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Federal Reserve Building in Washington DC // credit: wikipedia The line to be the next Federal Reserve Chair got one person shorter Sunday when former treasury secretary Larry Summers withdrew his name. The term for current FED chair Ben Bernanke expires January 31, 2014, and the Obama administration's first pick is no longer in the running. Summers cited the inevitable contempt that would follow his nomination as cause for his withdrawal: "This is a complex moment in our national life. I hav

Zack Frank / shutterstock.com New Hampshire proves to be one of the more innovative states in its electoral process. In its House of Representatives, districts are allotted a number of representatives to serve based on their population. Some districts have only one representative, but others have as many as eleven. They are elected through a process of multi-member district voting, where the citizenry casts as many votes as there are seats to be filled instead of voting for each seat separatel

Demand, meet Supply Amidst some disenchantment with both major political parties, the chart above shows, when looking across the 50 states, the share of votes earned by candidates that were not either Democratic or Republican has fallen significantly for U.S. House of Representative elections since 2000. The State Data Lab resource (Votes Cast for House Election – Other), developed by Truth in Accounting, shows that states with relatively high shares of non-major party votes in 2000 also had s

Can legislation on technology ever reflect the fast-paced nature of the digital frontier? Credit: readwrite.com In a push toward increased privacy in the social media realm, Washington became the most recent state to enact a law banning employers from asking for the website or password of an employee's personal social media profile. "We're trying to assure people's privacy in this space, that we (have) vigilance and the ability to move on a moment's notice when people's privacy has been violat

Justin Amash One of the youngest U.S. Representatives and Chairman of the House Liberty Caucus, Justin Amash is among the most independent members of the House GOP and strives to distance himself from party groupthink. The New York Times noted in 2011 that Amash, “has not voted with the majority 25 percent of the time, the most of any House Republican.” He was recently criticized by GOP strategist Karl Rove, asserting Amash's “staunch libertarian stances on legislation as antithetical to tackl

Two weeks after key parts of the Defense of Marriage Act were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would pursue a lawsuit against Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia, challenging their bans on same-sex marriage. "The ACLU has been a leader on this front since bringing our first marriage lawsuit in 1970 and we've been deeply involved in opening marriage up to same-sex couples in each of the 13 states plus the District of Columbia that now

Source: Industrial Hemp Tasmania / Facebook A bipartisan amendment to the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013 (FARM Bill) that would guarantee a state's right to make its own decision regarding the legalization of industrial hemp was approved by the House on Thursday. Introduced by Representatives Jared Polis (D-CO), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), the amendment passed with a narrow 225 to 200 vote. In states where industrial hemp is legal, lawmakers an

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdcHBifH5fg&feature=youtu.be Speaking on the floor of the Senate Tuesday, Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) offered his view on warrantless wiretapping: "It turns out that what the Obama administration was doing to the AP is nothing unusual. This appears to be exactly what the government has the capability to do to every single American. Furthermore, we have also recently learned that the government has the capability to monitor every website that we visit, every video

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

Polling place in Los Angeles // credit: atvn.org Unofficial results from the LA City Clerk's office indicate that Proposition C has passed with 76.56 percent of Los Angeles voters supporting the ballot measure. Proposition C is only one of many other preliminary efforts to undo the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v FEC. Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Montana, and Colorado have taken similar steps as well. Also known as the "Resolution to Support Constitutional Amendment R