Commonwealth Commonsense

No Shame

Don’t you just love it?  The Dems say nothing, allowing Sen. John Ensign to likely escape responsibility for his hypocrisy, while the Repugnicans try to make the poor cuckold the bad guy.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on Thursday issued a blistering attack on Doug Hampton, the husband of Sen. John Ensign’s (R-Nev.) mistress, saying that he had provided false information about paying off Hampton after Ensign revealed he was having an affair with his wife.

“John Ensign hasn’t put me in a tough position at all,” said Coburn, a housemate of Ensign’s at a Capitol Hill home owned by a Christian fellowship. “The person that’s deceiving now is Doug. And you all need to go do the investigation now on that side of it and quit asking us and ask what's the motivation here.”

Another example of the Repugnicans having the killer instinct and the Dems lacking it.

Sleaze Ball

This is incredible.  As has been reported, Sen. Tom Colburn knew of Sen Ensign’s affair.  He was there during a confrontation between Ensign and the husband of the woman he was seeing.

Now Colburn says he won’t testify, whether called by a court or the Congressional ethics committee.  The reason he gives is another example of the righteous right’s political bullshit. 

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on Thursday said he would not testify in court or before the Ethics Committee about any advice he gave Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) on how to handle his affair with a former staffer, citing constitutional protections for communications during religious counseling, as well as the patient confidentiality privilege.

“I was counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon. ... That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody,” Coburn said.

These guys who hide behind some flimsy religious facade is one reason many of us think of the religious right as a bunch of sleaze ball political opportunists who use religion to advance a dangerous, treasonous agenda.  They are America’s equivalent of the Taliban.

How to Get Good Customer Service

When I feel wronged by a company, I am a pain in the ass .  And I have a method for making myself so.

That method was proven again this morning when I received a call from the executive offices of Verizon with a promise that the caller would be my advocate for fixing a problem with our internet connection.

Trying to get satisfaction from a customer service rep is usually a waste of time.  They are trained to minimize losses.  They can give you myriad reasons why they won’t do a thing for you and with a smile in their voices.  That’s what they’re paid to do.  So, while I usually make an attempt to go through customer service channels, if I don’t get satisfaction, I ignore them and go right to the top.

No matter how large a company, one can usually uncover the email address of the CEO and other senior executives.  They don’t make it easy, but I can usually figure it out.  I go to the media relations or investor relations page of their web site.  Usually there you can find an email address for the PR or IR person because they want either the press or investors to contact them.  That’s their job.  Once you see the convention the company uses for its email addresses, you can usually then guess the CEO’s personal email.  I send her my complaint and copy some of her top lieutenants. 

It’s worked wonders.  Aer Lingus lost my daughter’s luggage when she went abroad to study.  It took three days for them to find it and when they did, it was broken open.  They not only paid for the luggage and the missing clothing (based on her word), but they also paid for her new clothing she had to buy while she awaited her clothes. 

AT&T earlier this year tried to charge me for an entire month of service when I cancelled with them on the first day of the billing cycle.  Although I had a “package” deal for both local and long distance, they tried to tell me what I cancelled was actually two different services and that the long distance they charge for an entire month.  I told them to go to hell.  Shortly thereafter, I began getting harassing calls from their collection department.  So I looked up the CEO of AT&T, figured out his email address and fired one off.  Later that day, I got a call from someone in the executive office telling me to disregard the charges.  It works like a charm every time.

But never as good as a recent experience.  When I tell friends of this, they are slack-jawed.  It was unbelievable customer service.

About a year and a half ago, I bought new eyeglasses.  In early April, I noticed a small crack in one of the lenses.  It looked like a miniature version of the kind of cracks you get on a car windshield.  Then a few days later, I tried to clean the lens after working in the yard and two smears wouldn’t come out.  The optician wouldn’t help me, saying the warranty was for only a year.

So I went to the top of Essilor, makers of Varilux lens.  The CEO responded to my email within a few hours and asked that a guy in its Dallas office call me.  He did and was solicitous, saying he was sure he could satisfy me, but first he needed to call the optician. 

He didn’t call me back the next day as he promised.  After about a week, I Googled the guy and sent him and the CEO another email.  The Dallas guy called me back later in the day, but with a surprising development.  He said the optician told him that I didn’t have Varilux lens; they were Zeiss lens.

