Sticking It to the President
What would it take for today's Republicans to stop trying to stick it to the president? If history is a guide, a much greater international crisis than Russia's invasion of Crimea. A case in point --...
View ArticleNew Governments Now: Distributed Digital Democracy
Our current governments do not work. I'm talking broadly here, but this is no generalization. You would be hard pressed to find a government on the planet today that operates as efficiently and...
View ArticleChained CPI Is Dead, and the Grand Bargain With It
Last April, President Obama proposed cutting Social Security benefits in his budget request for fiscal year 2014 -- the first time a sitting Democratic president has proposed cutting that party's...
View ArticleUkraine's Crisis Doesn't Justify Overspending on the Pentagon
Russia's military takeover of Crimea is an unacceptable violation of international law, but it provides no justification for increasing the Pentagon's already bloated budget, as many observers have...
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Breaking: Peabody Loggers Break Ground on Controversial Shawnee Hills Strip...
With mounting violations and administrative errors, will Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan finally intervene in the most controversial strip mine in southern Illinois? This question is being...
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Governor Brown, Don't Frack California
The fight over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has generated a lot of debate. But another fight brewing out west in California is equally symbolic of the current debate raging about our energy...
View ArticleWar on Poverty Book Misses the Program's Overall Successes
Just one serious academic book has been published this year to mark the 50th anniversary of one of America's most innovative and productive efforts: Lyndon Johnson's work to eradicate poverty. Legacies...
View ArticleLet's Not Yield to Putin on the Truth
On the subject of the Ukrainian crisis and the possible kidnapping of Crimea by the Russian Federation, we have been hearing two very strange arguments that are in urgent need of rebuttal: 1. Why...
View ArticleAfter Marriage Equality Win, State Leaders Take Opposite Sides on Appeal (VIDEO)
Things must be a little tense at the capitol building in Kentucky right now, where the governor and attorney general have staked out opposite positions on a marriage equality ruling. One one side is...
View ArticleReal-World Lessons From the Crimean Crisis
The late spy-thriller novelist and military historian Tom Clancy's posthumous novel Command Authority, published in December of last year, revolves around an ex-spy strongman president of Russia who...
View ArticleNow That the Future's Back in California, What's Up and Why with Jerry Brown,...
California still has some big problems, as pretty much always, but as observers across the spectrum and around the world have noted, the state's political system, long mired in gridlock has become...
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ISS Calling Russia: Friend or Foe?
I guess I've always been a little bit cynical -- not much, mind you, but enough to cause me to look at the current happenings between Russia and Ukraine with a slightly jaundiced eye. How might this...
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Raining on the Ukrainian Parade
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria I hate to rain on anyone's parade, but let's get off this thing about poor, picked on Ukraine standing up for freedom against the big, evil Russians....
View ArticlePoor and Uninsured? You've got an Obamacare Discount Waiting
Chris Walters, PolicyGenius Contributor Although the March 31 deadline to buy personal health insurance and avoid a tax penalty is only a few weeks away, a couple of new reports show that the two...
View ArticleIntelligence?
This week, 200 policy makers, former ambassadors, government servants, scholars and a battalion of journalists, gathered to hear on-the-record remarks by CIA Director John O. Brennan. Oh, there were...
View ArticleFL-13 -- Did Dems Have a Reason to Show Up and Vote?
Republicans won in Florida's 13th district special congressional election on Tuesday. What does this mean? Here is the key point about why the Republican candidate: More Republican voters went to the...
View ArticleThe CIA Is Not a Fourth Branch of Government
John F. Kennedy once said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." He reached that conclusion after CIA officials, including Director Allen Dulles, had...
View ArticlePublic Health: Why Facts Alone Don't Change Opinions
I knew we were on to something. For much of 2013, our team at Provide explored ideas about how we could move people on the issue of abortion in deeply conservative and seemingly entrenched places. We...
View ArticleAmerica's Young Need Trade Agreements
Imagine that, in 1800, the 17 states comprising the United States decided that the new territories expanding on their western borders represented an existential economic threat. Those territories were...
View ArticleThe EU: Climate Emitter or Committer?
Unfortunately, it is a truth that the climate process has been floundering for a lot of its 22-year history, and almost ground to a complete halt following the Copenhagen negotiations in 2009. However,...
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