By consensus across several non-partisan surveys....

Nonpartisan surveys show remarkable consistency in identifying our best and worst presidents... and the telltale difference between these two groups should be obvious to all of us.

I reprinted the greatest speeches from our greatest presidents in my book, What Makes a Great President? In honor of Lincoln's birthday, I present my reading of his Gettysburg Address.

Happy New Year! The purpose of Accountability Citizenship is to build and sustain communities of positive, informed and engaged citizens. The theme for this week is scorecards. Voters should insist that every elected official campaign on a scorecard containing the performance objectives they will try to achieve if elected. The elements of those scorecards should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Bound. Positive, informed and engaged citizens can make our government work at every level if we hold elected officials accountable using scorecards.

Elected officials work for us. We need to hold them accountable for doing their jobs well. Scorecards are essential for that. In Accountability Citizenship (xLibris, 2013), I present a methodology for scorecards on pages 62-65. Check it out! More coming on this topic as we continue with scorecards as our theme of the week.

We should make every candidate create the scorecard on which they want to be judged: more details in the video and in my next few vlogs this week.

To close out this Thanksgiving Day weekend, I wanted to offer my condolences to the family of Sarah Beckstrom, the National Guard soldier murdered in Washington, D.C. last week, and to offer my best wishes for a full and speedy recovery for Andrew Wolfe, the other National Guard soldier critically wounded in that incident. ​

Accountability Citizenship can help us find our way out of the current political wilderness... 

In this video, I explat two things Members of Congress can do right now that would break the gridlock in Washington. Almost every one of us (except residents of DC and territories) has one United States Representative (one of the 435 Members of the House of Representatives and two United States Senators (two of the 100 Members of the Senate). We all need to communicate directly and with urgency using either the electronic messaging available on your Representative's or Senators' web sites or by regular mail (or both). As I stress in the attached video, we should demand a bipartisan resolution condemning the President's action in bulldozing the East Wing of the White House (AFTER telling the American people the White House structure would not be harmed in any way), or, in the case of Republican Members of Congress, switching their party affiliations away from the Republican Party.