I’d like to resolve, like Susan Mernit, that I’ll blog every day this year. I doubt that I’ll make it – but I’m going to try. And maybe re-make the resolution on the first of every month.
News Day
Let Them Eat Cake
The Trump administration is cutting food stamps—now formally known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). They couldn’t get Congress to do it, so they are going the executive route, with three new regulations that will take food stamps away from more than three million people, and cut the benefits of many who remain eligible.
Thinking About Veterans
U.S. Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay’s essay in the New York Times comes right on time for Veterans’ Day. His profiles of two Iraqi translators who served with the Marines show the way that the United States is leaving behind people who put their lives and families at risk in the service of this […]
Today: St. Paul Elections and Water News
St. Paul elections are coming up on Tuesday. In an off-off-year election like this one, turnout is usually low, making every vote count even more. The entire city council and four school board seats are on the ballot, as well as the all-important trash collection question.
Blueprint for Smart Justice
The ACLU just published a 50-state Blueprint for Smart Justice, with state-specific recommendations for reducing state prison populations by at least half. It’s time and past time—Minnesota’s prison population grew by a stunning 51 percent from 2000 to 2016. Prisons were already over-full in 2000. The total growth in state imprisonment quintupled between 1980 and […]
Endangered-species protection should be strengthened, not gutted
I saw an eagle on Sunday, high above the Mississippi in St. Paul, swooping and soaring over the river under a bright blue sky. When I was in junior high school, back in the early 1960s, bald eagles were an endangered species. Growing up on a farm near Litchfield, I saw kingfishers and orioles, mourning […]
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Mary Turck
- Mary Turck is a writer, editor, and blogger. She is also the former editor of theTC Daily Planet and of the award-winning Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG and a recovering attorney.
Mary Turck