All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Nancy Cordes is the Transportation and Consumer Safety Correspondent for CBS News.

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Medicare is a lifeline for 45 million American seniors. But costs for the government program are exploding. Medicare now consumes a startling 16 percent of the federal budget.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have warned that without significant changes, Medicare will either go bankrupt in 10 years ... or swallow up the entire budget.

So, what would each candidate do to fix Medicare? Despite the magnitude of the problem, it's not a topic either man talks about much on the campaign trail. That's partly because Medicare reform has long been considered the "third rail" of politics – something candidates steer clear of addressing, for fear of alienating the single largest voting bloc: seniors.

So while both Obama and McCain have laid out some significant reform proposals, most Americans probably ...

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David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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Although the story is about where the candidates stand on the issue of combating Islamic extremism, the star of the piece is a down and out mountain climber named Greg Mortenson, who, for the past 15 years, has been building schools in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. His thesis is simple: the Taliban fear education much more than they fear smart bombs. It's the old cliché of winning hearts and minds. Everybody talks about it. Mortenson did it and has recounted his amazing story in a best selling book "Three Cups of Tea."

Mortenson started his work in 1993 after he almost died in a failed attempt to climb K-2, after Everest the world's tallest mountain. His life was saved by an illiterate porter who lead him down from the mountain, and Mortenson set out to repay the debt by building a school for the porter's village.

It was an enormous undertaking. Before he could build a school, he had to build a ...

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Jim Axelrod is Chief White House correspondent for the CBS Evening News.

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Every now and again, on some Web page, you’ll see a headline perfectly reflecting our anxiety-producing times. “Six-Figure Jobs You've Never Thought Of," or something like that. When you read the article, it’s usually a list of work in high-tech fields that seem to require a Ph.D. from MIT.

Not in Tampa, Fla. There – thanks to a program run by WorkNet Pinellas – hundreds of men and women, many with no more than a high school diploma, are training for jobs that practically guarantee a six figure salary within three-to-five years. It’s not high-tech, it’s as old school as it gets.

The job? Welding.

Precision welding is a highly refined skill ...

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Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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For months now Illinois state senator and pastor James Meeks has fought for more funding for Chicago Public Schools. With several hundred thousand students the district is the nation’s third largest. The graduation rate for black and Latino students is generally less than 50 percent and in many schools there aren’t enough textbooks to give one to every student.

Over the years we’ve done stories about CPS, focusing primarily on failure and frustration. But when Rev. Meeks announced his intent to bus a bunch of kids from Chicago to a public school district just to the north, New Trier High School, the story became personal. I have two kids at New Trier this year. The school consists of two campuses, one strictly for freshman, the other for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. There is a football field, track, tennis courts, soccer field, and swimming pool used for PE and for athletics. Helping my kids decided what to take each year is like revisiting my college years. The courses offered include zoology, marine biology, advanced automotives, Hebrew, Chinese, sports and entertainment marketing, sequential art and animation. You get the idea.

What Rev. Meeks wanted to do ...

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Seth Doane is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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It’s a great luxury to be given six minutes in a network newscast to really delve into an issue. I was assigned to look into the issue of healthcare. But, even with six minutes – we’re just hinting at some of the highlights of these very complex health insurance proposals. We take the plans at face-value and look at both of them as they’re set-out by the presidential candidates.

My producers Kevin Finnegan and Heather Tesoriero found The Hickory House in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and some of its employees, as subjects for our piece. The folks at the Hickory House were fantastic to work with and, incidentally, the food is quite good too. I think, the people we were talking with – Candy, Lisa and Randy – were compelling and have stories of the healthcare predicaments so many Americans find themselves in.

Randy, who has worked at the restaurant for roughly two decades, really wishes that providing healthcare plans was easier for them. As insurance premiums have skyrocketed over recent years, the Hickory House has had to ...

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Sandra Hughes is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles.

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There couldn’t be a more critical time to be a small business owner. So many small businesses rely on loans – for everything from payroll to buying needed equipment – that when credit dried up these past few weeks they started facing critical decisions on how to keep their businesses going. According to the National Small Business Association, which has recently polled its members about the economic crisis, nationwide 28,000 fewer small business loans have been approved this year. Sixty-seven percent of small business owners surveyed recently said they’ve been impacted by the credit crunch.

We interviewed two Southern California business owners who told us in addition to this recent crisis, they’ve been troubled for years over increasing healthcare premiums and what they feel are excessive taxes and regulations. What we also learned from our interviews is that while politicians talk a lot about the small businessman and woman, the small business owner doesn’t feel like anyone in Washington is listening to their needs.

