Reports Report

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There are a number of reports out today about various things. My favorites:

1. Anyone who has ever worked in a big corporation cube farm will find this one hysterically and pathetically funny.

In the months before the 2012 election, a group of high-powered consultants and political operatives prepared a secret report for candidate Mitt Romney, explaining how he should take over and restructure the federal government should he win the presidency.

“The White House staff is similar to a holding company” read one PowerPoint slide, which would have been presented to President-elect Romney as part of an expansive briefing on the morning after Election Day. It went on to list three main divisions of the metaphorical firm: “Care & Feeding Offices,” like speechwriting, “Policy Offices,” like the National Security Council, and “Packaging & Selling Offices,” like the office of the press secretary. This was the view of the Presidency Romney would have brought with him to Washington, a glimpse of the White House that never was — and plan that never saw the light of day.

Be sure to follow the link and savor the powerpoint illustration. A hoot.

Among the recommendations for the Romney administration:

  • Corporate-style training seminars were planned for appointees and nominees before the inauguration to teach management skills.
  • A plan to restructure White House operations to suit Romney’s corporate management style, with clear deliverables.
  • Detailed flow charts delineating how information and decisions were disseminated through the administration to achieve “unity.”
  • Plans to evaluate Cabinet secretaries’s performance by “systematically assessing the efforts of their departments in contributing to [Romney’s] priorities and objectives, perhaps by a newly created ”deputy chief of staff for Cabinet oversight.”

Any past or present cube farm drones will recognize this stuff as the same inane nonsense executive staffs come up with so that the big shots can pretend they know what they are doing. It amounts to the CEOs re-arranging their deck chairs while the crew in the engine room keeps the ship going, same as always.

2. The College Republican National Committee has issued a report explaining why the GOP is losing the youth vote. A sampling:

Gay marriage: “On the ‘open-minded’ issue … [w]e will face serious difficulty so long as the issue of gay marriage remains on the table.”
Hispanics: “Latino voters … tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them.”
Perception of the party’s economic stance: “We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there.”
Big reason for the image problem: The “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”
Words that up-for-grabs voters associate with the GOP: “The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

Alex Pareene:

Now, you and I know this, but apparently Republicans still haven’t figured out that another name for “errant Republican voices” is “people honestly and clearly stating the dominant policy and philosophical positions of the modern conservative movement.” This is where they may run into some trouble. In fact, most of these unfortunate impressions people have of the party are accurate reflections of the party’s positions.

Hey, it is what it is.

18 thoughts on “Reports Report”

  1. It really becomes clear that part of the reason that Republicans don’t approve of government is that they don’t actually understand what it is supposed to do. There are very few ways in which it makes sense to think of the White House as like a holding company, nor any reasons why you would want to think of it that way in order to make it function better. (Not that this would be the first elaborate report generated by an expensive consulting firm that was complete and utter bull-pucky.)

    It’s also pretty funny to see how hard it is for the GOP to fathom the basic problem with their popularity isn’t that people don’t get their message, it’s that we get it all too clearly, despite their best efforts to pretty it up.

  2. As a former Trainer of cubicle-dwelling Prairie Dog CSR’s (because when people in them stand-up, they look like Prairie Dogs getting a look-see to find out if it’s same to come all the way out of their holes), I know this deck-chair rearranging, very, very, well.

    And PowerPoint is my all time favorite corporate-tool whipping-boy!
    I can’t tell you how many bad PP presentations I sat through. Some, where the bullet-points had nothing to do with the presentation, except, maybe, tangentially. And others, where people tried to fit an entire chapter of “Moby Dick” onto one slide. And then, came the people who figured out how to include photo’s, sound-effects, and finally, streaming video’s – usually, of things that had NOTHING to do with the subject matter at hand.
    Don’t show video’s of cute kitties playing with string, when you’re talking about giving workers over 50, retirement “packages,” ’cause all we can think about, is, after strangling the kitties with the string, hanging ourselves with it.

    And, what a shock to the Republican College Republican ratf*ckers it must have been, when they discovered that their ratf*cking philosophy isn’t holding any traction with younger voters!
    What are young wannabe ratf*ckers to do, in their quest to become Master Ratf*ckers, like Atwater, Rove, Norquist, etc., when the young and old ratf*ckers are starting to realize that they’re rats who’ve cornered themselves – between a rock, and a hard, cruel, and stupid, place?

    And the best part is, their ancient, white ratf*cker base, want their ratf*ckers to ratf*ck faster, harder, more efficiently, and more cruelly.

    It couldn’t happen to a “nicer” bunch of festering, oozy, pustules, on the anus of humanity.

    But they ain’t dead yet, so don’t celebrate. They still could win. Some new wedge issues, are right around the corner. THAT’S, their only hope.

  3. PP – I took a one day class with Edward Tufte, who is acknowledged as a master at presenting information visually. If he comes to your town, and you have any interest in this sort of thing, Go. He hates PowerPoint, and remarked that people no longer go to “presentations”, they go to “powerpoint presentations” – in other words, the presentation tool itself overpowers the information being presented. And trivializes it, Tufte would argue. Tufte has called it The Tyranny of PowerPoint, and even went as far as to blame the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster on its widespread use within NASA and the various engineering firms.

    Like you Gulag, I’ve been through quite a few vacuous pp presentations where the special FX outweighed any of the content, and which revealed the presenter to be a buffoon. And yet said buffoon nonetheless drew great praise from his peers and betters due to such a wondrous presentation. Very familiar with the Prairie Dog cube dweller, coming up for air.

