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The Screaming Moderate

When is a robocall not a robocall?

12/27/2016

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So, regular followers of this space might remember that a few weeks ago I wrote about getting robocalls three times in less than 10 minutes and it turned out to be my wife hip-dialing our home number without knowing it. If you haven’t read that post, it was on Dec. 8. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay, so for the last few weeks our home phone rings at precisely 8 a.m. every weekday morning. When we’d answer, a recorded voice would say, “Hello, this call is for (pause) Bar (pause) ry Coo (pause) -per (my real name, but without the electronic pauses) and then continue to say I should press 1 for an important message.

For a couple of weeks, I actually answered the phone because it rang more than once (after one, Nomorobo picks up robocalls for me) but never pressed 1. After those couple of weeks, we just stopped answering.

This morning, the phone rang at precisely 8 a.m. and I decided to answer it. And, not in the season spirit, I actually did press 1 to get my personalized message because I wanted the calls to stop and wanted a real person to deliver that message to. I waited a couple of minutes and a young woman answered and said, how I can help you. I responded, “You can take my name off your list. You call every morning at precisely 8 a.m. And I want to be off your list!” She said, “This isn’t that kind of call.” I said, “What kind of call is it?”

She explained that I owed $117.34 on a Dominion Power bill. For those who don’t know, Dominion is the power company that services Virginia and I owned a condo in Virginia for nearly 20 years that I rented out for about 12.  I said that’s impossible, I pay my bills promptly every month. She said, “Sir, if you don’t make arrangements to pay this will be reported to your credit company and your score will be affected.”

I told her to do just that and I’d deal with them. “Who? “ she asked. I said, the credit company. She said “we are the credit company.” Now I’m getting exasperated and I say, how do I know this is real and not just a scam to get me to hand over $117.34?  I said, I could start calling random numbers, tell them they owe me $117.34 and if one pays, I’m a winner.

She said, it isn’t. I said, not good enough. Send me something in writing. Now she was getting exasperated, (Not that I cared but I found it a bit offensive that she calls me at precisely 8 a.m. and she gets mad at me.) Finally, she angrily agreed to send me something in writing and one of us hung up on the other, I’m not sure who.

I then called Dominion Power. A very nice young woman looked up the address and said indeed I owed them $113.57 on a condo. I said I  sold that condo in 2013.   Do you remember signing an owner’s agreement? I said no, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t, it was, after all, years ago. Now, an owner’s agreement is a contract you sign so the power is never turned off in the unit. If one tenant leaves, the power is uninterupted  and the new tenant puts her name on the account to pay the monthly bills. Easy peasy.

I said I have never received a bill. Anyhow, it turns out the owner’s agreement stayed in effect after I sold the unit because I never called to cancel it, because I didn’t remember I had one, and the new owner apparently wasn’t aware of it either…so, when the last tenant moved out of the unit earlier this year – three years after I sold the condo - I was responsible for the power bill in the interim.

I was transferred to another department to deal with the matter, explained it all again and another nice young woman was quite helpful. She cancelled my owner’s agreement, which I didn’t know I had, and said the $113.57 bill was wiped out since I no longer owned the unit. I did ask the nice Dominion woman if they would notify CBE this issue was resolved so they'd stop calling at precisely 8 a.m. every week day and she said she would.  Very pleasant, helpful and efficient!

So, the moral of this story is: you can’t always ignore what you might think is a robocall because maybe it isn’t a robocall at all but truly is a call you need to take to resolve an issue.

And I’m guessing tomorrow, when my phone rings at precisely 8 a.m., the caller will be telling me I owe CBE $3.73, the difference between the $117.34 they said I owe and the $113.57 Dominion said.

And the waiting music will be Judy Collins singing “The Circle Game “in the background.


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Доверяй, но проверяй (Trust but verify)

12/20/2016

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It’s official, if anyone had any doubts or hopes it would be different – the Electoral College has voted and Donald J. Trump is the duly elected president-elect of the United States of America.

This is one more time critics have said we’d see a new Donald – and we’ll see, but I doubt there is any other Donald than the one we’ve seen. At 70, you don’t change.
 He will be provocative, offensive, charming, outlandish, and will try to do the things he’s said he’d do. Many of us watch with trepidation, many worry he’s the Manchurian candidate and many see him as the savior of a government that’s not been responsive to their needs. He soon gets his chance to prove who’s right and who’s wrong.

First, though, he needs to put the Russian conspiracy to rest. He should endorse President Obama’s direction to get as much information as possible into the public domain about the intelligence on Russian interference in our democracy. He also should come out in favor of a select committee in the Senate to try to get to the bottom of this. He should do all he can to get confirmation of what the Russians did or didn’t do.

