Archive
How Should We Confront the Corporate Greed Grab?
In America today, The New York Times reports, we're living in "a golden age" — for corporate profits. These earnings have been soaring at a 20 percent annual clip. In fact, to find a year when corporations were grabbing as great a share of America's income as they're...
True Colors are to Dye For
A friend and I once tricked his kids on St. Patrick's Day. Maybe "tricked" is too strong of a word for what we did: The festive green pasta we served was spinach fettuccine, but we didn't admit that it contained traces of the vegetable. The pasta didn't taste at all...
Barnyard Sex Education
In 2009, an interim Texas school superintendent declared that sex-education classes were unnecessary in his rural district. Most of the area's school kids live on farms, he explained, therefore: "They get a pretty good sex education from their animals." It's this kind...
Making Death Less Painful
Spare me, Lord, From those who say That I need pain, Till my dying day. There's no quick path to a new personal freedom. Whether it's civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, reproductive rights, or the right to die with dignity, winning is not easy. There are always...
Shooting an Endangered Species
Anti-Government ‘Patriot’ Groups Ramp Up Again
It's déjà vu all over again. Twenty years ago, the passage of the Brady gun control bill helped ignite the first wave of the "Patriot" movement, a combustible mix of gun-toting militias and baseless conspiracy theories about government perfidy that culminated in the...
This Week in OtherWords: Smart Government
This week in OtherWords, Donald Kaul, William A. Collins, and I weigh in on sequestration, Elizabeth Rose calls for closing the gun show loophole, and Jim Hightower praises a GOP platform. Below, you'll find a clickable summary of our latest commentaries and a link to...
Will the Next Pope Make a Difference?
Will Pope Benedict XVI's resignation make any difference? He and his predecessor have appointed a College of Cardinals so profoundly rooted in his vision of the world that it would really take a miracle for the next Pope to be more in the tradition of Jesus and John...
Getting Small Arms Out of the Wrong Hands
Did you know that international laws dictate the rules of the game when it comes to selling bananas and iPods, but not grenade launchers and AK-47s? It's crazy but true. Fortunately, a solution is at hand. Negotiators at the United Nations will soon wrap up a global...
Close the Gun Show Loophole
Dozens of Americans will be murdered, hundreds of others will be shot, and nearly 1,000 will be robbed or assaulted with a gun — today. The United States has some of the weakest gun laws in the world. To make us, our families, and our communities safer, we need to...
