Peace and Security
Federal Budget Buster’s Last Stand
Zero Dark Thirty’s Losing Premise
Zero Dark Thirty is a movie the CIA wants you to see. It tells a tale of the search for Osama bin Laden wherein the key lead comes from a man softened up by waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement in a coffin-like box and other forms of pain and humiliation. It...
Stronger At Home, More Respected Abroad
Americans agree it's time to strengthen our nation at home and abroad — but how can we make it happen? We can start by making wise choices in the federal budget and with our efforts to cope with our nation's debt ceiling problem. We can make smart military strategies,...
Banning Assault Weapons Makes More Sense than Arming Teachers
They've been holding hearings on gun control up on Capitol Hill in Washington. It's always an inspiring spectacle. There are few things as bracing as watching terrified lawmakers duck behind the Second Amendment while they justify their lack of significant response to...
Second Amendment Vigilantes
I don't hunt, but I have nothing against hunters or owners of rifles, bows and arrows, or boomerangs. However, I am against vigilantes and those, like the NRA leaders, who encourage them. I had my own run-in with vigilantes when I joined the movement to end...
Duck and Cover 2.0
Last year, Sheriff Tommy Gage of Montgomery County, Texas, was eager to show off his new surveillance toy. Having obtained a $300,000 Homeland Security grant from the federal government, his office had become the first police agency in the nation to have its very own...
Automatic Congressional Allegiance
We Don’t Need a Secretary of Militarism
The chicken hawks are out in force these days, attacking Chuck Hagel, President Barack Obama's choice for Secretary of Defense. He's too reluctant to use force, they say. He favors negotiation over sanctions and sanctions over bombs, they say. He doesn't like Israel...
This Week in OtherWords: January 9, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Sam Pizzigati explains how the recent budget deal will benefit the richest Americans, Jill Richardson calls on President Obama to take decisive action on climate change during his second term in office, and Donald Kaul follows up on his Dec....
Plotting an Uncivil War
At this point, it's far from certain whether the massacre of 20 Connecticut first-graders and six educators by a madman armed with an assault rifle in December will lead to meaningful gun control. But a month after the Dec. 14 bloodbath, the American far right is...
