Regulators owned and controlled by industry are not the American way.
When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.
The best way to shine a light on all of this 'dark money' flooding into our elections would be for Congress to pass legislation requiring all organizations to disclose their political spending in a timely manner.
I'm not running for the U.S. Senate because I think Lincoln Chafee is a bad man.
As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once - just once - the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people.
When we breathe it in, soot can interfere with our lungs and increase the risk of asthma attacks, lung cancer and even premature death. The smallest particles can pass into the blood stream and cause heart disease, stroke and reproductive complications.
I think a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump were frustrated. And what they thought was, OK, government is broken. Therefore, we're going to send in this incendiary character. And he's just going to going to bust it all up, and we'll see what happens.
It would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their scheme.
I think a lot of the people who feel out of step with contemporary society or feel that they've been left back economically or feel disaffected and are drawn to the Republican Party, they are looking for a news source that will tell them something they would like to hear and then is reassuring, emotionally rewarding, and confirming.
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.
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.
The worst blows to humanity from carbon pollution may come at us from the oceans.
Putting a price on carbon pollution is one of the best things we can do to stem the tide of climate change.
These core principles - helping patients, preventing medical errors, promoting best practices and improving quality - are the reasons that health IT is featured in both the 2012 Republican platform and 2012 Democratic platform.
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.
The bottom line is this: A private company and/or its industry allies should not knowingly lie to the American people about the harms that are caused by its product.
