目前分類:nonfiction, biography (8)

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My Life  

My Life, William Jefferson Clinton 2004, Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Inc.

5. Page 334, Ch24
“In 1987, I might have made a decision rooted in self-confidence and driven by ambition, but I didn’t. What finally decided the question for me was the one part of my life politics couldn’t reach: Chelsea. Carl Wagner, who was also the father of an only daughter, told me I’d have to reconcile...
’...long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was.’”

Note 5:
This paragraph was with Bill’s words which echoed with my heart for when I was in my high school age, the same thinking was ever coming to my mind. But we could ponder on what Bill said in that “if I was ever lucky enough to have a child,” what Bill was trying to say to us.

6. Page 335, Ch24
“In July, Hillary, Chelsea, and I went to the summer governors’ conference in Traverse City, Michigan, to wrap up my year as chairman. I was succeeded by New Hampshire governor John Sununu, who promised to continue our work for welfare reform, and with whom I had a good relationship. After we adjourned, the Democratic governors went to Mackinaw Island, where Governor Jim Blanchard brought us together to meet with all our presidential candidates, including Senator Al Gore, Senator Paul Simon, Senator Joe Biden, Congressman Dick Gephardt, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, former governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, and Governor Mike Dukakis. I thought we had a good field, but I favored Dukakis...He was governing as a ‘New Democrat,’ and he knew what it was like to lose an election to negative attacks and make a successful comeback. Even though most Americans thought of Massachusetts as a liberal state, I believed we could sell him because he was a successful governor and could avoid the errors that had sunk us in previous elections. Besides, we were friends...”

Note 6:
In this paragraph mentioned Senator Joe Biden to be presidential candidate whom Hillary, Chelsea and Bill met at Mackinaw Island after the wrap up as chairman with the meeting adjourned. In Nigel Hamilton’s 2003 biography, “Bill Clinton, An American Journey, Great Expectation,” Betsey Wright was assigned the chairman of the Northern democratic association, before she became the White House Chief of Staffs. And that sounds interesting when we ponder this passage, “...as a liberal state, I believe we could sell him because he was a successful governor...Besides, we were friends.”

7. Page 336, Ch24
“I appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press along with Bill Bennett, who had succeeded Terrel Bell as President Reagan’s secretary of education...he had once inscribed a book to me with the words “To Bill Clinton, the Democrat who makes sense,” he apparently came to believe that either he had been wrong or I had lost whatever sense I had when he wrote those words.
Around the time of the Meet the Press interview, Senator Joe Biden, the chairman of the judiciary committee, asked me to testify against Judge Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the US Supreme Court by President Reagan.”

Note 7:
We could see that Bill, that is, Mr Clinton, as the author of his own autobiography, using his original name, William Jefferson Clinton, as the name of the copyright author. We could think about what the words implied that when secretary of education Bill Bennett sent the words to presidential candidate Bill by the inscription in book, “To Bill Clinton, the Democrat who makes sense.”
The US Judicial Power is supposed to make judgement without any intervention. The judiciary committee sounds like officials of magistrates, and the chairman of the judiciary committee seemed to be the chief magistrate. When Bill said that Senator Joe Biden “asked me to testify against Judge Robert Bork,” Bill was subordinate to Mr Joe Biden. When Bill met me in November 1990, he told me that he was used to be an “Attorney General,” and the legitimate power to order Bill to testify against a judge would be coming from the gubernatorial line authority.

8. Page 356, Ch 25
“Looking back on it, I can see how the statement looked ambivalent and a touchy arrogant, but it was an honest expression of how I felt, as I began the first campaign since 1982 that I could lost. I got a break soon afterward, when Jim Guy Tucker decided to withdraw from the race and run for lieutenant governor instead, saying a divisive primary would only increase the chances of a Republican victory in the fall, no matter who won. Jim Guy had made a judgement that he could win the lieutenant government’s race easily, then become governor in four years.

Note 8:
As far as I know, when I was in CUNY Baruch 1996 summer, Mr Jerry Brown was the one succeeded the Arkansas Governor at that time and was editing his Arkansas Gazette, which there had a discussion in 1996 with the White House staffs. Mr Jim Guy Tucker, during this period before 1996, was running for the lieutenant governor. He was the lieutenant governor to Bill in the Arkansas government.

9. Page 384, Ch 26
“February 4 issue of Star, in which Gennifer Flowers said she had carried on a twelve-year affair with me...
A year earlier, Flowers’s lawyer had written a letter to a Little Rock radio station threatening a libel suit...
Flowers, whom I’d known since 1977 and had recently helped get a state job, had called me to complain that the media were harassing her even at the place she was singing at night...
The media, to their credit, exposed Flowers’s false claims about her education and work history...”

