Free Republic

Nothing to fear—yet Gene Lyons Nobody should be surprised to see the nation’s esteemed celebrity news media align with FOX News against the White House, although even a cynical observer like me found the unanimity mildly shocking. Don’t they remember what journalism was supposed to be? Supposedly, the press regulates its own behavior. In reality, that’s been a joke for two decades. “Claiming the moral authority of a code of professional ethics it idealizes in the abstract but repudiates in practice,” I wrote in 2003, “today’s Washington press corps has grown as decadent and self-protective as any politician or interest...

Last October, fresh from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, there were signs that the financial crisis was driving a bull market in business school applications. A year later, the picture is a bit different. While aspiring bankers and would-be chief executives continue to apply to M.B.A. programs in large numbers, there are signs that the rush to the quad may be easing. On Thursday, the Graduate Management Admission Council, a business school trade group, reported that applications for business schools seem to have leveled off after a record-setting 2008. Schools participating in the council’s survey reported that 2009 applications for...

The U.S. Mortgage Bankers Association said on Wednesday it will ask Congress to transform mortgage lenders Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac into several smaller, privately held companies that would issue mortgage securities with a government guarantee. [Emphasis mine] snip The new companies would guarantee the securities against defaults on underlying mortgages and pay fees into a federal insurance fund that would make good on interest and principal payments to bondholders if the companies were unable to make them.

The Jack Welch MBA by: Deborah Lambert, July 15, 2009 In the case of former GE CEO Jack Welch, you name a degree after him. The Wall Street Journal reported that Welch is “paying more than $2 million for a 12 percent stake in Chancellor University System LLC, which is converting a formerly bankrupt university into an online entity—and naming its Business Administration Program the “Jack Welch Institute.” This didn’t happen overnight. Welch, a former skeptic of online programs, had to be convinced that this one would be a high quality product, worthy of his name. The Chancellor project is...

My guess is that she really doesn't know what she wants, or who she really is. It's probably dangerous to admit to a moment of empathy. I'll either get disqualified from ever becoming being a Supreme Court justice or asked to turn in my press card. But after watching reruns of Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation from the governorship, after hearing every grammatically challenged sentence and inconsistent paragraph dissected by some talk show host, I started to (blush) feel her pain. There was the frozen smile, the vulnerability, the odd grab bag of unfiltered, unedited, unintelligible un-reasons scattered across the lawn....

Former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jack Welch is putting his name and money behind a little-known educational entrepreneur, injecting some star power into the budding industry of online education. Mr. Welch is paying more than $2 million for a 12% stake in Chancellor University System LLC, which is converting formerly bankrupt Myers University in Cleveland into Chancellor University. It plans to offer most courses online. Chancellor will name its Master of Business Administration program The Jack Welch Institute. Chancellor's leading investor is Michael Clifford, an entrepreneur who has launched two publicly traded companies in the past year: Grand Canyon...

Former General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jack Welch is putting his name and money behind a little-known educational entrepreneur, injecting some star power into the budding industry of online education. Mr. Welch is paying more than $2 million for a 12% stake in Chancellor University System LLC, which is converting formerly bankrupt Myers University in Cleveland into Chancellor University. It plans to offer most courses online. Chancellor will name its Master of Business Administration program The Jack Welch Institute. ... Online higher education will generate revenue of $11.5 billion this year, EduVentures says. But "there is a concern about quality,"...

The Final Frontier I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism. Instead of swooping in to figure out the dimensionality and logarithms to rescue the world from red matter, as Spock does in J. J. Abrams’s dazzling new “Star Trek,” I imagined Spock rescuing read matter for the world. Newspapers are an “endangered species,” as John Kerry called us in a Senate hearing last week, just as the Vulcans are in the new prequel. I know Barack Spock likes newspapers. An aide told me during the campaign that Mr. Obama would get cranky if he didn’t...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The headmaster of Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville announced late Thursday afternoon that the school will be closed on Friday and for up to seven days over concerns related to the H1N1 flu virus. Headmaster Brad Gioia said the decision was prompted after a student appears to have the virus. Gioia said the student was taken to an area hospital, treated, released and was resting at home. The school notified MBA parents about the school's closure at about 5 p.m. "It is concerning," said MBA parent Worrick Robinson. "I don't remember anything of this magnitude coming through...

BofA withdraws job offers to foreign MBAs By Della Bradshaw in London Published: March 9 2009 00:07 | Last updated: March 9 2009 00:07 Bank of America has become the first US bank to withdraw job offers made to MBA students graduating from US business schools this summer, citing conditions laid out in its bail-out deal as the reason. The recently passed $787bn stimulus bill in effect prevents financial institutions that have received money from the government’s troubled asset relief programme from applying for H1-B visas for highly skilled immigrants if they have recently made US workers redundant. BofA, which...

