Whatever happened to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)? Is it dead?

I remember sitting in a meeting last May with Senate staff who said that after Al Franken was sworn in, EFCA would be an eight-week fight and then a vote in the Senate. It has been nearly...

One of the key items President Barack Obama campaigned on was his promise to transform government and restore Americans faith in government, which had in 2008, fallen to a historic low. He repeatedly spoke on the campaign trial about making government transparent and even proclaimed in 2007 that he would...

On the one hand:

When [Shawanna] Nelson was six months pregnant, she was incarcerated in Arkansas for passing bad checks. She went into labor during her short sentence. A correctional officer shackled her legs to opposite sides of the bed that transported her to ha delivery room, removing...

President Barack Obama has the potential of having a pretty good second year in office. Conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom is that "nothing much gets done in a congressional election year," but this ignores the fact that life itself does not halt for electioneering, but rather keeps right on happening. And there...

Following the Christmas Day near-disaster on an international flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, President Obama referred to a "systemic failure" of our nation's intelligence sharing. He is right in referring to a systemic failure, but it is not just in intelligence sharing. From day one, the Obama Administration's anti-terror policies...

In October, 2009, former Marine officer Matthew Hoh resigned his senior Foreign Service post in Afghanistan because he feels the war is pointless and not worth dying for. He said, American families "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love...

I wanted to share some good news that put a smile on my colleagues' faces here. These reform efforts have taken years, but have won -- are of national import. Here was our news release today.

FairVote Catalyst for Major Wins for Youth Pre-registration, Elections for U.S. Senate...

From evolution to global warming to vaccines, science is under assault from denialists--those who dismiss well-tested scientific knowledge as merely one of many competing ideologies. Science denial goes beyond skeptical questioning to attack the legitimacy of science itself.

Recent foment over stolen e-mails from a British research group inspired an...

The Republican record on terrorism is pretty damn terrible. Naturally, this hasn't stopped them from milking whatever remains of their purely cosmetic tough-guy reputation in order to fear-monger the failed Underpants Bomber incident irrespective of their lengthy history of failure, cowardice and stupidity on the issue.

I think we all...

I am a 76-year-old yellow dog Democrat, with a picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt still prominently displayed in my bedroom. And yes, I would likely vote for a yellow dog if the dog were running on the Democratic ticket against any of today's Republicans. To me, the current crop...

Here we go again. Failure of the multibillion-dollar TSA and CIA has allowed the actions of one man to put an entire nation into a tailspin, creating new regulations to "beef up National Security." Because a few sloppy employees at airport security counters didn't do their jobs, every person in...

The campaign theme of the Texas Democratic Party this election cycle is "Moving Texas Forward." And there is no better person to help the Democrats achieve that goal than longtime labor union leader Linda Chavez-Thompson, who announced her candidacy for Texas Lieutenant Governor yesterday.

I have...

Nice work, team. While we were focusing on denying gays their right to marry, a few scientists had a couple dolphins over for dinner, the dolphins cracked a couple jokes, and next thing you know, scientists believe dolphins deserve rights of their own. According to a recent article...

I have always resolved that I'd never write about my dog. Too self-indulgent to say nothing of too chiche-ish. So let's consider this the first resolution I'm breaking in the new year.

It's OK though. This is about his obvious similarity to Congress. Because, all you have to do is...