Public anger over bank bailouts was as much about fairness as the billions of dollars spent.Collection: Anger
When I visited the Water Institute's Baton Rouge offices overlooking the Mississippi River, I couldn't find a drop of the charged politics that drives so many environmental conversations in Washington.Collection: Environmental
In May 2007, congressional Democrats and the Bush administration agreed to a plan to include environmental and international labor standards in upcoming trade agreements.Collection: Environmental
Jobless workers, especially those out of work for months and years, don't have the skills to multitask in a fast-paced economy where medical workers need to know electronic record-keeping, machinists need computer skills, and marketing managers can no longer delegate software duties.Collection: Medical
To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.Collection: Sympathy
The mission of Patrick Henry College was to attract and cultivate academic stars from the ranks of home-schooled evangelicals, then send them off on graduation day to 'shape the culture and take back the nation,' in the words of a common home-schooling rallying cry.Collection: Graduation
Message to all you crazed parents desperately hiring tutors and padding your kid's thin resume: Chillax. Attending an elite college is no guarantee of leadership, life success, or earnings potential.
Sea World's killer whale collection needs constant replenishing. The average life span of the animals in captivity is less than half the average for killer whales in the ocean.
If you like Obama, if you like a Washington that offers free stuff and taxing the rich, that's what you get. I don't see him evolving as a president.
Great leaders don't rush to blame. They instinctively look for solutions.
Shamu the killer whale is Sea World's Mickey Mouse; whales named Shamu are the star attractions of three parks and the focus of their marketing efforts.
Direct mail was the basis of a lot of new Right organizations in the '70s and early '80s, and it actually led to the downfall of the majority of them. It's very expensive, and you end up putting your organization more and more in debt if you're not successful with it.
I always thought that Grover Norquist had a - he really is a true ideologue, in every sense of the word.
Ralph Reed is deeply ambitious and always was so. There was a time when he... in one of my interviews, he said he pondered running the Ross Perot campaign, and he wasn't sure he wanted to do the Christian Right thing; he was worried that it boxed him into a corner.
I think the danger with the liberal Left is seeing the Republican Party as a monolith.
If you want to know how Hillary Clinton could try to distance herself from President Obama's much-criticized foreign policy, listen closely to the words of her former top strategist, Anne-Marie Slaughter.
The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.
In 1996, Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over in the State of the Union address.
The discovery of heroes is rarely linear or obvious. They usually sneak up on you.
One of my most vivid memories from 1974 was the gas station at the foot of the hill below my Southern California high school - car lines snaking out into the street, heralding the failure of the government's price controls and lame ideas such as odd-even rationing.
We know that inflation distorts economic behavior. In the 1970s, a combination of high tax rates and inflation prompted investors to flee production in favor of protection.
Modern Americans - shaped by raucous politics and a rapacious media - like to think of themselves as experts in confronting mistakes.
Reality shows serve up juicy drama out of human shortcomings.
Our pride is tied up in being right. We tend to favor data that confirm our beliefs, so we don't see alternatives. Too often, leaders practice defense routines that become self-reinforcing.
We like to think that a free market's greatest strength is its self-corrective nature.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a platform of 'ending welfare as we know it.' His political worldview, drawn from like-minded thinkers at the Democratic Leadership Council, was based in private sector growth and personal responsibility.
Economically, long-term joblessness means fewer dollars for consumption. For deficit control, it means fewer taxpayers contributing to government revenues and tens of billions more spent on unemployment insurance.
The longer people are unemployed, the less employable they become. Skills become rusty; managers look more suspiciously at someone who has been out of work for years than a candidate already employed.
In the fall of 1996, I sat inside weekly strategy meetings of conservative activists as part of research for my book, 'Gang of Five,' chronicling the rise of the baby-boomer Right.
Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can't avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect.
The Citizens United ruling did not invent special-interest spending; it enables corporations and unions to advocate directly on behalf of a candidate rather than running more subtle 'issue ads.'
Government pensions, built into law and mostly protected from stock market vagaries, are the envy of the private sector.
Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.
Every journalist loves a peaceful protest -whether it makes news, shakes up a political season, or holds out the possibility of altering history.
A huge segment of the country has always felt overtaxed. In 1938, when taxes were roughly 17% of income, a 'Fortune' survey found that nearly half of all Americans thought they paid too much relative to what they got in return.
Successful candidates follow a simple fundamental rule: Define yourself before your opponent can define you.
Trying to decipher where President Obama really stands on free trade can be like trying to trace the U.S.-Mexico border with a Google map. There are words, and there are actions - but there is mostly that long squiggly line in between.
A desire to rescue secular America from fallen grace has driven conservative evangelicals at least since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a vehicle for conservative Christians to muscle their way into national politics.
We like to think of women as peacemakers, not purveyors of violence.
Presidential coverage used to be a very serious endeavor.
It's really important, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, to always challenge the conventional wisdom, which is what I've tried to do in all my work.
I've made decisions along the way so I would be there for my kids, and it's kept me from going places I would have gone.
Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed.
It's true that many of the leaders who started at non-elite colleges as undergrads later attended prominent graduate schools in law, business, medicine, and so on. But the point is that they found their own way there - as young men and women in their early 20s, not teenagers pressed into action by parents and peers.
I've been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught - from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships.
Your company is probably going to get hacked. The velocity and complexity of hacking attempts has skyrocketed, with companies routinely facing millions of knocks on the vault door.
The guardians of your company's cyber security should be encouraged to network within the industry to swap information on the latest hacker tricks and most effective defenses.
Birth mothers choose life, and a family, for their child. But this choice is rarely celebrated. Women routinely face family, friends and even health-care providers who think that adoption equals abandonment, according to researchers and conversations with birth mothers.
A woman's decision to carry a baby to term knowing that she will not reap the fruits of motherhood should be treated as an act of bravery and selflessness - the ultimate standards of good motherhood.
A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges - the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws.