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Nonprofits have been in the news lately, and it isn’t necessarily because of the good they’re doing. For starters, more than 412,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to revoke the National Football League’s 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, which the organization maintains despite reportedly raking in billions of dollars in revenue. Others are calling for the federal government to roll back coveted tax exemptions for faith-based organizations, with The Washington Post reporting that one secul

Does ISIS pose a credible threat to the United States and its interests? And if so, what is the best way to manage that threat? If you had asked any politician in 2003, they most likely would have agreed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq under his reign posed a credible threat to the United States, and a 10-year war was started because of that belief. Support for the war was lost broadly when it was determined that the claim of weapons of mass destruction was false, but the damage was already done.

According to Gallup, 42 percent of Americans self-identify as independent from either major party. But when it comes to our primary elections, the independent/unaffiliated/nonpartisan voter can be completely locked out of primaries, forced to choose a party in order to vote in a primary election, or live in a state where one party has an open primary and the other has a closed primary, even though their tax dollars subsidize both elections.Chances are, when the general election rolls around, vot

With over a million dollars being spent and plenty of attacks from both sides, the race in California's 52nd Congressional District has only just started to heat up with less than 40 days left until Election Day. Democratic U.S. Representative Scott Peters, who is about to finish his first term in Congress, is defending his incumbency against Republican candidate Carl DeMaio. While the race may have seemed like an uphill battle for Peters at one point, as a June Survey USA poll placed candidate

In the study of history we ask the question, what are the catalysts? In other words, the motivators that make events happen? Depending on the topic and the framing one puts it in, many times the question is not what made something occur, but what prohibited it from doing so. Agriculture has typically been a fundamental factor in world history in answering both those questions -- events that came about and those that had the potential, but failed. Despite America’s unprecedented urbanization in

“Now let's make two things clear:  ISIL is not "Islamic." No religion condones the killing of innocents. And the vast majority of ISIL's victims have been Muslim. And ISIL is certainly not a state.”—Barack Obama, 9/10/14 Well, it looks like President Obama is taking heat from his detractors again. No surprises here. President Obama is pretty much always taking heat from his detractors. Fish gotta swim, detractors gotta detract. This time, the president’s grave offense is that, in his speech to

Never let it be said that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) doesn’t know how to make an entrance — or exit. The onetime Republican presidential candidate arrived late to a homeland security committee hearing on cybersecurity threats in the Dirksen Senate office building slated to begin 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday. The Arizona senior senator slipped in from behind the dais as senior intelligence officials read their testimony to lawmakers and took his seat near Chairman Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) What McCa

Last week, former Iowa state senator Kent Sorenson pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe from the Ron Paul presidential campaign to switch his support from U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann to the former Texas congressman. Jesse Benton, campaign manager for Kentucky U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, was also implicated in the proceedings and resigned his post. Benton, a lightning rod within the Paul wing of the GOP, was a spokesman for Ron Paul during the former Texas congressman's 2008 and 2012 presidential c

On Thursday, August 28, Politico reported on a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll that said 35 percent of likely GOP caucus voters would vote for Mitt Romney in 2016 if he was added to the field of candidates. The poll released one day after it was reported that Mitt Romney was considering a third presidential run. By considering a third presidential run, Romney said that while he has insisted for months that he will not run, "circumstances could change." "In Wednesday’s survey of 170 likel

When I first heard about the top-two primary system, I thought "Yeah, it's alright but not all that helpful." In fact, there might be an IVN article where I endorse it, but don't exactly shout it from the rooftops. I had some of my own ideas and this one didn't exactly seem impactful. I was wrong. While I was looking at big picture ideas on how to overhaul an obviously broken process, I simply ignored the simplest and easiest way of all. For my site, I thought of many different ways we could