Weekend Digest: The Old And The New Edition

TV PREVIEW: THE END AND BEGINNING OF AN ERA
On this week’s edition of Talk Business & Politics:

Gov. Mike Beebe. He’s on his way out of office in January after more than three decades of public service. Talk Business & Politics contributor John Brummett sits down with Beebe for a one-on-one in front of a live audience. We’ll play a portion of the interview.

On the corporate front, changes at the top of the corporate ladder at Windstream. Changes at the bottom of the company ladder for Wal-Mart. We’ll catch you up on what’s happening with these two major Arkansas firms.

And under the dome, it was a week that focused on freshmen at the state capitol. Orientation week brought 40 new faces to the Arkansas House. We’ll sit down with two members of the freshman class – State Rep. Julie Mayberry, R-Hensley, and State Rep. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock.

Plus, we’ll also run through the latest business and political headlines of the week. Tune in to Talk Business & Politics on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. on KATV Ch. 7.

For our weekend business and political readers:

MARK CUBAN AND DEREK JETER TALK BUSINESS
It was quite a pairing. Billionaire businessman and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban and recently retired New York Yankee great, Derek Jeter sharing the same stage, talking about “motivation and crushing the competition.”

Entrepreneur reports the event was moderated by Brandon Steiner, who owns sports memorabilia company, Steiner Sports.

While Cuban, the business titan, and Jeter, the baseball legend, come from different industries the men were in agreement on a number of things. Namely, the idea that, to be successful in business, you have to be hungry, passionate and willing to work your ass off to accomplish your goals.

And neither man held back.

Cuban: “Business is the ultimate sport. Unlike sports, you often don’t even know who your competitors are. … Your character is really tested when you’re challenged … when someone is chasing you, when someone’s fighting you.

You come into my industry, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Jeter: “I’m close with my family. Even at this age, I still never want to do anything to disappoint my family.”

Follow this link for more on the philosophies and insights that motivate these two phenomenally successful men.

SQUASHING STRESS FOR SUCCESS
Stress got you down? Having trouble squashing it? You and millions of others wage that battle. And along with the tension comes the side effects of “serious physical and emotional consequences.”

Forbes asks, “So why do we have so much trouble taking action to reduce our stress levels and improve our lives?”

Researchers at Yale University have the answer. They found that intense stress actually reduces the volume of gray matter in the areas of the brain responsible for self-control.

As you lose self-control, you lose your ability to cope with stress. It becomes harder for you to keep yourself out of stressful situations, and you’re more likely to create them for yourself (such as by overreacting to people). It’s no wonder so many people get sucked into progressive rounds of greater and greater stress until they completely burn out (or worse).

But as researchers point out, “The tricky thing about stress is that it’s an absolutely necessary emotion.”

So what are the strategies that successful people use to moderate stress and not let it control and drag them down?

Click on this link for eleven of the “best” squashing strategies, “the next time your head is spinning…and your efforts will pay dividends to your health and performance.”

6 INDUSTRIES THAT CAN’T FIND WORKERS FAST ENOUGH
“NOW HIRING!”

Marketwatch reports, “Companies are clearly looking for employees — in the first nine months of 2014 alone, companies created roughly two million new jobs — but they aren’t always able to fill their open positions quickly.”

And that’s costing them big time — nearly $160 billion a year, according to research conducted by the Centre for Economic and Business Research and job site, Indeed.com.

One in three open positions now remains unfilled for longer than three months, site data reveal – a number that’s been rising recently.

“Organizations are having a really tough time filling certain positions,” says Paul D’Arcy, the senior vice president at Indeed. “Vacancies are rapidly growing.”

So what are the six industries where unfilled jobs remain open for longer than average? Go to this link to find out.

STUCK IN YOUR EMPLOYEE MINDSET?
You run your own business, but are you good at? You will be if you have the right mindset, says Tech Cocktail.

But what does that mean? Didn’t you always think you had the right mindset?

Too many of us get tripped up because we think like employees in someone else’s business, not owners of our own ventures.

Employee mindset is the collection of beliefs, thoughts, and opinions you hold when working for and answering to someone else. It can see you avoiding parts of your business that feel overwhelming, struggling to make the big decisions necessary for growth, and looking for ways to coast instead of hustling every day.

Is that you? Want to turn it around? Click here for three ways to break free of an employee mindset.

REFLECTIONS OF A WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT
After more than 40 years of covering the White House for ABC News, Ann Compton retired from ABC this past September. And she has written a marvelous piece for Politico reflecting back on her decades as a network White House Correspondent.

I retired from ABC News on September 10, 41 years to the day after I arrived as a network correspondent in 1973. Back then, the Cold War was hot, the Middle East was in flames and Watergate was coming to a boil.

When Richard M. Nixon finally resigned to avoid impeachment the following year, the president of ABC News in New York deployed me, his youngest recruit, to the White House beat. No network had ever assigned a woman there, and coverage would demand near constant travel. Being the first woman assigned was not the challenge. It was age. I was 27 years old, inexperienced and untested.

Four decades and seven presidencies later, the time has come to reflect one more time over several moments — some whimsical, others profound — that defined my time at the White House.

For a must read, connect to this link.

ARE SOUTHERN DEMOCRATS EXTINCT? NO.
Sean Trende, a political analyst with Real Clear Politics, takes a deep dive into the notion that Southern Democrats – who suffered major triage in the 2014 election cycle, including here in Arkansas – aren’t necessarily extinct and that trends are reversible to help their cause.

One of his arguments suggest that the national Democratic Party can help rescue the South for these politicians by putting a Southern Democrat on the Presidential ticket, though that is unlikely in 2016.

