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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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By Maya King @ Politico.com, Dec. 25
Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer have hit the $200 million mark combined, and Bloomberg, at least, is just getting started.
Anne Lee would never have considered turning to food stamps and food pantries in 2013, when she and her husband took over the family farm. But that was before years of falling milk prices and the effects of President Trump's trade wars.
By Annie Gowen @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 26
BERKSHIRE, N.Y. — The grocery list took Anne Lee hours to make, an exercise in her increasingly desperate effort to feed her family of seven. [....]
When Anne and her husband, Andy, took over his parents’ 305-acre dairy farm in 2013, they made a good living. But years of falling milk prices, complicated by President Trump’s trade wars, have left the couple nearly $200,000 in debt.
Farmers around the country are struggling to pay for basics like groceries and electricity as farm bankruptcies rise and farm debt hits a record high. Calls from farmers in financial crisis to state mediators have soared by 57 percent since 2015.
“We’re supposed to be feeding the world, and we can’t even put food on our own table,” Anne said. She has had less and less money for groceries each month, until one day in October when there was hardly any food in the house, and she started to investigate options she never would have considered before, like food stamps and food pantries [....]
Opinion by Rob Manuel @ TheGuardian.com, Dec. 26
I set up a Google form as a safe place for people to let rip. But it’s given me disturbing new insights into humanity in all its filth
First Big Pharma fled the field, and now start-ups are going belly up, threatening to stifle the development of new drugs.
By Andrew Jacobs @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 25
At a time when germs are growing more resistant to common antibiotics, many companies that are developing new versions of the drugs are hemorrhaging money and going out of business, gravely undermining efforts to contain the spread of deadly, drug-resistant bacteria [....]
[....] The problem is straightforward: The companies that have invested billions to develop the drugs have not found a way to make money selling them. Most antibiotics are prescribed for just days or weeks — unlike medicines for chronic conditions like diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis that have been blockbusters — and many hospitals have been unwilling to pay high prices for the new therapies. Political gridlock in Congress has thwarted legislative efforts to address the problem [....]
When the story catches Ha'aretz's attention, it's not local anymore--
By Taylor Telford @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 23
All 50 Cent’s son wanted for Christmas was an entire Toys R Us store. He got it.
The rapper, whose real name is Curtis James Jackson III, surprised his 7-year-old son Sire with a personal shopping spree at the first reopened Toys R Us store in Paramus, N.J. The whole shebang cost $100,000, E! News reported [....]
By Jennifer Steinhauer @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 24
WASHINGTON — The high costs of health care are a driving force animating House Democrats in the swing districts that will decide control of Congress next year, with the electoral consequences of their votes to impeach President Trump unclear and a court ruling that left the fate of the Affordable Care Act in limbo.
From the suburbs of Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and Richmond, Va., to East Lansing, Mich., and Southern California, first-term Democrats see the worries about health care that secured their 2018 elections playing out again in 2020, and they are eager to run toward them.
“I have done 15 town halls in my district this year and the top issue I have talked about is lowering prescription drug costs,” said Representative Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, who has made addressing health care costs the central point of his legislative agenda and his re-election campaign. “The cost side of things is something people see on a daily basis. It’s something tangible that they understand is a problem.”
The House majority in 2020 will be decided in roughly two dozen districts like Mr. Kim’s in south central New Jersey, where Republican voters outnumber Democrats, but where a Democrat nonetheless picked off a Republican incumbent in 2018. Democrats hope the debate over rising health care costs will give them a decisive advantage, especially in suburban districts where Mr. Trump, who has failed to deliver on his promises to lower drug prices, remains unpopular [....]