Being my usual old self, I was skeptical. But even I learned a few things!

Like how they closed a deal in ancient Rome not with a handshake but with testicles in hand! And how monkeys decide whether they can trust each other by poking each other in the eye.

Julie leads off by saying we’re often selling something that no one seems to want to buy.

It’s so true.

But we wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s so much better than selling soap or used cars. Our clients are changing the world!

If you have a few minutes, take a listen and hear why partner is one of the best in the business.

Even with the Bill of Rights and all the other amendments, it’s still only 7500 words long. And those 7500 words have guaranteed the freedom and independence of our democracy and our citizens for longer than any other modern democratic republic.

The Constitution impacts every American every day. But the vast majority of us have never read past its preamble (essentially an introductory paragraph). A 1998 study by the National Constitution Center showed more teens could name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. We frequently confuse the Constitution’s basic content and language with the Declaration of Independence or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Political leaders on the right and left often try to inject new meanings and loaded messages in the Constitution to reinforce their political views or arguments.

So in honor of this auspicious day when our Constitution was originally approved by the Founders, here are some key points to remember about our nation’s blueprint:

1. The Constitution protects our religious freedom and our ability to worship freely— or to not worship at all. While protecting this critical freedom, it studiously keeps government and religion separate. The words God, Creator, Christian and pray are nowhere to be found in the document. The founders knew those things belong in church and our private lives, not in government. It’s a shame more of today’s Christian conservative politicians don’t follow their example.

2. The Constitution gives the President a handful of enumerated powers laid out in just 4 quick paragraphs. Thankfully, no one in  the room went along with Ben Franklin’s idea for a virtual co-presidency. The beauty of the document is that it allows for great flexibility and growth. On many matters, it leaves more doors open, than closed. This allows the Presidency to grow with the times. It recognizes the developing complexity of our society and America’s place in the world.

3. The Constitution doesn’t care about our feelings. It never mentions happiness or exhorts us to pursue it. That’s the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution is designed to protect liberty and freedom of speech and it does so aggressively. The Constitution is on the side of unpopular, ornery and difficult opinions and viewpoints. It’s that dissent that makes America great.

4. The Constitution invented divided government and gridlock. By creating the three branches of government, the framers of the Constitution were trying to foster debate and dissent. They had lived under a monarchy and they wanted to ensure that power in the new government was not focused in one man or institution. Much of the give and take in modern day Washington is a direct result of the balance of powers and the specific duties reserved for each branch. That’s the way it was designed to be– we’re not a parliamentary system with a king and a prime minister. That’s called Britain.

5. The Constitution gets things wrong sometimes and the framers knew it would. The Bill of Rights was essentially added immediately and the amendment process provides a unique mechanism to adapt and develop the document for changing times. The courts exist to determine whether lawmakers get the basic boundaries of the Constitution right. Those decisions are ultimately supposed to be judicial, not political.

It’s important to remember that the men who wrote this document were flawed and victims of their times. Many were slave owners. They lived in a small country. The white population of the nation was less than 4 million people. Things have changed dramatically and yet the document is still relevant because of its fluidity and adaptability.

The Constitution belongs to all Americans. Not just to a chosen few. It’s not just for the self-proclaimed patriots or the military or the politicians. It’s our citizen handbook, our owner’s manual for our democracy. We have to read it, preserve it and demand our rights, if we hope to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

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“His failure to explain his own role or admit any errors suggests serious flaws both in his candidacy and as a potential President.”

The morning Mitt Romney was heading to Michigan to flip through an excruciating 30 minute PowerPoint explaining how he hadn’t flip-flopped on health care reform, the Wall Street Journal wrote him off in a scathing editorial.

The presumed Republican frontrunner was dismissed by the nation’s leading business publication and ridiculed for his leadership of Massachusetts.

If this happened to many of my clients they’d wear it as a badge of honor and get a standing ovation at the next union hall they spoke at. But for the man who is basing his candidacy on his business experience and ability to create jobs using free market principles, this rhetorical slap across the face could really leave a mark.

And Mitt’s gonna feel this same conservative sting over and over again in the months ahead.

The truth is that Romney cannot explain away his flip-flops. He has a closet full of them. It’s like being at a Jimmy Buffett concert. On healthcare, on abortion, on civil unions, on the environment, on guns.

