By: Jim Santel Edited by: Emily Kim On NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday, Senator John Thune (R-SD) became the latest in a long line of politicians and pundits to attempt to redeem the debt struggle as something more than a grim apotheosis of legislative irresponsibility. The showdown, Thune said, represents “a broader philosophical debate about the size, the role, [...]
Congress has the ability to keep the US Treasury solvent or let the nation spiral into serious economic despair, dragging the rest of the developed world with it. But time is running out. Our government can’t seem to put its political differences aside. What it needs to do is reach an agreement to raise the debt ceiling and prevent the [...]
Warning: There are some graphic and pretty icky details in this post. So the state of Texas went ahead and executed Humberto Leal. For those of you not in the know, Leal was a U.S.-born Mexican citizen, who raped a 16-year-old girl and then bludgeoned her to death with a 40-pound chunk of asphalt. Police discovered the girl’s corpse the [...]
Once again, we must somehow come to terms with the fact that we are facing the end of the world as we know it, dear readers. I thought it had been delayed until October, only to realize it will be occurring in August. Oh — but wait! — it’s actually happening on July now. Apparently, that’s when Congress would need to [...]
Stalin (a man who should certainly know about such things) once said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” I recently had the privilege of attending a joint Ford Foundation/AJC (there’s a bit of irony in that, if you care to pursue it) conference on immigration. One of the presentations centered on sharp, effective messaging. Tamar [...]
No doubt many of you have heard tell of Thomas Drake, the former NSA manager/software developer who is being tried for espionage under a Cold War-era amendment to the 1917 Espionage Act. Today, the government scaled back its indictment of 10 felony charges, offering Drake the opportunity to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor and serve no jail time. Drake [...]
by Ben Wofford It was a classic budget showdown. Invigorated by a resounding off-year election and emboldened by his perceived political mandate, a young politician stepped into his newly-won executive office and initiated a staring contest with public sector unions. With his government facing a considerable deficit—let’s just say a number followed by a ‘b’—municipal unions and their generous pension [...]
by Brian Collopy Hopping on the underground train that connects the offices for Congressmen in the House of Representatives to the Capitol building flashing an ID and wandering around restricted areas, I found myself thinking that I had a pretty good job. During the summer of 2010, I interned for a congressman on Capitol Hill, learning how things actually get [...]
by Graham White The prevailing trend in American history has been one toward the further democratization of our republic. Virtually every aspect of how we choose our leaders has been modified since the ratification of the Constitution well over two centuries ago. The arrival of secret ballots, the vast expansion of suffrage, the 17th amendment, and the introduction of ballot [...]
by Greg Kurzhals “Disappointed, disillusioned, and in some cases, downright disgusted.” This was the alliterative description used in an October 2010 article by CBS anchor/commentator Katie Couric to characterize the prevailing attitudes among what is perhaps America’s most misunderstood voting demographic: independents. While self-professed independent voters have always played a relevant role in American politics (one need only recall Ross [...]
Designed by
Copyright © 2012 Penn Political Review. All rights reserved.
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn