After President Barack Obama called on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9, it fell on U.S. Senator Marco Rubio to make the conservative case against it. Alas, for a Republican Party trying to reinvent itself for a brave new 21st-century world, all he offered were the same old […]

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In a townhall.com article published in July 2011, 88-year old conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly wrote that the Violence Against Women Act was “implemented to punish men” and ignored a “mountain of evidence” that women initiate physical violence nearly as often as men do. Schlafly demanded protections for men in the law’s reauthorization, and ways to […]

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In the American political lexicon “undocumented” means “Mexican”—our largest immigrant group. Unauthorized immigrant residents peaked at 12 million in 2007. Today Mexicans represent 28 percent of the foreign-born population and 58 percent of the undocumented population. In 2010, 73 percent of all deportees were deported to Mexico. What are the costs of large-scale deportation? A […]

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The U.S. used to be a frontrunner in the clean energy race. NASA invented solar panels and Jimmy Carter put them on the White House. What happened? Two things, says Osha Gray Davidson in his new book Clean Break: The Story of Germany’s Energy Transformation and What Americans Can Learn From It: policy and politics. […]

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President Barack Obama could not have been clearer about the urgency of now: “For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change,” he said in his State of the Union address. He issued a call to action—and a threat: “I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, […]

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