NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

Seniors skeptical of health overhaul

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Kyung M. Song - Nov. 17 (Special Report) - For seniors opposed to an overhaul, much of the fear stems from well-publicized news reports of massive Medicare cuts over a decade. The House bill calls for nearly $500 billion in spending cuts that are designed to keep Medicare solvent longer by reducing fraud, waste and excessive spending. Half the cuts would be to what experts call excessive payments to home-health, skilled-nursing and other institutional health providers.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

A tragic clash of cultures

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - An Iraqi immigrant father runs down his daughter with his car and calls it honor. That is not honor, writes columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. It is an act of appalling cowardice suggestive not simply of religious extremism but of a people in fear of the sexuality and independence of women.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Adding more U.S. troops to the Afghanistan mess is a bad idea

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - We should not underestimate the strength of nationalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly among the 40 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the border there. It's difficult to see why adding 40,000 more U.S. troops to the area will stabilize the situation.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Campaign-spending case will be a big test for Chief Justice Roberts

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By E. J. Dionne - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - The full impact of what the U.S. Supreme Court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Will the court use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Progressives shouldn't confuse a party with a movement

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By David Sirota - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington's major labor, environmental, antiwar and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor — specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

A man with two countries forced to choose the one that will take care of him.

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Keven Drews - Aug. 25 (Opinion) - I SUPPORT President Obama's health-care reform. I am a 36-year-old man who has dual citizenship in the United States and Canada. Born in Washington, I wanted to make my life there, but I was forced to move to British Columbia, Canada, after I got sick six years ago.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Does Group Health hold answers in health-care debate?

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Charles Duhigg - Aug. 23 (Special Report) - even some of Group Health's most ardent admirers warn that replicating the co-op would be difficult — and replicating it quickly practically impossible. Sixty-two years after its founding, Group Health remains one of just two major health cooperatives in the nation. The other is HealthPartners of Bloomington, Minn. Creating health co-ops, after all, could involve building or assembling new organizations from scratch, including management, medical staff, clinics and customers. And that "just doesn't happen overnight," Kreidler said. "Group Health has had 60 years" to gain 600,000 members.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama must win back progressives' trust

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Paul Krugman - Aug. 22 (Opinion) - there's a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that's why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar. Now, politics is the art of the possible. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted. But there's a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Sen. Charles E. Grassley feeds the death-panel smear, warning that reform will "pull the plug on grandma," and two days later the White House declares that it's still committed to working with him. It's hard to avoid the sense that Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can't be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Americans face a spiritual chasm

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Aug. 22 (Opinion) - We frame the differences in terms of "conservative" and "liberal," but these are tired old markers that with overuse and misuse have largely lost whatever meaning they used to have and with it, any ability to explain us to us. This isn't liberal vs. conservative, it is yesterday vs. tomorrow, the stress of profound cultural and demographic changes that will leave none of us as we were.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Freedom from fear: Why the First Amendment trumps the Second Amendment

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By David Sirota - Aug. 22 (Opinion) - We should worry about gun-toting protesters and public political events. The First Amendment ethos guarantees people — whatever their politics — a fundamental right to participate in their democracy without concern for physical retribution. It is the primary amendment because America was first and foremost created not as a gun-owners' haven, but as a place to shelter citizens from oppression.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Thanks to Big Government, the nation is stepping back from the economic abyss

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Paul Krugman - Aug. 11 (Opinion) - We've managed to step back from the abyss and avoid a full replay of the Great Depression, writes columnist Paul Krugman. What saved us this time? The answer lies in the very different role played by the federal government.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Giant vortex of floating trash swirls in Pacific

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Paul Rogers - Aug. 04 (Special Report) - Hoping to learn more about one of the most glaring examples of waste and environmental pollution on Earth, a group of scientists will set sail from San Francisco today to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a massive vortex of floating plastic trash estimated by some researchers to be twice the size of Texas.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Blue Dog Democrats aren't making sense on health-care reform

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Paul Krugman - Jul. 28 (Opinion) - The fate of health-care reform seems to rest in the hands of members of the Blue Dog Coalition. President Barack Obama can't give those Democrats what they want, he adds, because they aren't making sense.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.7 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Boeing 787 may not fly this year

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Dominic Gates - Jul. 22 (News Report) - The structural flaw that delayed the first flight of the 787 Dreamliner is more complex than originally described by the company, and the plane's inaugural takeoff is likely at least four to six months away, say two engineers with knowledge of Boeing's problem.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Congress must assert its right to oversee the intelligence community

