After numerous years of debate and general inaction, it looks like Congress is set to pass a bill banning genetic discrimination. The bill is expected to be signed by the president.
This is good news. What the law will do is ban employers and insurance companies from using someone’s DNA profile to deny him or [...]

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has proposed a series of regulatory reforms focused on lessoning future market turmoil and preventing crises like the current one. The effect would be to make the Federal Reserve far more powerful, giving it regulatory control over all financial institutions that operate with government guarantees including the insurance industry. The plan [...]

Like everyone else, I’m not going to turn down my tax refund that will arrive this May. But that doesn’t mean I think the giveaway is a good idea. Like most economists, former Reagan and Bush I official Bruce Bartlett agrees. Writing in The New York Times, he offers a more prudent plan:
We need to [...]

Larry Lessig and Joe Trippi announced this Thursday what Change Congress will be.
Here’s more from Wired…
The professor wants legislators to promise to do four things which he says will reduce the influence of money on policymaking: To promise not to accept money from lobbyists and political action committees; support public financing of elections; commit to [...]

Well, this is really no surprise. Despite the support of John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, all of whom returned to Washington for the vote, the Senate overwhelmingly rejected a one-year ban on earmarks. Only 29 senators voted in favor of the measure.
Earmarks are the primary way our congressmen and women bring home the [...]

Yep, the donkeys are getting beat up in public opinion polls, but personally I give the Dems a bit of a pass on a lot of the things since they have razor thin majority, and Republicans aren’t interested in passing hardly anything they want to put on the agenda. That puts them in an impossible [...]

What is the real story? It is not about whether GWB or LBJ is the biggest spender. It is not about whether Republicans or Democrats are bigger spenders. It is not about whether GWB is hypocritically claiming to be an advocate of fiscal responsibility. The real story is about what happens to spending under divided vs. single party control of the federal government.

This is the second of three posts examining the question “Is Iraq like Vietnam?” In our last post we concluded this is the wrong question for Americans to ask about our involvement in Iraq now. In this post we look at the President’s historical reference in the speech at the Veterans of [...]

The following is an article submitted by Joel Hirschhorn, former senior staffer in the U.S. Congress for 12 years and author of Delusional Democracy…
The Founders of our nation and the Framers of our Constitution surely did not foresee the day when, of the federal government’s three branches, the public would have the least confidence in [...]