If his fellow Harvard MBAs are all so clever, how come so many are now in disgrace? If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in. From Royal Bank of Scotland to Merrill Lynch, from HBOS to Leh-man Brothers, the Masters of Disaster have their fingerprints on every...

Throughout our nation's history, the size and scope of government has grown by leaps and bounds during times of crisis, financial or otherwise. The political class' natural instinct is for government to rush to the rescue, particularly when an election is near. The current financial meltdown appears to be no exception, as our government responds with a $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout proposal that was at best a Band-Aid and at worst a more deadly strain of the same disease. Rather than punishing taxpayers, an array of smarter options is at the government's disposal: abandon cheap-money policy; remove financial incentives that...

Students' career hopes in disarray as crisis batters bank industry BY MELISSA GRACE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Saturday, September 20th 2008, 1:50 PM Dolores Adams, a finance major at Baruch College, is one of many business students nervous about career options in the midst of the crisis on Wall Street. Mendez for News Dolores Adams, a finance major at Baruch College, is one of many business students nervous about career options in the midst of the crisis on Wall Street. The meltdown on Wall Street has some nervous business students across the city rewriting their résumés. "You think, 'What is...

The economy's in the toilet, but at Harvard Business School, the tycoons of tomorrow have different concerns. Like finding the perfect getup for the big cross-dressing bash, and fitting in a little learning amid the nonstop schmoozing and boozing. The sound system at the Fort Point Channel warehouse is blasting power ballads on a Friday night in October, and the future titans of industry are wasted. This is understandable, because the future titans of industry are wearing pink feather boas, fishnets, and amateurishly stuffed bras. It's the night of Harvard Business School's Priscilla Ball, an annual rite that calls for...

<p>Mark Morford: Is Obama an enlightened being?</p> <p>Spiritual wise ones say: This sure ain't no ordinary politician. You buying it?</p> <p>I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of all shapes and stripes and I'm having it in particular with those who seem confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What the hell's the big deal about Obama?</p>

(RE:) ...the changing demographics of the American work force and the increasing globalization of business interactions. "Many individuals are likely to find themselves directing--or under the direction of--someone demographically dissimilar," business professors Derek R. Avery and Kecia M. Thomas write in the journal "Academy of Management Learning & Education" (2004). "Hence, understanding diversity and its impact of workplace relationships has become a critical business competency." ( ... ) as a sample, I looked at the course listings of BusinessWeek magazine's top 10 U.S. business schools to see what they offered in diversity management. The magazine ranks MBA programs based on...

You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs. Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh...

Campus Populist by: Bethany Stotts, April 11, 2008 Campus Progress (CP), a program of the Center for American Progress, argues that “30 years of heavily-funded conservative organizing has made its mark” on universities and it’s time to push back. To that end, CP recently promoted a new book highlighting the successes of countercultural “uncorporations” and political activists. “I come to you as a Democrat, by the way, but I get very disgusted with my party leaders sometimes. You know, like gratifying Bush’s illegal domestic spying program by making it legal. I got an email from a guy saying he hoped...

NEW YORK - Could any reality TV show rival the swift falls and ignominious exits of top executives in 2007? Call it "MBAs Gone Wild" or "Survivor: Wall Street," since the only thing missing were tribal councils of teammates talking about their deep disappointment. For instance: _BP's chief resigned after admitting he lied to a judge about how he met his boyfriend. (The truth: An escort service's Web site.) _HBO's CEO was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot. He explained in a memo to employees, "Two years ago, I decided that I could handle drinking...

The Master of Business Administration degree has been a holy grail for decades. If you wanted a career that mattered and didn't have the aptitude for medical school, an MBA was a good ticket to prestige and riches. But things aren't so clear anymore. If the MBA used to be the entrance fee to climb the corporate ladder, there are few corporate ladders to climb anymore -- and people are increasingly experimenting with ways to speed up that climb anyway. One way is to skip the MBA altogether. So if you're thinking of getting an MBA, you should probably think...

Who, pray who, is still sucked in by grotesque fast-food ads? Shouldn't there be a law? I admit scattershot naivete. I admit to a strain of blind optimism, a sort of sporadic myopia, a weirdly sanguine tunnel vision that makes me somehow think that we as a species and a culture and as a mad gaggle of individual human souls who are coupled with functioning hunks of semi-rational gray matter, we must, at least occasionally, be learning something, ever-so-slightly advancing our awareness of those things on this planet that want to harm us and sicken us and even kill us,...

I must confess to being disappointed five years ago when my son, Vineet, told me he had no interest in applying to any of the schools I consider elite. He said he would fit in better at a public state university and he didn't believe that choice would lessen his chances of career success. Perhaps it was the bias that my company's venture capitalists showed toward management teams from top-tier colleges that skewed my thinking. Whatever the cause, I have since concluded I shouldn't have been upset in the least. An education from one of the world's top schools may...