No one is contesting Mr. Trump’s legitimacy to be the next president. He won. He will be sworn in January 20.  Hillary Clinton lost – for a bunch of reasons ranging from the Russian cyber espionage to FBI Director Comey’s bungled handling of the investigation into her email, and most of all to her own poor campaign that ignored the very voters who had been the spine of most Democratic wins.

What is being contested is Russia’s interference in our cyber systems, interference that is unacceptable, a threat to our republic and likely an act of war. Needless to say, this is very serious stuff.

Trump should want that cleared up – did they or didn’t they – so that his presidency is not clouded by allegations of Russian interference or his alleged complicity.

For the record, I do not believe he was complicit. But I do believe  our intelligence agencies that the Russians were behind the hacking and leaking of information to Wikileaks in  hopes of mucking with our democracy.

For a segment of the country, Trump being dogged by that allegation for the next four years would be like, well, it would be like our current president being dogged for so long by allegations he was not born here. It is a suspicion he should not have to worry about, or have to fight against for four years.

We have some of the best intelligence capabilities in the world. Our intelligence agencies are made up of professional men and women, many of whom risk their lives for us, and whose primary responsibliity and interest is the security of our nation.

And, though they can be wrong once in a while, the President should be supportive of their abilities and findings. It's part of what a president does -- make sure the voters have confidence in our country and abilities. I can understand why Trump doesn't feel, at the moment, he needs to have an intelligence briefing daily, though I don't agree with him on that, but he does need to be sure we all have confience in our intelligence community -- unless he can show proof why we shouldn't.

While the president-elect’s apparent plan to try to bring Russia more into the Western fold is admirable in some regards, President Reagan said it best when he said of the Russians, “Doveryai, no proverya” – trust but verify.”


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White House press corps needs to shake itself up

12/15/2016

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PictureWhite House briefing room may be a lonely place
As President-elect Trump fills out his Cabinet, some of whom are giving heartburn to many (former neurosurgeon Ben Carson at HUD?), we haven’t heard much yet about his plans for the White House press corps or who will be his press secretary.

It’s hard to imagine we won’t be seeing changes in how Trump deals with the media from the way they've been treated in the past. It’s been six months since he’s held a press conference which is sign enough that he doesn’t see why he needs to do them. So we likely can expect even fewer of them than his predecessor held. His administration still needs to be objectively covered, though.

Other changes, I’m guessing, are likely in the James Brady Briefing Room at the White House.

There are signs he wants to shake up even on who sits where (typically the networks and wires are in the front row, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal in the second row and so on. I’m guessing the briefing room will be a less populated place on a daily basis. This is far from a concern for most Americans who consider the press a pampered bunch to begin with. But it does affect how we will get news about what's really going on with our government.

We know what Trump thinks of the mainstream media (dishonest!) so he could care less how he treats them. He has his many millions of Twitter followers he can talk to directly. And, who need a daily briefing anyway, I imagine he’s thinking. "I can go over their heads and not be knocked off stride by their pesky, silly questions. Besides, the American people trust the media less than they trust me!"

While Trump figures out his plans, and who his press secretary will be (I’m still guessing Sean Spicer), the media ought to be figuring out how they are going to cover Trump. They will not be fed stories by his press office or in briefings, as they sometimes have been in the past, and the likelihood of getting good leaks from his White House are small givien his methods, his strategy of changing his mind and, sometimes, lying and confidentiality agreements (if a President can hold someone to one of those).

But editors and producers around the country, and world, should be figuring out new ways to cover his presidency. While the Cabinet has been more and more marginalized over the years, and the White House has assumed more control over policy than ever before – and that’s before Trump – maybe they’ll focus more attention on those Cabinet departments, which would be a good thing. Those department still do the heavy lifting on making and enforcing policy, even if the maknig of policy is now more influenced at the White House. That's where they may be able to ferret out what's really going on. Some of those will be  headed by typical politicians (a former governor, former congressmen, former Senate candidate) who are more likely to act as in the past than in the current Trump Method -- at least for a while.

Trump and his appointees are in for an awakening when it comes to dealing with the career civil serice. These are dedicated men and women who are there, through administrations, and without whom political folks could not run the government. It is not a corporate environemnt where the CEO (Trump or the cabinet member) walks in, gives an order and it's followed or you're fired. Government doesn't, and shouldn't, run that way.

White House reporters will be forced to cultivate a wider range of sources, another good thing. Media outlets maybe ought to have a Fake News Beat, where someone is monitoring those fake news sites regularly because much of that fake news is likely to be showing up in the White House and other places in the government and someone has to jump on that immediately to try to stop it from being perceived as real in this post-truth world. Otherwise we will see more armed people walking into pizza joints looking for a child sex ring managed by Hillary Clinton.

