I've met students across Rhode Island who rely on Pell Grants. They work hard, play by rules, and are doing everything they can to get the education they need for the jobs of tomorrow.
In the long term, a robust health IT network will support personalized treatment that adheres to proven best practices, and adapts to your personal health circumstances. The time will come when, whatever illness you may have, for your body type and health history, there will 'be an app for that' to keep you on your best path to wellness.
To a certain extent, platforms are platitudes that you test when you get to govern. You have to run those priorities up against the opposition and decide what's most important.
We pay for power plant pollution through higher health costs.
Health IT helps save lives now lost due to preventable medical errors, from incorrect diagnoses and needless infections to drug mix-ups and surgical mishaps.
Republicans aren't cowards. Many will take the side of climate principle in a fair fight. But it is asking a lot of them to take a principled stand on climate when they don't see one corporate friend ready to help them.
A lot of the Citizens United problem could be solved if we knew where the money came from for all these ads. The companies create these entities with fake names - like 'Citizens for Nice Puppies' - which means that the sources of the money are unaccountable.
According to the IRS, the wealthiest 400 Americans, who earned an average of roughly $270 million in 2008, paid an average tax rate of just 18.2 percent that year. That's about the same rate paid by a single truck driver in Rhode Island. It's not right, and we need to restore fairness to our tax code.
When I deliver the message to a cross section of Rhode Island that democracy is broken because special interests have relentless power - which prevents politicians from compromising despite popular support on an issue - I don't have any pushback.
If Republicans start losing their seats because they're climate deniers, that is a very salutary signal.
How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - that's not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.
At a time when the United States is handing out tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, corporate jet owners, and millionaires and billionaires, it is ludicrous that we would even be looking at Social Security and Medicare as a solution to our debt crisis.
We must unequivocally reject any cuts to Social Security or Medicare benefits.
Citizens United provided unprecedented political weaponry to big special interests. My personal view was it was calculated to do that.
