The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military's elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road.

What the military will say to a reporter and what is said behind closed doors are two very different things - especially when it comes to the U.S. military in Africa.

Without a clear picture of where the military's covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.

Whether I'm trying to figure out what the U.S. military is doing in Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably uniform - obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances. In short, the good old-fashioned military runaround.

The new era of bottom-up politics has had politically paradoxical consequences in China. While it has made the system of governance more participatory, it has made the central government less authoritarian and, therefore, more bureaucratic and cautious.

Democracy is the common pursuit of mankind, and all countries must earnestly protect the democratic rights of the people.

During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.

If you have a private firm and you spend a ton of money to pay employees, but what you produce is a flop, there will be no value to GDP. But government spending all gets counted as contributing to economic growth. That's why in the early days of creating these measurements, some people didn't want to count government spending.