Note 9:
When 1990 November Bill met me at HsinChu City, there was a girl ten years elder than me, living at Tainan and commuted between Tainan and Taipei. Bill hadn’t met her for some years, Bill(Robert Clinton) told me he was married and had a daughter during the three-hour lunch. If it was from 1989 to 1990, there would be almost two years during which period without any possibilities that they could have any affairs between each other.
Bill told me on November 1, 1990 in a three hours lunch, that he had a brother alike companion died for some reasons Bill could hardly to explain clearly. According to the description in Nigel Hamilton’s 2003 biography, “Bill Clinton, An American Journey, Great Expectation,” Bill’s young companion was with him coming to the Arkansas governor’s Mansion, where Bill first met Flowers and her high school companion in 1977. Bill’s companion, a college graduated and President Nixon’s recruit, died there. That girl on November 1, 1990 was living at Tainan commute between Tainan and Taipei. She graduated from Chinese Culture University in 1994, had an MBA degree in 1996 from the same university. In 1998 she earned a psychology Master degree from University of Texas. Several years later, she got her Ph.d degree in psychology from University of Arkansas. Nigel Hamilton in 2003 biography, “Bill Clinton, An American Journey, Great Expectation,” had a comparison between her and Hillary, both of Republican daughters, both of feminists, both of blonde, but with a little difference that one embraced the alien(extraterrestrial) while the other rejected it as an “experience not comfortable rather than extramarital experience.”

9-1, Page 384, Ch 26
“Her name had been on the list of five women Larry Nichols alleged I had affairs with during the 1990 governor’s race. At the time, she had strongly denied it.”

Note 9-1:
After November 1, 1990, Bill was coming back to Taiwan again and stayed for several months. Bill rented a room near the library in Taipei County and looked up the archive newspapers for materials of surrogate pregnancy. Before 1980 governor Frank White’s wife died in an accident, she seemed to give birth to a child which was not her own, that is, a surrogate pregnancy.

9-2, Page 384, Ch 26
“The press reported that Flowers had been paid for the story, and that she had vigorously denied an affair a year earlier.”

Note 9-2:
After a letter was sent to a radio station, Little Rock or Florida, the radio station staffs seemed to be familiar with some magazine reporters, had that letter released with the Star magazine February 4 issue. The Star paid Gennifer Flowers for that report in the Star February 4 issue, but had not told Gennifer Flowers that the report was connected with the letter Gennifer Flowers or her lawyer sent to the radio station, which the radio station gave them for legal purpose.

9-3, Page 385, Ch 26
“I was dropping in the New Hampshire polls, and Hillary and I decided we should accept an invitation from the CBS program 60 Minutes to answer questions about the charges and the state of our marriage...
We taped the program at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston on Sunday morning, January 26, for showing later that night, after the Super Bowl. We talked to the interviewer, Steve Kroft, for over an hour. He began by asking if Flowers’s story was true. When I said it wasn’t, he asked if I had had any affairs. Perhaps I should have used Rosalynn Carter’s brilliant response to a similar question in 1976: “If I had, I wouldn’t tell you.” Since I wasn’t as blameless as Mrs. Carter, I decided not to be cute. Instead, I said that I had already acknowledged causing pain in my marriage, that I had already said more about the subject than any other politician ever had and would say no more, and that the American people understand what I meant.”

Note 9-3:
The Star testified that they had paid Gennifer Flowers for the report of Star February 4 issue that Gennifer Flowers said she had carried on a twelve-year affair with me[Bill], which should mean Gennifer Flowers agreed and recognized with the statement as she received the payment. [9-2] “...and that she had vigorously denied an affair...”
When Bill was asked by CBS program 60 Minutes that if Flowers’s story was true, Bill answered that it wasn’t. This could be justified because the testimony Gennier Flowers made, “she had twelve year affair with Bill” and “she had vigorously denied an affair,” conflicted with each other. Bill did not want to answer the further question from the CBS 60 Minutes that if he had any affairs.

9-4, Page 387, Ch 26
“Ironically, almost exactly six years after my January 1992 appearance on 60 Minutes, I had to give a deposition in the Paula Jones case, and I was asked questions about Gennifer Flowers. I acknowledged that, back in the 1970s, I had had a relationship with her that I should not have had...But I was under oath, and of course, if I hadn’t done anything wrong, I couldn’t have been embarrassed. My critics leapt on it. Ironically, even though they were sure the rest of the deposition was untruthful, this one answer they accepted as fact. The fact is, there was no twelve-year affair. Gennifer Flowers still has a suit against James Carville and Hillary for allegedly slandering her. I don’t wish her ill, but now that I am not President anymore, I do wish she’d let them be.”

