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Physicians and health professionals from the University of Michigan are available to comment on health care reform.

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Indiana University experts A.B. Assensoh and Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh comment on President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to Ghana. The president, First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters will visit the African nation Friday and Saturday.

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The University of Maryland has a number of experts who can talk about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara - who died today at the age of 93.

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House members and supporters rally for passage of historic clean energy bill.

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The United States has attempted to pass major health reform legislation eight times in the last century, starting in the mid 1910s up through 1993-94 with the failed Clinton health reform effort. "Only once in that period was any legislation passed "” in 1964-65 when Medicare and Medicaid were passed," says Timothy McBride, Ph.D., associate dean of public health at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. "Yet, for many reasons, I feel that it is much more likely that legislation will pass this year."

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With health care reform moving to the front of the national agenda, 10 Indiana University experts from the fields of public health, medicine, policy and law share their perspectives.

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The land value tax, an increased tax rate on land and a reduced tax rate on buildings and improvements, can spur urban development and help contain sprawl, but its implementation has been sporadic, according to a new book co-edited by University of New Hampshire Professor Richard England.

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Social Security's long-term solvency is a "manageable problem" that will not require "drastic action," but federal policy makers need to ensure that benefits are adequate for widows and other vulnerable groups to survive, said University of Maryland professor and former Social Security Commissioner Kenneth Apfel in recent Senate testimony.

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Are you someone who squirms when confronted with slime, shudders at stickiness or gets grossed out by gore? If so, you might be politically conservative, according to two Cornell studies.

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Painful but inevitable Social Security and Medicare reforms will be difficult to sell because years of partisan wrangling have clouded the public's grasp of the programs' dire financial problems, a former government economic adviser warns.

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In "Policy and Evidence in a Partisan Age: The Great Disconnect," Paul Gary Wyckoff presents an accessible, compact, and iconoclastic exploration of the paradox between the exaggerated claims made for public policies and the reality of their limited effectiveness.

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A new study provides some of the strongest evidence to date that Americans prefer to read political articles that agree with the opinions they already hold. Researchers found that people spent 36 percent more time reading articles that agreed with their point of view than they did reading text that challenged their opinions.

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People who closely follow political blogs and regular news media put more faith in the accuracy of blogs. Research also shows journalists tend to follow the liberal blogosphere more closely despite equal awareness of conservative blogs.

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Defense and foreign policy expert and former Clinton administration official Gordon Adams is available to provide insight into Defense Secretary Robert Gates's defense budget and the challenges it faces in Congress.

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Michael Steele should embrace a proposed system of checks and balances on the RNC chairman's spending power, says political scientist Carol Swain. Steele has blasted a proposal to impose new controls on his power to award contracts and spend money on legal and other services. Swain said that this has become an unnecessary distraction for the GOP.

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Two Texas Tech political science professors can discuss history of party-switching and the fallout of this decision.

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This week, as political pundits rate President Obama's first 100 days in office, MBA students at the University of Indianapolis are giving the new administration a passing grade, based on concepts learned in a course titled Leading Organizational Change.

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"Specter's party switch is a further step to the extinction of the Republican Party in the Northeast. Republicans now have only 3 of 22 Senators in the region," said Donald Beachler, associate professor of politics at Ithaca College.

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Arlen Specter's switch to the Democratic Party will raise questions about the Republican Party's ability to appeal to moderate voters, but Democrats should realize Specter will likely remain fairly independent in his voting, including ongoing opposition to pro-union "card check" provisions, suggests WUSTL congressional expert Steven S. Smith.

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Thought leaders discuss President Barack Obama's first 100 days and government, society, and individual roles in building communities for change.

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"Using the term 'the federal personnel system' is a stretch. The prime instinct of most federal agencies is that, if they can find a way to break out of the existing system, they'll do so...We must lower the procedural barriers to recruiting the best workers into federal service." -Donald F. Kettl, incoming Public Policy dean,University of Maryland.

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President Obama's first 100 days have been marked by lightning-fast changes, not fully thought out, that are in the process of redefining the role of government, says Donald Kettl, incoming dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and an expert in government management. "While surely needed, they are unrolling without assessment of long-term effects."

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Governments at all levels must make major changes or risk failure in the face of unprecedented challenges, says the new dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, Don Kettl. An expert in transforming government, he says the US must get "real smart, real fast." Despite the stimulus, state governments face a "fiscal time bomb."

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When it comes to how we see presidents, fiction often trumps fact, says USC Marshall expert Jeff Smith.

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"The allocations to research and science education in the stimulus package are answering the call so many of us have been working for," says University of Maryland president C.D. Mote, Jr., adding the support is critical to U.S. economic recovery. Mote led a delegation of higher ed. leaders acknowledging Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chair Bart Gordon's vital support.

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Ironically, Barack Obama's election could turn out to have negative consequences in addressing racial injustices in the United States, according to new research.

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The University of Maryland's John Frece is taking his years of "smart growth" expertise to the Obama Administration to head the U.S. EPA's Smart Growth division. "We have a tremendous opportunity at this particular moment to make major progress in smart growth "“ and it's about time," says Frece, who has been active in the field for about 15 years, most recently at UM.

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Ilan Peleg, a foreign-policy scholar at Lafayette College and author of a new book on the international impact of the George W. Bush administration's foreign policy decisions, is cautiously optimistic about the possibilities for the U.S. to regain global respect and credibility.

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The University of Massachusetts Amherst is hosting a two-day conference April 16-17 that examines the electoral impact of user-created YouTube content on the 2008 election. Conference participants will also discuss new technical and analytic opportunities associated with new media technologies and politics.

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In this essay, a seasoned finance professor looks at what President Obama is doing -- and should be doing -- concerning the economy.

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An Al Gore presidency would have acted on Iraq the same way the Bush administration did, says Dalhousie University professor Frank Harvey.

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President Barack Obama's nomination of Timothy Geithner for treasury secretary demonstrates that leaders can feel justified in breaking rules, and followers sometimes allow it to happen. So says Terry Price, a professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond and author of the new book, "Leadership Ethics: An Introduction." The Geithner nomination reveals the tension that exists between leadership and ethics, Price explains.

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A study by UAB political scientist Holly Brasher, Ph.D., in the latest issue of Party Politics shows historically how public perceptions about political party strengths change over time.

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Almost 30 Indiana University faculty members, including experts in health care, education, the environment, technology, the arts and other fields, offer policy advice to the new U.S. president.

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President Obama spurred a dramatic change in the way whites think about African-Americans before he had even set foot in the Oval Office, according to a new study.

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The current proposed stimulus plan will result in limited economic stimulus and a lot of spending for questionable pork, exceed the entire cost of the Iraq war, result in tremendous increases in the national debt and set the stage for rampant inflation when the economy starts to grow, according to a New Jersey finance professor.

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President Barack Obama's choice of a former congressional aide and associate pastor of a Massachusetts Pentecostal church to head his Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships highlights the importance of and the need for continued research into the effectiveness of the work of FBOs, says the co-director of Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion.

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President Barack Obama's tightly crafted speech was deliberately understated, says Tulane University rhetoric expert James Mackin.

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About nine in 10 Americans heard the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim, making it possibly the most prevalent rumor of the 2008 presidential campaign, according to a nationwide survey. However, only 22 percent of those surveyed said they actually believed that Obama is a Muslim.

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New research by Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management professor Ray Friedman finds that the presidential run of Barack Obama has had a strong positive impact on the test-taking achievement of African Americans.

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When Barack Obama becomes president, not only will the political landscape shift in this country, but the judicial landscape will as well. Empirical research from Vanderbilt professor of law and political science Tracey George shows how the United States court system, especially the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, could dramatically change soon after Obama takes office.

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A new book, Black Star: African American Activism in the International Political Economy" studies the Black Star shipping line as an example of the political and economical ties among African-descended populations living in the Americas, the Caribbean and West Africa in the early 1920s.

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Eleven graduate students from the history and social science education program at Virginia Tech will be partnering with high school and middle school students from across the country to witness the historic inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama.

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Expert to comment on topics regarding disaster preparedness and how the general public can prepare for and respond to an emergency during the Inauguration in Washington, D.C.

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Transportation and security officials on Inauguration Day will have a centralized, consolidated stream of traffic information and other data displayed on a single screen using software developed by the University of Maryland. The system gives officials a single real-time view far more comprehensive than previously available.

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On a precedent-setting day, can Barack Obama's inaugural speech live up to the hype and become one for the ages? It's possible, says Rowan University's Daniel Schowalter, a communication studies professor.

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UALR students organize bus trip to Washington to celebrate Martin Luther King by attending the presidential inauguration of America's first black president.

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Law professor Todd Pettys says that Americans have a need to believe law comes from an exalted source, not the grubby world of politics, and so we demand our judges set themselves apart from the rest of us and wear robes. Which is why nobody will notice that John Roberts will administer the oath of office while wearing a robe, while Barack Obama wears a suit and tie.

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The choice of Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery to pray at the inaugural ceremony reflects important dynamics in public religion past and present, says Bill Leonard, dean and professor of church history at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Leonard is available to talk about prayer and public piety at presidential inaugurations, and implications of the absence of a non-Christian voice at this year's event.

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For African-Americans, the election of a black president is not only a historic milestone but may represent a psychological catharsis akin to South Africa's election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, says Anthony Parent, professor of history at Wake Forest University.