It’s not about harm. It’s about hype. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, every year heart disease kills two hundred times more Americans than terrorist attacks killed in the peak year of 2001. In other years, heart disease deaths are hundreds of thousands of times more numerous than terrorism deaths. Yet year [...]

Last week, the U.S. Senate passed S. 1867, a military authorization bill with a special provision granting the U.S. military the power to put people into detention without charges and without any time limit. All classes of people are subject to detention without charge: Americans citizens and noncitizens, people living inside the borders of the [...]

Independent Women’s Voice describes itself as “non-partisan”, but absolutely none of the independent expenditure spending Independent Women’s Voice has been for the benefit of a Democratic candidate.

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 [...]

Through the 111th Congress of 2009-2010 and into the 112th Congress of 2011-2012, an urban myth regarding the U.S. Congress has been making the rounds. HB 1388, the story goes in bulletin board posts by Hutaree Tina Stone and in e-mails ricocheting about the Internet, has just been passed by Democratic legislators and signed into [...]

“No offense to my colleagues here, but we’ve created a caucus for just about everything under the sun except creating a job.” — Republican Representative Reid Ribble, March 29 2011 This was the claim made by Reid Ribble in announcing his new Congressional Job Creators’ Caucus. But is Ribble really the first member of Congress [...]

Candidate Allen West on Banning Mosques in the United States of America Letter to opponent, Representative Ron Klein: August 18, 2010 Dear Congressman Klein, Last week, President Obama made the following comment regarding the proposed mosque at Ground Zero: ‘As President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone [...]

Wars over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region have flared between Armenia and Azerbaijan for a century, and disputes over the the identity of the region simmered long before that. With a new war between Armenia and Azerbaijan looming over the horizon, it is interesting to note that the United States Congress maintains congressional caucuses to represent [...]

Earlier this week we learned of an bill introduced by Senator John Barrasso that finally brought a caucus of oil industry-supported legislators in the Senate to the point of acknowledging that a certain class of chemicals released by industry act as greenhouse gases and have a warming effect upon the climate. This remarkable bill, S. [...]

The Tea Party movement buoyed Republican Scott Brown into his Senate office last year, ostensibly on the basis that Scott Brown would be a firm supporter of the Constitution and Freedom. The Greater Boston Tea Party says of itself, “We are a group of freedom loving, constitution supporting Americans.” Shortly after the Massachusetts victory of [...]