Diggapedia

  Have the Republicans given up or are they simply trying to destroy the country?   I get the role of the opposition is to challenge the party in power and make sure you extract something during legislative debates, but for the last five years, and I imagine for the next three years, they will be willing to induce significant harm to this nation.   I accept there will be some instances when the opposition will take a firm ‘no’ position and I get that.   But this is completely different, and what’s worse about it now is it is no longer about ideology, but politics.   Not the good kind of political bargaining and gamesmanship, but the nasty personal, damaging, and selfish kind.   Our government is dysfunctional and I just had to break out my copy of Patrick Lencioni Five Dysfunctions of a Team to analyze further. Lencioni’s leadership fable has been read by millions and it is simple and effective lesson in rooting out the sources of a team’s inability...

24 hours after most Congressional Republicans came to their senses we have effectively kicked the can into early 2014.   The president is feeling a little cocky, Boehner is holding on, the GOP is ruing the day it hooked up with the Tea Party, and many in the Tea Party are upping their Thorazine dosages. But what is in store for America?   The economic recovery is sputtering, labor markets are anemic, political will is absent, fiscal policy is missing, and too many of our representatives are preoccupied with re-election.   So how do we get this ship righted? For starters, fix immigration now.   It is the single biggest reason why we have few start-ups today than before 2001.   Start-ups become small businesses and small businesses are the labor engine of America.   According to The Economist , start-ups created 2.7m new jobs in the 2012 financial year compared with 4.7m in 1999 .   The Republicans need to accept that they have no one to blame but t...

A famous quote in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and a colloquialism to describe today’s fiscal policy impasse.   And while pollsters take polls to find out who the uninformed ill-informed and often misinformed public blames for the government shutdown and the media rushes to share these shiny new data sets with the very same public, we are stuck in neutral with a sputtering engine.   I refuse to believe that our sclerotic government is at its worst right now, not when you look at the first hundred years of our nation’s history, and anyone who compares today’s situation to the Civil War has stretched credibility.   No today is bad, but not as bad as the ratings searching media and talking heads would like you to believe.   No, we just need to deal with these devils. These usual suspects: For starters, the mainstream media, especially the beltway brand that is more interested in playing the blame game and deciding which party or politician is winning or losing. ...