U.S. Calls to Palestinians to Take Risks for Peace Sound Hallow
The need for Israel and Palestine, the parties to decades long conflict, to take risks for peace are obvious and expected. But U.S. President Barack Obama's public call on Monday on Palestinian...
View ArticlePutin and the West
Crimea is gone. Increased sanctions and criticism from the West will not stop Russia's annexation of this largely ethnic-Russian peninsula. As Ukraine now withdraws its troops from Crimea, America and...
View ArticleWomen Who Demand Equality Are Not Whiners
Out of touch comments from GOP lawmakers are a common occurrence, but having a woman call women who demand equal pay whiners is utterly sad and a new low. Minnesota State Rep. Andrea Kieffer made this...
View ArticleHow Safety-Net ERs Can Save Health-Care Reform
Safety-net emergency departments are frequently blamed for being the source of rising health-care costs. After all, they care for the millions of underserved and uninsured Americans forced by a variety...
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GOP's Post-Mortem Post-Mortem
Has it really been a whole year since the Republican Party put out their "post-mortem" document, which tried to identify why they got shellacked so badly in the 2012 election? Since it's not a big date...
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Does the Democratic Party Have an Indian Problem?
"They wouldn't even bring it to the floor," said Mark Wandering Medicine, a Northern Cheyenne spiritual leader and voting-rights advocate. It was the afternoon of March 9 in Helena, Montana, and he...
View Article'Then They Fight You' -- Why The 1 Percent Is In Full Panic Mode
It was nearly a century ago that a trade union leader said this: "And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they...
View ArticleTV: What the Media and Politicians Are Talking About and What They're Not
The media is spinning around theories of what happened to Malaysia Flight 370. Nobody seems to know the truth as of yet. Instead, seasoned pilots and security experts appear to be the best narrators on...
View ArticleIt's Time to Hold Accountable Advocates Who, in Pursuit of Their Values, Put...
By 2002 golden rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the vitamin-A-producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed...
View ArticleBeyond CIA and NSA Spying: Corruption
Even before open war erupted last week between the CIA and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), embattled NSA officials had woven tangled skeins to downplay public crimes...
View ArticleGates' Prediction About Ending Global Poverty Is Built On Progress Already Made
Next year marks the 30th anniversary since Doc Brown introduced movie audiences to the flux capacitor. What's significant about that milestone is that 2015 was the year that Doc and Mary McFly were set...
View ArticleAre Young Americans Shuffling From Left to Right?
Young Americans have become an integral part of the Obama coalition, but they don't necessarily belong to the Democrats as a recent Pew Research Center study suggests. The Pew Research Center reported...
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The Fed Moves the Goal Line
Following its meeting, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee announced no increase in the near-zero interest rate on Fed Funds and said it would reduce monthly bond purchases to $55 billion. In...
View ArticleUkraine, From More Than One Perspective
I came to the US from Kiev, Ukraine, in 1992. Like many of my fellow Ukrainians, I have been vigilantly following the events unfolding in my birthplace with a mixture of hope, desperation, frustration,...
View ArticleA Bad Investment: Recognizing Religious Rights of Corporations
Supporters of corporate religious freedoms may be swapping corporate freedoms in exchange for individual ones. The controlling shareholders of Hobby Lobby and two other corporate plaintiffs in Sebelius...
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Self-Determination, Redux?
The West could have held the upper moral hand in the Crimean crisis, but chose not to. In his annexation speech (March 18, 2014), Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin resorted to the principle of...
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The GOP's Talk About Minority Outreach Just That, Talk
One year ago Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus assured one and all that the GOP had learned from its 2008 and especially 2012 presidential election debacles and that it would change...
View ArticleThe Compassionate Executioner
"If it were an art to overcome heresy with fire, the executioners would be the most learned doctors on earth." -- Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility of the German States (1520) At last a touch of...
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