TO: Edward P. Crisp, President, Crisp's All-Natural Soups, Inc. (CANS)

FROM: Kay Street, Director, Government Relations, Producers Institute for Safe Soup (PISS)

RE: Harvard School of Public Health study that found human urine containing dangerous levels of bisphenol A (BPA)

The young people now organizing protest marches on nursing homes have a legitimate gripe. Old people are living much too long nowadays and the costs of their prolonged care are likely to bankrupt Generation X. And maybe even Generations Y and Z.

Astutely, the Occupy Nursing Homes (ONH) organizers...

Maybe I'm a big sissy, but the use of "wedge issues" in politics scares the living you-know-what out of me. This is not just because wedge issues are so damnably effective, and it's not just because they are so injurious to causes I hold dear -- which they...

Gays are making giant strides in building public support for same-sex marriage. Last May, the Los Angeles Times reported on five recent national polls showing a surge in support of same-sex marriage, including a Gallup survey that found -- for the first time -- a majority (53 percent)...

Human beings are whizzes at devising new tools. It's what we do best. But, alas, we're not so hot at collaborating politically for the long-term common good. Case in point: the persistent inability of the federal government to grapple with the threat of climate change. This has stumped environmentalists desperately...

We environmentalists have had to stomach a lot of bad political news lately. The federal government's failure to address global warming is distressing enough but even worse is the likelihood that results of the upcoming midterm election will eradicate any hopes that linger for federal action.

It used to...

Resiliency is the key to energy security;
the key to resiliency is decentralized energy production

The Gulf oil spill is yet another grim reminder that our society's reliance on highly complex and centralized energy systems renders us highly vulnerable. In fact, there seems to be a correlation:...

Carolyn Lewis, who served on the national commission that investigated the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear-plant accident, was asked last week by the Wall Street Journal to comment on the Gulf oil spill. "I hear echoes of the earlier disasters because the technology, once again, is monumental and complex," observed...

The near-unanimous opposition of Republicans in Congress to climate change legislation strikes me as inconsistent with the tenets of modern conservatism laid down by Edmund Burke (1729-97), the movement's patron saint.

Burke is the Anglo-Irish politician and writer whose appeal to the right is based largely...