One of the pleasant aspects of being the editor of Miller-McCune is regular and often unexpected contact with people and entities that are working to improve the world by introducing some small piece of it to factual reality. Look, for just one instance, at the network of investigative reporting and transparency nonprofits — from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune to the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Public Integrity — that has grown in the last decade or so, and tell me your old daily paper used to do accountability journalism better. Another hopeful part of the media future ... Read More
Foreign Aid for a Frugal Age
February 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As they prepared to take control of the House of Representatives, congressional Republicans were also getting ready to take on foreign aid — with a scalpel or a meat-ax, depending on how one parsed words. U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, conservative South Florida Republican and incoming House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, told Agence France-Presse she wants "to cut the U.S. State Department and foreign aid budgets and use U.S. contributions to force reforms in multilateral organizations like the United Nations." And Foreign Policy magazine suggested that Rep. Kay Granger — a Texan who is ... Read More
The Magic of Re-reinventing Government
December 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Last summer I got pick-pocketed in Chicago. I was walking back to my hotel room after dinner when, mid-block, I reached down, found nothing where my wallet should have been and went straight to panic mode. Thanks to FedEx and my passport, I was able to make it onto an airplane and back to the West Coast, where the pocket-picking gave me a delayed lesson in governmental competence, via the seemingly simple and parallel tasks of replacing a Social Security card and a driver's license. The Social Security office in Santa Barbara, Calif., is located in an outdoor mall downtown, but it's not at ... Read More
Desert of Fear
July 27, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
After driving through the slanting light and long vistas of the high Mojave Desert at sunrise, coming down into heat-blasted, midday Lake Havasu City, Ariz., is, literally and figuratively, a downer. I like the desert, but Havasu has a way of exuding tourist-trap despair, even when it's late June and 103 and climbing, and the snowbirds are all intelligently back in Canada and the upper Midwest. It didn't help my mood that I was trying to cover a political campaign event that did not want to be found. Early in May, John Dougherty, an old friend who's the best investigative reporter I've ever ... Read More