Here is Aetna’s mission statement.

Why we exist: The Aetna mission

Aetna is dedicated to helping people achieve health and financial security by providing easy access to safe, cost-effective, high-quality health care and protecting their finances against health-related risks.

Building on our 158-year heritage, Aetna will be a leader cooperating with doctors and hospitals, employers, patients, public officials and others to build a stronger, more effective health care system.

Our values

Everything we do at Aetna starts with our values — a clear, strongly held set of core beliefs that reflect who we are and what you can expect from us. We created our core values together, as one company with more than 30,000 individual voices, and with guidance from our customers. Our values carry through our thoughts and actions every day, inspire innovation in our products and services, and drive our commitment to excellence in all we do.

– Chairman, CEO and President Mark Bertolini

source: Aetna Mission and Values — Aetna.

Sounds great? What he says about the fiscal cliff: (from MarketWatch):

WASHINGTON–Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Mark Bertolini, who is among a dozen chief executives meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama later this week, on Monday warned that companies are preparing backup plans that include layoffs if the White House and congressional leaders are unable to reach a deal to avoid the combination of tax increases and spending cuts known as the “fiscal cliff.”

“The American people are going to suffer because we’ll lay them off–because we know how to respond to these kinds of situations,” Mr. Bertolini warned at a Wall Street Journal CEO Council event.

How to respond is massive layoffs. Not cost cuts. Salary negotiations with workers. Price changes for products. Layoffs. I wonder if these are values 30000 individual voices hold too.

They are pressuring congressman to deal because they are confident a deal now will result in a better tax deal for them.

Ars Technica has overview of Obama team’s superior back office platform:

One of the biggest problems in the last campaign was that you had all these people who are out in the field who are volunteering who start building their own versions of these rogue tools to do the same thing over and over again,” said Clint Ecker, senior engineer for Obama for America (and an Ars Technica alum). Every field office assembled its own patchwork of tools using spreadsheets or a hacked Web application to track operations. They communicated over Google groups or simple e-mail lists. “It made it hard to keep everyone on the same page,” he added

[…]

“We definitely bumped up against some limitations with RDS but they were largely self-inflicted,” Ecker said. “We were able to work around those and stretch how far we were able to take RDS. If the campaign had been longer, we would have definitely had to migrate to big EC2 boxes with MySQL on them instead.” Not having to switch off RDS meant that the Obama campaign saved “a shitload of money” on hiring additional database administrators, Ecker added.

Ecker says the team also tested Amazon’s DynamoDB “NoSQL” database when it was introduced. While it didn’t replace the SQL-based RDS service as Narwhal’s data store, it was pressed into service for some of the other parts of the campaign’s infrastructure. In particular, it was used in conjunction with the campaign’s social networking “get-out-the-vote” efforts.

The integration element of Narwhal was built largely using programs that run off Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS). It pulled in streams of data from NGP VAN’s and Blue State Digital’s applications, polling data providers, and many more, and handed them off to worker applications—which in turn stuffed the data into SQS queues for processing and conversion from the vendors’ APIs. Another element of Narwhal that used SQS was its e-mail infrastructure for applications, using worker applications to process e-mails, storing them in S3 to pass them in bulk from one stage of handling to another.

source: Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech | Ars Technica.

…Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) skipped Wednesday’s classified briefing for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that he sits on.

source: Mavericky | TPM Editors Blog.

Just taking shots at Obama. and everyone is eating it up because his judgement is apparently sound.

What a slippery slope: The Petraeus Women: AP Goes Tabloid (props to BagNews)

First, Paula Broadwell’s home was being voluntarily being searched by FBI officials. Also it comes out, James Clapper told Petraeus to pack it up even though Petraeus wanted to stick out the scandal.

Gen. John Allen, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is under investigation in relation to Petraeus/Broadwell affair scandal:

A senior defense official told reporters Tuesday that it was alleged there had been “inappropriate communications” between Allen and Jill Kelley.

He also said the general “disputes that he has engaged in any wrongdoing in this matter.” The official said the investigation involved some 20,000 to 30,000 pages, mostly of emails, which were sent from 2010 to 2012.

Kelley complained to the FBI about receiving anonymous threatening emails and, during their investigation, agents discovered emails between Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell that were indicative of an extramarital affair between them, according to government and law enforcement officials.

Def. Secretary Panetta has said that Gen. Allen’s nominations to be the next commander of US European Command and commander of NATO in Europe are currently on hold pending results of this inquiry.

“The secretary has asked both Senators Levin and McCain that the confirmation hearing on General Allen’s pending nomination to be Commander of the United State European Command and Supreme Allied Commander, Europe be delayed,” the statement said.
“The President has nominated General Joseph Dunford, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, to succeed General Allen at ISAF,” it added. “The secretary has respectfully requested that the Senate act promptly on that nomination.”

In addition, Jill Kelley, who may have had 30K messages between Gen Allen, has lawyered up (props to The Empty Wheel):

Second, as I noted early yesterday morning, Jill Kelley has hired some of the most astoundingly powerful criminal defense and PR help imaginable:

They hired Abbe Lowell, a Washington lawyer who has represented clients such as former presidential candidate John Edwards and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. And the couple are employing crisis PR person Judy Smith, who has represented big names like Monica Lewinsky, Michael Vick and Kobe Bryant.

In addition, some folks are intimating that the White House buried this, but in reality it’s well known that Petraeus is a Republican and may have had further political goals beyond military and intelligence endeavors, had a tight inner circle that attempted to protect him from scrutiny of sorts. Also, Majority Leader Eric Cantor knew two weeks before the White House did and presumably sat on the information.

The current problem is that Petraeus and Lt. Col Broadwell engaged in this illicit affair, she became part of his inner circle as a journalist (even though she was not experienced as a journalist) and enjoyed access beyond what you would expect for a General in Petraeus’ position. Not sure what this could mean for Gen. Allen. as he is still active in the military, whereas Petraeus was serving in a civilian capacity. In general, this shakeup may end any attempt to retard any withdrawal from Afghanistan and may quicken reduction of military support.

Between McChrystal, Petraeus and now Allen, it seems that the leadership in Afghanistan had long become privately reckless and had serious lapses in professionalism.