"I think Kevin Towers is THE most significant figure in the health of Major League Baseball." ~ FMR. State Senator Steve Peace

For those lucky enough to call Kevin Towers a friend and colleague, they all say he was much more than a notably successful MLB General Manager.

Rare in professional sports, the 56-year-old Towers, whose life ended after a battle with Thyroid Cancer, was a man who rarely veered from his principles despite enormous political and business pressures brought by Major League Baseball.

THE PRINCIPLED MAN

President Donald Trump gave his first State of the Union address Tuesday night where he touched on several topics in the roughly 90-minute speech, including a surging economy, infrastructure needs, immigration, terrorism and wars abroad, and more. After the speech, a CBS / YouGov poll found that most people who watched generally approved of it -- including independents.

When Pat Tiberi finally got around to resigning after 17 years in office representing our district, he had more than six million dollars in his campaign account. Had he chosen to ride things out indefinitely, he could easily have financed another four hotly contested races to retain his seat without raising another dime.

And he hasn't had a hotly contested race for more than a decade. Why?

Because he had six million dollars in his account. For that reason, he has quietly sat on the Ways and Means Committee presiding over America's headlong pursuit toward financial ruin.

The fourth estate is a term you used to hear more often in reference to American politics. These days, it has to be explained. It's not a hard concept. The media takes responsibility for sharing objective information with the American people so that they can make informed decisions.

Perhaps the reason we don’t hear that term so much anymore is because our news media is failing.

Liberal media outlets may have mentioned Donald Trump’s retweets of nationalist group Britain First’s Islamaphobic content, but in Great Britain, the social media move sparked outrage.

IVN recently published an article that cited a Rasmussen poll referencing heightened voter interest in President Trump’s State of the Union address (Poll: Nearly 3 in 4 Voters to Follow Trump’s State of the Union).

Millions of people are expected to tune in Tuesday night to watch President Donald Trump's first State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. But according to a new Rasmussen poll, there is also an increased interest in the opposing party's response.

The theme will be “building a safe, strong and proud America" when President Donald Trump takes the stage to deliver the State of the Union Address Tuesday.

The word “building” in the literal sense is what a significant focus of his speech will be on, according to the White House. The trillion-dollar pitch to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, and transit systems is an area that has proven to be surprisingly bipartisan.

Your current lease with the

Hello fellow independent voters! This is your weekly Independent Thought Alarm: Hashtag Russian Bots Edition. In case this is your first time reading Independent Thought Alarm:

These are thoughtful missives about controversial subjects with some thoughts that are so novel, independent, and outside the mainstream of acceptable opinion, that repeating them might trigger a call to security to have you escorted off the premises!

Will the government shut down again in 2018? IVN readers took our Facebook poll on this exact question and most said yes, they believe it will.

Congress allowed the government to shutdown for a couple of days last week as Senate Democrats and many Republicans argued over the future of immigration reform and the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the nearly 800,000 DACA recipients.

Did the shutdown accomplish anything?