If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Rumor has it the U.S. Senate will consider a budget bill provision to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Here's what they need to share with their constituents.
Both Republican and Democratic senators see the Obama administration as unduly delaying the approval of this Keystone pipeline.
'Comprehensive Immigration Reform,' a.k.a. CIR, seems to be on a roll. The Gang of Eight in the Senate and a similar cabal in the House claim they will release bills in April. I hope they do.
Want to cut something like $850 billion from the next 10 years of budgeting? End the War. There's a novel budget-cutting idea, eh, folks? The Drug War has now cost us roughly the same amount as the Iraq War, to put it in context -- $2 trillion each.
While the military justice system is different from our civil justice system for good reasons, the time has come to take a hard look at the rules which allow military commanders to vacate entire jury convictions, expunge criminal records, and reinstate convicted sex offenders.
Paul Ryan introduced his version of the Republican budget this week, and it seems Ryan has agreed that two or three of President Obama's biggest budget victories actually do significantly cut the deficit, and are therefore worth including in the Republican plans for the future.
There is a clear role for the Treasury, and senators should use today's hearing to clarify it. If the Treasury has a responsibility to coordinate and ensure regulatory oversight of U.S. financial institutions, then what is it doing to ensure financial regulators provide stronger oversight?
As long as both parties go into negotiations determined to make each other side look bad, they have about as much chance of reaching a meaningful bipartisan agreement as a non-floater has of beating Michael Phelps across the pool.
When agreements are always so far off, and hair-brained ideas like "Sequestration" become policy, we are looking a situation where something drastic is called for.
Remember when a big takeaway from the 2012 elections was the changing political calculus behind immigration reform?
One of the reasons Americans are still confused about the ACA is the ongoing misrepresentation of the law by members of Congress who voted against it. This obfuscation isn't confined to what the law actually does, but also to what impact it might have on the federal deficit.
The world watches this absurd show of impotence with incredulity. So, the most important country in the world and a model of democracy (or at least we believe so) are unable to have a serious dialogue on a measure that they accepted over a year ago and knew they had to fix?
New legislation would effectively signal that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can decide not just whether to enter Israel into war with Iran, but whether the United States enters such a war.
A bad guy in body armor is a bad guy who's harder to kill. Humanitarian items that are unmonitored get traded for currency spent on weapons. No aid is really "non-lethal." Who are these people we are proposing to help?
Eric Cantor is like this season's Paul Ryan: an influential conservative with bad ideas who has thus far escaped public scrutiny. This time around we don't have a Mitt Romney to help raise Cantor's profile, but that's okay.
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