Archive
Tied to the Tracks
If life were an old-fashioned movie serial we’d be at the scene where Barack Obama is tied to railroad tracks while an oncoming train sounds in the distance.
Pop Goes Our Anti-Poppy Policy in Afghanistan
Recently, I found myself humming the Old Beatles song: “Poppy Fields Forever.”
It’s Still Not Easy to Die Peacefully
It’s been 25 years now since an AP poll revealed that a majority of Americans thought terminally ill patients should have the right to die. Assuming, of course, that they wanted to. Fat lot of good that poll did. Not one state legislature has followed it.
Whitman’s House
The Lineup: Week of October 11-17, 2010
Here’s what you’ll find in the latest OtherWords editorial package.
Washington at Work–for the Wealthy
Most federal asset-building programs, the study explains, deliver their benefits through the tax code, an approach that almost guarantees that the wealthy will score, by far, the biggest benefits.
Four Hundred Thousand Reasons to Vote
Alan Simpson, the co-chair of President Obama’s task force on deficit reduction, insulted those who depend on Social Security–many of them older women, children, and people with disabilities–by referring to the program as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.” Earlier, Simpson described the millions who depend on Social Security benefits as “lesser people.”
Rattling Democracy in Latin America
In late September, tear gas and the smoke from burning tires filled the air as Ecuador’s president was held hostage in a police hospital.
The Faces of Government
I had dinner the other night with one of those villains, a “faceless bureaucrat” working as a wildlife biologist for the Department of the Interior in northern Florida. A college friend of my wife, she had spent many years in research on endangered species, and now has moved into an administrative position where she supervises the research of other wildlife scientists.
Confronting the Reality of Climate Change
It got so hot in downtown Los Angeles the other day that the thermometer broke. The National Weather Service’s device hit 113 degrees at about noon (the highest temp ever recorded in LA), then just quit. Climate change hawks were quick to seize on this as evidence that global warming is revving up and we ought to do something about it before it’s too late.
