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Commentary: The hard work of being poor
As Congress advances a COVID-19 relief package that calls for a $15 national minimum wage by 2025, I am aware that some people think that being poor is a personal choice, or something that reflects personal failings. It isn’t and it doesn’t. I’m a coal miner’s daughter — no one has to teach me about hard work. My four siblings and I grew up in a West Virginia coal camp. Hard-working people were the foundation of our lives, even as the air we breathed was polluted with coal dust. The mines offered good work for a while, but they took a terrible toll. Our communities and water were contaminated....
Tribune News Service
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NBC pulls ‘Nurses’ episode over accusations of anti-Semitism
An episode of NBC’s Canadian import “Nurses” has quietly disappeared from its digital platforms after multiple national Jewish organizations called out its anti-Semitic tropes. The episode, which aired Feb. 9, included a scene in which a young Orthodox Jewish patient, Israel, finds out he’ll need a bone graft for his injured leg if he ever wants to play basketball again. “You want to put a dead leg inside of me?” Israel asks. “A dead goyim leg — from anyone,” his father responds, using the Hebrew word for a non-Jewish person. “An Arab, a woman.” Israel eventually refuses the surgery, saying Go...
New York Daily News
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Editorial: Buckley would weep at the CPAC circus coming to Orlando
If the political descendants of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan and Antonin Scalia were coming to town, that would be exciting. But that’s not what CPAC is bringing to Orlando, Florida, starting Thursday. We’re getting a new breed of 21st century conservatives, who, instead of focusing on economic policy and foreign affairs, obsess over fables of stolen elections and delusions of victimhood. The four-day Conservative Political Action Conference at the Hyatt Regency on International Drive features seven separate sessions — seven — devoted to elections. The titles include, “Protecting Elec...
Orlando Sentinel
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Editorial: Collapse with a capitol C: The failure of coordination before the Jan. 6 insurrection was even greater than previously known
Tuesday, hearings in the Capitol on last month’s storming of the Capitol revealed two depressing truths: The breakdown of communication that rendered law enforcement utterly unprepared for the siege was worse than previously known, and Donald Trump apologists engaged in instant revisionism continue to go to great lengths to minimize the severity of what occurred. As became known shortly after the Jan. 6 assault, an FBI report circulated on the eve of the attack. Based on an analysis of online activity, it said extremists were preparing to commit violence and wage “war.” Turns out, according to...
New York Daily News
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Editorial: Trumped, finally: The Supreme Court says Trump can’t stop his accountant from complying with a grand jury subpoena
When District Attorney Cy Vance and the 23 Manhattanites comprising his grand jury probing the possible criminality of Donald Trump served a binding legal subpoena for his financial records, the documents should have been surrendered immediately. Instead, the standard legal demand ran up against an obstinate president asserting boundless executive power. That was almost exactly 18 months ago. Trump, despite being president at the time, had no right to have his accounting firm, Mazars, withhold the returns and other files. But he tried, suing in federal court and losing and losing and losing an...
New York Daily News
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Editorial: Raise the wage: The federal earnings floor is embarrassingly low; fix it already
President Joe Biden was right when he said on his TV town hall last week that the federal minimum wage, frozen at $7.25 an hour for more than a decade, must increase. But Biden fumbled some of his numbers, and his sloppiness helps prove that there’s nothing magical about his target of a $15 national floor in four years. The key is steady progress toward a living wage for all. Biden’s words: “For example, if it went — if we gradually increased it — when we indexed it at $7.20, if we kept it indexed by — to inflation, people would be making 20 bucks an hour right now.” Actually, taking $7.25 in ...
New York Daily News
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Jay Ambrose: Don’t play softball with Iran
President Joe Biden says he’s ready to resuscitate the Iran deal former President Barack Obama disastrously gave us if Iran quits its advanced uranium enrichment, the kind that could ultimately deliver nuclear bombs. Bullying Iran says in reply that it will do no such thing unless Biden first ends the sanctions former President Donald Trump inflicted through getting out of the deal. Biden has said no, he won’t lift the sanctions first, and shouldn’t. He should instead make them tougher by trying to get the other signatories still in the deal to add their own sanctions despite the profitable lo...
Tribune News Service
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John M. Crisp: Trump’s impeachment trial was worth the trouble
Before ex-President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, many Americans considered the same question: Why bother? Nearly everyone knew the trial would result in an acquittal. They were correct. But I’m glad that the hasty Republican attempt to scuttle the trial on jurisdictional grounds before it began was quashed. I watched every moment, and it was 30 hours well spent. Here’s what I learned: First, the highly detailed case presented by the House managers makes clear that the attack on the Capitol was much more dangerous than was understood in the several days after Jan. 6. I was watching when Vi...
Tribune News Service
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Commentary: Rush Limbaugh’s real legacy: He planted the seed from which Fox News, and Donald Trump, grew
Rush Limbaugh died last week. His impact on our nation’s discourse and polity will long outlive him. Many Americans had been puzzled when President Donald Trump bestowed upon Limbaugh our nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After all, previous honorees include Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King and the crew of Apollo 13. I, however, was not surprised. Because without Limbaugh, there is no (former) President Trump. Rush was the first broadcaster to take full advantage of the FCC’s little-noticed 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Since its adoption in 1949, the ...
New York Daily News
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Editorial: While you're freezing in your Texas home, Sen. Ted Cruz took off for Cancun. Really
When he burst onto the scene in 2012, Ted Cruz pulled a remarkable political feat. He defeated a well-known three-term lieutenant governor and other top contenders to win Kay Bailey Hutchison’s Senate seat, despite a low-political profile heading into the race. Cruz understood before his rivals that the tea party sentiment and desire for a “fighter” had firmly taken hold among staunch Texas Republicans. His political instincts carried him to an upset and then almost to the GOP presidential nomination four years later, until he ran into an even bigger disrupter, Donald Trump. Cruz’s instincts —...
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
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