U.S.-E.U. Rhetoric on Russia as Destructive as a Chekhovian Duel
Returning home last week from Poland and Germany, as part of a United States and European Union transatlantic policymaker conversation on the crisis in Ukraine, Crimea and Russia, as well as other...
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Shame: Wall St Journal Compares Rule for Predatory Colleges to Obamacare
I thought it was a matter of time before defenders of America's predatory for-profit colleges tried to equate President Obama's effort to regulate those schools with Obamacare. In seeking to block...
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The Last Walk for Water
Originally published on Medium. It was still dark and cool when 13-year-old Letikiros walked out the door to get water. She never came home. At 4 p.m. a man found her lifeless body swinging from a...
View ArticleThe US-Saudi Meeting
President Obama's upcoming meeting with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah comes at a time when transformative developments are convulsing the regional and world order and relations between the US and the...
View ArticleFor Healthy Births and Happy Birthdays, Get Covered and Trust Women
Five years ago this morning, I was in labor when we lost track of my daughter's heartbeat. My OB wasn't on duty that Sunday before dawn when a doctor I had never met leaned over me and informed my...
View ArticleIf Hobby Lobby Wants to Deny Insurance Coverage of Birth Control It Should...
Hobby Lobby is the Oklahoma-based chain of craft stores that is challenging the Affordable Care Act (ACA), claiming that the health-care reform law violates the corporation's free exercise of religion...
View ArticleWhen Water Scarcity Becomes Personal
"There are so many problems here around water," Sabeen said. Sabeen is Syrian. Last year she and her children fled Damascus, and now they live in northern Jordan in a one-room flat. Mattresses without...
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Ukraine and Nuclear Weapons
When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons to Russia. By 1996 they had rid themselves of the third largest arsenal in the world, larger than those of Britain, China and...
View ArticleSunday Roundup
This week, the mystery of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 took another turn when Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced that two objects -- one 80 feet long -- had been spotted by satellite...
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Open Diplomacy, Wartime, and the Modern Surveillance State
References to open diplomacy and its long history have been surprisingly absent from recent public debates and discussions about security and privacy, including the NSA and the PRISM program, Edward...
View ArticleA Field Guide to Libertarianism
Last week Rand Paul spoke to students at UC Berkeley. On the face of it, the event might have had a Daniel in the lion's den flavor to it: Tea Party darling goes to the most liberal campus in America...
View ArticleThe Affordable Care Act -- Women's History in the Making
By Representative Jan Schakowsky and Professor Amy Fried All month we have been commemorating Women's History Month. As March comes to a close there is no better way to recognize women's history than...
View ArticleFree EPT Tests in Alaskan Bars... Because Birth Control Is Irresponsible
I had a plan to write a column that was going to make the Anchorage municipal elections coming up be the sexiest, most riveting thing you've ever read. Then someone did something stupid in Juneau, so...
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Weltanschauung -- How We Think of Things Determines How We Look at Them
Our world is to a large extent ruled by money, since it is the one thing we all agree on as a measurement of performance and success. Economists look at the world as a competition for scarce resources...
View ArticleGhost Port
Twenty-five years ago or thereabouts I brought together an international consortium to build a new seaport at Novorossiysk, north of Sochi on the Russian Black Sea coast. There was already a small port...
View ArticleReligious Refusal's Long Discriminatory History
I've seen discrimination masquerade as religious liberty long before Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties waged a Supreme Court challenge against the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive...
View ArticleWorld's Largest Democracy Prepares for Biggest Ever Elections
Hopes for maintaining freedom and democracy are shaky in many countries today from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand the continued success of autocracies such as China has...
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Debunking the Top 10 Most Egregious Republican Lies
I spend a lot of time debunking various myths, slogans and lies, and the undisputed champion of easily debunkable myths continues to be the Republican Party. But, until now, I don't think I've ever...
View ArticleCould Mexico Save Kiev (and the Rest of the World) from War?
The answer is maybe if energy has anything (read everything) to do with it. Specifically natural gas, which the Russians have used as recently as 2009 as leverage against the Ukraine and the rest of...
View ArticleThe CNN Affect
Consider the last couple weeks a case study in American infomania. Infomania refers to the compulsion to accumulate information, especially news, via cell phone or computer -- a kind of Digital-Age...
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