The San Diego Union Tribune

“I can't remember more anticipation of a speech in my lifetime than this one,” said historian Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown ...

Joe Mathews, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who wrote a book about Schwarzenegger's 2003 campaign, envisions the governor becoming “climate ...

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Obama's spending plans would entail a four-year cost of $990 billion, to be offset by a like amount of spending cuts. While traveling the campaign trail, the Illinois senator's promises include increased annual outlays of $18 billion on education, $15 billion to develop cleaner energy sources and $6 billion to replace or rebuild bridges and dams. LINK

“The oil centers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain have been investing in economic growth in places without much oil, such as Egypt, Morocco and Jordan,” said Parag Khanna, director of the Global Governance Initiative at the New America Foundation. LINK

The package of six tax increases that passed in the Budget Conference Committee this week includes two described as loophole closers. Who can argue against closing a loophole? Unfortunately, the two provisions proposed to be changed aren't loopholes.

A loophole is the ability to use a rule in an unintended way. It may be due to poor wording or an incomplete definition in the law. For example, assume a state has a lower property tax rate for agricultural land to help farmers. However, the definition of… more

Ending birthright citizenship is a placebo, not a solution to illegal immigration.

The debate over immigration is fundamentally about who we are as a nation,who we are not, and who we want to be.

It is thus no surprise that those most afraid of who we are becoming have moved to redraw the rules of inclusion by proposing to do away with birthright citizenship. Such a move is not only legally dubious, it is a threat to American prosperity.

There's a rule that politicians are reminded of: “do no harm.” In recent months, politicians have implicitly amended the rule to say “do no harm -- unless immigration is involved.” The rancor sparked by a failed New York plan to permit illegal immigrants access to driver's licenses and the fallen federal and state versions of the DREAM Act highlight a dangerous obsession with keeping illegal immigrants from accessing the supposed privileges of citizenship at any cost.

In today's debates, considerations of… more

Get rich with no risk. The classic business pitch is usually too good to be true – unless you're talking about the student loan business. Student loans, which banks and other lenders avoided in decades past, have become a creditor's dream...This month, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo disclosed that the financial aid directors of three universities had held stock in Student Loan Xpress. Earlier, five other universities agreed to pay a $3.2 million settlement after… more

Gov. Schwarzenegger has successfully called attention to California's ongoing health care crisis by proposing a comprehensive plan that calls for shared responsibility in finding a solution to our state's broken health care system.And make no mistake, it is a broken system. Hospitals and physicians have been living with the effects of this crisis for some time now demonstrated by hospital closures and relocation of providers. For example, in the past decade, more than 65 emergency rooms and more… more

MEXICO CITY – Mexicans living abroad sent home a record $23 billion last year, raising new questions about whether the government of President Felipe Calderón can afford to slow migration.

In just one year, the amount of money migrants wired their families jumped 15 percent, according to Mexico's central bank, overtaking tourism to become the nation's second-biggest source of foreign income after oil. “This is a river of gold that flows into Latin America and Mexico.… more