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San Diego, Calif.- If the media wanted a dash of spice for the 2020 San Diego Mayoral race, enter Cory Briggs. A consistent critic of City Hall who has had success suing the city, Briggs has announced he intends to run for the city's top post in 2020. Briggs joins Councilwoman Barbara Bry and Assemblyman Todd Gloria in the race to succeed Kevin Faulconer. No Republican candidate has yet to announce, but City Councilman Mark Kersey is considered a good bet to join the race. The Briggs Factor

You may have heard the story. In late December, it came out that leaders of the Women’s March made anti-Jewish remarks and had ties Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. You can see the Women’s March press release in response. The story led to outrage, and the outrage led to the Democratic National Committee removing their support and a split march in New York. Additionally, marches in Humboldt, California and New Orleans, Louisiana were cancelled and the Washington State Chapter

Gretchen Bakke thinks a lot about power—the kind that sizzles through a complex grid of electrical stations, poles, lines and transformers, keeping the lights on for tens of millions of Californians who mostly take it for granted. They shouldn’t, says Bakke, who grew up in a rural California town regularly darkened by outages. A cultural anthropologist who studies the consequences of institutional failures, she says it’s unclear whether the state’s aging electricity network and its managers can

I watched the TV coverage of the opening session of the 116th Congress and was happy to see all the inspired women in jewel-toned dresses, many young, some of color, taking their places...

In these times of mounting national and international crisis --  from poverty to climate change -- a lesson that emerges from studying how liberal democracies fail is condensed in a few words noted in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, “rights” are only relevant “between equals in power." The Declaration of Independence declares a right to equality, but the reality of inequality for the powerless remains. The great task of the independent political movement is to empower the American people to fr

It’s 2019 and the United States of America still has a democracy problem. A few powerful studies have summed it up differently, but the heart of the problem is that despite Lincoln’s claim that we ever had a government of, by, and for the people, we have always had unrepresentative and unresponsive government. In recent decades it has only gotten worse. Over that same time period, the Democratic and Republican parties have worked hand-in-hand to build up a powerful fortress of protection over

In December, I wrote an article on a particularly egregious case of the famous legislative "revolving door." After sixteen years in the South Dakota Legislature, Senator Deb Peters announced her resignation to take a job with the state's healthcare association. Two things about that story were particularly galling: Peters did not make her decision public until after starting her new role, and just a few weeks previously she stood for and won a seat in the South Dakota House. It turns out, as I

It is unclear whether or not voters can expect a slow political news cycle in the final of 2018. Congress was expected to pass a temporary funding bill that would kick the can down the road another few months before another budget fight dominates the headlines. In the midst of the partisan competition of who can brand this disaster in governance against the other side better, there are nonpartisan news items that are worth noting that are not getting any attention from cable and other mainstrea

62 Somalians were killed in four U.S. precision airstrikes over the weekend, the U.S. military said in a statement Monday. Nobody knows the identities of the 62 people who were killed, but just as it nearly always does after deadly missions such as this one, the U.S. military immediately claimed that the dead were "terrorists" and "militants," and also as usual, the quite accommodating mainstream press faithfully and uncritically passed along the government's characterization of these events ev

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In defiance of President Donald Trump, who has taken a barrage of criticism from Republicans and Democrats for standing by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the U.S. Senate issued a stunning bipartisan rebuke to Saudi Arabia's government and royal family Thursday, for the Washington Post journalist's murder, and for the escalating humanitarian crisis in Yemen, with a 56-to-41 vote to end U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia's war against t