Editorial

OP-ED: Cruise Lines Need a Watchdog Agency

Seattle, WA (Special to Huntingtonnews.net) – The traveling public needs an official agency to gather and report on safety, health, security and environmental issues, customer service and complaints against cruise lines.  Nearly 13 million Americans took a cruise last year and not all of them had a Love Boat experience.  The U.S. Department of Transportation regularly publicizes and ranks U.S. airlines on their on-time performance, lost baggage and customer complaints but there is no central source for consumer information regarding cruise ships. Read more

OP-ED: Hunger-Striking Students Finally See Some Progress for University of Virginia Workers

A living-wage campaign at the University of Virginia has been pressing the university's six-figure-salary administrators to treat its workers better for the past 14 years, sometimes winning higher wages, but always watching them be wiped out by the soaring cost of living in Charlottesville. The workers, lacking a union, and witnessing retaliation against some who have spoken out, have been reluctant to take the lead in the fight, but students have stepped up to the task. Read more

OP-ED: Top 10 Genius Reasons to Keep Troops in Afghanistan

1. When you're setting a record for the longest modern war, cutting it short just increases the chances of somebody breaking your record some day. Read more

COMMENTARY: Syria Proves the Case for UN Security Council Reform

A United Nations Security Council, genuinely concerned with the welfare of people and applying objective standards, would have taken positive global steps to apply biting sanctions on the regime in Syria to compel an end to the killing of innocent civilians including children. Read more

Who Are the 399 and Why Should You Care?

Last week I was watching an independent news exit poll of predominately white middle aged to senior citizen voters being asked if they knew what the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was. Most of them much to my horror had never heard of it nor had the foggiest notion that the President of the United States had effectively signed away both their 4th and 6thAmendment rights just as all of America was happily looking forward to some New Year’s Day football. If somehow you missed the memo, the government can now throw you or anyone else into prison just because someone high enough up the totem pole believes you might be a threat. To do so they will label it terrorism but really it could apply to just about anything because no longer do they need justify your detention to anyone, not even the courts.  No phone call to your lawyer, no bail, no court date, just prison for as long as they want. Hard to believe? It’s all true.

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EDITORIAL: Raese Focuses on Gasoline Prices, Jobs, and Runaway Spending

The voting public of West Virginia has already benefited from Republican John Raese's run for the U.S. Senate this year.  While Raese--unopposed in the upcoming May GOP Primary--could lay back and take it easy this Spring, he has characteristically reset the checkerboard on incumbent U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, advancing three main economic issues that mirror the public's own concerns. Read more

The Peace Movement Needs Kucinich, With or Without Congress

If Congressman Dennis Kucinich becomes simply Dennis Kucinich sans the "Congressman" his value to the peace movement need not diminish. Read more

COMMENTARY: The Rhetoric of Threat is Lethally Obsolete

When President Obama spoke to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbying organization, he provided the required red meat—America’s support for Israel remains drum tight, and war on Iran to prevent their acquisition of nuclear weapons continues to be a viable option. Mr. Obama's pandering (mitigated, in fairness, by his continued commitment to diplomacy) ignored Israel’s own nuclear weapons, and its government’s obdurate support for the settlements that keep eroding Palestinian territory. Read more

A Dad’s Point-of-View: How to Rule Your Unruly Teenager

When they say  “What goes around, comes around” they must have had me in mind. That’s because I gave my parents a certain degree of difficulty during my teen years. Now, I have double that trouble, since I have two teens at home. The good news is that one of them will be heading off to college in six months. The bad news is that the one left behind is as or more difficult than his older college-bound brother. Read more

MANN TALK: The Mess the Myth Has Made

Once upon a time in the dawn of civilization somewhere at the crossroads of his world, a human with a poetic imagination decided to describe fancifully how he and all his brethren and sisters and all organic and inorganic things came to be. A God, he imagined, created man in His image and woman from a rib of man and enjoined man to multiply and subdue the earth and have dominion over it and every living thing that moved on it. The poet had no notion of what an impact his poetry would have on following generations and on God’s creation.      Read more