Mike O’Toole owns the Gondola Getaway in Long Beach, Calif. The idea to take people on gondola rides through the canals of his hometown came to him in business school. And he’s been making it work for 27 years. But O’Toole says: “if we’re the engine that drives the country (as so many politicians like to say) we need a new mechanic.” Why? He told us he’s drowning in regulations and taxes. There is no way he could afford to provide healthcare for all his employees, many of whom are part-time; because it would put him out of business.

Mark Murai is a third-generation strawberry grower who also owns processing plants. His top concern is paying for healthcare for his 30 employees whom he considers like family. But ...

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John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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When I was asked to prepare a report on how the candidates’ positions on climate change would impact voters, I remembered one voter who cares deeply about global warming. I first met her in January while I was on assignment in Antarctica. Jean Pennycook studies penguins there, and she has seen the devastating impact on penguin colonies when glaciers melt more rapidly than anyone has seen before. I decided it was time to check in with Pennybrook again.

When she’s not in Antarctica, Pennycook teaches environmental science at Awhanee Middle School in Fresno, Calif. I sat in on a class where she talked to students about the science of global warming and about the real-world results she has seen first hand down in the Antarctic penguin habitat. The most significant thing she sees in this presidential campaign is that – after eight years of the Bush Administration pretty much denying that global warming is caused by human activity – both parties' nominees accept the scientific conclusion that climate change is real. While she hopes that will bring new sense of urgency at the top in Washington, she continues to work from the bottom up, telling students that doing things like saving energy at home is a step toward saving some penguins at the other end of the earth. She asks them the kids: "are you willing to turn out the lights in your room to save the penguins?"

Some people are doing much more than turning out the lights. John Fiscalini is a California dairy farmer who was shocked when people started pointing fingers at agriculture as one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases. He discovered the truth: Manure from his 3,000 cows produces huge ...

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[Editor's note: This post was written by CBS News producer Paul Facey, who worked on the latest installment of "Where They Stand" with correspondent Ben Tracy. Check out Ben's blog below, if you want more.]

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If you really want to see the effects of the foreclosure crisis, take a tour of Las Vegas. I'm not talking about the Strip, but rather, the city's once-promising residential neighborhoods. That's what Ben Tracy and I did for our report on housing for the series "Where They Stand."

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Ben Tracy is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles.

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If you don’t believe the housing market is as bad as the media makes it out to be, just head to Las Vegas. It’s ground zero in the mortgage mess. In fact, one in every 35 household in the metro area received a foreclosure notice this year. That’s amazing when you think about it! Vegas is our backdrop for tonight’s “Where They Stand” piece that will explain the presidential candidate’s positions on the housing crisis – and how they propose to fix it.

As you know, when it comes to any home improvement, there is no easy fix. One of the people we met in Las Vegas was Adriana Camejo. She’s a young mother who bought her house in a Las Vegas suburb two years ago. She had a great job and even better credit. Unfortunately, she signed on for a risky adjustable-rate mortgage. She says her lender told her that her interest rate was 6 percent, but after signing her loan documents she realized it was 11 percent. When her husband lost his job, she fell behind on her payments, and is now facing foreclosure. Her credit is ruined.

So, would the housing plans of Sens. McCain and Obama help her stay in her home? I was pretty surprised by what the candidate’s agree on and how their political philosophies inform their plans. Tune in tonight at 6:30 p.m. EST and see which ideas you find most compelling. And you can click here to see our past installments of "Where They Stand."

[Editor's Note: Tonight on the CBS Evening News, you'll see the second installment of our series, "Where They Stand," which is an examination of the issues facing the next president of the United States. This time, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Lara Logan tackles how John McCain and Barack Obama propose handling one of the biggest issues of this election: ending the war in Iraq. CBS News producer Max McClellan explains how he encountered the remarkable man featured in tonight's piece – and why he exemplifies this issue.

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Ft. Carson, Colo., is home to the 10th Special Forces Group and one incredible Green Beret named Tim Brigham. We first heard about his story through contacts in the Special Forces community – and as soon as we did, we knew we had to meet him.

Tim is a classic soldier. Understated and modest, but profoundly dedicated to the mission. He'd have to be that way, given all that he's been through. He was badly wounded on the battlefield in northern Iraq in 2005, during his second tour. His unit was ambushed by insurgents; in the midst of heavy fire, Tim's first instinct was to climb to a higher position to get a better shot at the approaching enemy. He told us the safety of his men was the only thing on his mind. As he scrambled to the roof of his disabled humvee...

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