    At least the college Republicans are introspecting. It’s hilarious watching them or their masters struggle with the report’s conclusions. I’ve seen two distinct reactions : either we need to stay the course and be more purely conservative, the public be damned, OR we need to be better at sugar coating what we’re really about. It’s fun watching this particular weasel struggle in its corner, with no way out.

  4. One more thing – a millenial pal of mine works for some large insurance company, doing some kind of phone work to customers. They no longer have cubicles, just a bunch of office drones in a large space using telephones. I never thought I would look back to the glory days of being a cubicle dweller, as if it was some mark of high status, from a bygone era of fantastic opulence, but that’s how it appears today.

  5. Any past or present cube farm drones will recognize this stuff as the same inane nonsense executive staffs come up with so that the big shots can pretend they know what they are doing.

    I have memorized that sentence so I can smile all the way home from the cube farm.

  6. I wonder if Romney’s consultants made a provision for shortening the amount of tax filing pages required for the wealthy to hide their assets from the IRS..845 pages is way to long. If you can’t hide your tax obligation in less than 100 pages than clearly something is wrong with the system and it needs to be fixed.

  7. All this management speak got me thinking of the Romney campaign’s spectacular failure with their Orca system. I found a good article on it here. I don’t think you’re likely to find better proof of Romney’s fundamental incompetence.

    Speaking of inane nonsense executive staffs come up with so that the big shots can pretend they know what they are doing, here’s a quote from the article:

    John Ekdahl, Jr., a Web developer and Romney volunteer, recounted on the Ace of Spades HQ blog that these preparatory calls were “more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. I had some serious questions—things like ‘Has this been stress tested?’, ‘Is there redundancy in place?’, and ‘What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?’, among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.”

  8. What strikes me is bizarre is I recognize the template. They didn’t even use an original template for this important plan.

  9. Worst PP ever: I listened to a Chinese scientist spruce up his weekly progress report with an animated GIF of a kilted cartoon Scotsman marching with a set of pipes.

    “I’ve seen two distinct reactions : either we need to stay the course and be more purely conservative, the public be damned, OR we need to be better at sugar coating what we’re really about”. Yea, modernizing your outlook on life, basing policy on data, or developing a sense of empathy wouldn’t occur to those turds. Nor would it appeal to their patrons.

  10. I was listening to that discussion ( Republicans wanting to change their “image”) on the way home today.So they think an “image” change is the magic mojo? How about a “substance” change? Maybe they can refer to themselves as “My nigga” or “home Boy”; that would be cute. This is theater of the absurd. I believe it was Voltaire who said “I prayed : “God make my enemies rediculous, and my prayers have been answered”.
    So the repubs at the think tank were thinking how they could change their image to appeal to more voters. One stood up and suggested they could be less obnoxious ass holes. hey, its a start……
    But I doubt it will work.

  11. Stephen…Great link to the Orca story..LMAO.. A good example of Murphy’s law. To think they could mount an army of 30,000 tech savvy senior citizens and teabaggers is just crazy when probably ¾ of them can’t even copy and paste. . I guess it’s synonymous with “Heck of a job, Brownie” type governance that Romney would have brought to the Oval Office.

  12. “They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.”

    This has Rmoney (and Bush/Cheney) written all over it.
    It is difficult to screw up bigger than the arrogant MBA-speak jerk who insists everything is perfect, that he is totally awesome all the time and never makes a mistake.

  13. I once did work for a major cube farm down in Sarasota for ADT security headquarters. I say cube farm only as a generic term because their layout pattern was a hexagonal. Just like a honey comb. I think the logic behind that pattern is that studies have found that the workers become more productive.

  14. Way OT – the great Deacon Jones has died.
    He was, without a doubt, one of the greatest Defensive Football players of all time.

    I saw him in the last few years of his career, so I missed his apogee, but even in his last few years, he was pretty great.

    He was also a pretty funny guy when he did TV shows like, “The Odd Couple,” and on Carson.

    As a Football player, he was brutal and tough – bur from all I’ve ever heard about him, I’ve also heard he was a very charitable person, who had a heart of gold.

  15. More OT – Did you know that, not only in NY City, but in this entire country, we have an “All-powerful bike lobby,” and that it’s supported by a Totalitarian regime?
    You may say to yourself, ‘WTF?!?!?!?! An all-powerful bicycle lobby! So, it’s NOT the gun lobby that’s all powerful, with people dying all over the place, but a bicycle one. I KNEW IT!!! We get kids hooked on those tricycle thingies, and pretty soon, they’re two-wheeling it all over town!”

    Apparently, yes, in the mind of at least one ancient female albino dingleberry, over at the WSJ, who loses her poop over NY Cities new ‘bike-share’ program:
    http://live.wsj.com/video/opinion-death-by-bicycle/C6D8BBCE-B405-4D3C-A381-4CA50BDD8D4D.html#!C6D8BBCE-B405-4D3C-A381-4CA50BDD8D4D

    I think it’s the “sharing” that’s been rammed down her throat, down to her colon, that she’s objecting to – SocialiFasciCommunism!!!

    Somewhere, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren cringe and shudder, when they get that call that says, “Hey, heads-up! Nana’s got another appearance on some WSJ video show.”

  16. Snake oil no longer requires the use of snakes, but there’s still plenty of it. It seems the snakes have cut out the middle man and gone into business for themselves. How ironic that so many of their customers also have an ophidian nature themselves.

  17. Snake oil no longer requires the use of snakes, but there’s still plenty of it. It seems the snakes have cut out the middle man and gone into business for themselves. How ironic that so many of their customers also have an ophidian nature.

  18. Rats! I thought I had discovered a clever way to edit a hasty post. Alas, it was not meant to be. Sorry for the awkward phrasing.

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