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The community of federal campaign oversight will undergo significant downsizing following announcements from the Federal Election Commission and the House Administration Committee, Wednesday. Tony Herman, General Legal Counsel to the Federal Election Commission, will leave the agency this July and the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) moved one inch closer to being scrapped. In a statement, FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub said, "I want to thank Tony for his outstanding service to this agency and

According to recent research mapping sentiment on Twitter, Napa - located in the heart of California's Wine Country region - is home to the happiest tweeters in the nation. California as a whole, however, did not even rank in the top five in a measure of happiness on Twitter. Figure 1. Average word happiness for geotagged tweets in all US states collected during calendar year 2011, from PLoS ONE In Figure 1, the redder the state, the happier the tweets. Using geotagged tweets, researchers at t

Credit: carl ballou / Shutterstock.com This week, California and Alabama joined the growing number of states advancing towards greater government transparency by adopting new online disclosure systems. In California, Secretary of State Debra Bowen reversed her initial opposition to providing a unified campaign finance database entirely online. Pressure from groups like MapLight and California Common Cause -- nonpartisan government accountability organizations -- had been mounting on the state

Credit: Erik M. Lunsford The environment and climate change were not only discussed in a limited manner during the election season, but the current Doha Climate Change Conference, hosted by the United Nations (UN) until December 7, is not making headlines either. Will the imminent economic disaster resulting from Mississippi's record low-water mark shift the focus to this issue? In 2012, the United States experienced the worst drought in at least 50 years and its consequences on the US agricul

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. -Nicolo MachiavelliThe Prince (1532) Since this column bears my name you may assume what you read in this space is indeed my thinking. Although, given that I am, as the French would say, “a gentleman of a certain generation”, you should allow some opinions previously expressed to have been revised. In defense of changi

Credit: http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/aids/HealthcareReform.htm States will have now until December 14th to decide if they want to have a state run health insurance exchange or not. This extended deadline comes from the fact that many states have simply not yet made their decision. The Health Insurance Exchange is a key piece of Obama's health care reform, the Affordable Care Act, that should give health insurance to more than 30 millions uninsured Americans.  The Health Exchange provision

Citizens in nearly thirty states have signed online petitions propagating secession from the United States. These states have filed their petitions with the We the People Program, a facet of the Obama Administration which attempts to facilitate citizen participation in government. Though the ability to petition a presidential administration is not a new concept, the online petition program is. Petitions bear little to no legislative power, but the implications of online petitions for secession a

Since Obama won reelection a week ago, the White House website has been flooded with petitions from citizens in various states wanting their states to secede from the union.  It is important to note that these are not official petitions by the state governments but rather petitions started by individual citizens. The threat of secession is nothing new in the United States.  It seems that after any election, people want their states to secede so that they don't have to live under a leader they d

Every two years approximately one-third of the US Senate is up for re-election. The following 13 Republican US senators face re-election in 2014. Click here to read about the 20 Democratic US Senators who also face re-election in 2014. 1. Lamar Alexander (Tennessee) Before election to the Senate in 2002, Alexander was governor of Tennessee, US Secretary of Education, and a two-time presidential candidate. Alexander resigned from his position as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference in

While states throughout the nation passed reforms and enacted new laws on Tuesday, the people of Puerto Rico voted on whether they would like to seek statehood. The island passed a two-part referendum, with 54 percent of the island affirming they would like to change their 114-year relationship with the United States, which began after the Spanish-American war, and potentially become the 51st state.The unincorporated US territory has granted residents American citizenship since 1917. However, ci