Check Me Out at My New Second Home

I have been asked by the proprietors at Best of the Blogs to be a contributor. The site is very eclectic and significantly more liberal than I am. You should enjoy the content and feel free to comment. Here is a quick biographical summary of all involved as relayed to me by one of my new colleagues, Josh Hammond...



Max is the newest. He lives in Japan and he’s an expert on military matters and contributes to a military history blog. He’s been good on sort out the mess in Iraq and elsewhere. He is also an actor and has a weekly TV show in Toyko. He’s a Vietnam vet.

Sasha is our diversity show. She works on Capitol Hill and has a great analytical mind. She picked the number of Senate pick ups for the Democrats and almost picked the exact electoral vote. (I managed to pick the percentage of the popular vote. We had a little open contest.) Sasha is also the sharpest tongue, and comments regularly but doesn’t post that often.

John McCreery is a anthropologist who also lives in Japan. He is a writer and marketing man. The most gentle in the group, but he does not post too often.

Blackdogred (Jeff) is from Washington, D.C. and works at a university. He has his own blog. And he is the quirkiest writer. An acquired taste. He provides a lot of links to a lot of sites, he invents his own words, and he is forever posting his “silly” cat and dog pictures. He posts a lot but doesn’t get that many comments because it is hard to navigate his posts.

J.A. Bartlett is from Madison, Wisconsin. A teacher I believe. He doesn’t post too often either, but his areas of specialization are religion and culture. He’s an avid football fan who picked all the playoff wins last year, except for those lucky Giants in the Super Bowl. He is a former radio DJ.

Groomlake (Eric Ehrman) is from New Mexico and hangs out a lot in Brazil. He speaks five languages fluently and once wrote for the Rolling Stone. He has lived in Paris and Buenos Aires, and he knows something about everything. He used to write regularly but has his hands full with a full-time online, money-making blog that Jerry Bowles runs. He is also a vet and a cancer survivor. He is the most eccentric writer in the group, with a unique style all his own. He has more command of people, places and things than 10 general experts. A lot of fun most of the time.

Jerry Bowles is the founder. He is a West Virginia boy who knows the best line from every country song ever written. I swear he has a photographic memory, but he denies it. He and I are best friends. We started this blog seven years ago. Together we were some of the major players in the big quality movement back in the 80s, so we know something about what is not happening in Detroit. Jerry is the best natural writer in the group, but he is very busy with three or four business sponsored blogs that, believe it or not, are making some money. One you might want to check out is http://www.socialmediatodayllc.com/ and one he does for fun is http://www.sequenza21.com/ a contemporary music blog ranked in the top 10 classical music blogs.

I was born in Bolivia. My parents were missionaries and I am the black sheep in the family. I worked on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide and then I worked in the Nixon White House in a non-partisan position. I also worked in the Carter administration as well as a stink with Governor Moonbeam Jerry Brown when I lived in California. My claim to fame is that I created the “Just Say No” to drugs campaign that Nancy Reagan popularize. I was good friends with Ronald Regan’s marketing guys lead by Dick Wirthlin who was a UC Berkeley professor who talked Regan into running for governor of California and then followed him to the White House. I’ve done a little bit of everything and I’ve been all over the place. I published a business quarterly, rank a business think tank in New York and I have had some publishing success with a business book back in the mid-90s called The Stuff Americans Are Made Of. That lead to lectures and workshops and then I faded into the Catskills outside of New York where I now live. My areas of expertise are politics, idea marketing, business process improvement, media critic and other useless things. I have a petanque court in my front yard, love single malt whisky, and a good Cuban cigar in the summer.