COMMENTARY: International Impotence and the Middle East: How Are We Supposed to Know Whom to Like....Or Dislike

I don’t know about you, but I sure find it confusing that the people we are supposed to like or dislike keep changing, and, worse, keep reversing positions.
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OP-ED: Murder Is Legal, Says Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, March 5, 2012 explained why it's legal to murder people -- not to execute prisoners convicted of capital crimes, not to shoot someone in self-defense, not to fight on a battlefield in a war that is somehow legalized, but to target and kill an individual sitting on his sofa, with no charges, no arrest, no trial, no approval from a court, no approval from a legislature, no approval from we the people, and in fact no sharing of information with any institutions that are not the president.  Holder's speech approached his topic in a round about manner: Read more

OP-ED: A Race of Gods

Last week, I was driving in the rain from Oregon into Washington state along a road that I’ll call the “Terror Mountain Pass.”
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OP-ED: Syria and the U.N.

Those who have systematically blocked structural reform at the United Nations indirectly have the blood of the Syrian opposition on their hands.
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DEVOTION: Second Sunday in Lent

Sunny days and the perfect temperature.

 

No storms... tornadoes... floods...fires... deadly winds. Read more

OP-ED: What's the Matter With Norway?

The beautiful thing about the internet is that whenever you write an essay on a topic you imagine is new, some wonderful person contacts you within about an hour who's written a whole book about it.  This is different from writing a book about something new (or old) like the Kellogg-Briand Pact (everybody still thinks it must be a breakfast cereal). Read more

OP-ED: Ambition Without Action is Failure

A recent statement by the Secretary-General of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Irwin La Rocque, that the region has been “overly ambitious in its integration targets”, coming from the person who is expected to drive the regional integration process, is cause for disappointment.

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OP-ED: Virginia Says No to Lawless Imprisonment

Good things do come out of the Virginia state legislature.  That normally reprehensible body has just stood up to the federal outrage that has come to be known as the NDAA.  The letters stand for the National Defense Authorization Act, but at issue here is not the bulk of that bill.  Virginia's state government has no objection to dumping our grandchildren's unearned pay into the pockets of war profiteers while our schools lack funding.  At issue is the presidential power to lock people up without a trial, which was slipped into the latest military funding bill late last year and signed into law by President Barack Obama on New Year's Eve.  In fact, Virginia's legislature does not object to that abuse except in one particular circumstance, namely when the victim of it is a U.S. citizen.  But in that circumstance, Virginia says Hell No. Read more

COMMENTARY: 'Occupy' Movement Is a Failure

“Occupy” is a failure and it needn’t have been.

As a longtime supporter of strong public expression by demonstrations, marches and other means on major issues to the nation and the world, I can only conclude the so called “Occupy” movement is nothing more than a failure. Read more

OP-ED: Un-Cheating Justice: Two Years Left to Prosecute Bush

Elizabeth Holtzman knows something about struggles for justice in the U.S. government.  She was a member of Congress and of the House Judiciary Committee that voted for articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon in 1973. She proposed the bill that in 1973 required that "state secrets" claims be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. She co-authored the special prosecutor law that was allowed to lapse, just in time for the George W. Bush crime wave, after Kenneth Starr made such a mockery of it during the Whitewater-cum-Lewinsky scandals.  She was there for the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. She has served on the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, bringing long-escaped war criminals to justice.  And she was an outspoken advocate for impeaching George W. Bush. Read more

OP-ED: Lazy Day

The fireplace is going crackle, crackle, crackle, and when I look into it, I amuse myself by thinking up ways to describe the flames. Read more

EDITORIAL: Why John Raese is Joe Manchin's Worst Nightmare

Joe Manchin would appear to have it all:  elected twice to the Governorship of West Virginia, now once to the U.S. Senate.  Just one problem, no, two.  First, his ongoing act as both an Obama supporter and a conservative is beginning to wear thin on conservative Democrats and Independents in West Virginia. Read more

EDITORIAL: Obamacare's Medicare Cuts Threaten West Virginia Hospitals

We salute the Charleston Area Medical Center, whose leaders have recently spoken about a hard truth that many hospitals across the state are feeling about now. 

