This year marks the centenary of the birth of Balto. Who is Balto? He was a sled dog who, in 1925 when he was six years old, played a key role in a heroic rescue effort. Laura DeMarco recounts the events.
The actress has died at the age of 89. In a long career as a stage and screen and TV actor and director, she may be best remembered as part of a terrific ensemble cast in the prime time parody of daytime soap operas called, appropriately enough Soap, that ran from 1977 through 1981. It was utterly hilarious must-see TV until its last season when it succumbed to the disease of shows that run too long when the plots become increasingly absurd even for a parody and the quality of the writing weakens.
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Short and to the point.
The meeting of senator Diane Feinstein where she spoke dismissively and condescendingly to a group of children and their parents who were urging her to sign on to the Green New Deal has reverberated widely, having been viewed more than nine million times. As Aida Chavez and Ryan Grim report, the exchange has had a big impact, forcing Feinstein to change her mind.
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The idea of Medicare For All as a way of creating a pathway to a single-payer universal health care system, that was deemed to be wildly socialistic and unrealistic when first proposed by Bernie Sanders, has now become a platform that any Democratic candidate for president has to pay at least lip service to, because the idea has been embraced by majorities of people.
Now the next step has been reached because actual legislation has been proposed to implement it and this will force people to take an actual stand on it. The crafting of the legislation is led by new congresswoman Premila Jayapal, part of the new breed of progressives who was elected to congress in the 2016 elections. She is a Seattle-based activist no stranger to advancing progressive causes, having served on the Mayoral Advisory Committee that negotiated Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. That measure was harshly attacked by conservatives and the business industry as the death of business in the city, as they would pack up and leave and would thus increase unemployment. That did not happen, even though conservatives seized upon a single flawed study that seemed to support their case before it was repudiated.
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I do not follow carefully all the stories about Donald Trump and the Mueller investigation and its many ramifications because the ratio of mindless speculation to facts is way too high. I tend to wait for the comedy shows to give me some idea of what transpired during those events. Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah oblige with these synopses of the nine hours of the Michael Cohen testimony before Congress.
The way that the US government strips migrant children away from their parents and keeps them in freezing cages for long periods without allowing them to reunite is bad enough. Two children died while in custody. Now comes another report that says that thousands of these children have also been subjected to sexual abuse while in custody.
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The highly acclaimed composer, pianist, and conductor has died at the age of 89. His music career included four Academy Awards for film scores.
Previn, like violinist Yitzhak Perlman, was comfortable in a wide variety of genres and one of my favorite CDs is The Easy Winners where the two of them play Scott Joplin’s music. Here is one track The Entertainer that many will recognize from the soundtrack to that classic film The Sting.
He was also willing to not take himself seriously, as seen in the sketch with the comedy duo Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.
The Bernie Sanders campaign has reached an important goal. When he announced his candidacy for the presidency last week, Sanders set as an ambitious goal to recruit one million volunteers. He has now reached that mark. This is important because we need grassroots efforts to really change people’s minds. Top-down campaigns based on TV, newspapers, and the internet are fine but they tend to only target the existing voter pool and ignore all those who have become disenchanted because they think the system does not work for them. Progressives need to go into every nook and corner of the country to get the message out. He has also received $10 million in donations.
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Among other things, he looks at Ivanka Trump’s deep understanding of what Americans really want in their hearts and the South African resurrection miracle.
