Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

Two Small Children: The Anguish of Elizabeth Edwards

By now all the denial has to be gone.  Elizabeth Edwards has to be fully aware that the father of her two young children is a cad.  Maybe he didn't start out that way but that's what he morphed into.   The woman he had an affair with is just as shallow, plus seemingly a gold-digger.

There is an older Edwards's child.  She is at Harvard Law School.  Elizabeth has to know she cannot saddle that young woman with oversight for her brother and sister. 

It might be extreme anguish for Elizabeth to speculate what kind of childhood, teenage years, and young adulthood her two young children might have after she dies.  She certainly has motivation to stay alive as long as she can.  Each day she can build a world of values for her children.

Campaign 2012: Is it Scott Brown's to lose?

Seemingly sane, youthful and attractive, Scott Brown is a conservative who supports abortion.  A political package doesn't get better than that.  The White House could be his to lose in 2012.  Who would be the Vice President on that ticket?  

Dropping like a stone - Andrew Young's book down to #37 on Amazon

Yesterday it was 11.  Early this evening it was 29.  Now Andrew Young's book is 37 on Amazon.com.  The play it got on "20/20" and then on "Nightline" on Friday night should have held the numbers up longer.  Will this be a fade-in and fade-out?  After all, no one like a snitch, especially one who presents himself as self-righteous.

"Desperate Housewives" - 1 suicide prevented, murders still possible

High drama.  Orson toyed with suicide and almost did the deed.  Then Bree pledges that she will try to rekindle the love she once felt for him.  It seems that he will stick around, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, Angie bares her temper and to the wrong person: Carlos, who has an equally bad temper.  The confrontation comes over the sexual relationship between her son and his niece.  Angie spots Carlos attempting to strangle Danny.  She bursts in.  Then, when Gabby convinces Carlos to make nice, they go over to Angie's door.  There they hear her husband warn Angie to return to a low profile.  He mentions they better stay under the rock they've been trying to hide under.

Another instance when we witness Angie's temper is her wrath against the woman who won't take the time to recycle.  The woman is as shocked as we are when Angie kicks over the trash cans.

Can Angie be the Wisteria Lane murderer?  She is possessive of her men, both her son and her husband.  Julie, the first victim, was involved with Angie's husband and Danny had a crush on her.  The second victim, the cafe waitress, was flirting with the husband.

Angie, who was also part of "The Sopranos," is the dramatic center of "Desperate Housewives."  Unlike the other cardboard characters, she is complex and mysterious.

Meanwhile, Tom and Lynnette make a breakthrough in therapy.  Tom admits he needs to be liked so much that he allows Lynnette to be Bad Cop.  That realization creates a new kind of pull force between them.  This could be the beginning of the healing of a marriage that might have been dead since Lynnette deep-sixed Tom's promotion years ago.

Declining Fortunes: Andrew Young's book down to #29 on Amazon.com

The book is just out there.  It is falling instead of climbing.  Andrew Young's expose was #11 or Amazon yesterday, today it's #29.  Let's see where it is tomorrow.

Davos: Like everything else, it has its pecking order

Is it better to have a rundown house on the best block or a decent house on an okay block?  That's what some attendees at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland must be asking themselves as they fly home.  The BigFoot event is over.  BLOOMBERG BUSINESS WEEK provides a slide show of the Movers and Shakers.

There are those who were there who are not movers and shakers.  Perhaps they were in the past but aren't now.  They had to feel the chill.  After all, the powerful want to be with the powerful.  Power needs more power to stabilize itself.  That's how the game works.

Would the lowest tier of attendees gain more in influence, confidence, and media attention if they quit going?  They could use creativity and take the risk of establishing their own local, regional, national or even global forums.  There are plenty of provocative thinkers who are not Davos-level brandnames.  With the right kind of media attention. all that could trump the increasing pile-on of cliches which emerge from Davos. 

A right thing to do for business, different for individuals?

Skipping out on the mortgage has become the right/smart thing to do, at least for business.  Think Tishman Speyer Properties walking away from 11,232 apartments in Manhattan.  Yet, when individuals do the same thing, they kick up clouds of ethical questions. Some also try to heap shame on them. In HuffingtonPost.com, Rachel Beck looks at that strange difference.

The rules of business were always different from the rules of personal life.  It's good for business to exile mediocre performances.  It's heartless for families not to provide for their vulnerable members, including the aging.  However, that might be changing.  Perhaps the ethos of capitalism is rubbing off on real people.  It makes no sense to sit out, perhaps for 10 years or more, an underwater mortgage.  And, if an offspring keeps screwing up, sure, cut him or her loose or committed to a correctional facility.  And can a whole family unit be in constant upheaval because a parent is losing it?

Capitalism is a brutal system.  It had to come to this, that we people take on the values for our own personal lives and intimate relationships.

What kind of depressives are we? Severe, moderate, lifestyle?

Science has thrown us depressive a curve ball. 

The latest research indicates that those supposed wonder drugs, the SSRIs, don't do much for us unless we're severe depressives.  And on a less analytical level, psychologist Darian Leader tells us in his new book "The New Black" that the clinical condition called "depression" may be where a capitalist society defaults because it isn't allowed to admit and process loss.  For example, say we are laid off.  Not encouraged to deal with this blow, the laid off bypass any kind of healing and succumb to the medical condition of depression.

Like much else that has been pushed at us vulnerable group of The Depressives  this latest is too generic and trying too hard to sound certain.  From my 53 years either being depressed, pulling out of a depression, or preventing a new episode, I know that whatever that entity is it has many forms and probably operates idiosyncratically in each individual.  Perhaps the most effective treatment for us is to observe our own conditions, make hypotheses about triggers and what lessened the symptoms, and test our both possible preventions and remedies. 

Since 2003, I have been doing just that.  There have been bad days but not depressed ones.  The triggers are all about, I discovered, opening myself up, professionally or personally to abuse.  The exit strategy from that is to push-back, along with avoiding that kind of situation in the future.  Eckhart Tolle and Mark Matousek have useful comments on how some of us tend to invite abuse and how to stop it.  

Borders Group Stays Stuck

Borders had and probably has a deep knowledge of books.  But it seems to lack the business strategy and digital skills to make it in an era of Amazon.com and Apple's e-bookstore.

On Mediabistro.com, Jason Boog reports that company laid off 164 workers, 124 in corporate and 40 in the warehouse.  That followed a holiday season in which sales were down 13.7% from the year before.  The Chief Executive Officer Ron Marshall had recently resigned.  According to rumors, he took a leadership retail job somewhere else.

# 11 on Amazon.com - Maybe Andrew Young Will Make Money

So much for dignity.  Andrew Young, who likely faces bankruptcy, might make a decent buck from his book.  Right now it's #11 on Amazon.com and the positive reviews - e.g. describing it as a "page-turner" - keep being posted on the Amazon site.