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Common Sense Action (CSA), a grassroots network of college students who are working to formulate methods through which Generation Y may traverse the many onerous political and economic challenges that they will likely inherit in the coming years, is conjoining with Run for America (RFA), a nonprofit political advocacy group with a similar mission, to form Run for America Action. With 40 campus chapters dispersed across 20 states -- from Boston University to UC-Berkeley, Michigan State to the Un

Last week, the Utah House reignited the capital punishment controversy by approving a measure to bring back the firing squad as a legal form of execution in response to growing court challenges over lethal injection. Wyoming approved a similar law in January, joining Oklahoma as the only states with the firing squad approved in the event of court rulings against lethal injection. Too often, the death penalty debate centers on what the Founding Fathers meant by the phrase "cruel and unusual pun

On December 16, 1773, a group of colonists dressed as Indians boarded three British cargo ships to destroy 342 cases of tea -- a "tea party" over a 90 percent tax cut. Tea throughout the Empire had been taxed at 30-pence a pound, which had been reduced to 3-pence a pound in the colonies to combat sluggish sales and smuggling. But that wasn't good enough; we wanted tax-free tea. From the very beginnings of the Republic, Americans have hated taxes. Looking at modern political discourse, one woul

Jury selection began on Monday in the Boston Marathon case, a process that could go on for weeks as prospective jurors not only weigh the guilt or innocence of 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but what his sentence will be if he is found guilty: life in prison or death. There is no doubt that the trial will be closely watched by people all over the country; it is likely to be the most followed terror trial since the Oklahoma City case where Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for bombing the A

No matter what political ideology a voter identifies with, every single election comes down to one thing: voter turnout. If voters don't go to the polls to cast ballots, their party affiliation, or lack thereof, doesn't matter. But which states have the worst turnouts and why?According to Nonprofit Vote, a group that works with nonprofit organizations to increase voting opportunities, in 2010, there were about 91 million votes cast across the country, which means that approximately 42 percent o

The Associated Press reports that the Supreme Court on Monday rejected to hear the appeals of 5 states in an effort to keep their bans on same-sex marriage. Marriage rights will immediately be extended to gay and lesbian couples in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. In addition to ending the delay on marriages in these states, according to the AP report, same-sex couples in 6 other states may be allowed to get married soon as well after federal courts struck down marriage bans in

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”—Oliver Cromwell, in a letter to the Church of Scotland "We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts."--Mario Vargas Llosa, "Sartre, Fierabrás, and Utopia" One of the greatest satiric characters in all of literature is Dostoyevsky's Comrade Shigalyov—a member of the revolutionary cell at the center of Demons (variously translated as Devils and The Possessed). Shigalyov is an atheist, an anarchist, a sc

1. Ralph Nader criticizes the use of "spoiler" to describe independent and third-party candidates and how the major parties treat these candidates to maintain their dominance in elections. "Remember that the words "political parties," "corporation" and "company" are not even mentioned in our Constitution, raising the central question of why they are ruling "we the people" today." While Nader does not raise the issue, the above quote should also be considered when we talk about all aspects of t

Sarah PalinJohn Boehner In politics, they say, a week is like a year. By this reckoning, John Boehner’s claim that the “impeach Obama” talk originated with Democrats makes a certain amount of sense. It has, after all, been two and a half years since a former GOP nominee for vice president demanded, not only that President Obama be impeached, but that voters punish members of Congress who think otherwise. Here in Kansas, where time flows differently, it has only been two and a half weeks since

It’s no secret that the Keystone issue is a political powder keg. Neither is it a secret that it’s a controversial topic pitting two traditional foes: environmentalists versus big oil. Very murky, however, is what benefit Keystone XL offers the United States.As in so many situations, in order to understand the present, we need to understand the past and Keystone has a bit of a checkered and rapidly evolving past. With blinding speed, progress on the Keystone project began in 2005 when it was pr