Best Books for an MBA As the New York Times recently highlighted, a business student (or CEO’s) best friend is a well-constructed library. The following are the books that I highly recommend to any current, aspiring, or “damn, why did I go to law school!” MBA student. Certain titles may be a bit ‘atypical’ at first glance; indeed they are anything but. [Note: each title links to the listing on Amazon.com] The Power of ProductivityAtlas ShruggedAgainst the GodsThe Little PrinceWSJ Guide to Understanding Money & InvestingWikinomicsThe Art of WarThe Long Tail George Soros on GlobalizationWhen Genius FailedGuns Germs & SteelBeating...

BARACK OBAMA looked as if he needed a smoke and he needed it bad. Everyone knows you're not supposed to make two big changes at once. But Michelle Obama's price for letting her husband run was that he quit. So there he was, trying to meet the deep, inexhaustible needs of both Iowa activists and the global press behemoth on his first swing across the state, while giving up cigarettes. He was a tad testy. Traipsing around desolate stretches of snowy — and extremely white — Iowa to go into living rooms and high school gyms and take questions like...

The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties.W, Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.Far from being run out of town, the defense czar has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday's tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19 gun salute, and Old Guard performance in Revolutionary War costumes, & John Phillip Souza music. Even Joyce Rumsfeld got a Distinguished Public Service Medal...

Maureen Dowd: Good gracious - It's the truth Staff Report Article Launched:12/06/2006 10:16:33 PM PST FIRST, JUNIOR TOOK over the house with big plans to remodel it and make it the envy of the neighborhood. But then he played with matches and set the house on fire. So now he's frantically trying to stop the flames from torching the whole block. The Bush administration has gone from a breathless plan to change the Middle East to a breathless plan to preserve it, from democracy promotion to conflagration avoidance. That was the cold shower offered Tuesday by Robert Gates, the former...

After 9/11, Americans had responded to bellicosity, drawn to the image, as old as the Western frontier myth, of the strong father protecting the home from invaders. The macho poses and tough talk of the cowboy president were undercut when he seemed flaccid in the face of the vicious Katrina. Even former members of the administration conceded they were tired of the muscle-bound style, longing for a more maternal approach to the globe. ?We were exporting our anger and our fear, hatred for what had happened,? said former Deputy SoS Richard Armitage. He said America needed ?to turn another face...

THINGS have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush. The president is cutting and running from the president. In a momentous event at the White House on Monday, Tony Snow made a major announcement about an important new strategy for Iraq. The president will no longer stay the course on the rallying cry "stay the course." A presidency built on message discipline (Message: "Stay the course") is trying to salvage itself with some last-minute un-messaging. Of course, the administration has never really said what "the course" is, so it was never really...

Graduate business students take their cue from corporate scandals The corporate scandals that have plagued Wall Street in recent history are setting a fine example for young students looking to make their mark in the business world: They are learning to cheat with the best of them. Students seeking their masters of business administration degree admit cheating more than any other type of student, from law to liberal arts. "We have found that graduate students in general are cheating at an alarming rate and business-school students are cheating even more than others," concludes a study by the Academy of Management...

"...How will we ever persuade him to give up his modeling gigs in Men’s Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life? How can we lure the lanky young senator from Illinois out of the glossy celebrity pages and back to gritty substance, away from Annie Leibovitz’s camera and back to Abraham Lincoln’s tradition? He may not want to come back, now that he has mastered that J.F.K. casual glamour pose in shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket slung over his shoulder, elegant wife and pretty children accessorizing. The Washington Post’s fashion reporter, Robin Givhan, analyzed the Men’s Vogue spread,...

BOSTON: Graduate business students in the United States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said on Wednesday. The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 per cent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business. Following business students, 54 per cent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 per cent of physical science students, 49...

George W. Bush is the first president with an MBA (from Harvard Business School, no less), but it's not clear that being a master of business administration has made him a better chief executive.[...] Business schools are a relatively new institution. The MBA was invented in the Progressive era as a way to abort future generations of robber barons. The idea was to train a class of business administrators (the ethos was anti-entrepreneurial) who would expiate capitalism's sins by managing their corporations in keeping with higher morality. The higher morality was whatever the spirit of the age revealed to professors...

As I said during my most recent radio spot, "listening to my arguments rarely involves having to have bail money ready." Think about it...." Whether it's gather all-the-facts ignorant students to engage in street protests while their protester-professors are usually curiously absent, liberals use kids to perpetuate their causes, just daring the authorities to do their jobs. If the kids get busted, it's considered a necessary evil, as more kids come along to fill any voids. Thus we now have (again) Cindy Sheehan in her latest quest for attention and relevance -- goading kids who've fully digested the anti-war diatribe...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

It's spring, and at the Indian Institute of Management - a premier management school in this industrial town - the campus is abuzz with company recruiters offering fat pay packages to new grads. . Bagging a $185,000 per year offer, Manan Ahuja, an affable 26-year-old lad, coyly notes that his salary package offered by Barclays Capital, a British investment bank, is far more than his father, a Delhi government bureaucrat, earned in his entire lifetime. "It feels great to get an international offer," Mr. Ahuja says. "Beyond the salary, this promises an interesting job profile and great growth prospects." Ahuja's...

