Opinion
- Opinion
-
-
AS I SEE IT: Choosing words carefully these days often best policy
I learned the value of choosing the right word when 16-year-old me (who by today’s standards should have known better sooner) encouraged my 18-year-old boyfriend to share a shady joke with Mother and me ... one he’d heard on Stillwater’s then Oklahoma A&M campus where he was a freshman. “Go on, Bill, tell the joke,” I insisted. “Mom and I aren’t exactly virgins.”
There followed a stunned silence on their part and puzzlement on mine before Mom picked up her sewing and fled into the bedroom and Bill (who later became my husband almost 40 years) scurried out the front door.
In my defense, it wasn’t unusual in the early ’50s for a rural Oklahoma girl of my age to equate the word “virgin” with the faultless demeanor of the Virgin Mary we Baptist teens admired when we attended mass with a classmate — the only Catholic any of us knew at the time. -
Austerity, like supply side, is a scam
Used to be, economists knew that the way to growth was through robust economic activity: corporations would invest in their long-term economic health by hiring workers with good wages and producing goods everyone could buy and use.
It was more than an economic theory. All economists had to do was look at American communities and watch them work. Things began changing in the 1970s and took a radical turn in the 1980s with supply-side economics, which said that money should be funneled to the rich, primarily through tax cuts, and they would use their wealth to create new businesses and jobs. -
ROCK DOC: The Smoking Gun: Mass extinctions
As any child can tell you, the Mesozoic Era ends with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Most geologists think the cause of that extinction was the impact of an enormous meteorite that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. As the theory goes, the impact was so large it led to global changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Smoke and dust raised by the collision blocked the sun’s light for a time, making temperatures drop and plants die off. Many species of both plants and animals didn’t live through the crisis, as parts of the food web simply fell apart. As it happens, the dinos were one group that gave up the ghost and slipped into extinction.
-
‘42’ is more about fairness than baseball
One of the first major league baseball games I saw in person as a young boy was when my beloved Cincinnati Reds hosted the Brooklyn Dodgers at Crosley Field.
-
‘42’ is more about fairness than baseball
One of the first major league baseball games I saw in person as a young boy was when my beloved Cincinnati Reds hosted the Brooklyn Dodgers at Crosley Field.
I remember being considerably upset by the fact that the African American fans supporting the Reds gave their loudest cheers to a player for the Dodgers. -
Turkish festival highlights culture in Oklahoma
Several weeks ago young men in bright red Turkish historical costumes stood on Classen Boulevard in the MidCity area and welcomed people to the Turkish Festival at the Raindrop Foundation on that thoroughfare. In the main hall of the foundation building a line of smiling women of Turkish heritage who now live in the Oklahoma City area made a variety of Turkish and Mediterranean foods that were dispensed to festival patrons. The women who were preparing the Turkish pastry toward the end of the line were working with elongated thin rolling pins and it was explained that those are used in Turkish cooking.
-
How a no vote solved gas tax problem
Frequent readers of these articles will recall the series of columns I have written about the significant progress the state is making in regards to paving roads and building bridges.
State policy makers are re-directing ever-increasing amounts of motor vehicle tax revenue away from the general fund and toward roads and bridges. The state is starting to adopt a user fee based system where money paid for access to roads is truly used for roads instead of elsewhere.
How did these positive changes come about? -
Is Google more powerful than some nations?
Today, Google is arguably one of the most influential nonstate actors in international affairs, operating in security domains long the purview of nation-states.
-
The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Mass.: New front in terror war will be tough fight
After a dozen years of the war on terror, America has grown somewhat complacent toward the threat of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism here at home.
It’s clear that the war abroad and our security measures at home have rendered al-Qaida incapable of executing a large-scale strike against the United States comparable to the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks of 2001 that left nearly 3,000 dead. Instead, al-Qaida has been relegated to failed, individual attempts such as “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. -
BY THE NUMBERS: U.S. just might learn Spain’s economic lessons
Rising debts amidst a slumping economy spur leaders to aggressively reduce budget deficits. For congressional Republicans, this is apparently their ideal economic policy. For Spain, it’s what they have lived through for the past two years and they are much worse off for it.
In November 2011 with an unemployment rate exceeding 20 percent and a government budget deficit above 8 percent of GDP, Mariano Rajoy became Spain’s prime minister with the promise to enact an “austerity” program to slash the deficit. Following through on that promise, Rajoy ushered through significant government spending cuts and tax increases and has successfully reduced the budget deficit in half in just two years. Unfortunately for the Spanish people, it has come at a heavy price. - More Opinion Headlines
-
AS I SEE IT: Choosing words carefully these days often best policy
