In response to overwhelming public opposition to its livestock tracing policies, the USDA announced last week that it is revising the standards for its National Animal Identification System. In a surprising yet welcome move, a federal agency is abandoning a blanket policy approach on a heavily lobbied issue and all because of grassroots action. Yet this may not be the lasting victory the majority of farmers and ranchers were hoping for.

Given the oft-bemoaned existence of partisanship in California politics, it is no surprise that imaginative remedies are frequently proposed. The standard anti-partisan argument goes that, because political parties are naturally polarized and ill-disposed to play well with each other, some sort of check must be placed on their fanatical opposition so as to permit the occasional bit of government action to pass muster.

At Sarah Palin's Tea Party Convention speech in Nashville, she was careful to say that the Tea Party movement has no leader and should remain that way- a leaderless, spontaneous, grassroots movement of the people. But without an official organization, platform, or leader, the Tea Party movement finds itself struggling to find an identity, a definition, and a common purpose. What is the Tea Party?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a San Francisco based non-profit international digital rights advocacy organization.  They are veterans in the fight for internet privacy.  The list of their lawsuits is astonishing, and includes Jewel v. NSA. 

News publications across the state are reporting the plunge in illegal immigration here in the United States. The Washington Post takes a good look into the numbers, saying that illegal immigrants living in the United States have declined by 1 million.

As colleges and universities continue to see dramatic declines in revenue and our nation’s young people carry increasingly high levels of student loan debt, there was a strong feeling in mid-2009 that Congress would easily pass much needed student loan reform. 

Extra taxes on such goods as alcohol and tobacco are sometimes referred to as “sin taxes,” since, as the name suggests, they are seen as vices.  When buying a loaf of bread at the market, you may have noticed that you will not be charged an additional tax, whereas if you go to buy a bottle of wine or a pack of cigarettes, you will incur that charge. Such extra taxes were set up (particularly on cigarettes) as a form of social punishment for those who still choose to exercise their God-given rights as Americans and smoke a cancer stick or twelve each day.

Avatar's pro-environment, anti-war ideology has been thoroughly scrutinized by political pundits on both sides of the aisle.  One aspect of their critical analysis that has been missing, however, is the prospect of an Avatar-type, 3rd party candidate in 2012.  At first glance, such a proposition may seem implausible, even repugnant to the Right, but it may not be as far fetched as some believe.

My recent article promoting Medicare as a solution to the crisis in health insurance costs and availability started a lively discussion about the pros and cons of the 44-year-old program signed into law by Lyndon Baines Johnson.  My personal story about Medicare was anecdotal in nature, and many of the responses were also based on personal experiences.  So I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at some hard numbers about Medicare’s effectiveness and popularity.

Earlier this week I was reading AB 347, a bill that is currently circulating in Washington DC. The summary reads as follows:  "Allows an individual or a corporate taxpayer to deduct a charitable contribution made for the relief of victims of the earthquake in Haiti on the taxpayer's 2009 tax return, instead of the 2010 tax return."