Note 9-4:
Bill acknowledged that in the 1970s having “a relationship with Gennifer Flowers that Bill should not have had.” That is to say, under oath, Bill admitted a relationship which was previously supposed not to exist. What Bill meant by “there was no twelve-year affair,” firstly Bill said that he did not want to wish Gennifer Flowers ill, he was saying that he was trying to help Gennifer Flowers with her troubled lawsuits by clarifying her conflicted testimony in this statement. Secondly, early in 1977 or 1978 Bill’s first inauguration as the Arkansas governor, neither Bill was called Governor Bill, nor Governor Frank White’s daughter to accompany him in the inauguration would be called Gennifer Flowers. Therefore, there was no twelve-year affair between Bill and Gennifer Flowers, as Bill said under oath.

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
April 21, 2013,
National Central Library,
Taipei City

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My Life  

My Life, William Jefferson Clinton 2004, Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Inc.

1. Page 182, Ch17
“We spent the next several days together, just hanging around, talking about everything under the sun. The next weekend Hillary went up to Vermont on a long-planned visit to the man she had been dating. I was anxious about it. I didn’t want to lose her. When she got home late Sunday night I called her. She was sick as a dog, so I bought her some chicken soup and orange juice. From then on we were inseparable. She spent a lot of time at our house on the beach and quickly won over Doug, Don, and Bill.
She didn’t do so well with my mother when she came to visit a few weeks later, partly because she tried to cut her own hair just before Mother arrived…”

Note 1:
This paragraph sounds like Hillary and Bill’s first dating.
In 1982 summer when I was just local junior high school pupil, there was a call out to testifying from remote law court in Arkansas and I was as a reference, for two years before in 1979 when Hillary was located at the airport in the New York City. But that conjured up memory was at the time when I was only a grad K-4 pupil during the classes break playing in school yard with other pupils. My home did not have telephone at the moment, therefore some critical information such as the shape of a public telephone or the calling in airport could not be recognized in the communication, and as a ten-year-old boy I could only realize that someone called me which my grad senior pupil reminded me that somebody using that real time message to call me, but failed to take note of the importance of that communicating. Hillary was making phone calls at the airport using public phone, and in 1982 during the Arkansas law court was held that complete content with telephone making was conjured up for a testifying reference purpose, as Hillary carrying a United Nations Child Abuse Case account preliminary documents in 1979 at New York airport telephone booth.

2. Page 218, Ch 18
“Hot Spring headquarters”
“I rented an old house on College Avenue, which was kept open mostly by college students, and often on weekends by my cousin Roy’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Marie Clinton, alone. We
painted big CLINTON FOR CONGRESS signs. Today there’s one word over the old signs: TATTOO.”

Note 2:
This reminds me when I was City University of New York, Baruch Business Graduate School student in 1996 summer, the White House staff mentioned that Hillary had two more daughters, after Bill(Robert Clinton, as it was mandated to reveal this name for the statement in this autobiography reminded us that we could not use the name “Bill” legally to address him at least before Nov. 1990) met me on November 1, 1990 when I was a sophomore at NCTU. The two daughters were five years old and three years old, while Chelsea was seventeen years old at the moment. But we could only find out Chelsea as the Clintons’ only daughter in a statement dated in 1990, and pictures of her as the only First Family daughter from the autobiographies.

3. Page 245, Ch 20
“Vince Foster”
“One day early in the legislative session, I appeared at a committee hearing to speak against a measure. The room was packed with people representing interests who were for it, including Vince Foster…”
Page 246
“We often worked until midnight to catch up, and in the process we developed a great rapport and had a terrific time.”

Note 3:
From Hillary’s autobiography “Living History”, Vince Foster was involved with “Travel Gate Scandal”, then committed suicide.
From Bill’s “My Life”, page 282, the third page of the pictures, “Miss Marie Purkins’ School for Little Folks in Hope,” Vince Foster was Bill’s kindergarten classmate.
And from page 245 and page 246, Vince Foster and Hillary were all from the Rose firm.

4. Page 323, Ch 23
“[White] went after Hillary, alleging she had a conflict of interest because the Rose firm was representing the state in its fight against the Grand Gulf nuclear plants. We had a good response to that charge, too. First, the Rose firm was working to save Arkansas money by lifting the burden of the Grand Gulf plants, while White, as a board member of one of the Middle South Utilities companies, had voted three times to go forward with construction of the plants. Second, the Public Service Commission hired the Rose firm because all the other big firms were representing utilities or other parties in the case. Both the legislature and the attorney general approved the hiring. Third, the money the state paid to the Rose firm was subtracted from the firm’s income before Hillary’s partnership profits were calculated, so she made no money from it. White seemed more interested in defending the utility’s effort to soak Arkansas ratepayers than protecting them from a conflict of interest. I asked him if his attacks on Hillary meant he wanted to run for first lady instead of governor. Our campaign even made bumper stickers and buttons that said, “Frank for First Lady.”
White’s final charges did him in. He had been working for Stephens, Inc., then the largest bond house outside Wall Street.”
(Page 325)”…Over the years, I came to like Frank White and his wife, Gay, and to enjoy being on programs with him. He had a great sense of humor, he loved Arkansas, and I was sad when he died in 2003.”

Note 4:
This paragraph could also be found from Nigel Hamilton’s “Bill Clinton, An American Journey, Great Expectation,” biography, seemed to come from the Arkansas law court documents.
Frank White was the former governor of Arkansas.

* do in. To do someone in means to kill them; an informal expression.
* do time. Someone who is doing time is in prison; an informal expression.

“Gay,” apparently was not a real name of former Arkansas governor Frank White’s divorced wife but used in the law court to hint some fact. She seemed to die in a car accident in 1980 after a testimony was given in the Arkansas law court.

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
April 19, 2013,
National Central Library,
Taipei City

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Alan Greenspan  

Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, Adventures in A New World, by Alan Greenspan 2007, the Penguin Press

What if the Keynes offered mathematically elegant solution and the Keynesian interventionism, which the theoretical basis for much of this laid down by the great Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes and his masterworks “The General Theory of Employment” and “Interest and Money” that had provided the intellectual underpinning for Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the discipline Keynes created now known as macroeconomics, all were deemed as without real world experience based analyses but only a few of simple business facts could be overruled? In Alan Greenspan’s 2007 autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, there is a witty, humorous description of such a question. When I had been trying to answer such a question in 1996 autumn semester at CUNY Baruch business graduate school, that question ended with introduction of some controversial marketing concepts and consumer behavior of myself in the Virgin Records shop with Madonna’s dated single album compact disc buying, The Lucky Star, and REM’s latest album Wake Up Bomb(New Adventures in Hi-Fi). That was a matter of fact, I’d say. But I still do not have an answer to this question, even that I don’t think anyone could confirm there would be a definite answer to be presented to this question. Mr Alan Greenspan answered this question in his 2007 autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, for a perfect period of his eighteen and half a year of Federal Reserve Chairman career. He is a New Yorker, from uptown West Side of Manhattan of a Jewish family. His father was a businessman who was writing business books and sent Mr Alan Greenspan one copy as a birthday gift. As a New Yorker and an eighteen and half a year Federal Reserve Chairman, of course he can write. Just like the opinion and comment to Mr Bill Clinton and Mrs Hillary R. Clinton about their 2003 autobiography writings, My Life and Living History, in contemporary fashion and Mr Alan Greenspan shall deserve the same opinion and comment to his autobiography masterpiece, Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence.

Mr Chairman Alan Greenspan mentioned in details the Wall Street “Black Monday” which happened in 1987, the stock market crashed when he was just appointed by President Ronald Reagan to be Federal Reserve Chairman from an enterprise holder of Townsend-Greenspan company. Mr Chairman Alan Greenspan had been kept appointed by President Reagan, President George H.W. Bush, President Clinton, until 2006 January Mr George W. Bush became President to be eighteen and half a year of Federal Reserve Chairman.

Mr Alan Greenspan had a wife of NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent in Washington. The New York Times in 2006 had their marriage and wedding news. Mr Alan Greenspan did not agree with President Nixon and ever refused his job offer, saying that he would go back to his job. In his autobiography, Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, he writes, “To be largely free of fear of a secret police arbitrarily hauling us off for interrogation for ‘crimes’ we never knew existed is something not to be taken for granted.(page 468)” We can think of his Jewish background and infer that Mr Alan Greenspan was always involved in the security of this country, equality of the citizens and the Wall Street to be a devoted New Yorker. Also on page 500, Mr Alan Greenspan writes, “Russia has vast natural resources, but it is plagued by a declining population, and as I noted in chapter 16, the nonenergy sections of its economy are at risk from the effects of the Dutch disease. Its encouraging embrace of the rule of law and respect for property rights has given way under Vladimir Putin to selective enforcement of the law based on nationalist expediency, a negation of the very basis of the rule of law.” Mr Chairman Alan Greenspan makes it clear in his autobiography, Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, that how we should cope with such an invaded problem in that we could comprehend from the title of the word “turbulence”, should be laid as something not to be taken for granted. That's it.

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
October 26, 2012,
National Central Library,
Taipei City

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Why We Want You To Be Rich  

Why We Want You To Be Rich, Donald J. Trump, Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Press 2007 September

Robert T. Kiyosaki is a teacher of business and investing in Hawaii. Donald J. Trump is famous in real estate business in New York City and the USA. Donald is also the star and co-producer of virtual reality television series, which has received national and worldwide attention.

“Why We Want You To Be Rich,” as the book title goes, that when you are working, you are rich dad, and until you are retired, you are poor dad, the authors want you to be rich because the authors would like to make you working and then you will get wealth, happiness and health from work. That’s why the two authors of this book say to you, Why We Want You To Be Rich. This is a small book with enlightenment and on the final page Mr Donald J. Trump wishes the readers empowered by this book and succeed.

