Archive
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...
The Pot Prohibition Runs Its Course
Half a year ago, Colorado and Washington voters approved ballot measures to make marijuana legal in their states. But ending the pot prohibition can't happen overnight, even after electoral wins like that. Just ask Gil Kerlikowske, the nation's "drug czar." "Neither a...
Holy Smokes
Don’t Mourn the Planet’s Destruction, Organize!
Should we weep or cheer on Earth Day? Both. The first step toward any recovery is admitting that we have a problem. In fact, beaucoup problems. For example, despite the squawking of profiteering polluters and professional deniers, our very atmosphere — without which...