As reported in a recent story by Charleston Daily Mail reporter, Zach Harold ("CAMC says losses on Medicare "unsustainable," 2/23/12), CAMC realized that approximately $80 million in Medicare cuts were to be absorbed by the hospital through the end of this decade. Read more

COMMENTARY: Our Trance of Separation

The biggest challenges we face all have their root cause in an artificial separation—between nations, races, religions, classes, between political parties, between humans and the living ecosystem upon which we depend for life—even between our heads and hearts. Such apparent separations represent a kind of global neurosis for which one antidote is what Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing”—the recognition of our deep interdependence. Read more

OP-ED: Imagine a Leader Leading

Imagine if a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Head of Government were to say boldly the following truths however inconvenient they may be to other Heads of Governments: Read more

EDITORIAL: Raese Stump Speech Even More Relevant in 2012

Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Raese is one of those rare birds in West Virginia politics: while he may update his message for relevancy, fundamentally his position never changes.  Read more

COMMENTARY: The 10 Most Excellent Reasons to Attack Iran

1. Iran has threatened to fight back if attacked, and that's a war crime. War crimes must be punished. Read more

A Dad’s Point-of-View: Revisiting Gratitude

Nearly seven years ago, I fell asleep at the wheel of my truck. The resulting accident – with the cruise control set at 72 mph – should have killed me, or worse. I walked away with nary a meaningful scratch as did my dog, who was thrown from the vehicle when we veered off the highway. As I drive that same route regularly, a recent visit to the crash site made me reflect on how lucky I was then and how lucky I am now. Read more

EDITORIAL: Political Spouses Still Walk a Fine Line

American politics has many set traditions, some of which may befuddle us today.  Yet we also take them for granted, as a set part of a campaign's landscape.  Take the political spouse's role, which, until British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a handful of women Governors, U.S. Senators, and Congressional representatives, always fell to the supportive, adoring wife. Read more

MANN TALK: Fourscore Is Enough

Every birth is no less than twins: life and death. As soon as there is birth, death stalks the new life. Nature designed it that way. What nature had in mind is biological balance. It is obvious that if life had not included death as a twin and that if everything that had received life were still around, life would be piled upon life, every species of which would be gasping and grasping for earth and air and whatever else needed for it to continue. Life would be a living death rather than a life and a death. Read more

OP-ED: Why Students Are Hunger Striking in Virginia

Twelve students at the University of Virginia on Saturday, Feb. 18 began a hunger strike for a living wage policy for university employees. They've taken this step after having exhausted just about every other possible approach over a period of 14 years. I was part of the campaign way back when it started. I can support the assertion made by hunger-striking student A.J. Chandra on Saturday, who said, Read more

OP-ED: Living Wage Campaign at the University of Virginia Declares Hunger Strike Starting Feb. 18th

Charlottesville, VA (Special to HNN) —  After years of dialogue with administration, marches, rallies, petitions, and public resolutions, the Living Wage Campaign of U.Va. began a Hunger Strike on Feb. 18th to urge U.Va to enact a living wage policy.  For 14 years, the Living Wage Campaign and its allies have urged U.Va. to pay their employees enough to meet the basic cost of living in Charlottesville.  Despite years of pressure, dialogue, and other efforts, no progress has been made.

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OP-ED: Not Another Rabbit Hole!

When Alice went down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s novel, Alice in Wonderland, she experienced all kinds of unpleasant surprises. What kind of surprises will we Americans face if our government bombs Iran? Read more