In the book, Robert T. Kiyosaki introduces the CASHFLOW Quadrant, which four English letters, E, S, B, I, are representing Employee, Small-business person, Self-employed or Specialist, Big-business owners such as Donald Trump, Investor, respectively. Robert T. Kiyosaki also introduced the CASHFLOW game board, which three different levels of investors we can see: 1. The Rat Race; 2. Small deals and big deals; 3. The Fast Track. The fast track was created in 1933, by Joseph Kennedy, father of President John Kennedy.

There are also several photo pictures in this book, which we can see Donald and Robert were interacting in California and other place, Donald’s wife, sons, daughter Ivanka. Donald’s picture at the New York Military Academy and marching on the Fifth Avenue for the Columbus Day parade in the New York City. The interacting in 1996 New York City of shortness would be mended by these illustrated pictures, I’d say. That’s all.

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
October 22, 2012,
New Taipei City Library,
Banciao, New Taipei City

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The-World-Is-Flat  

ReviewReviewReviewReview The World Is Flat
Category: Books
Genre: Nonfiction
Author: Thomas L. Friedman
 
The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus and Ciroux 2006 

"Thomas L. Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work at The New York Times, where he serves as the foreign affairs columnist," as the cover back page goes. I remember in 2006 when I was subscribing to the international edition of the New York Times of the International Herald Tribune for a year and six months, I read a lot of Friedman's articles in the editorial page. Then I stayed in the National Central Library at Taipei City, reading newspapers including IHT in the library for years. That was kind of experience different from that of reading Chinese translated journalist related books such as "The Power Shift, Alvin Toffler" or "The Power Game, Hedrick Smith", which I had read before. I check out from library of paperback edition of The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, easy to read because of plain style in English and as always Friedman inscribed economic and political critical concepts in journalist fashion to his readers. 

Page 22, "Others deal with "inbound" calls--everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. The calls are transferred here by Satellite and undersea fiber-optic cable. Each vast floor of a call center consists of clusters of cubicles. The young people work in little teams under the banner of the company whose phone support they are providing. So one corner might be the Dell group, another might be flying the flag of Microsoft." 

That said, you are out of your earshot, somewhere, somewhere out there, underneath the rainbow, not that kind of engineer you think, totally out of control, maybe that's a she and owns me. You don't know. Someone might get very angry like the lunatic crying out because his nose was hurt and another would come in near you because he had explanation to say to you. 

Gorgeous. We would be waiting and tending the flowers in garden affairs, like a taskforce leader do. 

Also on page 22, "I was wandering around the Microsoft section around six p.m. Bangalore time, when most of these young people start their workday to coincide with the dawn in America, when I asked a young Indian computer expert there a simple question: What was the record on the floor for the longest phone call to help some American who got lost in the maze of his or her own software? Without missing a beat he answered, "Eleven hours." 
"Eleven hours?" I exclaimed. 
"Eleven hours," he said. 
I have no way of checking whether this is true, but you do hear snippets of some oddly familiar conversations as you walk the floor at 24/7 and just listen over the shoulders of different call center operators doing their things." 
Explain. 

It is the reason and theory of Copernicus collide with the opinion of church traditional view and that of Columbus set out for the orient China but found India. Because the world is flat, dimensional space twisted for your team in game to converge into a knot covering every potholes. And fly away, we just fly away from here, anywhere scattering the whole universe and side B played it would always bleep. When a year ago the Japanese earthquake caused shortage of materials, we know some liquid crystal display devices had their prices fare well. That's why we all need this kind of flat panel, and we have supply chain from Japanese Sharp, Toshiba company, South Korea Samsung, LG, or Taiwanese Chi Mei, AU. The supply chain may need time to recover back from the disaster. The world is flat and that's all. You know that software? Software is like the heart in a computer. With no software it is like a computer with no soul, without a soul was seen. You spent eleven hours to solve a bug, whether it was a hardware bug or a software one, you don't know because you are just an engineer. But that bug was always yours. That's the reason why today we all say the world is flat. Thanks Friedman. 

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042, 
August 18, 2012, 
National Central Library, 
Taipei City

NB. Oct. 3, 2012 from http://chaokai60.multiply.com
http://chaokai60.multiply.com/reviews/item/38

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Obama-from-promise-to-power  

ReviewReviewReviewReview Obama, From Promise to Power
Category: Books
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Author: David Mendell, Harper 2007

Obama, From Promise to Power, by David Mendell, Harper 2007 

On August 2, 1996 City University of New York, Baruch College school opening day, when Congressman Mr Barack Obama hurried into the College lobby Hall, Ms Michelle was carrying an infant child following him up. But Congressman Mr Barack Obama seemed not to be aware of Michelle's coming, saying to his senior that Michelle was staying home baby-sitting their young baby. Meanwhile, Ms Michelle was just passing in front of us students and hurried into the lobby hall. She happened to answer the question when a baby was in her arm, that she was sort of too engaging in feminism thinking to be staying home alone to care the baby, therefore she was carrying the baby to find its father.

But we can dig out some related information about this from Obama's biography, "Obama, From Promise to Power, by David Mendell," page 116, "This was 1997, before Obama's first child was born, and there were fewer encumbrances on his time. So, according to Shomon, Obama responded without hesitation: "Let's do it."(In Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, he takes credit for the idea of this first far downstate trip.)" Page 148, "In 2002 the couple's second child, Sasha, was just a year old and the eldest, Malia, was only four. Obama had been regularly absent from the household for months in 1999 and 2000 in his campaign..." And from the pictures between page 198 and page 199, "Obama leaves a Chicago polling station with Michelle and his daughters, Sasha, front left, and Malia, after voting in November 2004.(Courtesy of Associated Press/Nam Y. Huh)." and "Obama and his eldest daughter, Malia, then 6, along with his wife, Michelle, and their second daughter, Sasha, then 3, celebrate Obama's Senate victory in November 2004. Obama became the third African American since Reconstruction to hold a U.S. Senate seat.(Courtesy of Associated Press/M. Spencer Green)." The Chicago Tribune journalist David Mendell in Obama's biography, From Promise to Power, cruelly excluded this baby in Michelle's arm on August 2, 1996 at CUNY Baruch lobby hall, from any possibility that it would be the U.S. Congressman's baby. It's stunning to know this kind of political fact. 

There are some paragraphs describing the White House senior adviser David Axelrod, page 11, "Intimate aides like Axelrod would question privately whether Obama's warp-speed ascension had gone too fast..."David always worries about a meltdown," a confidante of Axelrod's told me." Page 156, "Obama had not yet announced his candidacy, but he had realized he needed more political talent behind him...So Obama turned to the other major political consultant he knew, David Axelrod. A couple of years earlier, Axelrod and his wife, Susan, had thrown a quick fund-raiser for Obama...", page 215, ""David," I told Axelrod," if it wasn't through me, you folks would have figured out another way to get this mess out there. I just fired the first bullet loaded in the chamber."...Hull and Sexton jointing asked the judge to release the records.(the divorce records). 

About Obama's family and his mother, page 25, "Ann Dunham was the only child of a Depression-Era couple originally from Witchita, Kansas." Page 27, "Ann Dunham met a Kenyan foreign exchange student named Barack Hussein Obama in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii. They fell in love, he just twenty-three and she just eighteen...On August 4, 1961, Ann gave birth to Barack Hussein Obama Jr." Page 52, "We also visited the nearby military gravesite at the National Memorial Cemetery of Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who died from prostate cancer in 1992 at the age of seventy-five. And we drove by the massive seaside rocks near Sandy Beach, from which a despondent Obama and his sister spread the ashes of their mother when she passed away from ovarian and uterine cancer in 1995." Page 126, "In his third year, 1999, Obama was even more successful. He cosponsored almost sixty bills and eleven became law. They included measures that established a state-funded screening program for prostate cancer( a disease that disproportionately affects blacks)." 

About Obama's education background, page 62, "Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983 with a bachelor of arts degree in political science. He stayed in Manhattan and took a position with the Business International Corporation, a firm that published newsletters on global business and offered consulting to American companies operating overseas. Obama was an editor and research assistant in the firm's international financial information division." Page 123, "The loose poker atmosphere, however, did not always fit with Obama's exceeding strict sense of propriety and morality, traits instilled primarily by his mother. During one poker game, Obama was irked when a married lobbyist arrived with an inebriated woman companion who did not acquit herself in a particularly wholesome fashion. Without offending his buddies, Obama registered his displeasure with the situation. "He didn't think much of that," an Obama associate said. "He didn't see the purpose of bringing her."" 

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042, 
August 3, 2012, 
New Taipei City Library, 
Panchiao, New Taipei City

NB. Oct 3, 2012 from http://chaokai60.multiply.com
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Barack-Obama-The-Audacity-of-Hope  

ReviewReviewReviewReview Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
Category: Books
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Author: Barack Obama
 
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, Vintage Books Edition July 2008

