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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...
Carbon Divestment
President Barack Obama is on a rhetorical roll on the issue of climate change. "The 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15," Obama pointed out to Congress and the American people in his State of the Union address. "Heat waves, droughts, wildfires,...
Big Can Be Beautiful
I have a question: If this is the greatest country in the world, why do we keep acting so dumb? I suppose the sequestration of the federal budget isn’t as dumb as deliberately going over the fiscal cliff, but it’s plenty dumb. Just as the economy was showing signs of...
The Luxury Fortress in Your Future
A dozen years ago, Brazil ranked as the world's most unequal major nation. Brazil's most affluent 10 percent were grabbing nearly 50 times more income, on average, than Brazil's poorest tenth, over double the U.S. gap. Amid this intense inequality, wealthy Brazilians...
Perturbed by Pesticides
The nastiest looking insect I've ever seen crawled out of a hole near a dead stump in my garden the other day. I was weeding there, and I'm sure I disturbed it. To be honest, I was scared. This thing looked like it could bite me and it would hurt. I briefly considered...
The GOP’s Pitch-Perfect Platform
Here's some unexpected news. It comes from what purports to be an official document of the National Republican Party. And — wow — the policy positions it contains show that party leaders really are serious about coming to their senses and rejecting the far-right...
Stalling the Incomplete Recovery
How do you gauge the impact of depriving 12,000 low-income California preschoolers of the opportunity to participate in the Head Start program because of budgetary gridlock? Or stripping more than half a million people living in poverty of their access to the highly...
