Leading up to the Fourth of July, Gallup reports that Americans are less satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives than they were 7 years ago. In 2006, 91 percent of Americans were satisfied with their freedom. That number dropped 12 percentage points to 79 percent in 2013.

The People's Daily News reported this week that the Chinese ministry of public security has deployed an armed peace-keeping force to Liberia. This represents an ever-expanding Chinese strategy of forming alliances and exerting military and political power in areas ignored by Western powers.

With only 1,057 votes between them, Democratic candidates Jim Cooper and Darrell Fong will continue to campaign for state Assemblymember Richard Pan’s seat in District 9. Their reported fundraising and law enforcement resumes also show little variance between them — making this an interestingly homogeneous race going into the general election.

AD-9 is one of California’s 25 intra-party races.

Few quid pro quos are as apparent as when McDonald’s CEO, Ray Kroc, donated $250,000 to President Nixon in 1972 in return for an exemption from price control that allowed McDonald’s to raise the cost of a quarter pounder with cheese -- along with its profits.

Let’s start with two beliefs that one cannot logically hold at the same time but which many people do anyway:

Two hundred and thirty eight years ago, on July 2, John Adams led the Continental Congress to declare the independence of 13 American states. Two days later, representatives of the 13 colonies ratified the text of the Declaration of Independence, written by a committee headed by the 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson.

What followed was revolutionary.

29,707. That is the number of signatures collected to get gubernatorial candidate Scott Summers onto the general election ballot in Illinois as the Green Party candidate. Around 40,000 signatures were collected to get Libertarian candidate Chad Grimm onto the ballot as well.

Why does this matter? Because in Illinois a “new party” needs to get 25,000 signatures, minimum, in order to gain access to the ballot.

To better understand this, it is important to know the difference between “established party” and “new party.”

There is a shift in the types of candidates and campaigns that will win general elections in California and current contenders are not in a place where they can do what they may have done in previous elections.

In 2014, as a result of California’s nonpartisan, top-two open primary system, Republicans are seeing tossups in areas of the state usually considered easy-wins for GOP candidates, while Democratic candidates have to re-strategize for intra-party campaigns.

On June 24, incumbent Mississippi U.S. Senator Thad Cochran managed to overcome his primary challenger, state Senator Chris McDaniel, in the state's runoff election. McDaniel, heavily backed by the tea party, narrowly defeated Cochran on June 3, but failed to gain a majority of the vote.

In American folklore, it is President Grant who coined the term “lobbyists” to designate those influence peddlers who attempted to bribe him with whiskey and cigars during his jaunts to the Willard Hotel in exchange for political favors.