"Of course, we love Chicago," as the comment on 1980's famous band goes. When I first met Mr. Barack Obama on the occasion of City University school opening day on August 2, 1996, he was 32 and an elected congressman. With Ms. Michelle carrying a baby in her arm following him entering the college hall lobby, that was 16 years ago. In the autobiography of Barack Obama, the Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama writes, "I met Michelle in the summer of 1988, while we were both working at Sidley & Austin, a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. Although she is three years younger than me, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having attended Harvard Law straight out of college. I had just finished my first year at law school and had been hired as a summer associate."(p.386). Two young professionals with promising future came to the Big Apple, New York City, seeking advice of the senior members for the difficulty they were facing, and as I know that the Texas Governor George W. Bush and the White House couples Mr. and Mrs. Clintons, President and the First Lady, all offered their helps. Mrs. Hillary Clinton lived in Chicago when she was young. My graduate program adviser of Baruch Business School Ms. Mitchell, Tery was 34 at the time. It was said that two Michelles lapsed for only one year were appearing at the same time in the Harvard campus to be two of the few minority of African ethnics enrolling the prestige Harvard of law school and business school in their university days. Because the two schools were close they developed kind of affectionate emotion, therefore my adviser Ms. Terry Mitchell even wrote her doctorate thesis "America's Problems and Needed Reforms: Confronting the Ethic of Personal Advantage" with a lot of law concepts(p.143, Ethics and Values, The Organizational Behavior Reader, Six Edition, 1996 & 1995 Prentice Hall, Inc., adviser Terry said the boy's name "Terrence R. Mitchell" was printing error, she was Terry, diminutive of Theresa).

Of course, Obama loves Michelle, in page 402 he writes "In the end, I credit Michelle's strength--her willingness to manage these tensions and make sacrifices on behalf of myself and the girls--with carrying us through the difficult times." And Mr. Obama uses some paragraphs to depicting how he's developing his character, in page 408, "There were men in my life--a step father with whom we lived for four years, and my grandfather, who along with my grandmother helped raise me the rest of the time--and both were good men who treated me with affection. But my relationships with them were necessarily partial, incomplete," and "It was women, then, who provided the ballast in my life--my grandmother, whose dogged practicality kept the family afloat, and my mother, whose love and clarity of spirit kept my sister's and my world centered. Because of them I never wanted for anything important. From them I would absorb the values that guide me to this day." In the 1990's avant-garde thinking of equality between the sexes, without the partisan taboo against subject of abortion right or gun control, a conception of emancipation would bring on the struggle between the two young professionals each other. Even the high school students in 1990's date would go Dutch when they are dining at the restaurant after all. On the other hand, however, when the young couples Mr. and Mrs. Obama had decided to settle down, Mr. Obama would spend every evening when the congress was out of session, staying at home to baby-sit the baby himself. That is beyond generation X, Y or Z to be a new generation of good man. Their first child, described in page 400, "Then Malia was born, a Fourth of July baby, so calm and so beautiful, with big, hypnotic eyes that seemed to read the world the moment they opened."

The 44th President of the USA, Mr. Barack Obama, has a military police grandfather who ever served in Patton's army. Mrs. Hillary Clinton's father Hugh Rodham used to served in Navy and they said that Mr. Hugh Rodham was a military police officer and proud to have a daughter like him. In Barack Obama autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, page 348, "...I explained that unlike some of the people in the crowd, I didn't oppose all wars--that my grandfather had signed up for the war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed and had fought in Patton's army." In 1994 Taiwan, there was an anecdote that the young Harvardman encouraged an African ethnic Canadian teacher Patrick Particular to marry the young USA sergeant Ms. Eva Ivory who served in the military police corps of Taiwan, but Ms. Eva Ivory declined the request.

There were some paragraphs about Obama's family in Chapter 6 Faith, page 240, "I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in religion as children: My grandfather had been raised by devout Baptist grandparents after his father had gone AWOL and his mother committed suicide, while my grandmother's parents--who occupied a slightly higher station in the hierarchy of small-town, Great Depression society..." President Barack Obama is the Nobel Peace Award Laureate of 2006 November. President Obama also was the editor of Harvard University student magazine in his university years. Definitely President Obama is a Christian. But in the New York Times 2006 revealed that he had some Chicago Muslim connections. When I read the newspaper in 2006, I was thinking that would be some connections of social movement activists or election campaign organizing cadres.

