Since 2001, Congressional approval has declined by an average of 4.17 percent each year. This trend line reaches zero by 2016.

The Super Committee. The debt ceiling. Multiple fiscal cliffs. The sequester. We've added a lot of new vocabulary to the cultural lexicon for what boils down to this: Our nation's leaders routinely and repeatedly fail to work together and compromise to solve problems.

If we are unable or unwilling to look deeply at ourselves, it is possible that we will be relegated to watch from the sidelines as democrats enact their principles across the country.

The party is likely only to become more extreme, not less, for at least the next couple of political cycles. No amount of charm, or compromise, or whatever is going to change these dynamics.

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I call on all of us regardless of age to forge a compact that will undergird the United States in the decades ahead. It will require that we resist so focusing on the needs of seniors that we fail to invest in young people and therefore neglect our children and grandchildren.

To those 885,800 immigrants who arrived this year (up 110,000 from the year before), I say "Thank you for coming! We welcome and cherish your contributions to our economy. Please ignore the right wing nut jobs who want to send you away.

Governing in this climate must be based on collaboration and compromise. Either party has the power to stop the wheels of government by itself, but neither has the ability to govern alone.

The fiscal cliff has the potential to stop the growing economy and possibly send the country back into a recession. In Washington, there is a war over how to handle this problem. How about looking through the eyes of a physicist?

Any informed person understands we must both raise taxes and meaningfully reduce expenditures, including entitlements. It is the elephant in the room.

The fiscal cliff is quickly approaching and unlike what Americans were hearing for the previous four years, it looks as though Congress and the presid...

This is no time for a newly-reelected Democratic President to compromise with Republican politicians of a ultra-conservative hue, many of whom (including Mitch McConnell, again) have a personal political interest in continued economic stagnation through the Obama second term.

One of the things that makes America exceptional is the genius, common sense and level-headedness of its people. They proved their mettle once again ...

We are not delusional or naive enough to expect that getting to maybe will be an easy task. We recognize that over the past few years, compromise in Congress has become an oxymoron and bipartisanship a dirty word.

This back-and-forth controversy over marijuana is like a microcosm of the entire polarized political sphere. But we're losing sight of the common ground here: we all agree that addiction is a disease.