in higher education administration.

Two significant points are raised:

1. Nevada is a working class state (some would say working poor), and it is true that it is possible to make a living, even a good one, without a higher education. The state has a tourism-based economy that historically undervalues education primarily because it does not see a greater need for it. Dealing blackjack does not require a college degree. At the other end of the spectrum, it is well established that high-quality education correlates to societies with greater civic participation, quality healthcare, communities with greater social cohesion and so on. It is here where Nevada, verified with easily found research, typically ranks lowest in many indicators. Along with this, to imply that a university is not needed simply because of the state’s job market ignores the reality that many students come from out of state (because of its low costs) to attend these institutions. Moreover, other industries, especially the state’s emerging high-tech, science and environmental firms require higher degrees. The more the state diversifies into other sectors — especially in light of our current economic crisis due in part because of the state’s tourism dependence – the more the job market will demand higher education.

2. Gibbons is correct to say that higher education is “hard to evaluate.” One of higher education’s chief faults is its lack of measurable variables that determine success. Thomas Sowell, in his book Economic Facts and Fallacies, states this poignantly:

“Accrediting agencies must rely on broad-bush indicators of campus resources, such a the number of books in campus libraries and student:faculty ratios – in short, the same kinds of input criteria, rather than measures of educational output, for which the U.S. News and World Report has been criticized.”

Lack of adequate measurements is in part characteristic of the very nature of higher education, with few exceptions (the University of Phoenix would be one). Suggestions to redress this situation are numerous, and it is likely that in years to come we will see more attempts at accountability similar to what public school education has seen with No Child Left Behind. Among measurements, expect to see attempts to increase student retention as a chief proposal.

But what makes the suggestion to tie professorial performance to student retention so fantastic is the obvious nature of how students move through higher education institutions. On one hand, it’s purely logistical. Classes are taught not just by professors of all ranks but also by adjunct faculty and graduate students. Any one professor simply cannot be tied to any one student, let alone hundreds, if not thousands, when students attend any number of classes in any given semester with any number of different types of instructors who represent a variety of disciplines.

There are countless other externalities that contribute to student success, from university climate, geography and finances, to even something as simple as students who drop out to get married and have children. To attribute any one of these to the professor as a measure for his or her salary, not to mention the even more perplexing issue of attributing career success post-college, to the professor – something also clearly influenced by external factors such as the economy – would be a precedent-setting and improbable way to attempt to achieve increased accountability.

Finally, students choose to attend higher education institutions; they also make the choice to quit if it is not for them. Should this really the responsibility of professors? If so, it’s quite a claim for a “free-market” institute.

Perhaps most striking is the recommendation being these ideas are the ONLY way professors can justify their salaries. Professors are already accountable, just according to variables the lay public does not readily understand or, perhaps, does not regard with value. Specifically, the professoriate is accountable in public universities (and even more directly, in land-grant universities) usually in tree ways:

1. Student evaluations of teaching
2. Research productivity — typically, the amount and quality of research publications, grants, etc., and
3. Service to the campus and community.

To succeed as a professor, particularly in order to get tenure within five years, each of these should be in order; if not, your peers will show you the door. Perfect? Hardly, but it’s far more variable and realistic than what is suggested above.

The literature, or even Sowell’s book chapter on higher education, gives a much better analysis of the nature of higher education and its intangible role to society. In short, to invent something so afar from what policy research suggests makes, to put it nicely, for a fascinating read. And that is why it was in the local daily newspaper.

The short lesson is that journalists will quote these types of organizations and their representatives, and because these kinds of organizations are accountable more to demagogic interests than verifiable facts or, in this case, reasoned policy based on research, the level of misinformation continues unabated.

What reporters should be doing instead is seeking out experts, especially those with ties that are as impartial as possible.