In the autobiography of Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, there were introduction of law, politics, the Senate, the Constitution, the dividing and balancing of power, the Founding Fathers, the Congress and judicial system, the Supreme Court, etc. I checked out Barack Obama's autobiography from library but found that it is a masterpiece, full of knowledge and worth keeping. We can read it in plain English with awe and complement our concepts in the shorts. In Chapter 1 Republican and Democrats, page 19, "The speaker's voice may flare with passion; his arguments--about cuts to programs for the poor, or obstructionism on judicial appointments," page 26, "endorsed George Bush, and delivered the blistering keynote address at the Republican National Convention--a no-holds-barred rant against the perfidy of John Kerry and his supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange," page 31, "That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won't be prepackaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break." Page 35, "But the country's tectonic plates had shifted. Politics was no longer a pocketbook issue but a moral issue as well," page 36, "As the child of a mixed marriage, my life would have been impossible," page 38, "when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without understanding," page 45, "So where does that leave us? Theoretically the Republican Party might have produced its own Clinton, a center-right leader who built on Clinton's fiscal conservatism while moving more aggressively to revamp a creaky federal bureaucracy and experiment with market- or faith- based solutions to social policy." Page 47 "Of course, there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similar zealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove or a Delay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists...the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections...John Kerry believes in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military, Hillary Clinton believes in the virtues of capitalism, and just about every member of the Congressional Black Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins." In Chapter 7 Race, page 308, "Everywhere I went, I found immigrants anchoring themselves to whatever housing and work they could find, washing dishes or driving cabs or toiling in their cousin's dry cleaners, saving money and building business and revitalizing dying neighborhoods, until they moved to the suburbs and raised children with accents that betrayed not the land of their parents but their Chicago birth certificates, teenagers who listened to rap and shopped at the mall and planned for futures as doctors and lawyers and engineers and even politicians."

Dangerous. This the third autobiography which I read in English, ever since I bought Hillary Clinton's Living History on October 23, 2003, driving my Toyota Altis 1.6 Break into Style hybrid sedan. That Toyota sedan had many problems. Although I purchased it all brand new from the local Toyota Assembly firm(also served as Toyota car dealer) via Toyota salesperson, I found that this car was assembled with an old, marked number engine(engine series number was rub off and carved new series number on the engine). After I sold this suspicious car within the same month after bumped into some killer covered by National Security Bureau in a lot witness occasion on July 13, 2004, I bought another autobiography of Bill Clinton's My Life in August, 2005. This month I read Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. I feel that reading these three autobiographies were like driving that Toyota sedan. I felt that dangerous. I think many people felt that before. But I wonder how people would feel when they have found out that we can do nothing about it.

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
July 18, 2012,
Internet Cafe,
New Taipei City

NB. Oct 3, 2012 from http://chaokai60.multiply.com
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SpeedofTrust

ReviewReviewReviewReview The Speed of Trust
Category: Books
Genre: Nonfiction
Author: Stephen M.R. Covey

 

The Speed of Trust, published by Free Press in 2006, Stephen M.R. Covey introduces readers how to build trust and how to restore trust had you once lost it. The Covey junior, also a Harvard MBA, follows the writing style of his father Stephen R. Covey in CoveyLink consulting book series, using plain English to compose his thesis and the contents are easy to comprehend. I remember that when I first read the book of Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that's my freshman year in the university, and I read the Chinese translation edition. I always could find many, many resonances especially in the lonely cold winter nights. Then I was thinking that if someone, somewhere out there, was reading the same book as me, he might be just telling me that his reading skills, capability and competence were improved from the read, just like at this moment I am reaping the benefits from the read of The Speed of Trust, written by his son, Stephen Covey Jr. of Harvard MBA.

Trust, of course the most important priority when we try to perform leadership or conduct business. And speed kills. Both are necessary to make a success story. Stephen M.R. Covey is trying to discuss this topic in an easy understanding style, when he mentions the empathy issue. He confesses that even the corporate CEOs cannot easily pass the scrutiny of trust test. But Stephen Covey Jr. reminds us that integrity and honesty would help you.

The one thing that changes everything. I remember that after my motorbike hit by a military car in front of the McDonald's in 2001, I then bought the Harvard Business School consulting book, Maximum Success, by Dr. James Waldroop and Dr. Timothy Butler. Those success stories sell ideas to my heart. For example, the client Helen's story hit a chord, and later I also found the same story in the book of Dr. Susan Forward, the Emotional Blackmail. What's the one thing? I think that was revealed in the book describing the behaviors of children. It says, according to Sigmund Freud, children with Oedipus complex mixed illusions tend to feel that parents are threaten by its own charisma or personality character. It's wrong.

The new concepts Stephen M.R. Covey brought us are that he is using a business consulting model to explain the essence of trust and speed, the capability and suspicion concepts. That's different because you with that can tell the difference between competence and confidence or discipline. He also mentions the issues of relevant and credible, using the business terminology, the Dividends and Taxes to explain, contrast to the Banking Account metaphor and Time Managing versus Importance Managing Grid concepts of his father Mr. Stephen R. Covey. In the final chapter, Mr. Stephen M.R. Covey introduces how to restore trust, from societal, relationship, looking forward into market and organization, family and self trust. Stephen M.R. Covey uses 5 waves of trust, 4 cores of credibility and 13 behaviors model to make trust-worthy alignment possible to the Speed of Trust readers.

David CK Chang,
SSN:057-86-4042, HBR:431242551,
P.T. Subscribe ID:26--501, 
December 12, 2009,
Public computer,
National Central Library,
Taipei City

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