Opinion

Bess Truman famously said “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” Well, even though I’m a dog person myself, cats might just hold the key to fixing our politics. Let me explain why.

If you’ve ever seen the show "My Cat From Hell" you know that cat behaviorist Jackson Galaxy helps cat owners figure out why their cats are misbehaving and get them back to having a mutually beneficial and harmonious relationship. The nonpartisan innovation community needs to take the same approach with fixing our broken political system.

It has become popular on the Left to ascribe Republicans’ recent attempts to change voting laws as anti-democratic, even potentially criminal.  There are those, such as Paul Waldman at the Washington Post, who have gone so far as to suggest that the Right has descended into madness.

Propaganda. We imagine regimes feeding fake news to a subjugated populous via state-controlled media. Even though we have a free press in the U.S., we have our own forms of propaganda, which is why Cynara Velazquez created PoliticalPropoganda.org.

Editor's Note: This piece by Larry Diamond, Kevin Johnson, and Miles Rapoport originally published on The Hill, and has been republished with permission from the authors.

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Editor's Note: The following piece was originally published as a "Letter to the Editor" for the Portland Press Herald and has been republiched on IVN by request and with permission from the author.

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On February 22, the Washington Post reported, “A spate of high-profile assaults on Asian Americans has renewed long-standing criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups that the U.S. government is vastly undercounting hate crimes, a problem that they say has grown more acute amid rising white nationalism and deepening racial strife.” 

Democrats, if they acted out of more than pique and the need to feed red meat to their base, hoped that the second impeachment would prevent Trump from running again, legally disqualifying him. Justice Roberts put the lie to that when he signaled that he would not preside because it was not, constitutionally speaking, an impeachment, as Trump was no longer in office. Moreover, if anything, the impeachment will keep Trump’s base engaged and in sympathy with their leader. 

Editor's Note: The following is a speech given by Steve Peace in 1998 along with additional supporting documents from research and extracted passages from earlier drafts of the speech. He believes what he said then. And, he believes it today. This speech is even more relevant today than it was back then as we see the continued downward spiral of politics and political discourse in the United States:

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