For years, my father, a federal employee with a top secret clearance, carried a copy of his birth certificate when he went into Baja California from our home in San Diego. Many times, when he tried to reenter the U.S., he was stopped by the Border Patrol. My father had thick black hair and naturally [...]
Final installment in Walter Brasch’s three-part series on fracking. Read part one here and part two here. The history of energy exploration, mining, and delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases land in rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, [...]
Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 looked at a state gag order on physicians; Part 3 examines why Pennsylvania is giving special consideration to the natural gas companies. The natural gas industry defends hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, as safe and efficient. Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, [...]
Part One of a Three-Part Series. A new Pennsylvania law endangers public health by forbidding health care professionals from sharing information they learn about certain chemicals and procedures used in high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. The procedure is commonly known as fracking. Fracking is the controversial method of forcing water, gases, and chemicals at tremendous [...]
For most Americans, the only significance of Labor Day is that it concludes a three day weekend. For Kirk Artley, it means he has about six weeks left of employment. On Aug. 24, RR Donnelley, a Chicago-based megacorporation that claims to be “the world’s premier full-service provider of print and related services,” told Artley and [...]
Speeding along city streets, going from somewhere to somewhere else, was the Sarah Palin “One Nation I’m Not Running for Anything But Follow Me Anyhow” bus chase. Following her were about two dozen reporters and photographers from the national news media, and now and then some local news teams, many of whom violated traffic laws [...]
Unless you were in a coma the past few years, you probably know who Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton are. You heard about them on radio, saw them on television. You read about them in newspapers and magazines, on Facebook, Twitter, and every social medium known to mankind. Because of extensive media coverage, [...]
The latest garbage spewing hate as it circles the Internet in a viral state of panic continues a three year smear against Barack Obama. The attacks had begun with the extreme right wing spitting out Obama’s full name—Barack HUSSEIN Obama, as if somehow he wasn’t an American but connected to the Iraqi dictator who, despite [...]
It was a little before 9 a.m. I was chatting with two students. Another student came in, and asked if we had heard a plane had hit a building in New York City. We hadn’t, but I assumed it was a light private plane, and the pilot had mechanical difficulty or problems with wind turbulence. [...]
Millions of Americans gave George W. Bush unquestioned support when he diverted personnel and resources from the war against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to invade Iraq. Several million fewer opposed the invasion, stating that the primary mission was to destroy the enemy hiding in Afghanistan that destroyed a part of America and not to [...]