Massachusetts Mitt was a moderate, sorta middle of the road guy on lots of issues.  Republican Romney is a pro-life, big oil defending, anti-gay, gun-loving, health care repealing radical.

Conservative GOP primary voters won’t trust Mitt and his opponents will hammer him over and over again for his hypocrisy.

Another presidential candidate from Massachusetts learned a few years ago what happens if you say you were for it before you were against it. Now, it’s Mitt’s turn.

The TV ads are already written. The Wall Street Journal took care of that Thursday morning.

Romney’s candidacy is on life support.

So when the Better Government Association came along with a proposal to reform city government late last year, I was struck by how it missed the mark on an even bigger problem at City Hall. The BGA called for cutting the size of the City Council in half. To be fair, with 50 members Chicago has one of the largest city councils in the country. Reducing the size of the Council would save money in operating budgets, staff and overhead. But it would be a drop in the bucket in the city’s overall billion dollar debt problem.

And reducing the size of the Chicago Council could lead to a massive increase in something else: The control and power of the Mayor and the influence of a handful of officials over city programs, priorities and finances.

That seems like a bad idea for a city that has seen one family control the Mayor’s office for 43 out of the last 56 years. It seems reckless for a city that watched while a virtually unchecked Mayor bulldozed an airport in the middle of the night, slammed through the rebuilding of a historic landmark stadium with little citizen input, sold off the Chicago Skyway, leased out the City’s parking meters for 75 years, and tried to sell off Midway Airport. The money from these deals which was promised to last for generations has been spent. And the public trust has been squandered.

Now, Rahm Emanuel is trying to pick up the pieces and chart dangerous political waters as Mayor-elect. In private meetings with Aldermen last week, he reportedly put the BGA idea up the flagpole. I assume not too many Aldermen saluted.

2011 is the first time in generations that Chicago could have some real checks and balances in city government. Aldermen should be careful about giving away their neighborhoods’ power without significant reforms in the Mayor’s office. And citizens should realize their best chance to influence what happens at City Hall right now is at the grassroots by pressuring their Aldermen to stand up and demand more accountability and power-sharing with the new Mayor.

Before Chicago moves to implement the BGA’s proposal to cut the size of the City Council and possibly eliminate grassroots voices in City government, there are some other good ideas that should at least be in the mix: Limit the terms the Mayor can serve in succession; enact tougher campaign finance limits; limit the power of the Mayor to fill Aldermanic vacancies and put term limits on Aldermen. Then maybe there will be some balance and some real debate about where billions of city tax dollars are going.

So what about the millions of others in public service? Why won’t conservative leaders honor and respect them too?

OMB and the Census Bureau estimate there were 2.65 million civilian federal employees throughout the U.S. and territories in 2010. There were another 3.84 million full-time state government workers last year according to Census Bureau estimates and approximately 11.1 million full-time local government employees. These men and women may not be fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan but they are on the front lines every day for the survival of our communities and the health and safety of our families.

So why do so many Republican officials rush to deride them as “greedy public employees” instead of respecting them as hardworking public servants? Because admitting that these patriotic Americans do critical work would undermine the basic Republican plan to dismantle government. If you don’t demonize the people performing the work of government, how can you encourage Americans to hate government?

The reality is these folks do more every day to improve the quality of our lives than most corporations and a lot of politicians do in a lifetime. They patrol our streets, clean our water, teach our kids, drive our school buses, guard our jails, pick up our garbage, issue our Social Security checks, fight fires, respond to medical emergencies, move hazardous waste, keep planes from crashing into each other, manage traffic, pave roads, build bridges, take care of our sick and dying and generally clean up our messes. They do dirty, difficult and often thankless jobs that most of us wouldn’t even want to try.

And the dirty secret that conservative politicians don’t want you to know is that these public employees are performing at a historic level of productivity. Public employees do their jobs well in most cases and deliver higher quality services more efficiently than the private sector could manage.

So the next time you hear about the bloated U.S. bureaucracy or listen to attacks on the “out-of-control” federal workforce, push back with the truth.

The reality is that OMB and US Census figures prove there are less federal civilian employees in 2010 than at almost any time in the last 40 years. And the number of federal employees as a percentage of our overall population has dropped steadily over the last 50 years.