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - Jul. 14 (Editorial) - U.S. intelligence operations require secrecy and operational flexibility, but the programs do not operate outside or above the law. All Americans need to know whose authority was invoked by Vice President Cheney when he ordered Congress be denied information the law says it must receive. Congress and the White House can stay focused on the issues before them. These are not political hunting expeditions, but specific grievances grounded in a legal system others actively chose to ignore.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's critics from the right are the judicial radicals

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By E.J. Dionne - Jul. 13 (Opinion) - The argument over the political and philosophical direction of the judiciary that began 40 years ago has reached a critical moment. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, conservatives have finally established a majority on the Supreme Court that is beginning to work its will. ... "They have more or less given up on defeating her, so they are going to engage in a framing exercise," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. "They're trying to define a Republican worldview imported into the judiciary as the judicial norm for the country." The goal, Whitehouse added, "is to define the political ideology" of the new conservative judiciary as "representing the mainstream, and to tarnish any judges who are outside that mark."

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Aim higher, Mr. President

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By David Sirota - Jun. 22 (Opinion) - The Founding Fathers' Constitution didn't replicate monarchy, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal wasn't just tinkering with Hooverism, and Ronald Reagan's revolution didn't merely dismantle the welfare state. All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that's why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama's America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Pity the oppressed conservatives

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Jun. 18 (Opinion) - modern conservatism is defined by an Alice-through-the-looking-glass incoherence: small government except when it is growing larger than ever, fiscal restraint except when we are spending like Michael Jackson in a Disney gift shop, foreign policy pragmatism except when we are trying to transform the Middle East. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if it is no longer defined by principles at all, nor by energy and ideas, but rather, by a limitless ability to feel put upon and slighted. To be a conservative these days is, or so they would have you believe, like being black in Birmingham in 1952. It is to be the victim of media, culture and law that hate you just for being.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Oysters in deep trouble: Is Pacific Ocean's chemistry killing sea life?

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Craig Welch - Jun. 14 (Special Report) - as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific Ocean — icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into seaside hatcheries — may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters. If true, that could mean shifts in ocean chemistry associated with carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels may be impairing sea life faster and more dramatically than expected. And it would vault a key Washington industry to the center of international debate over how to respond to marine changes expected to ripple through and undermine ocean food webs.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Green jobs must mean good jobs that respect labor

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Rick Bender, Tom Chamberlain - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - in March 2007, SolarWorld purchased a facility in Hillsboro, Ore. The company was lured there in part by $43 million in tax breaks and public subsidies. SolarWorld jumped at this opportunity to move its operation to a new facility. But at the same time, they adamantly rejected requests by the Machinist Union to remain neutral in any efforts to unionize the Oregon work force. New employees at the Hillsboro facility were offered much lower pay than the unionized Washington workers, inferior benefits, no job protections and work shifts that varied between 12-hour graveyard and 12-hour day shifts.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Fix public education

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Donald P. Nielsen - May. 07 (Editorial) - In other words, if only 20 percent of our children receive the education needed, then 80 percent of our children will not be adequately prepared for the world in which they will live.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Student-loan overhaul key to Obama's goals

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Shailagh Murray - May. 05 (News Report) - At stake is a plan to expand the Pell Grant Program, making it an entitlement akin to Medicare and Social Security. Key to the effort is a consolidation of student lending that would give the U.S. Department of Education a near monopoly over the practice — a proposal that has mobilized the private loan industry, which lent $55.3 billion to 6.4 million students in the 2007-08 school year.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

How we betrayed the rule of law for the fool's gold of security

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Apr. 03 (Opinion) - People came out of the McCarthy era marveling at how easily fear and paranoia had stampeded us into surrendering principles that are supposed to define us. Mark my words: We will look back on this era the same way.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Supreme Court backs power plants over fish

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Robert Barnes - Apr. 03 (News Report) - The court ruled 6-3 that such cost-benefit decisions are allowed under the Clean Water Act as the agency moved to require more than 500 older power plants to upgrade the ways they draw water to cool machinery. Water-intake systems kill 3.4 billion fish and shellfish each year, the EPA estimated.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Torture did not yield significant leads, officials say

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Peter Finn, Joby Warrick - Mar. 31 (News Report) - In the end, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Zubaydah's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Zubaydah — chiefly names of al-Qaida members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer