Archive
A Disappointing TV Breakthrough
I'm legally blind. Like most blind people, I don't take cars for test drives, chop down trees with a chainsaw, or keep my blindness a secret. You wouldn't know this from watching the new NBC show, Growing Up Fisher, a TV show about a blind lawyer named Mel and his...
Fasting to Pierce the Silence from Congress on Immigration
"My deportation date is April 18," I overheard a woman say next to me in the large white tent where we were both fasting. Due to a simple miscommunication with her lawyer, Lupita received a deportation order that now threatens to send her back to a country she has not...
Paying for the Climate Change Pivot
We only have a few decades to deal with climate change. If humanity fails to cut back dramatically on carbon emissions by 2050, according to an alarming new UN report, our planet may warm past the point of our ability to fix the problem. Given global dependence on...
The High Price of Cheap Chicken
If you want to buy a fresh, whole chicken at the store, it'll run you about $1.54 per pound. But if I buy it from my local farmer, it costs $5 per pound. I live in an expensive part of the country — California — but even the farm I visited last year in rural New...
Meanwhile, the War on Tobacco Limps Ahead
Smoking isn't in the news much these days, but maybe it should be. Nearly half a million Americans still die from it each year. As the leading preventable cause of death in our country, tobacco kills way more people than guns, car accidents, and drug overdoses...
This Voting Measure Has Got to Go
No one can deny that voting is a civic duty, right? Well that depends on who you are. The reality is that many powerful people don't want certain folks to vote. They go to extremes to discourage those folks from voting and even harass them to keep away from the polls....
Engineering Away Consumer and States Rights
In 79 A.D., a volcanic eruption buried Pompeii in ash. Nearly 2,000 years later, an eruption of hot legislative ash is spewing from Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) is threatening U.S. consumers. Pompeo is the right-wing Congress critter from the Ideological Republic of...
Waiter, Am I Subsidizing Your Pay?
Late April doesn't just bring flocks of tourists to Washington. It's when hundreds of members of the National Restaurant Association — a.k.a. the "other NRA" — swarm Capitol Hill for two intensive days of lobbying. With a $65 million budget and over 52,000 members,...
When Congress Serves the Other NRA
This Week in OtherWords: April 16, 2014
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson tells "vegangelicals" they'd become better missionaries for a healthy-eating lifestyle if they just stopped preaching and Amanda Ufheil-Somers suggests that the United States and Saudi Arabia end what she calls a "loveless...