Short answer: Of course you do. Longer answer: Wait, a what? Are you serious? Where? It is a time of great wonder and sporadic hope and hot liquid sighs masquerading as just another day in your life. It is a time of vital physical awakening and innovative technological excellence resulting in unprecedented levels . . .

No one wants to admit it, but the University of Texas changed everything. The state's flagship university brought its brand of business education to Houston and upended the local MBA market. Before UT showed up, Rice University's Jones School of Management was the highest-ranked business school in the city and offered its curriculum only to full-time students and seasoned executives earning Master of Business Administration degrees on the weekend. Before UT, the University of Houston's Bauer College of Business abandoned efforts to offer an MBA program to full-time students and refocused its mission to cater exclusively to working professionals taking...

Something that was useful at the MBA Association I would like to recreate here is a live thread (completely vanity) on The Apprentice. This is for only those who actually enjoy the business aspect of the program and would like to analize the actions of the members.

Bush's cinematic war on terror Gene Lyons Why do Republican-oriented pundits spend so much energy lashing out at Hollywood for its sins? Professional jealousy. Partly because so many Americans imagine the world beyond Wal-Mart as a movie set, the Bush administration does its best work in the realm of illusion. I was reminded of this when a Kansas student recently asked President Bush what he, "as a rancher," thought of "Brokeback Mountain." On cue, Cowboy W said he hadn't seen it and would rather discuss "ranching." The TV networks ate it up. Never mind that it was sheer fakery. Bush...

Does having a Harvard MBA make someone a better stock picker? We think not! We're now two weeks into the TradingMarkets/Playboy 2006 Stock Picking Contest and 4 of the 10 Playboy models are beating 11,705 out of the 11,739 equity mutual fund managers in the United States. Yes, that's right, 4 of the Playboy models would be ranked in the top 1% of all mutual fund managers if Morningstar tracked their performance! Here are the highlights of the contest so far: 1. 9 out of the 10 contestants are beating the S&P 500. 2. The average performance of all ten...

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

No, the WNBA doesn't count. What about the NFL? The NBA? What about the big, macho men?You know they're out there. The gay pro male athletes, grunting and sweating and spitting and running and crashing and hurling, right now, acting all manly and tough and rugged and heroic on the field or on the court. And they're signing autographs and getting themselves all beloved by largely homophobic 'Murkin men and swooning 'Murkin boys and even handfuls of women as they jam the secret of their sexuality way, way down and go on raking in their millions, leading their lives...

Like so many people today, I work a second job to make ends meet. I write a column for a quarterly magazine called the Turbo Diesel Register, a special-interest publication for the owners of Dodge Ram diesel pickup trucks, one of which I happen to own. I provide this background to explain why I happen to know so much about 1950s Cadillacs, and why dumb marketing at Cadillac is so emblematic of the deterioration of the entire General Motors Corp. For a recent TDR column, I found myself researching the early development of the Chrysler Hemi engine and the competitive...

A relative of mine, immediately after graduating from college, went to work for a bank. Even though he had a university degree, he was assigned the job of repossessing cars. We kidded him a lot about that. He eventually ended up a vice president, but his entry into the banking industry was about as low as you can get, and we never let him forget it. In similar fashion, the Enterprise car-rental firm goes to college campuses to recruit management trainees, but among the first jobs these trainees handle is washing and cleaning cars coming off rental. When I moved...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...

The word "reinvent" is a dumb term, having an overtone of redundancy. After all, when you have invented something, it exists. You can revise it or change it, but you can't "reinvent" it after you have already invented it. I never heard the term when I first entered the workforce. But somewhere in the 1970s or so, corporate executives-began using the word, and using it a lot. Then as now, the nation had its usual economic ups and downs, but suddenly after one downturn, our nation was heavily laden with companies that had reinvented themselves. What happened is that after...

Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report: Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks: "Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes...

Leather, techno, sex & war: more only-in-SF juice to make you proud. Take that, uptight neocons. It was the moment when we walked by a jam-packed S.F. City Hall and realized it was open to host a VIP techno dance party, while immediately outside its gilded doors upward of 50,000 revelers wandered and shimmied and flaunted their costumes and drank nasty Red Bull cocktails in the huge Civic Center plaza for the third annual Love Parade, everyone baring flesh and shaking their groove thangs to any one of 200 world-class (well, some of them) DJs spinning their wares on over...