Diggapedia

Lots of opinions on the deal struck in Geneva with Iran, and predictably those on the right oppose the deal and those in the center and left support it.   So what’s one more opinion. The crippling sanctions have nearly shattered the Iranian economy, the pain on Iranian Main St. is real, but has it really stopped the nuclear program?   The numbers say no.   In 2003 Iran had 164 operational; today it has 19,000 centrifuges.   Did the sanctions bring Iran to the negotiating table?   Probably.   President Rouhani’s pledge to improve the economy in the wake of the Ahmadinejad failure could only happen with a relaxation of the sanctions.   But no one should once think this means Iranian citizens have given up on their nuclear aspirations.   The question is in what form these aspirations develop. I had to laugh at Conservative Pundit Bill Kristol today on This Week when he said our allies oppose this deal.   Keep in mind, this is the same ma...

Form McCain to Limbaugh, the right loves to criticize the U.S. Near and Middle East policies.   You make sense out of: Hamas runs Gaza but lost its patron Iran when the Palestinian organization came out against Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.   It then lost its brief patron in Egypt when the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown in a coup. Israel was paying Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari to keep the peace and when he couldn’t control Islamic Jihad and Al-Qassam, he was summarily executed via missile attack by an Israeli helicopter.   Iran is now providing money and weapons to Hamas’ rival Islamic Jihad which threatens Hamas’ control   in Gaza.   The new military leaders in Egypt have flooded and sealed tunnels from the Sinai into Gaza strangling the Palestinian economy in the enclave. Kurds in Syria are fighting with AND against various anti-Assad Islamist factions in Syria. Iraq’s Shia led government wanted the U.S. ou...

Most casual Supreme Court watchers tune in every June to hear how the highest court in the land rules on the landmark cases.   The arguments for these cases take place in the fall and it is one such case that has piqued my interest on both content and personal grounds: Town of Greece (NY) v Galloway.   According to SCOTUSBlog, the issue is Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that a legislative prayer practice violates the Establishment Clause notwithstanding the absence of discrimination in the selection of prayer-givers or forbidden exploitation of the prayer opportunity, but what makes this one personal is I lived in Greece for many years and still spend significant time there.   Firstly, Greece, NY is a typical northeastern suburban town.   Mostly white, moderate to conservative, predominantly Christian, 24 of the 26 houses of worship fall within the realm of Christianity, with the typical landscape of fast food, pizza places, chain restaurants, str...

  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. ...

1)       Public polling is a colossal waste of time, and any elected official who lets it determine policy is both a fool and dangerous. 2)       Is it possible for our government to govern without first considering the political consequences? 3)       “Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection." – Harry S. Truman 4)       President Obama reaching out to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, may lead nowhere in the short term.   But diplomacy is about engaging your adversaries to come to some common ground; it’s tedious and slow and is why neocons hate it. 5)       When the mall att...