In this final chapter excerpt from What Would Jefferson Do? (Harmony Books, 2004), bestselling author Thom Hartmann reflects on why democracy works and how we can return to the Founders’ ideals.

"Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise."- Christopher Columbus, 1503 letter to the king and queen of Spain.

As a child, I remember hearing the phrase, "no life grows in a vacuum" in science class. That phrase called my attention.

In January of this, I was in Washington, DC. Prior to the antiwar protest, I went to the interfaith service Saturday morning at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation...

One of the oldest cultures on Earth is that of the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in the northern parts of South Africa.

Every year at Christmastime, millions of Americans watch TV portrayals of Charles Dickens’s classic novel A Christmas Carol. In the story a regular guy named Bob Cratchit works at the firm of Scrooge and Marley.

Every time the media — or a Democrat — uses the phrase "War in Iraq" they are promoting one of Karl Rove's most potent Republican Party frames.

Several months ago I worked in my native Guatemala at a midwifery center, Asociación de Comadronas del Area Mam (ACAM), founded in part by my parents, Elena and Felipe Ixcot, traditional Mayan midwives, and Members of the Midwives of Alliance of North America.

The corporatist Republicans ("amnesty!") are fighting with the racist Republicans ("fence!"), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America.

The Dubai Ports world deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called conservatives and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.

What was historically commonplace and normal has developed in American society as unnatural.

About a year ago, an op-ed article on Al Jazeerah's website by Fawaz Turki titled "For Bush, A Hot Line To Churchill" opened by noting that Tony Blair had given George W. Bush a bust of Winston Churchill, which sits in Bush's Oval Office.

Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Gina McCarthy has decided to review the law to determine for herself whether mercury amalgams are included in the ban.

Nationally, it was clearly a phenomenon when several truckers called into a radio show on Sirius Satellite to say that they were interrupting trips through central parts of the USA to head to Crawford, Texas.

In his recent news conference, George Bush Jr. suggested that our nation's "problem" with high gasoline prices was caused by the lack of a national energy policy, and tried to blame it all on Bill Clinton.

Definitions in Webster's dictionary include "tending to preserve old institutions, methods, customs, and the like;" and "modest, prudent, safe.

A dear friend of mine insists that our world would be a much better place today if people had stayed in their own lands throughout history and did not migrate or explore.

Democrats and progressives make the mistake of thinking that today's Social Security debate is about Social Security. It's not. It's about creating single party rule for a generation or more.

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?

The announcement that the California Supreme Court would rule within the month on the legality of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s initiative granting of marriage licenses to same-sex couples had been made weeks earlier.

Antonin Scalia, the man most likely to be our next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, turned history on its head recently when he attended an Orthodox synagogue in New York and claimed that the Founders intended for their Christianity to play a part in government.

Ending extreme poverty, disease, environmental degradation, war? We asked one of the world's most influential economists--adviser to Kofi Annan and Bono alike--what would have to be done to put the world on a course to do exactly that. What follows is his modest little plan.

Having lived in Germany and extensively interviewed many former, now elderly, members of Hitler's Nazi Party (and one spy for him) for a book I was writing on the religion of the Nazis, I can say categorically that Hitler had (or at least his people believed he had) a Vision.

Many of the world’s mature democracies require every high school graduate to serve a year or two of either military or nonprofit service.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon thought they could bomb Vietnam into accepting democracy. George W. Bush thinks he can do it with Iraq. Thomas Jefferson had some very different thoughts on the issue.