Citizen Stan Clark has a message for those in Congress who are hoping that the protests will go away: “People are pissed because it makes you feel as though this Administration and Congress are looking the other way, because they’re all involved.”

Congressman Jay Inslee and law professor Maxine Burkett were just two of the many citizens of the world who joined together yesterday in a special effort to bring the dangers of climate change to the attention of their neighbors and colleagues.

Civilian programs are much more cost effective than military ones. Yet, the U.S. government has spent as much on civilian programs in two years as it spends on military programs in Afghanistan in just one week.

Social Security is sustainable, if money isn’t taken away from Social Security to pay for other programs. Unfortunately, that’s just what’s happened, and the proposed “payroll tax cut” is just such an attempt to redirect Social Security money into the regular budget.

Representatives and senators will all offer conspicuous memorials of the relatively small number of deaths from terrorist attack, because those deaths fit nicely within their chosen political frame: The idea that Americans have to fear evil foreigners, and spend huge amounts of money on military machines to provide for defense.

To confront the much more dangerous threat from smog is less convenient to their political agendas. To reduce the threat of smog would, after all, require Americans to look at their own behaviors, and for powerful corporate donors to restrain their impulse to seize profit regardless of the consequences.

Tom Carper intends to hold Obama Administration officials accountable for the President’s embrace of pro-smog policies. Carper will hold a hearing of the Clean Air Subcommittee about the decision to abandon anti-ozone regulations, at which Obama White House officials will be forced to testify.

With the Share Your Spare Act, Rep. Larry Kissell of North Carolina has injected an ethical question into the proceedings 112th Congress. What is a tax credit for? Is it to reward selfless behavior? If selfless behavior is institutionally rewarded, is it no longer selfless? And should we worry about such questions, or simply be [...]

I get a little bit tired of being lectured about deficit reduction and how significant a problem our deficit is by many folks who voted for legislation time after time after time over the last ten years that in fact have caused the deficit crisis that we’re in right now.

Lindsey Graham had no suggestions about how to pay for the new war. He had no idea of where to get the soldiers and equipment to fight the new war. Yet, Graham said he wants Obama to start planning for a new US war in Syria.

A report from the National Academy of Sciences warned Congress that global warming is real, that the causes are largely human, and that the cost of inaction would be grave. Yet, Congress has taken no comprehensive action as a result of that scientific report.