Weekend Digest: The Thanksgiving Pie Edition

For our weekend business and political readers:

TV PREVIEW: THE DEMOCRATS REFLECT EDITION
On this week’s TV edition of Talk Business & Politics, Democratic Party of Arkansas chairman Vince Insalaco joins us. Democrats were routed on Nov. 4th. We’ve heard from Asa Hutchinson and Tom Cotton. This week, Chairman Insalaco analyzes the election results and discusses where the minority party in Arkansas goes from here.

Consumers are feeling better about the Arkansas economy. What’s driving the optimism? John Womack with Arvest Bank, whose Consumer Sentiment Survey shows the latest, is our guest.

Plus, we’ll run through the latest business and political headlines from across the state.

Tune in to Talk Business & Politics Sunday morning at 9 a.m. on KATV Ch. 7.

SECRETARY OF COMMERCE TALKS ABOUT IMMIGRATION REFORM
U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker tells Inc., “Immigration is needed, it’s a moral issue.”

Prizker made those comments to Inc. in Marrakech, Morocco where she was attending the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, along with Vice President Joseph Biden. The summit now in its fifth year was created by the Obama administration to support the growth of small businesses worldwide.

She spoke about prospects for global business in the year ahead, the importance of women entrepreneurs, and the executive order on immigration.

Prizker says 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or their children, and immigrants create about 28 percent of new businesses, although they only make up about 13 percent of the population.

“We know if the Senate bill would pass, it would add $1.4 trillion to our economy over the next 20 years. Immigration reform is needed, it’s a moral issue. The president is trying to come up with an accountable way to address this through an executive action, because frankly he has been waiting for Congress to act,” she said.

Follow this link for her complete interview.

THE CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM
The National Review says, “The debate over immigration reform, intensified by the surge of unaccompanied child migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border, has many conservatives worried.”

“According to conservative opponents of immigration reform, immigrants will change America,” the article notes.

But taking a more pragmatic and supportive approach The Review says, “Reforming our immigration system to allow more immigration would indeed mark a significant change. But far from representing a liberal diversion from American principles, such reform would marginally change America back to the way it used to be.”

Some small reforms and a few tweaks to our current system — such as allowing migrant workers to easily switch jobs, removing quotas, removing or streamlining minimum-wage regulations that apply to migrants, and allowing more sectors of the economy to hire migrant workers — could recreate a workable migration system like the one we had in the heyday of the Eisenhower administration.

Conservatism is not an ideology that opposes all change. It is a reformist ideology that supports measured and practical changes based on our experiences, history, and institutions. It opposes social experiments that radically depart from the past but seeks to adjust our laws to better fit the realities of today, with a firm grounding in our institutions and traditions. Such a pragmatic and measured approach should lead conservatives to support immigration reform — at least in the direction of allowing more lawful immigration and guest-worker visas.

For more on another side of this debate and a look at how immigration laws have changed over the years, connect to this link.

ODE TO THE PIE
That delicious Thanksgiving pie.

Inc. reports, “Turkey shortage or not, Americans won’t be skimping on one thing this holiday, and that’s pie.”

According to data provided to Inc. by Goldbely, a San Francisco-based e-commerce site with $3 million in funding that delivers signature foods from regional shops, not only is pie the top Thanksgiving dessert, it also happens to be among the company’s most-ordered items.

So what kind of pie does America want?

Think you know? Well you might be surprised. Click here to learn more. Plus, how much is that Thanksgiving dinner going to cost you this year? The price is higher, as the annual Arkansas Farm Bureau survey reports.

WHAT NET PRESENT VALUE CAN’T TELL YOU
Here’s a tricky investment quiz posed by Harvard Business Review.

Let me pose a question: What’s more valuable?

1. Investing 10 million dollars in a program that will return 20 million dollars in 3 years with 100% certainty…or
2. Investing 1 million dollars in a program that will return 3 million dollars in 3 years with 50% certainty?

What’s the best choice? Think you know? But wait a minute. Did you get enough information?

In the above example, the only information I’ve provided is information about the potential outcomes for the investor in the first three years of an investment’s performance. The truth is that most programs don’t simply up and disappear after three years. And the longer they can impact your organization, the more difficult it is for people to project their exact financials with any sort of certainty.

Instead of comparing the above projects with a simple 3-year net present value calculation (all too common in corporate America), more executives need to think of project investments as complex options.

For more advice about “leaving options open to capture the biggest gains at every step of the way,” click on this link.

THE BUSINESS OF SIGHT
CNBC reports that shares of Second Sight Medical Products Inc, a maker of artificial retinas designed to partially restore sight to the blind, more than doubled in their market debut.

The stock touched a high of $22.45 on the Nasdaq on Wednesday, valuing the company at $777.3 million.

Second Sight’s Argus II System – the world’s only approved retinal implant – treats outer retinal degenerations, a hereditary disease affecting an estimated 1.5 million people worldwide.

For more on this stock, click here.

And for an in-depth video look at the technology, go to this link, where Larry Hester, a Second Sight patient and bionic eye recipient, and Dr. Robert Greenberg, Second Sight CEO, discuss the breakthrough of restoring partial eyesight using robotics.

DEMOCRATIC BRANDS DIDN’T WORK
“Lessons for Democratic Strategists From 2014.” Political analyst Stu Rothenberg has plenty of them posted in Rothenblog, including a review of the Mark Pryor campaign.

