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Nuclear Winter
The Lineup: Week of November 22-28, 2010
In this week’s OtherWords editorial package, Tiffany Williams calls for raising the minimum wage and Lisa Hajjar highlights the recent conviction of Canadian Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr. Get all this and more in your inbox by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do.
Raise the Minimum Wage
When he was campaigning in 2008, President Barack Obama promised to raise the federal minimum wage, declaring “people who work full-time should not live in poverty.” Obama proposed raising it to $9.50 by 2011. That would merely adjust the minimum wage for inflation and restore its 1968 purchasing power.
We Can’t Afford Cheap Meat Anymore
Most Americans view cheap meat as a good thing, but they generally don’t understand who pays the high cost of the policies making it inexpensive. More than 80 percent of the beef, pork and poultry consumed in this country comes from livestock fed and processed by only three meatpacking companies: JBS-Swift, Cargill and Tyson. Through deregulation and antitrust practices, these companies have been allowed to devour smaller companies that both feed and process meat
Getting it Wrong in Guantanamo
I was at Guantánamo Bay prison on Halloween. In a ghoulishly fitting coincidence, that was the same day a former child solider was convicted for war crimes for the first time since the end of World War II. Eight years and one day after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantánamo, his military commission case concluded with a plea-bargained sentence of eight more years.
Audio-Visual Accountability
Political pundits moan that video cameras on the campaign trail stifle candidates from saying much of anything, for fear a gaffe will ruin their careers.
Good-for-Nothing Commission
We have seen the future and it is grim. That glimpse of the road ahead arrived in the form of a preview of the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s report on the kinds of things government has to do (and not do) if we want to avoid economic doom.
The Immorality of ‘America at War’
Are you aware that America has now been at war for nearly a decade? We’ve been fighting, bleeding, and dying in two hellacious, multi-trillion-dollar conflagrations since 2001–and our blood continues to flow, with no end in sight.
The FBI Got its Groove Back
Most likely, you’re too young to remember J. Edgar Hoover. He led the FBI in the ’40s and ’50s. Badly. He was the Establishment’s enforcer. Liberals lived in fear of appearing on his “list.” Mere suspicion of leftist thought could lead to an interrogation and potential job loss. The media and film industries were purged of many supposedly wrong-thinking Americans.
Tortured Evidence