Trump was elected to shake things up. He’s doing that so far through his Cabinet choices (the ExxonMobile CEO as secretary of state; a company man at the head of Labor; and others) and his approach. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. DC has been stagnant for many years now and could use a little shaking.

And the media needs to shake things up too.

They adapted during the campaign to begin to highlight false news or untrue statements uttered by Trump or, less so, by Hillary Clinton, and call him on it. Not that it stopped him either from winning or from spreading phony news. But at least the public had the truth available to them, in real time.

The media now needs to adapt – and I mean before his Administration takes office – as to how they will cover a president who only wants fawning coverage. Of course, all presidents want fawning followers and media, but that’s not the media’s role in our society. If the media doesn't adjust, they will look like the dishonest people he claims they are – whining about being treated differently than in the past. And Trump will leverage that whining to his benefit.

Trust me, ladies and gentlemen, you’re going to be treated differently. Plan on it. And I mean plan.

I’m assuming planning is going on at the major news outlets as we speak. But I stopped ASSuming a long time ago.



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I hear ringing and there's no one there...or is there?

12/8/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
When you retire and move away from the town you worked in for 30 years you begin to lose regular contact with good friends. The landline rings and it’s typically a robo-call from Linda at Card Services or the CBE group offering me, by name, a fantastic business opportunity if I’d only  press “1” on my phone.

I’ve yet to press “1” but maybe I should because maybe I’d get a real person to talk to and maybe even a real good business opportunity.

We’ve already signed up for “Nomorobo” which stores lists of known robo-call numbers so that one ring on your phone and most of those calls disappear without you needing to pick up. Nice. When the phone rings more than once, you assume it’s a real person really calling you for real. And you pick up. Oftentimes it’s just another robo-call but from a number that “Nomorbo” has yet to store so not a known unknown number, thus not a one-ringer and you have to pick up to see who it is, or isn’t.

Today, at 10:22 a.m. the phone rang one, twice, three times. My wife answered on the upstairs extension and I picked up downstairs, there was no one there, so the two of us had a nice conversation and hung up figuring it was a robo-number not yet in the Nomorobo storage bank, so no biggie.

At 10:27, the phone rang again. Once, twice, three times. Again, we both picked up, had a lovely conversation, kidding each other that we were Linda from Card Services, and hung up. This time, though, I sat by the desk where the phone rested so that I wouldn’t have to make the marathon walk of 10 feet from my reading chair to the desk if it rang again.

I didn’t have to wait long. At 10:29, one, two, three rings. This time only I picked up, heard what sounded like rustling of paper on the other end of the phone, said, “Hello? I hear you! Speak or I’m hanging up.” Nothing. I hung up.

Now I was frustrated and wanted to figure out what was going on. So, I looked up on my handy-dandy FIOS app to see from whence these calls were coming. The number that appeared, three times, at 10:22, 10:27 and 10:29 was….my wife’s cell phone number.

I assumed someone was cloning her number and we better figure out how to fix that. First, though, I went upstairs and asked my wife to check her cell phone. Sure enough, the calls came from HER cell phone. Obviously, pocket-dialed by my wife.

We had a good laugh. I said, damn, we’re so old the only calls we get are robo-calls ...  from ourselves, and returned to read my newspaper.

So far, the phone hasn’t rung again. Sigh.



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The whole non-truth and nothing but...

12/7/2016

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 Fake news is a big topic in this post-truth era.

Oxford Dictionary named post-truth its word of the year. It defines it as: "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

That is the definition in many ways of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign. Let me be clear: I am not contesting the legitimacy of his Electoral College victory. He will be the next president as chosen by our system and my fellow citizens.

Like milliions of other Americans, though, I hope for a bit of a different Donald Trump.

As I watch his first couple of weeks as “just” the President-elect, I see no change in his reliance on a post-truth world. He did engage and helped save hundreds of jobs in Indiana and deserves credit for that. Still, we learned from that company’s union chief, after the pomp of the announcement, that it was not as many jobs as we first were told. While that was a wonderful thing for him to day.

Yesterday he announced,  $50 billion/50 million job investment with a Japanese tech billionaire. But never mentioned that the investment was went public weeks before our election. Just a minor detail as he took credit for the investment.

He was elected to get the economy moving to create more jobs. He was elected to bring our country together, not drive us further apart. He was elected to keep us safe, not just from other country’s companies beating our pants off but from other countries, enemies of ours, pantsing us.

He yesterday fired a low-level transition aide, and son of his chosen national security advisor, because that aide was spreading false news, news that led a guy to walk into a DC pizza joint, armed, looking for what some Internet trolls’ claim was a conspiracy in tunnels under that pizzeria that are of a part of some conspiracy to rape and kidnap children. A syndicate they claimed run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chair. I mean, really?

