Perspectives
The consequences of a wildlife comeback
Amidst the horrors of fracking and climate change, America has a mostly unnoticed environmental success story. In his fascinating new book Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds, Jim Sterba — veteran reporter ...
Walmart is still bad for the planet
In May, Walmart was hit with $110 million in environmental fines after pleading guilty to improperly dumping pesticides, fertilizer and other hazardous materials into public sewers and landfills. The Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section said that it was ...
Continue saying no to nukes
Climate change is the biggest challenge human beings have ever faced. We don’t have much time to deal with it. Unfortunately, political transformation is usually a slow process...
The Zinn witch hunt continues
In 2010, after historian Howard Zinn died, then-Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels sat down at his computer and started a quiet witch hunt with a flurry of emails to top state education officials. This only became public this summer after the Associated Press obtained copies...
Taking care of our least fortunate
In 1992, Rush Limbaugh ridiculed Boulder Mayor Leslie Durgin for saying, “We don’t want to become the kind of community where everyone is white, upper-middle class. ... We really want to have a diverse community...
After the deluge: What I told city council
On Sept. 17 I ended up the first to address the Boulder City Council during citizen participation. Several council members were nodding their heads by the end of the first sentence ... but soon they stopped. Here’s what I said, prettied up for print...
It’s time to open the vault on Kennedy
President John Kennedy was killed 50 years ago. There is still considerable controversy about who did it. The release of 4 million pages of long-secret documents since Oliver Stone’s movie JFK clarified some disputes but raised new questions. Many thousands of pages ...
Potholes in the road to privatization
“There’s a reason that there’s been so much enthusiasm in the finance community for privatization deals. You are dealing with a less savvy partner ... The bigger sucker is always the government...
A fracking threat to children
We’ve all seen (or at least heard of) the movie Erin Brockovich, in which a bold and fiercely determined mom takes on a chemical company for exposing a small town and the families and children that live there to toxic chemicals that have been linked to cancer. It’s ...
Single-payer health care is the answer
President Obama sold single-payer health care short in his speech to Congress. It's actually the only sensible solution to our health care crisis...
Tycoons and their taxes
Corporate fat cats are prowling the halls of Congress and scratching up all the furniture. These tycoons are peddling the old line that if they get tax cuts and subsidies, they will create jobs for us. That hasn’t worked yet. They say ordinary Americans should “lower...
Sometimes, the government comes in handy
Americans have a love/hate relationship with government, condemning those wasteful and corrupt government bureaucrats in the abstract while praising many public services in the concrete like the fire department, schools or parks...
