Op-Ed

With the specter of a jobless recovery looming, Washington has been casting about for ways to put Americans back to work. In the process, the political class has re-discovered infrastructure.

A jury of one’s peers is a guaranteed right of criminal defendants in the U.S. justice system.

At the gym this week, my iPod shuffled to a heavy metal song from the 1980s, pushing me through my third mile with the reminder that “I never played by the rules/I never really cared.”

Word on the Hill is that several members of the Congressional Black Caucus are going to get a pass from the House ethics committee on a trip they took to the Caribbean underwritten by corporations, regardless of what the new travel rules say.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, to a then-unparalleled extent, leveraged the most cutting-edge technologies to reach potential supporters, organize them, raise money from them, and ultimately, get elected by them.

Detroit, the “Arsenal of Democracy,” retooled its factories during World War II and switched from making cars to making tanks, trucks and aircraft for the war effort. Unfortunately, we were so successful that we quickly ran out of raw materials to keep up with the rapid clip on the assembly lines. So Congress took an unusual step, in 1942, of eliminating the import tariff on scrap metal, allowing Detroit to keep military equipment rolling off the line.

A consistent refrain from witnesses during the climate change hearings before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last week was that the nation’s environmental and energy goals cannot be reached without the significant expansion of nuclear energy.

Last week I argued in my column that, even though I strongly oppose the Stupak amendment because I am pro-choice, if things come down to a bad choice — a national healthcare bill with the Stupak language — or a worse choice — no healthcare bill at all this year — I would favor a vote for the Democratic healthcare plan this year, even with the offensive Stupak amendment.

You don’t have to read Going Rogue: An American Life to know that Sarah Palin is running for something: leader of a conservative movement, president of the United States, talk show host, top draw with the speakers bureau. Ideally, something involving rope lines.

Behind the heated rhetoric surrounding the healthcare debate lies an even more profound issue: the changing relationship between American citizens and their government. Two stories bring this into focus.