Peace and Security
It’s Time to Cut the Contractors Loose
How much of your paycheck do you plan to hand over to corporate Pentagon contractors this year? The average American taxpayer will have paid $14,520 in federal income taxes in 2017. And that’s not even including the taxes that every working person pays to take care of...
Police Killed More People Last Year Than Mass Shooters
This spring, an estimated 800,000 Americans gathered in Washington, DC to participate in the "March for Our Lives" organized by the teenage survivors of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida. Thousands more attended 800 sister marches across the nation and around...
‘Modernization’ Is Media Code for Military Build-Up
One of the most effective rhetorical tools in normalizing massive military budgets is to treat spending billions — and sometimes trillions — of dollars as something one has to do in order to be "modern." "Modernization" is, after all, an attractive label. Who doesn’t...
King’s Dream Included Economic Equality, Too
April 4 marks the 50th anniversary of the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, King was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. American history...
It’s on Us to Stop the War in Yemen
We’re helping fight someone else’s war in Yemen — and the blood is on our hands. Since March 2015, the United States has supported a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that's intervening in a civil war in Yemen. The war has...
This Popular Pro-Gun Argument Doesn’t Make Any Sense
As our nation debates gun rights vs. gun control, there's a stupid argument that keeps resurfacing on the anti-gun control side. I'm not anti-gun, but I am anti-stupidity, so this is bugging me. It's the idea that because criminals, by their very nature, do not follow...
One No-Brainer Way to Bring Gun Deaths Down
It's now been over a month since 17 teenagers were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, culminating in a march that brought nearly a million people to the capital. Yet Congress is still dragging its feet on guns. While Republicans and Democrats...
Get Ready for Bush 2.0
Political reporters have a saying: There’s always a tweet. That is, for nearly every political moment or presidential decree, there’s an uncannily on-point comment buried somewhere in the presidential Twitter feed. Often it features the president expressing a past...
A Genuinely Scary Moment in Foreign Policy
I'm scared. I don't have anything more savvy, or cool, or nuanced to say. I'm just scared. Since November 8, 2016, I've felt varying degrees of distress ranging from unease to panic. But whatever Donald Trump has done while in office — however much he's taunted Kim...
Give Me Liberty or Give Them Death
