Archive
Missing in Action: Political Reality and Leadership
Every federal budget is a dream sheet. They're all unrealistic. It goes something like this: The president lays out a slate of new programs, revenue raisers, and strategic cuts. Then Republican leaders pull out their X-Acto knives, highlighting cuts to programs they...
When Red Tape Is a Good Thing
One of the dirtiest words in politics is "regulation." It conjures up images of confusing paperwork, red tape, and obstacles to progress and innovation. However, when it comes to guaranteeing that the water we drink is lead-free, the air we breathe is clean, and that...
Belgian Awful
The ISIS supporters who attacked Brussels killed more than 30 people and injured hundreds more. Bombings at the city’s airport and a subway station blew up the notion that measures taken after the Paris siege were keeping Europe safe. The scariest part of this story...
Dying in Prison
Over the past three decades, judges and juries have filled America's prisons with non-violent offenders. Many are serving draconian sentences for first-time offenses. Indeed, while only about 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States, our country is...
What’s ‘Processed’ Food?
If you've read any nutritional advice lately, you've probably encountered one hard-and-fast rule: Avoid processed foods. But what does "processed" mean? On one level, anything humans do to food — slicing fruit, cooking beans, fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut —...
NBA: The National Billboard Association?
Billboards must be living creatures, for they appear to propagate like breeding rabbits. They spread everywhere, growing to enormous sizes while shouting corporate messages at us. Some even watch and track us with their digital eyes. Now, though, rather than...
A Nuclear Juggling Act
The Great American Plane Robbery
If you take the word "free" and rip the "r" out of it, what do you get? Two things, actually: You get a "fee" — and then you get mad. This is happening to millions of airline passengers who are discovering that the advertised price of a ticket isn't the half of it....
Heil Trump
In OtherWords: March 16, 2016
This week in OtherWords, John Kiriakou explains why it's important to take Donald Trump's vitriol seriously, I point out that the GOP's front-runner will probably wind up being a huge loser, and Lindsay Suter tells his personal fossil fuel divestment story. If you...
