Thinking

The world needs to produce more electricity to meet energy consumption needs AND reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We know what we need to do: stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, take some of the carbon emissions that are already in the atmosphere out, and generate at least 2 times more electricity by 2050. We can do all three — at the same time. Climate change prevention and U.S. energy independence are not mutually exclusive objectives.

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On May 24, 2022, a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in the city of Uvalde, Texas — a small, quiet community that I represented in Congress — became a war zone. Nineteen beautiful, innocent children and two dedicated, brave teachers are gone forever because of a vicious massacre. It’s infuriating. It’s heartbreaking. It was preventable.

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5 min read

The budget and appropriations cycle in the U.S. Congress is a complex and often unpredictable process that involves multiple actors, stages, and deadlines. Here is a simplified overview of the main steps:

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3 min read

If you had worked hard to save $200,000 in your 401k and it was invested in NASDAQ on the day Joe Biden became president in 2021, two weeks prior to the 2022 mid-term elections you would have had only around $158,000.

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5 min read

Since Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 the Russian propaganda machine has been working surprisingly well despite Russia’s military setbacks. Putin’s military and intelligence apparatus are experts in creating propaganda designed to misinform and manipulate public opinion. Recent examples have generated global debates on American involvement in sabotage, whether the Pope was advocating for appeasement, and if Elon Musk should stick to just talking about Mars.

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The fact that many folks are more upset about Governors Abbott and Desantis’s transporting-immigrants-from-Texas-to-blue-cities antics than they are about the yearslong crisis that has been happening at our southern border is an indication that too many people truly don’t understand the depths of the problem, especially the issue of asylum.

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Two days after the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, an attack that killed 2,977 Americans and injured thousands more, The Pew Research Center conducted their first poll on how 9/11 was impacting American psyche and culture. They have continued polling on this topic for twenty-one years.

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In mid-August of this year the Biden Administration passed a milestone they are not celebrating — 2 million encounters with individuals coming to this country illegally. This is almost double the previous record of 1,277,177 set last year and there is still a month and a half left in this fiscal year.  Since President Biden took office, more than 3 million people have been encountered/apprehended entering the U.S. illegally from over 150 countries, and this number doesn’t include “gotaways,” the term CBP uses to describe those who enter the U.S. illegally and evade capture.

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If the United States is going to maximize the advancement of our citizens while sustaining harmony with our planet, we have to stop listening to the nuts on the fringes (extreme environmentalists AND climate deniers) when it comes to energy policy and environmental issues. While conflict sells advertising on television and garners clicks on social media, it doesn’t help develop good policies that help all Americans. It’s time for our country to have an energy policy that is affordable, reliable, secure, and cements us as energy independent.

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The horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas has restarted conversations on what we should be doing outside our schools to protect our kids on the inside. While we are having this necessary debate, we should also be talking about what we should be doing inside our schools to make sure our kids are ready when its time for them to be outside our education system dealing with the realities of the world.

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Inflation is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? What causes it? And how does it impact everyday Americans? In this blog post, we will explore all of those questions and more. We’ll start by defining inflation and then move on to discuss the factors that cause it. We’ll also take a look at the Federal Reserve’s role in combating inflation and the role of monetary policy in dealing with this important economic issue. Finally, we’ll talk about the relationship between inflation and a recession.

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American domestic policies should be based on a simple reality — prosperity is a product of empowering people not the government. Individuals should have the freedoms to choose where they go to school, where they want to live, which doctors they want to visit, what business they want to start, and, ultimately, who they want to be.

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What the heck is a Goth? That’s a question that I’m sure was frequently asked in Rome in 476 AD — the year the Western Roman Empire fell after more than half a millenium of being the most powerful empire on the planet. The Goths, one of several Germanic tribes considered to be marauding barbarians, had been invading the Western Roman Empire on and off since the middle of the 3rd Century.

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The World is getting weirder. Over one million people lost power in Louisiana recently because of its fourth natural disaster in twelve months. Texas was shut down for a week because of winter storms. People were dying in the Pacific Northwest because it was too hot in the summer and the West Coast seems like it’s perpetually on fire. I had the opportunity recently to meet someone who put all this stuff in context for me. Katherine Hayhoe, a climatologist and Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, taught me that to care about climate change you don’t have to be a certain type of person, you just have to be human.

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What if the next coronavirus was actually designed in a lab to affect a specific population? The field of bioengineering has evolved to a point where this could become a reality. COVID-19 is far from the last pandemic the world is going to have to reckon with, whether naturally occurring throughout the world, or being engineered by people with bad intentions.

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