Portside

A conservative minority refused to fund the government unless the president gave them their agenda. Sound familiar?

Flawed though it may turn out to be, Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is popularly known, could fundamentally change the relationship between working Americans and their government. This could pose an existential threat to the small-government credo that has defined the G.O.P. for four decades.

The red-green coalition government in Norway, whose political platform when it took power in 2005 was called the most progressive in Europe, experienced a bitter defeat in the country's parliamentary election on 9 September. A coalition of four centre-right and right-wing parties, including a right-wing populist party, gained a solid majority and are now negotiating the political platform for a new government.

Colorado has crippled its own ability to tax. And now some citizens say that's depriving them of their right to a republican government.

If we don’t want our state and national laws drafted by corporations in partnership with right-wing ideologues impervious to empirical evidence of the toll their ideas take, we citizens of all backgrounds who believe in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” must come together to find our voices and vote our values.

". . . our goal is simple, which is always the goal of nonviolent civil disobedience, is to shine the unavoidable moral light on that which is wrong until it is so clear to everyone how people have misused their power." - Rev. William Barber, President, North Carolina NAACP.

A co-author of a new Heritage Foundation study highly critical of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration proposal also wrote a doctoral dissertation in which he argued that immigrants generally had an I.Q. that was “substantially lower than that of the white native population.”