The young guy was fired, deservedly so. His father, the about-to-be national security advisor to the President, spreads fake news on his Twitter account too but, so far, he is remaining in place. Oh, and the President-elect is known to spread phony conspiracy theories too. For example, he claimed for years that our current president wasn’t born in this county. And, yesterday, he said Boeing is running up costs on the new Air Force One fleet, which isn’t even being built yet nor has a contract been awarded.

Why did Trump do that? I don’t know but there is speculation that it was because Boeing’s chairman criticized Trump’s planned policy of walking away from free trade deals about a half hour before his edict to “cancel” the contract came via, of course, tweet.

I toyed with the of writing a post making fun of fake news and  tossing in a few of my own potential fake news story. But you know something? It is not funny.

It is not funny that our incoming President likes to spread false news, often in middle-of-the-night tweets. It is not funny that among his apparent men and women being considered to be his press secretary are people such as TV personality, radio talk show host and newspaper columnist Laura Ingraham who have no respect for the 1st Amendment and no regard for the mainstream press, despite often being paid by it. 

Imagine someone with Ms. Ingraham’s beliefs briefing the press corps daily – or with whatever frequency the Trump Administration deems sufficient? We won’t be able to discern truth from falsehood or even post-truth.

As I said, I respect that Trump was elected by my fellow American voters. What I don’t respect is a continuation of lies we heard on the campaign. I am having trouble imagining four years of not knowing what to believe and not trusting our President to be telling us the truth.

Can you?

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Saving 1,000 jobs. A small step for a President, a big step for Trump

12/2/2016

1 Comment

 
Candidate Donald Trump promised that American companies moving to other countries would face severe consequences if he became president. In his first effort at keeping that promise he is taking credit for brokering a deal in which Carrier Corp. is being given $7 million in tax credits by the state of Indiana in return for keeping about 1,000 jobs in that state rather than moving them to Mexico as planned.

My question is: How do I get in on those consequences? I could use $700,000 a year myself. Those are way better consequences than a chicken in every pot.

I’m very happy for those 1,000 families, especially at this time of year. But we need to look at this “deal” in a larger context.
  1. While it’s great that Trump saved those jobs, is this really what we want our President spending his days on? The most important commodity a President has is his time and it must be spent on the most important issues of the day.  
  2. An unfortunate consequence of this success is that it reinforces in Trump that “deal-making” is what works for the U.S. government. Running the government is not about the “deal” the vast majority of the time.
  3. Picking winners and losers among companies is a losing game for the federal government.  
  4. How many companies now will use the Carrier experience as negotiating leverage against the government for their company?
  5. Now, who becomes, as one anonymous source said in the Washington Post this morning, the "next piñata" for Trump to beat up on to make a point?
  6. Let’s also remember that Trump admitted to forgetting all about that promise to Carrier until he watched the nightly news and saw a Carrier employee commenting on Mr. Trump’s promise. That’s when he kicked into gear, he admitted. What other promises has he forgotten since the campaign?

We look to our President to create policies that will create jobs. While it’s fabulous to convince a company to remain in this country that’s not really the president’s job, and it’s not creating jobs or re-training yesterday’s workers for today’s jobs. Vice President-elect Mike Pence is still serving as governor of Indiana. He said that in March he basically offered Carrier the same deal and they turned it down.

So what changed?

Donald Trump was elected. Fortunately his vice president is Pence who could control the levers of the relevant state government and make the tax credits available.

And even though an individual, even the President, cannot muck around in government contracting – which is governed by about a bazillion regulations and rules so that the system is fair to both the government and the bidders -- apparently United Technologies (UT), which owns Carrier, was scared of ignoring the President-elect’s desires in this matter. To them, this “tiny” matter of saving $65 million by moving these jobs to Mexico did not match their concern about the tens of billions of dollars in contracts they have to build jet engines and the like. UT has about $60 BILLION dollars in revenue. If you do the math and figure out how much of $60 billion is $65 million it’s – well, not much.

A small price to pay to stay out of the White House's crosshairs.

Immediately after going to Carrier to bathe in the credit of saving those jobs, Trump moved on to Ohio to begin his “Donald Trump is Wonderful, Aren’t I” tour where he mostly ignored his script, and ad-libbed his way to again promising to build a wall (something since the election he has backed away from) and getting the crowd to chant “lock her up” (another promise he said he wouldn’t keep because the Clintons have been through too much already).

He spent a lot of time praising himself for his great wins in various states last month demonstrating how “they” lost and he “won.”

So when does the uniting, not dividing begin?


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    B. Jay Cooper

    B. Jay is a former deputy White House press secretary to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He also headed the communications offices at the Republican National Committee, U.S. Department of Commerce, and Yale University. He is a former reporter and is the retired deputy managing director of APCO Worldwide's Washington, D.C., office.
    He is the father of three daughters and grandfather of five boys and one girl. He lives in Marion, Mass.

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