In his second inaugural address, President Obama called on Americans to confront the urgent issues of our time in light of our "founding creed," exemplified in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The men who established the republic were idealists who proclaimed that "all men are created equal" and...

TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful "idea worth spreading" every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week's TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new...

Today's political campaigns exhibit a tragic feature of modern democracy: In elections for high office, honesty is a losing strategy. Sadly, what's morally required conflicts with what is necessary to win.

Consider U.S. elections for President. Borrowing the tools of corporate marketing, each candidate tries to persuade voters to entrust...

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline recently agreed to pay the government $3 billion in a record health care fraud settlement. Its public response followed the usual pattern for official contrition. Chief executive Andrew Witty expressed the company's "regret" and gave assurances that "we have learned from the mistakes." Investors have...

In response to reporting by the New York Times, the U.S. and Mexican governments are conducting criminal investigations into alleged corruption in Walmart's Mexican operations and a possible cover-up by the firm's top officers. This story of a deplorable leadership failure at one of the world's largest companies...

When a large corporation gets caught breaking the law, the costs can be severe -- for the firm if it's sanctioned, for employees blamed for the misconduct and investors if the news hurts the stock price. Just last week, Barclays PLC agreed to pay fines of $453 million...

It is no surprise that, as a conservative, presidential candidate Rick Santorum promises to use executive power to press for prohibition of abortion and same-sex marriage. What is remarkable is that, now that he is the Republican front-runner, he continues to argue for his social agenda by insisting...

Poor Raj Rajaratnam. He's the billionaire hedge-fund manager who in October was sentenced to 11 years in prison for trading stocks on nonpublic information obtained from corporate insiders. If only his sources had been members of Congress or their staff and the nonpublic information had concerned pending legislation likely to...

Facebook and Twitter are transforming politics around the world, but to what effect? They helped dissidents drive dictators from power in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. No doubt they will continue to help subvert despotic regimes. Will they also foster democracy in newly liberated nations? Will they increase the leverage of...

Facing severe budget shortfalls, a number of states and the District of Columbia are looking to online gambling as a substantial new source of tax revenues. New York is considering legalizing non-Indian casinos, allowing commercial gaming operations to move beyond racetrack casinos, significantly adding to the...

The United States has long worked to foster democracy around the world. We press authoritarian leaders to move toward representative government, and we support opponents of autocratic regimes that resist democratic reforms. We welcomed the Arab Spring as the harbinger of a transforming struggle for democratization in the Middle East....

The U.S. government's solvency after August 2 may well depend on who prevails in a sharply partisan debate about how bad a default would be for the economy -- ordinarily the sort of issue politicians leave to experts. Democrats predict catastrophic consequences if Congress and the president can't reach an...