A handful of Democratic and Republican senators are considering a rewrite of 60 of the most consequential words to ever pass through Congress. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed after the attacks of 11 September 2001, and provides the legal cornerstone for the so-called US...

The World Bank has always focused on poverty reduction; it is their stated mission to 'help reduce poverty'. But actually ending it, with a target date, was never their explicit goal, until now. In Washington, at their annual spring meeting last week, the World Bank, with the support...

While the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G20 meets in Washington DC this weekend to discuss economic growth, a completely different, and much more diverse, group of stakeholders met in Delhi, India, to discuss a model that turns the IMF, World Bank and G20 model on its...

This week, thousands of immigrants, documented and undocumented, gathered in Washington, D.C. to rally for comprehensive immigration reform, hoping to tip the scales of Congressional bipartisan support.

The city's Mayor Vince C. Gray (D), if he chooses, can support these immigration reform efforts via executive order, by...

The District of Columbia's poverty problem received much-needed attention recently with reporting on how D.C. General has become a home for hundreds of homeless parents and children. The over-crowded and abandoned hospital-turned-homeless shelter has become a testament to D.C. benevolence, ushering in an outpouring of comment,...

In downtown Anacostia, on the corner of Good Hope Road and Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave, there are spotlights already pointing to, and waiting for, a totem pole. It is scheduled to arrive this spring. It may seem odd that a Native American totem pole was the picked...

When it comes to forecasting the educational future of District youth, especially for those living in low-income communities, there are some impressive words and initiatives being thrown around by past and present city leadership. Whether it's Mayor Vincent C. Gray's "Raise D.C.," a recently established public-private sector partnership...

No matter how much Congress softens the sequestration's austerity footprint, everyone in government will have to nip-and-tuck in order to balance budgets. And that will include the Pentagon -- something that Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel and even the Bowles-Simpson commission support.

We cannot afford to continue a clear...

That three New Jersey police officers were shot today, by a suspect being processed for a completely unrelated domestic incident, pokes holes in the National Rifle Association's remedy for gun violence in America. How would the NRA, who suggested after the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut that we...

The greatest legacy of Marion Barry, as city council member of the District of Columbia, could've been his latest ex-offender bill, which was shot down this week by fellow Democrat on the council Phil Mendelson. Chairman Mendelson, using procedural tactics, never allowed the bill to come to a...

If anyone thinks that the Discovery Channel is about actual discovery of, say, science, history, space, or tech, as their website claims, think again. Or if you think that its sister company, The Learning Channel (TLC), is about learning new insight or information, you are mistaken....

There is much to laud in the recently released film Lincoln, and Participant Media, which produced the film, points a principled way forward for fellow filmmakers, and their audiences, who care about social action. Participant Media is relatively new to Hollywood, but it has done much to draw attention to...

No longer can the president of the United States defer dealing with immigration. While it was barely a campaign issue, for America to continue avoiding comprehensive immigration reform is plainly inexcusable.

When President Obama takes up immigration reform in 2013 he must make absolutely clear the reasoning driving many Latin...

Of the two rivers that cup our nation's capital -- the Potomac and the Anacostia -- the latter of the two is, perhaps, the most apt reflection of where America is at socio-economically. The Anacostia River, the Anglicized namesake of which was first officially recorded by Thomas Jefferson...

Watching television this week, as Hurricane Sandy descended on Washington D.C. and meteorologists scurried to remain atop the latest forecasting, myriad presidential election campaign advertisements were met with one major marketing competitor: the American Petroleum Institute and its various oil, coal and gas bedfellows.

It was ironic,...

If someone got physically violent on the Metro in Washington DC, they would get kicked off the train or bus. Similarly, if someone indecently exposed him or herself (as noted in the new Metro ads threatening action against indecent exposure) or yelled incendiary, racist or bigoted comments at...

The riots across the Muslim world give warning to something much direr than a diplomat's death, however deplorable the Benghazi tragedy. What we say, do, and eat has global implications, and on these three major security frontiers we must do better: religious, food and climate security. Each of...

Being here in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the 2012 Democratic National Convention, having watched the Republican National Convention religiously on television, one thing that is explicitly different between the two national conventions is the diversity of delegates.

Walking the convention hallways, the arena stairways, and the Charlotte sidewalks, there...

In pursuing politics in Washington, and as a former senior congressional staffer, I am the odd one out in my extended family: many, if not most, of my relatives are farmers, preachers or teachers. At family reunions, consequently, like the one I recently returned from, political questions are...

Look past the boyish, small-town Wisconsin charm, the incredible commitment to physical fitness, and the impressive clarity in communicating fiscal conservatism, and what does America get with the Paul Ryan vice president pick? Having served as a senior policy advisor to one of Chairman Ryan's colleagues on the