1. Opinion piece in the Montgomery Advertiser advocates adopting a nonpartisan, top-two open primary system in Alabama.

"Even more importantly, however, this eliminates the unfair choices that some voters have to make under the current system.

I have often said that there are three basic questions that our political process has to answer anew in each generation:

1. What kind of stuff do we want to do?
2. How do we want to pay for our stuff?
3. What kind of country do we want to be?

The first two questions take up the most of our time, and they create most of our partisan divisions.

The Roberts Court, which began in 2005 and has been altered by two replacements — Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010 — has been asked to clarify the precise nature of the church-state relationship on several matters.

One topic the court addressed is whether religious symbols may be displayed on public property:

In late May, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel ordered a review of the military health care system in light of the ever growing health care scandal at the VA. While the review is still ongoing, early findings, as well as an independent review conducted by the New York Times, show the alarmingly poor state of military medicine.

Greg Orman, the independent candidate for U.S. Senate in Kansas, hit a major milestone on Wednesday by reaching the $600,000 mark in individual campaign contributions. This total does not include any PAC money (his campaign is not accepting any PAC money) or personal contributions from Mr. Orman.

1. California No Party Preference candidate Dan Schnur published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Daily News about the growing independent voting bloc and the future of politics.

"Independent voters are not necessarily centrist. In fact, numerous studies have shown that most independents do not significantly differ in their policy positions from more traditional partisans.

In interviews for IVN, Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen (R) and Democratic Assemblyman Jose Solorio (AD-69) were asked how their campaigns to represent Senate District 34 plan to appeal to the district's 80,000 independent voters. Voter registration is almost evenly split between the Republican and Democratic parties, 35.3 percent and 38.3 percent, respectively.

Update notice: This article has been updated from the original published post to include quotes from Maurice Henderson, the campaign manager for Yes on Oregon Open Primary.

Voters in Oregon will have an opportunity to reform elections in the state to give all voters, regardless of party affiliation, a meaningful and equal voice in all integral stages of the election process. Initiative Petition 55, also known as the "Open Primary Initiative," officially qualified for the ballot on Tuesday, July 15.

study, the national poverty rate was approximately 27 percent in 1967: without decades of welfare programs, that rate would have risen to 29 percent by 2011 rather than dropped, as it did, to 16 percent.

One of Americans’ favorite topics to gripe about is the woeful state of American journalism. However, the angles of attack are as varied as people’s political opinions.

For some, the majority of journalists seem to have a liberal bias. For others, the rise of corporate journalism has led to malpractice and power worship among reporters and journalists.