Bill Clinton was as perfect a Democrat as you’ll find for this region, and he carried most of these states twice. He was from small-town Arkansas, spoke with a Southern accent, loved Big Macs, and was in many ways a regular Bubba.

Gore had some of these attributes, but had spent most of his life in Washington. John Kerry was a step further away from Clinton. We can go through the cultural contrasts between Clinton and Obama but suffice it to say that, using this helpful typology, the Democrats have transformed from a blue coalition that tries to scrape away from the “red tribe,” into a blue coalition that tries to scrape away from the “gray tribe.”

Trende also contends that some national issue – any issue – has to work in a Southern Democrat’s favor.

Southern Democrats went into their 2002 and 2008 elections being able to point to important, defining issues where they’d broken with their national party. In 2010, 2012 and 2014, they couldn’t really do the same. It’s a combination of these factors, really, that led to the wipeout.

The good news for Southern Democrats is that, because this didn’t just sort of happen, it really is reversible. There are no permanent majorities in politics.

Read his full take at this link.

IS OBAMACARE DESTROYING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?
And is that assessment coming from within in the party itself?

An op-ed in The New York Times focuses on recent comments coming from Charles Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the senate that make some serious assertions.

According to Schumer, President Obama and his party suffered defeat last month in large part because of the strategic decision to press for enactment of the Affordable Care Act soon after Obama won the presidency.

In 2009, with Democrats in full control of Congress and the White House, Schumer said, “Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – health care reform. The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed. But it wasn’t the change we were hired to make; Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs; not for changes in their health care.”

To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense. So when Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought, the Democrats are not paying enough attention to “me.”

Obviously Schumer’s remarks “set off an explosion” as The Times put it.

For complete details and an in-depth look at reactions to these startling remarks, go to this link.

EPA ADMINISTRATOR TAKES A STAND
For Obama that is.

It seems little if any vocal support is coming to the president regarding his second term environmental agenda. Granted it has lofty goals, and Gina McCarthy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has been responsible for translating “his lofty aspirations into thousands of pages of complex regulations.”

The EPA has until next summer to finalize its Clean Power Plan limiting carbon emissions from power plants, especially coal plants; it is also pushing tougher restrictions on ozone and mercury pollution, which will hit the coal industry as well, and on methane, an issue for oil and gas drilling. McCarthy was once a top environmental aide to a Republican governor named Mitt Romney, but times have changed; the GOP has vowed to use its control of both houses of Congress to roll back EPA regulations in general and the carbon rules in particular.

Politico magazine senior staff writer Michael Grunwald spoke to McCarthy on Wednesday, after the House had passed a budget that cut EPA funding, while blocking U.S. aid to the global Green Climate Fund that Obama has pledged to support.

McCarthy: Environmental issues have never been, in the past, partisan issues. There’s always been a bipartisan effort to make sure every kid can breathe clean air and have clean water and have a healthy, safe place to live.

For the full interview, click on this link.

DID A COMPUTER HELP DEFEAT THE NAZIS?
Didn’t think computers were around then? Actually, they weren’t until a genius British mathematician invented the first one to help crack German military codes near the end of World War II. His name was Alan Turing.

An unsung hero of almost mythical proportions, Turing only recently started to attract the international recognition he never received in life, thanks in part to a new film that opened Friday called The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Directed by Norwegian filmmaker Morten Tyldum, the film is based on Andrew Hodges’ 1983 book, “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” the title of which refers to both Turing’s mysterious personality as well as the German military’s Enigma machine, which the Nazis used to send encrypted messages during the war.

Inc. calls the film part biopic, part historical drama.

The Imitation Game portrays Turing as a gifted innovator and war hero who was considered by many to be an outcast, failure, or both. A socially awkward introvert and closeted homosexual, Turing preferred crossword puzzles to the company of others and seemed almost incapable of getting along with colleagues.

Inc. says the underlying theme of the film and one of its recurring lines is: “Sometimes it’s the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

For more on this holiday movie release, connect here.

WHITE HOUSE CHEF EXITS
Sam Kass is leaving Washington after six years as chef for the Obamas.

…his successor probably won’t inherit three titles, two offices and an extraordinary bond with the first family. But his replacement will still need to be ready for a political fight.

The Obama administration is set to lose its behind-the-scenes food policy general at the end of the month, right as a Republican Congress plans an assault on much of first lady Michelle Obama’s healthy eating agenda.

Considered the most powerful White House chef in history, Politico reports, “he (Kass) has turned his gig into a political juggernaut, driving the administration’s aggressive food platform, from school lunch reform to mandatory nationwide calorie labeling and banning trans fat.”

But Republicans see much of that agenda as nanny-state overreach that needs to be reined in.

For more on this high-stakes food fight, go to this link.

ARE LAW STUDENTS DUMBER?
Or “Is the bar exam broken?”, asks Bloomberg Newsweek.

Law schools and the bar exam’s creators agree: The plunge in test scores that hit several states this year is alarming, and it’s probably the other side’s fault.

“This test is mysterious, unpredictable, and unfair,” says Nick Allard, dean of Brooklyn Law School. “It is depriving highly qualified, motivated, well-prepared people from earning their license.”

So upset about it, Bloomberg reports Allard was one of 79 law school deans demanding the nonprofit National Conference of Bar Examiners, that creates the exams multiple-choice questions in most states, “facilitate a thorough investigation of the administration and scoring of the July 2014 bar exam.”

So just how low were those scores and are the students “less able” as the NCBE claims?

For more on this bar exam dust-up, click on this link.