How many times did I hear or read that Sen. Mark Pryor was no Blanche Lincoln? That comment was meant to highlight Pryor’s political strengths, but also to throw Lincoln (who lost re-election in 2010) under the bus so party strategists didn’t have to look at why she lost and how hostile the Arkansas terrain has become for any Democrat.

“They have their own brands,” I heard repeatedly about Pryor and Sens. Mark Begich in Alaska and Mary L. Landrieu in Louisiana from Democratic operatives and journalists.

I can’t count the number of times I heard or read about the vaunted Democratic field operation, whether in Little Rock or the most isolated areas of Alaska. Even I came to think it might matter.

It didn’t and Rotherberg goes on to say, “I was told, for example, Democrats were registering and would boost turnout among African-Americans in Arkansas, which would change the arithmetic in that race and improve Pryor’s prospects.”

But if African-Americans in Arkansas didn’t turn out to help elect the first black president, why would they turn out for Senator Pryor’s re-election bid he wondered.

So now that the Democratic charts and graphs are in the past, what lessons can be gleaned?  Go to this link for some provocative answers.

NOTE TO OBAMA FROM DEMOCRATS
“You broke the party, now fix it.” Or at least that’s what they should be saying according to Politico.

As much Hillary Clinton anticipation as there is, two weeks later, Democrats are still reeling and anxious. Obama may have built his political career without the party — and created anti-establishment alternatives — but he’s a lame duck with a new Congress that’s been elected to oppose him. He needs Democrats. And they need him.

They want him in the mix, talking about what Democrats accomplished, what Democrats are fighting for, and what the president has done to make lives better.

The Republicans have not retreated from the battlefield, so why should President Obama surrender?  He can’t give up, he can’t waver.

For the full story on what some Democrats suggest should be taking place, click on this link.

HILLARY’S PRESIDENTIAL PLATFORM?
“What should she do?”, wonders U.S. News and World Report.

As Clinton learned the hard way in 2008, running on political inevitability is fraught with risk.

Given she would arguably enter a 2016 White House race as an even stronger front-runner, it behooves her to outline a concrete vision of how she would address the country’s most vexing problems.

So what should that agenda include? Go here for one expert’s analysis.

HOUSE GOP FIRES BACK AT OBAMA
House Speaker John Boehner says the GOP-controlled Congress won’t sit back and allow the President to implement executive orders on immigration reform, and the House leader says a new challenge to the Affordable Care Act is on its way. From a Friday press conference covered by The Washington Post:

In what was clearly a coordinated campaign against what Republicans have labeled as Obama’s “imperial presidency,” Boehner announced the filing of the lawsuit minutes after he denounced Obama’s executive action on immigration.

The suit, which was approved by House Republicans four months ago, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It will be led by Jonathan Turley, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School, who is the third legal adviser to handle the case.

In recent weeks, some Republicans have pushed for including the immigration order in the lawsuit against the president. Instead, Boehner promised action in the House to counter Obama’s plans.

Read the rest of the story at this link.

THE NEW, NEW CONGRESS
From The Fix’s Aaron Blake, it appears that the current Congress and the next Congress have a lot in common:

You can say a lot of things about the U.S. Congress. One thing you can’t really say, though, is that they’ve been in Washington way too long.

Come January, nearly half of Congress (48.8 percent) will have been in office for four years or less — i.e. elected in 2010 or later. That includes 49.7 percent of the House and 45 percent of the Senate — assuming GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy defeats Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in the Louisiana runoff Dec. 6.

Read more analysis on the turnover taking place in Washington at this link.

THE INCREDIBLY SUCCESSFUL MIKE NICHOLS
An entertainment legend passed away last week at the age of 83. Mike Nichols – director, producer, and husband to ABC’s Diane Sawyer – died and his resume of award-winning work is impressive.

Dryly urbane, Mr. Nichols had a gift for communicating with actors and a keen comic timing, which he honed early in his career as half of the popular sketch-comedy team Nichols and May.

An immigrant whose work was marked by trenchant perceptions of American culture, he achieved — in films like “The Graduate,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge” and in comedies and dramas on stage — what Orson Welles and Elia Kazan but few if any other directors have: popular and artistic success in both film and theater.

An almost perennial prizewinner, he was one of only a dozen or so people to have won an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy and a Grammy.

Read more on the life and times of Mike Nichols from The New York Times here.

“SERIAL”
It’s a hit that has sparked a following straight out of the golden age of radio.

But it’s not on the radio.  Rather it’s a podcast about a non-fiction story of a murder that happened 25 years ago.

The show, which reopens the investigation into the 1999 strangling death of a Baltimore high-school student and her former 17-year-old boyfriend now serving a life sentence for the crime.

It also has managed a rare trick in a noisy news and entertainment landscape driven by a lights-camera-action mind-set: It gets people to drop everything and just listen. New episodes are made available every Thursday at 6 a.m. Eastern time. This week, hundreds of thousands of listeners eagerly tuned in to hear episode 8 out of a likely 12.

In the normally low-profile world of podcasting, “Serial” is a certified sensation — a testament to the power of great storytelling.

So who are the brilliant talents behind the most popular podcast in the world, and what is the underlying theme of the storyline? Connect here to find out.

SUITS ME
He wore the same suit for a year and no one noticed. Now, we’re not talking about a guy working in a busy environment where perhaps it could go unnoticed. We’re talking about a TV host who did this on the air for 365 days.

Who did it, and more importantly why did he do it? For the surprising answer, dial up this link.