Following up on last week’s post about the health care policy debate, the subjects addressed below focus on the on-going debate over financial reform. As the financial markets have continued to stabilize, the financial services industry has become increasingly outspoken in defense of its prerogatives and aggressive in its opposition to regulatory initiatives designed to prevent the policies that caused last summer and fall’s meltdown. We discuss the reasons and implications for this.

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver assesses the impact of the conservative to moderate, predominantly rural and southern democrats known as “Blue Dogs” who have received most of the credit and attention this summer for slowing the health care reform bill in the House of Representatives. The July 29th announcement that an accommodation on the bill has been reached suggests that Silver’s analysis was remarkably prescient. more »

In Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications (McGraw-Hill, 2009), authors Courtney Barnes and Paul Argenti explore the changing business landscape at the hands of social media’s emergence and subsequent proliferation, and offer corporate executives a survival guide for the Web 2.0 world–and beyond. In this podcast, hosted by Nielsen Business Media’s Training Magazine, Barnes answers questions about the implications of social media on companies’ brands, reputations and bottom lines, and then reads an excerpt from the book describing one social media-driven integrated marketing initiative that made big–and “bloody”–statement.

This video highlights the findings from the book Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications, Chapter 8 (A Public Affair: The Digital Dimensions of Government Relations). “In the wake of the longest presidential campaign in U.S. history–21 months–and the subsequent election of the first African-American President of the United States, the country’s political landscape finds itself in the midst of as rapid and drastic and evolution as that experienced by business in recent years.”