Before I could attempt to extricate myself from this embarrassing development (for I then recalled that ulike in the past whe I bought Varilux lens, this time they were indeed Zeiss lens), the Varilux rep made an astonishing offer.  Because he wanted to make me a future Varilux customer, he offered to replace the lens free of charge.  A rep of one company offering to replace another’s defective lens at no charge!

I pressed my luck when I told him I wasn’t satisfied with the service I received from the optician, so he found me another one who processed the order.

It was the most astonishing display of customer service I’ve ever encountered.  Sure enough, a few weeks later I received a new pair of lens.

It’s apparently working again this morning.  I use a wired Internet conection, but the FiOS service from Verizon comes with a wireless router.  I use a netowrk switch to keep my wired connection, but my wife uses the wireless service.  It’s been intermittent since we got it.  She loses her conection several times a day.

At first, a custoer service rep said the router had to be “in line of sight” to work.  That, of course, is ludicrous.  A second rep told her that Verizon offers “an internet conenction” but doesn’t guarantee wirteless service and that the router had to be away fromn monitors and electrical outlets and not on a carpeted floor.  Whihc is exactly the location the installer chose to put the router.  The Verizon rep said that a new installer could not be sent to relocate the router because, again, we had no guarantee of wireless service.

So I went to the Verizon web site, figureed out the convention, found the CEO’s name and guessed at his email address.  This morning I received a call from Verizon’s executive office offering their assitance in fixing the problem. 

It remains to be seen whether the problem gets fixed.  But I got theri attention.

Myth of Small Business Job Creation

The Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein argues that the meme that comes mostly from Repugnicans is patently false.

Suffice it to say that, in terms of new job creation, the data show that most of it happens in a small number of very fast-growing companies that are no longer what most of us would consider small. There are lots of reasons for the success of these fast-growing firms, among them the ingenuity and hard work of their founders, the availability of capital and a culture that celebrates risk-taking.

But the dirty little secret is that a lot of small-business job growth has also been driven by the decision of big businesses to outsource many tasks that they used to do in-house. In an economic sense, jobs haven't been so much "destroyed" and "created" as they have been shifted from one company to another.

Pearlstein says the healthcare debate is colored by this myth. If we have universal coverage that requires all businesses offer healthcare and all employees must buy it, the impact on small business will be nil.  If all must offer it, none would get competitive advantage and thus be put out of business.

Pearlstein goes on to explain that many jobs created by small business is because big business has found that it is cheaper to outsource work to small businesses that are not saddled with healthcare costs.

What Pearlstein leaves out is that small businesses cited by GOPers are defined as companies with less than 500 employees.  I doubt most Americans think a business of 499 employees is a small mom-and-pop small business operation.

Bias By a “Reporter”

Feeling a little disrespected, progressives, after President Obama yesterday told you to mind your manners?

"We shouldn't be focusing resources on each other," Obama opined in the call, according to three sources who participated in or listened to the conversation. "We ought to be focused on winning this debate."

Specifically, Obama said he is hoping left-leaning organizations that worked on his behalf in the presidential campaign will now rally support for "advancing legislation" that fulfills his goal of expanding coverage, controlling rising costs and modernizing the health system.

And if you don’t…

Obama also hinted that efforts are under way to discourage allies from future attacks on Democrats, according to the source, who did not have permission to speak on the record about the discussion.

So an anonymous source delivers his threat.  Obama’s reputation as a wuss is bolstered. Progressives, perhaps it will be an anonymous source who’ll put you in the time-out corner.

And helping the president in his effort to exert discipline on those who worked for change and are increasingly disappointed is the “reporter” of the article.

See, she’s not a real reporter.  She’s not the kind of reporter who delivers the facts and context dispassionately.  She’s the kind of “reporter” who finds ways of denigrating those she doesn’t respect.  Isn’t that what we do when we describe someone in quotes? 

MoveOn, a Web-based political action committee that works to elect "progressive" leaders, intended to run commercials….

Can you imagine her writing that Focus on the Family works on behalf of electing “conservative” leaders?  You might think that she thinks they’re not really conservative at all, but wannabes.  Or worse, some fringe group.

This is the same “reporter” who drew a strong reaction form someone she misquoted, after accusing him of being unable to “to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan,” when the “reporter” hadn’t asked him to do so.

Ceci Connolly clearly has a chip on her shoulder. Or maybe she’s miffed that her employer didn’t invite her to a salon (use the French pronunciation, sa-lawhn, s’il vous plait) where she would get to mingle with health care executives in hopes of finding a cushy “PR” job, when her “reporter” days are over.

Let’s wish her luck in her job hunting.