Monetary Madness—Days before the Bush administration unveiled its 2007 budget, the House of Representatives approved a bill mandating over $40 billion in spending cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, student loans and numerous other social programs. It was a squeaker, passing by 216 to 214, only after Dick Cheney returned from the Middle East to break a […]

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Reading through the text of President Bush’s State of the Union speech the morning after, it occurred to us that to get real information about the state of our union the last source one should look to is this annual address. The State of the Union has become a dis-infomercial, an overstuffed grab bag of […]

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The United States Senate is often called “the most exclusive club in Washington,” or exalted by its members as the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” But a new appellation may be in order: the world’s best investment club. According to a study conducted by four business professors, in any given year between 1993 and 1998 roughly […]

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When we heard about a stunning report on lobbying that was discussed on National Public Radio, we presumed there wouldn’t be much coverage of it in the major media, and we were right. But the Center for Public Integrity, the non-partisan Washington research group that compiled the report made it all fairly visible. We asked Roberta […]

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On July 27, 2004, when he made one of the most memorable speeches in the history of our political parties, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama began to click with American voters as they watched him on TV. In Illinois, helped by his reputation as a state senator and a African-American statesman, […]

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