Archive
Useless Baggage
They've hit a new low. Citing significant concerns about long lines at airports and flight delays caused by the furlough of air-traffic controllers, Congress let the Federal Aviation Administration override strict sequestration rules and redirect funds within its...
This Week in OtherWords: April 24, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson looks at the Texas factory explosion in the context of whether we should be using so much nitrogen fertilizer in the first place and William A. Collins and I review recent progress toward ending the prohibition on pot. Here's a...
A Reasonable Food Fight
President Barack Obama wants to revamp Washington's global food aid system. His 2014 budget request would transfer much of the program from the Department of Agriculture to the Agency for International Development and make other changes that the White House predicts...
Our Biggest Terrorist Threat
Acts of terror like the ones committed at the Boston Marathon are reprehensible and lack moral or logical explanation. They rock us to our core. They also unite us in common purpose. Victims and their families seem to become our own loved ones. We want to ease their...
Shameless Bipartisanship
A quick Google search of "politicians are" returns the following four suggestions: like diapers, sociopaths, the lowest form of life, and liars. A recent Public Policy Polling study found politicians to be less popular than the conqueror Genghis Khan or cockroaches....
Saber-Rattling on the Korean Peninsula
North Korea has a dramatic flair for stringing along the world. Whether it's reactivating a long-dead plutonium reactor in the face of mounting sanctions or forcibly suspending one of the last major cooperative efforts with South Korea, Pyongyang seems intent on a...
Stopping the Senseless Carnage
It was a confusing week, dominated by the Boston Marathon bombing, the evil act of two young men who had been welcomed into this country and had repaid the kindness with unspeakable cruelty. Then, for grim comic relief, letters believed to contain the deadly poison...
Tracking CEO Pay
Under current U.S. law, all our publicly traded corporations must annually disclose exactly what they pay their top executives. So why do all those CEO pay scorecards we see every spring show such different results? USA Today found an 8 percent hike in 2012 CEO pay...
The Price of Our Fertilizer Addiction
My heart aches for the people of West, Texas, the tiny town where a fertilizer plant recently blew up. Many of the folks who perished in the blast were heroic volunteer firefighters who ran into danger instead of away from it. With 14 dead and 200 injured, and a...
Making Poverty a Crime
Ebenezer Scrooge, the Dickens character, perfectly personified the nasty rich. For example, when asked to make a charitable donation for people trapped in poverty, Scrooge curled his lip in contempt and snarled: "Are there no prisons?" Blessedly, our American society...
