There probably are valid arguments to be made against the Affordable Care Act. The problem is that Tea Partiers aren’t making any arguments at all.
They really do hate it, don't they? ForAmerica, a Tea Party group, calls the Republicans who shut down the government "chickens" for failing to be aggressive enough in stopping Obamacare, a law they
One historian’s analysis of the 1964 presidential election offers an explanation of the American far right’s intransigence today.
Around the time President Kennedy was killed in 1963 and Barry Goldwater succeeded in capturing the nomination of the Republicans for president in 1964, the noted historian Richard Hofstadter published "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a work now considered a classic. In this and two other lesser-known essays about the
While there’s no risk-free utopia to be achieved, America’s current evaluation of the risks of various power sources tends toward the irrational.
In early July of this year, a freight train loaded with crude oil left a small town in western North Dakota headed east. A day later it was being handled by a small railroad company in Quebec. Night came and the engineer, operating the train by himself, was ready to finish his shift.
He left the train on the
Most everything is at least slightly radioactive, and there’s no truly safe level of radiation. But some radiation is more dangerous than others.
Assessing the dangers of nuclear power requires coming to some understanding of radiation, how much of it we get exposed to and how dangerous that exposure is. Unfortunately, this is a topic that not only brings out the irrational in some people but also is genuinely difficult to untangle.
The first problem is being
Media reports of radioactive leaks into the Pacific Ocean are conflating — and exaggerating — two separate incidents, while ignoring legitimate safety issues.
(Don't miss part 1.)
Two evolving stories are the current focus of news from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in Japan. The first story is about leaks, the second about leaks into the ocean. Both are full of
The media plays on nuclear contamination fears, drowning out far more lethal consequences of Japan’s tsunami while exaggerating the dangers of nuclear power.
Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor complex, severely damaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, was back in the news this week with stories of an apparently massive and uncontrollable leak of dangerously contaminated water
Why are we so different from Europe, or other industrialized nations?
Americans who travel often encounter people who want to understand why the United States is the way it is. Why are we so different from Europe, or other industrialized nations? Why do we seem uninterested in foreign news, isolated from the world despite our vast economic reach? There are many factors of course, and untangling cause and
