Michael Regan

On the eve of the U.S. House vote on repeal of health care reform, Gallup reports that 16.4 percent of American adults were uninsured in 2010, up from 14.8 percent at the start of the recession in 2008. During the same period, those getting insurance coverage through their employers declined from 49.2 percent to 45.8 […]

Climate change skeptics take heed: A new analysis of growth rings in European trees suggests that warming and cooling trends may have played a part in the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Andrew Curry reports in ScienceNOW that the study revealed a period of mild, wet summers, ideal for agriculture, during the rise […]

In the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Tucson, some members of Congress are calling for bi-partisan seating at President Obama’s  State of the Union address later this month. Among the backers: Sen. Joe Lieberman and his on-again, off-again ally Sen. John McCain. “I believe that members of both parties can symbolize our common […]

Although news coverage of major stories and the public’s interest in them generally were in sync, there were times in 2010 when they diverged markedly, a Pew Research Center analysis says. Comparing the results of weekly national opinion surveys with weekly reviews of press coverage, Pew found that the public tended to maintain interest longer […]

After a tragedy like the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last week, the immediate impulse to is figure out why it happened, says Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com. Was Jared Lee Loughner fired by political rhetoric? To what degree was mental illness a factor? Was he liberal or conservative? Was he influenced by the Tea Party? […]

The State of Washington has wiped out funding for early childhood education. Arizona no longer covers the cost of organ transplants for low-income residents. Some public defender offices in Missouri won’t take new cases because they are overworked and understaffed. “From Oregon to Rhode Island, state governments today are smaller, stingier versions of what they […]

States have lost out on some $7.5 billion in federal highway money–including $149 million in Connecticut–because of unspent Congressional earmarks for transportation projects, USA Today says. Transportation earmarks, in which a member of Congress directs spending toward a particular project, are a popular way to send money back to the home district. But a lot […]

There are two sets of freshmen being sworn in to the U.S. House of Representatives this week, and their entrances couldn’t be more different. The Democrats call themselves “The Mighty Nine,” David A. Fahrenthold says at the Washington Post, and that’s half right: There are nine of them. But the smallest freshman class either party […]

Three days on the job and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already taken a whack at the state’s budget deficit: He’s promised to cut his pay–and the salaries of top aides–by 5 percent. Returning $8,950 from his $179,000 salary may not seem like much, but analysts say it’s likely a precursor to efforts to […]

Even as Republicans in Congress try to undo federal health care reform, the action is shifting to the states, Sarah Kliff says at Politico–and Connecticut is one to watch. The SustiNet program could become a model for a state version of the so-called “public option,” which was excluded from the federal reform bill. Under a […]

Environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers concerned about global warming are going back to basics: persuading the public that the problem is real, Darren Samuelsohn reports at Politico. Thanks to factors such as the “Climategate” imbroglio and the political ascension of climate change skeptics, the issue has dropped off the radar for many Americans. In a recent […]

Connecticut’s two US senators rank near the bottom in home-state net approval ratings among 59 senators in surveys by Public Policy Polling this year. Sen. Joe Lieberman, elected as an independent in 2006, is third from the bottom, with 33 percent approval to 54 percent disapproval, for a net rating of -21. That’s the lowest […]

More than a quarter of kids and teenagers take prescription medications on a chronic basis–and nearly 7 percent are on two or more such drugs, Anna Wilde Mathews reports at the Wall Street Journal. Many of the medications are prescribed to treat conditions that are well known to be increasingly prevalent in children, including asthma […]

The election of anti-death penalty candidate Dan Malloy in the midst of the gruesome Cheshire home invasion trials is “just one of the many indications that capital punishment is on the wane” nationwide, Steve Chapman says at the Chicago Tribune. Among other factors contributing to the decline of the death penalty, he says, is the […]

Reapportionment can have a big effect on the balance of power in Congress, but what about its impact on presidential elections? Not as much as you might think, Nate Silver says at FiveThirtyEight.com. Although the new Census numbers will result in gains in Congress–and thus in the Electoral College–for some Republican-leaning states such as Texas […]