It's graduation season and while colleges are advertising pictures of happy graduates in caps and gowns on their websites, there is one distinctive feature about the class of 2015 across the country: they have the most student loan debt in history.

By way of introduction, I’m Jeff Marston, co-chair of the Independent Voter Project.

Starting today and every couple of weeks I’m going to be sending out these short updates with nonpartisan issues that I feel are important for us politicos to start thinking and talking about.

I’m a lifelong Republican, always will be. I was even elected to California’s legislature as one. But I do nonpartisan communications now with a company that includes independents and Democrats.

There has been yet another mass murder using a gun in the U.S., and now we have the inevitable reiteration of the arguments for and against ‘gun control.’ To my mind, all we need to wrap this up is to read the Second Amendment and do what it says.

Here it is:

In 1636, my 11th-great-grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Hooker, founded the colony of Connecticut and contributed greatly to the ideas of constitutional government and universal Christian suffrage in colonial America.

Among his brilliant contributions was the -- at that time -- novel idea that the foundation of authority came from the free consent of the governed --an idea that stuck throughout American colonial history.

Although some of the members of this minority are unusually educated and privileged outliers, we rarely see them with their hands on the levers of power; we rarely see them in control of large companies or wherever else there is great wealth; their neighborhoods tend to be poorer than those of the rest of the nation; when its men walk down the street wearing fashions and symbols that reflect their sub-culture, others look

We are starting to hear ritualistic grumblings from the Federal Reserve that they are preparing to raise interest rates, in order to stave-off inflation. And yet, anyone who buys groceries, energy, and gasoline knows deep inside that we have had serious inflation, and that it seems harder and harder to stay on an even playing field, let alone to get ahead these days.

Roll Call reported Tuesday on efforts by both major parties to secure an election win in Texas' 23rd Congressional District, the only competitive district in the state. This is not a new development. The border district has been the only competitive congressional district in Texas for years, switching often between Republican and Democratic representatives depending on what type of election year it is.

Roll Call reports:

For being the presumed front-runner of the Republican field, Jeb Bush's failure to launch a consistent message to the media has many taking notice -- inside and outside of the party's faithful.

One media guffaw could be excusable, but Bush is creating a consistent pattern of evading, poorly answering, and/or ignoring the media's questions -- a pattern that simply cannot be blamed on "gotcha" politics.

Bush seems to have the disease of "moderate-itis," and it seems to be a terminal case -- if not addressed quickly.

One of President Obama's primary reasons for supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the massive free trade deal currently being negotiated by twelve countries, is his concern that, "If we don't write the rules, China will write the rules in that region."

Americans are more concerned about the influence of money in politics than any other issue in the 2016 presidential election, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.