Our view on honesty in government: House ethics enforcers leave Congress mired in the muck Committee members find ways to excuse colleagues’ bad behavior. What does it take for a member of Congress to get in real trouble with the...

Opposing view: The ethics process is working Democrats have kept their promise to restore accountability in Congress.By Michael Capuano Under Democratic leadership over the past three years, the House has initiated unprecedented ethics reforms that have produced real results for...

Et cetera Smart insights on the news of the day David Brooks, columnist, The New York Times: "We all have our emotional hot and cold spots. ... For the Democrats, expanding health care coverage is an emotional hot spot. ......

Not that hungry for change Washington has misread the public. People want problem-solving, not political whiplash. By Michael Medved According to the all-but-unchallenged conventional wisdom, the American people feel angry at the status quo and demand dramatic change. Why, then,...

Tell my 5-year-old that we've given up on space By Peter Salgo My 5-year-old daughter knows their names: Earhart, Lindbergh, Yeager, Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong, Aldrin, Gagarin. In New York, she has visited the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and...

Analysis on federal salaries misses important factors Rohit Dhruv - Potomac, Md. I was surprised by the broad conclusions in your article on federal pay that were apparently based on a rather rudimentary USA TODAY analysis of Bureau of Labor...

When will students figure out the politicians have sold them out?

For every voter who strongly favors the plan, two are strongly opposed.

Capital misallocation is usually a fallout of bad government policy.

Blaming the very folks who buy Greek debt.

A botched tanker bid is bad for taxpayers, and American airmen.

It's wrong to criticize attorneys who represent alleged terrorists.

The United States Postal Service must cut services, close offices and make sensible changes if it is going to survive the transition to the Internet age.

Americans for women’s rights need to make their voices heard against recent attacks on reproductive freedom.

Laurence Tribe cannot be expected to solve all the problems impeding the delivery of indigent legal services, but he can be a catalyst for improvement.

Voters should oust for good the disgraced former senator Hiram Monserrate in a special election in Northern Queens on Tuesday.

Throughout much of the developing world, women's rights are being trampled. In Cameroon, some mothers "iron" their daughters' breasts to delay or prevent them from having sex. The procedure often involves grinding a very hot rock into the chest of the girl, but sometimes kerosene or hot plantain peels will do the trick. The practice, which permanently disfigures the girls, starts with adolescence because that's when girls start becoming attractive to boys.

Reaction to its cars' safety records is way over the top While driving with my future wife along California's Highway 1 south of Big Sur, my new Toyota MR2 suddenly fishtailed. It shot off a cliff, then rolled 350 feet before stopping. Mary sustained a broken neck and crushed skull, but she made a miraculous recovery. I suffered only scratches and bruises. The pavement was dry, I was under the speed limit, and skid marks testified to my desperate effort to stop.

How worried should we be about nuclear proliferation? Not very. Iran's announcement last month that it will begin enriching uranium for use in a medical reactor sparked a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington. Politicians on both sides of the aisle treated the news as the latest evidence we are moving closer to a nuclear crisis.

On big issues, surveys of the public should be taken that allow the participants time to study the facts before arriving at conclusions about what should be done. The designers of the Constitution were a literate bunch of Enlightenment thinkers. They lived in the time of the printed word and the close argument. We, on the other hand, live in the age of YouTube, talk radio, reality TV, cable news and the 30-second attack ad. A constant barrage of public opinion polls -- Gallup, Zogby, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, New York Times/CBS News -- tells us what we think.

Buffoons on college campuses are not heavyweight racists. The real villains -- far more subtle -- are those who believe in their own superiority. News flash from UC San Diego: Party-animal frat boys sometimes engage in stupid, offensive and even racist stunts!

He should be regarded as the icon that he is, not pushed off the face of our currency. Shame on the 14 Republican congressmen who last week proposed substituting Ronald Reagan for Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Their action suggests they need a history lesson about the Northern general who won the Civil War and went on to lead the country.

This time, I dispensed with the wheatgrass.

Whatever the legislative fate of health reform -- now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats -- the reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president's public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, reengaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president's ambitions.

A life spent stranded in Los Angeles traffic can nonetheless yield its epiphanies. One such moment came in November 2008, when L.A. County's beleaguered commuters voted to increase their sales tax by half a cent over the next 30 years to build an electric rail system that could speed their journeys and clean their air.

Skipping through the Candy Land of the health-care bill, one is tempted to hum a few bars of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would -- and rightly so.

There is plenty of pessimism about democracy these days, and autocrats seem to be on the march on every continent. So we should take note when democracy triumphs over autocratic temptations.

Editorial: There's been a march of good news lately from a region we least expect it.

Representing Gitmo inmates serves America Aryeh Neier was a Jewish refugee from Germany, but when a group of Nazis was barred from marching in Skokie in 1977, he knew his duty. As head of the American Civil Liberties Union, he insisted on defending the Nazis' right to free speech, and the ACLU won the case.

Unclothed politicians aren’t usually the Chicago Way A naked, wet and angry Rahm Emanuel?

Despite the risks, a young illegal immigrant will publicly declare her status at downtown rally Her name is Tania, and she's undocumented.

Last year, Illinois joined California as most at risk of fiscal calamity, according to the Pew Center on the States. Last month, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, Chicago's Civic Federation, reported that every day puts Illinoisans closer to the edge of a financial cliff.

Black leaders learn scrutiny comes with power A recent wave of scandals involving black elected officials has awakened familiar suspicions of racial conspiracies, even though the evidence points mostly to self-inflicted wounds.