Susan Dudley isn't the only controversial nominee that might be snuck through during the lame duck session. According to CongressDaily, future chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), is threatening to put a hold on the nomination for the Environmental Protection Agency's nominee for Inspector General. The IG is responsible for sussing out waste, fraud and abuse in the agency.

The focus of Katy J. Harriger's opinion piece in the Philanthropy Journal should not be overlooked; nonprofits and the philanthropic community are hurt when government and citizens are not engaged in politics. This makes government less responsible and in addition to various other reasons, the public sector becomes weakened which there by hurts the nonprofit sector. As we all learned in class, a three-legged stool is used to represent the relationship between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors and therefore each must be equally strong.

Word is that the lame duck session of Congress will consist of this week, followed by a two-week break, with a final work period of Monday, December 4 to Friday, December 18. The current Continuing Resolution (CR) funding federal government operations expires this Friday, November 17. So, this week, a new CR is must-pass legislation. Congress is expected to set an expiration date for the new CR of Friday, December 8. The questions before Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate are:

In their latest edition of Tax Justice Digest, Citizens for Tax Justice rundown the various tax propositions which appeared around the country on state ballots. CTJ applauds the defeat of a host of dreadful TABOR proposals, estate tax repeals, and a smattering of other awful tax measures, but they also applaud the defeat of cigarette tax increases. But, wait - don’t we want to discourage people from smoking? Now seems like a good time to discuss balancing competing objectives of a just tax code. In this case, the conflict is between degrading tax code progressivity and using the tax code to discourage harmful behavior (harmful not only to the individual who engages in the behavior, but also to those near him or her, and harmful to the economic prosperity of the jurisdiction).