There were 14.4 executive branch employees for every 1000 Americans when Richard Nixon was president. Today, we are at a 50-year low with 8.4 federal employees per 1000 Americans.

So, when they spout off about greedy public employees, think about who pays our politicians. It’s the height of hypocrisy to collect your taxpayer-funded salary while you stand in front of the cameras and attack the real people who quietly do the hard work of government every day.

For years, Tip O’Neill was right when he said: “All politics is local.”

Until this year, when officially our politics isn’t local anymore.

It seems that in 2010, all politics in America is nationalized, partisan and divided.

State legislators who have nothing to do with the mosque at Ground Zero, the national health care law or the bank bailout are being swept out of office because of the Party they’re in. Not the work they’ve done, not their records in their communities, not their specific ideas on local issues. Just the company they keep and the team they play on.

One legislator called me yesterday and told me he was finished. “There was always a middle,” he said. “Now, the middle is gone. And I’m gone too.”

America is a center-right nation in many ways. And Tuesday we went through a seismic shift. A big wave swept in, but inevitably it will ebb back out.

Don’t get me wrong. They’re was an important wake-up call here.

Americans are hurting. They’re out of work and losing their homes and their retirement savings.

They’re pissed off. And they took it out on the Party in power at the ballot box.

At least for now, they want power-sharing and divided government.

But new polls are already showing that they don’t really trust the Republicans in Congress.

Within a few months, John Boehner and his followers will own their own piece of the jobs, budget and deficit mess and be expected to provide responsible solutions.

Unless the economy turns around significantly, Americans will still be looking for politicians to blame.

And one thing is certain…

For John Boehner and his new Republican colleagues in Congress and in State Houses and Governor’s mansions across the country, the celebrating will need to be brief.

The honeymoon is already over.

But like so many of us, Debbie Riddle had a secret. And now she’s telling America to protect us from our own trusting natures.

In the grand tradition of Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, Representative Riddle is exposing a secret plot that endangers America and threatens our security and our future. Today’s new threat isn’t communists at the State Department or Reds writing the movies. It’s far more insidious than that.

Terror babies.

According to Riddle, these are babies born in the US when their pregnant mothers sneak in. These terrorist mothers do this to allow their soon-to-be indoctrinated offspring to return to the  United States later as citizens and attack the country they have now been trained to hate.

It’s a serious threat. And Representative Riddle says if we don’t do something about it soon our country could be destroyed.

So, how does this unassuming, God-fearing politician from Houston know this? Former FBI agents told her so. She can’t tell us who they are though. She needs to protect their identities.

Representative Riddle can’t show any evidence of who the terror babies or their mothers are either. But she knows they are being born every day and the government is doing nothing about it.

Like most visionary leaders, she doesn’t care much for questions from the media or any examination of her motives.

Debbie Riddle demands blind loyalty and absolute trust. She knows what’s best for us and here’s her plan:

We need local police to challenge those who look like they might not be “real” Americans and demand their papers. If they can’t produce them they need to be deported— especially the pregnant ones.

And we need to overhaul our outdated and broken Constitution to change the 142-year old 14th Amendment to remove the birth right of citizenship for kids whose parents aren’t legal American residents.

Representative Riddle says it’s all about protecting Americans.

But that’s why this groundbreaking law she wants to scuttle was written after the Civil War. To finally protect ALL Americans.

Black people were not citizens of the United States and could not become citizens of the United States until the 14th Amendment.

It would take 100 years more for the rights of citizenship to become reality for most African Americans, but the 14th Amendment was what made it legally possible.

The 14th Amendment allowed black men (and eventually women) to vote.

And 140 years after its passage, the 14th Amendment even made it possible for a black man to become President of the United States.

Republicans have touted it on their website as one of the great accomplishments of the GOP.

Now, from the Texas State House to the US House and Senate, Republicans are calling for the dismantling of this pillar of American fairness.

So here’s the truth…

Representative Debbie Riddle and others she echoes are terrorists who endanger Americans and our way of life. They are intent on blowing up our Constitution and wiping out our most sacred freedoms.

And when they attack mothers and scapegoat newborn children, they have finally gone too far.