"A majority of the American public believe that the U.S. government engages in widespread monitoring of its own citizens and worry that the U.S. government could be invading their own privacy," says Monmouth University reporting the results of a recent survey it conducted of 803 U.S. adults earlier this month.

Well we should hope so! The U.S. government does engage in widespread monitoring of its own citizens.

A scathing 158-page Inspector General’s report released last week detailed serious problems and “failed leadership” among the VA’s enormous health care system in general and at the Washington D.C. VA Medical Center specifically. This comes on the heels of another investigation that found that the VA director violated ethics policies, and eventually forced the retirement of David Shulkin’s chief of staff, Viveca Wright Simpson.

Gun control advocates have made it clear in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting that they think reflexively supporting the NRA position on gun safety blocks potential solutions for curtailing mass shootings in America. However, not many people are talking about how reflexively opposing the NRA may also block potential solutions for curtailing mass shootings in America.

Editor's Note: The following article was written by Dr. Lynn S. Kahn and Cindy Peak, president of Cogent Technologies.

“That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government is well known to us both:  but we have differed as friends should do: respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confining our difference of opinion to private conversation.”

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, July 17, 1791.

The new Lilac Hills Ranch is a transformational community that might just move the San Diego region to a new path that embraces growth.

Last year, at the peak of San Diego County’s housing emergency, housing production actually dropped, according to new data. Demand for new housing was at an all-time high and our homeless crisis was making national headlines, but builders were unable to pull permits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgBDGHGJSEk

Transparency, integrity, and accountability. Three words that currently cannot be used to describe elections and the political system in the US. However, a new campaign has launched to change this.

Issue One, a bipartisan political reform organization in Washington, DC, launched a national campaign Thursday to address these three important pillars to the democratic process and "Fix Politics Now."

Katie Fahey, President and Treasure of Voters Not Politicians, is leading an effort to establish a citizen's redistricting commission in Michigan. She and her team have built a statewide network of donors and volunteers who gathered over 400,000 signatures to put the issue before the voters this November.

Republicans now claim he ran as one of them.

Democrats say he's their best and brightest.

The truth, Conor Lamb showed America that rejecting partisan politics is a winning formula.

These days there’s a lot going on in the world of independent politics. More to the point, it’s now accurate to say that there is a “world” of independent politics.

I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party.

I'm an independent voter.

But I am a small "L" libertarian.

I think our political institutions are vastly corrupt and tyrannical.

I've seen all the ways over the years in which the government in Washington violates its own charter, the U.S. Constitution, and hardly even tries to keep up appearances anymore that it is even trying to follow its own laws.

I've seen all the ways in which state and local governments steal money from their states' economies and waste resources.