Westminster Town Hall Forum

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The Annenberg Center runs FactCheck, which is committed to examining the accuracy of U. S. political campaign advertisements. She is the author or co-author of fifteen books, including Presidents Creating the Presidency and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation. Her areas of research include political communication, rhetorical theory and criticism, campaign communication, and the discourse of the presidency. She is a native of Minneapolis and a graduate of Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she earned her PhD in Communication Arts.

Jacob Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He is co-author of the bestselling book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. He is a developer of the Economic Security Index (ESI), which measures the share of Americans who experience at least a 25 percent decline in their income from one year to the next, and his 2007 plan "Health Care for America" became a template for several presidential candidates' health care reform proposals. In his latest book, American Amnesia, written with Paul Pierson, he argues that the vital link between business and government has frayed, and along with it, the American record of social advancement and prosperity.

E.J. Dionne writes a twice-weekly column on politics for The Washington Post. He is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a professor of government at Georgetown University, and a commentator on politics for NPR, PBS, ABC, NBC, and MSNBC. He is the author of six books, including Our Divided Political Heart and Why Americans Hate Politics, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a nominee for the National Book Award. His latest book, Why the Right Went Wrong, explores the recent history of unrest and discontent in the Republican Party, tracing its beginning to Goldwater conservatism in the 1960s. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University and holds a DPhil from Balliol College at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Senator Timothy Wirth was elected to the United States Senate from Colorado in 1986. Prior to that, he served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives where he led efforts that changed American telecommunications policy. He is the author of the major Senate legislation addressing the issue of global warming and has been a leading spokesman for stronger federal clean air laws. An avid outdoorsman, he has paid special attention to Colorado's conservation, public health, and environmental issues.

Studs Terkel is a prize-winning author and broadcast personality. He began his career in Chicago where he worked with the WPA Writers Project in the radio division. In his early years on the radio, he featured music ranging from folk to opera to jazz. Over the years, his programs evolved into an interview format, including his award-winning show, The Studs Terkel Program. His first book, Giants of Jazz, was published in 1956, and ten years later, his first book of oral-history interviews, Division Street: America, was released, followed by a succession of oral-history books on the Depression, World War II, race relations, working, and the American dream.

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Lisbeth Schorr is a lecturer in Social Medicine and Health Policy at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Harvard University Working Group on Early Life. With her husband, journalist Daniel Schorr, she co-authored Within Our Reach, an analysis of effective social policies and programs aimed at breaking the cycle of inter-generational poverty, which threatens to create a permanent American underclass. In the Johnson and Carter administrations, she headed national efforts to improve the lives of disadvantaged children and families.

Leonard Silk is the economics columnist for The New York Times. Prior to joining the newspaper, he was the economics editor and editorial page editor for Business Week. He is a five-time recipient of the prestigious Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His 1978 book, Economics in Plain English, has been updated and revised for release again this year.