“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” – Ben Franklin

A spokesperson for the Housing and Urban Development Office went on the record on CNN’s “State of the Union” program and announced that President Obama plans to offer refinancing aid and loans for jobless homeowners. I’m all for helping those in need, but are we completely giving up on personal responsibility?

Am I the only one with a problem shifting all the power of both government and business to Washington?

Most of my friends disagree with me on this and think that corporate America is just a pile of greed dressed up in an Armani suit. Their arguments are always centered around unregulated industries stepping on their employees and abusing the little guy along the way to print money for the stockholders and C-level executives. I don’t disagree that much of the damage for Wall Street has been self-inflicted.

Here’s my question: What makes the President or Congress any different? Why are they morally superior to these shyster business execs? George W. Bush started the trend of bailing out industries and the slippery slope has turned into bailing out every group or industry in trouble. Slowly but surely, we’re shifting more and more power to a handful of decision makers in Washington. Need help? Lobby Congress. They’ll give you money.

At what point do we just vote to print our own?

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Philadelphia is now requiring anyone that has income outside of their typical wages to pay for a business license, regardless of how you earn the money.

Someone pays you $20 to watch their dog, and if you do the honorable thing and declare it as income the city is now requiring you to pay a $300 annual fee.

Thoughts?

Read the article on Washington Examiner

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Techcrunch is reporting that Indianapolis based Precise Path Robotics just raised $4.5 million in funding. This group, led by serial entrepreneur and local tech celebrity, Scott Jones, is building a robotic lawnmower targeted to the 32,000 golf courses in the world.

It’s great seeing Indiana companies like this making a splash on the international stage.

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This week we added two new members to the RNC New Media team in Indy.

Lisa Rusche is our Senior Graphic Designer and will be building out all graphics and branding. She’s a former college basketball star and has her undergraduate and master’s degrees from Ball State University.

Matt Turow is our Application Developer and will be responsible for coding in PHP, Javascript, Actionscript and HTML/CSS. He’s great at what he does and will be an awesome asset to the team.

My plan was to update this blog periodically with projects that we launch, but I’m guessing it will happen much more frequently with our newest team members. Watch out world!

I have long struggled with scheduling. My fiancé would be the first to tell you that I’m a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants over-worker that needs someone or something in my life to maintain order. In my personal life I’m grateful for her to keep me on track. In my professional life I’ve found (finally) the solution. Tungle.me

Tungle is a free web-based calendar platform that merges multiple calendars into a single user interface that makes it super easy to schedule meetings with clients, co-workers and friends.

It took me all of 2 minutes to sign up for a Tungle account and integrate my URBaCS Google Calendar with my RNC Outlook Calendar. Then I created a simple subdomain redirect to make it even easier to share my schedule with others. If you face similar scheduling challenges, give Tungle a try.

Meet with me at meet.jaysonmanship.com.

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Derek Sivers gives a great 3 minute leadership lesson about how a movement is made.

“The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader.”

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When I worked in corporate America I would always get frustrated with the time that my company wasted on meetings. For the most part, they were unproductive, pulled us away from what we needed to be doing and just ended up creating more overhead and protocols. We literally had meetings about meetings.

Meetordie.com has created a way to measure just how must is wasted in meetings. Enter your company name or industry, the number of people that will be attending and the length of the meeting and they’ll spit back an estimated waste cost. I’m not sure how scientific this is…but it’s definitely entertaining to at least get a rough idea of how much companies waste.

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Super Bowl XLIV was the most watched television show in history. 106.1 million people tuned in to see the Saints beat the Colts for the Lombardi Trophy.

We saw Google run their first ever TV ad. And we saw Danica Patrick and GoDaddy run their umpteenth awful “hot chicks unrated on our website” ad.

But, curiously, no companies used this opportunity of hundreds of millions of eyeballs to grow their SEO.

In 2007, Pontiac, encouraged users to ‘Google Pontiac’ instead of simply going to Pontiac.com.

If a company owns the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) this strategy is brilliant. Google uses preferential results now to show ads, so if you Google a keyword and click a link…that link will be more relevant to you next time you search. Pontiac would rank higher in search results for people that Googled Pontiac, clicked the link, and later searched for cars.

Successful advertising will push your target audience to take action. If they’re not going to buy a car right now, why not use the opportunity to increase the likelihood of a future purchase?

Read a more detailed account of this personalized search optimization at SEOmoz.org.

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I blogged about Blippy a few weeks ago. Apparently, I’m not the only one that doesn’t get it. Watch Stephen Colbert’s take on it below.

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Interesting post today, An Apology to Our Readers, on TechCrunch from the editor of one of the web’s top five non-celebrity-gossip blogs. Michael Arrington openly disclosed a problem his company faced with an intern taking an unethical bribe to write a glowing review for a tech company. This intern accepted a computer as payment to write a positive post about a technology company. Although the exact details aren’t outlined on TechCrunch to protect the privacy of the underage intern, Michael and his team have once again stepped up to the plate to be completely transparent with the hundreds of thousands of TechCrunch readers.

The intern in question, Daniel Brusilovsky, posted his response on his blog DanielBru.com.

Trust is earned. Transparency and honesty help it grow. TechCrunch has done right and hopefully Daniel and others will learn from this situation.

Now, if only we could get the bozos in Washington to become more transparent, instead of trying to ram through bloated legislation that no one has ever even read.

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