By Tamar Abrams The global COVID-19 pandemic has upended our lives and, possibly more significantly, many of the assumptions we make about the impact it is having on the world. For example, with human beings on every continent engaging in some form of quarantine for an extended time, early reports were that our lack of activity was greatly impacting the…
May 19, 2020
Immigration and Family Separation: a personal story
You can catch Sascha Burns representing her clients on the Hill or talking politics on Fox News, MSNBC, and local and international news channels, but Sascha’s life beyond the camera includes helping refugees seeking asylum in the United States. “When family separation came to light, I was so angry at what the Trump administration was doing in the name of…
February 12, 2017
Let’s Make the World a Better Place Together
By Suzanne Turner, President, turner4D, and Alan Rosenblatt, Ph.D., Partner, turner4D With the myriad of social media channels and tools, news outlets, websites (yours and theirs), influencers and policymakers out there it is easy to get lost in the weeds; to focus so much on tactics that we lose our strategic way. Good strategic vision is the cornerstone of any…
July 13, 2016
Getting Good Things Done in a Dysfunctional Congress
There’s plenty of evidence that Congress isn’t doing its job. Instead of conducting responsible oversight of government spending, it has wasted nearly $7 million on a Benghazi investigation discredited as little more than a partisan sham. The House has voted more than 40 times to repeal Obamacare, unsuccessfully, but refuses to schedule a vote on gun control. The last three…
November 10, 2015
How “digital refugees” choose their own escape route
The refugee crisis in Europe continues. An estimated of 700,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Europe this year from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, North Africa and beyond. Most of them have spent thousands of dollars to take their families on this dangerous and unsafe journey. Despite the tragedy of the situation, a new development that has made it easier…
October 5, 2015
A Swiss in America on 9/11
The 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington, DC on the 14th anniversary of the attack. Photo by Mattia Bütikofer. On 9/11 2001, at the time those hijacked airplanes were smashing into the World Trade Center, I was 8 years old and had just started my 3rd year of primary school; much more interested in toys than politics. I could never have…
September 1, 2015
Social Advocacy and Politics: Handicapping the 2016 Presidential Candidates with Facebook
Candidate buzz on social media and in search engines has emerged as an interesting metric for gaging how well the campaigns are doing. Back in 2008, for example, while the last opinion poll in the field predicted that Barack Obama would win the New Hampshire primary, Yahoo Buzz correctly predicted Hillary Clinton would win. Unlike the polls, which were wrapped…
June 25, 2014
We Need a Citizen Maker Movement
It was hard to miss the giant mechanical giraffe grazing on the White House lawn last week. For the first time ever, the President organized a Maker Faire–inviting entrepreneurs and inventors from across the USA to celebrate American ingenuity in the service of economic progress. The maker movement is a California original. Think R2D2 serving margaritas to a jester with an…