Opinion

For months, the Editorial Board has implored Gov. DeSantis to put a protective mask on the smiley face that he continues to flaunt as Florida’s coronavirus cases reach the stratosphere. He could mandate face masks. He could credibly threaten another lockdown. The number of cases is soaring, but no dice. He’s blamed Hispanic farmworkers. He’s blamed low-income residents. He owes both an apology, for they are the essential workers who let the rest of us stay home.His dereliction has gotten national attention, as most things Florida do. The headlines tell the most infuriating of stories. So, mayb...

Aboard a Trump Train that is hurtling out of control toward its inevitable fate — and which in June 2020 feels more like Agatha Christie’s Orient Express with its warped passenger list of muddled motives and evil intent — the mysterious midnight ouster of Manhattan’s U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman reads as the ultimate “Whydunnit?”Everybody knows WHO wielded the ax late Friday night in a botched, messy political hit job that took nearly 24 hours to complete. That would be Attorney General William Barr, who’s taken on the role of “President Trump’s Roy Cohn” and over-the-top defender with such a...

In New Jersey cities, many thousands of families will soon be homeless, once the governor lifts his moratorium on evictions during the pandemic.Some are already being evicted, illegally. Yet even a decent landlord is in an impossible situation without federal help. And Mitch McConnell is standing in the way.The Senate Majority leader and President Trump have been blocking any more help to states, including as much as $100 billion for tenants and landlords, in rent and utility assistance.Miserly Mitch also pledged not to renew the unemployment benefits that have been helping tens of millions of...

From the beginning a civil war was inevitable.The first seven decades of our history are a story of compromise, accommodation and temporizing, all in the attempt to avert armed conflict as long as possible.The Three-Fifths Compromise, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 eased tensions temporarily. But the conflict between an industrializing, modernizing, free-labor North and an agricultural South that depended on slaves and white supremacy was irresolvable, except, eventually, by war.Hostilities began on Apr. 12, 1861, when confederates opened fi...

It’d be great if racism didn’t exist. If you didn’t have to give your kid an explanation for why a person clutched a bag as a black man walked by. If black families didn’t have to hold multiple versions of “the talk” in hopes that their child doesn’t become the next Michael Brown or George Floyd. But that’s not our current reality, nor has it been across our nation’s entire history.As psychologist Beverly Tatum puts it, anti-blackness is a smog, one we’re breathing in everywhere, knowingly or not.“Cultural racism — the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of Whites ...

Tucked away on an inside page of the Star Tribune last week was a short story noting that global surface temperatures in May were 1.13 degrees above average, topping the previous record for that month set in 2016. Also noted was that for the 12 months just concluded, global temperatures were 1.3 degrees above average, matching the warmest 12-month period ever, set between October 2015 and 2016.It’s possible if the coronavirus pandemic had never happened and if George Floyd were still walking the streets of Minneapolis, this latest earth-is-heating-up story would have gained more prominent medi...

Donald Trump is such a cunning politician. He knows the kumbaya moment taking place in America right now will not last forever.He realizes that this multiracial alliance is fragile, because anything that has to do with race always is. Before George Floyd could be laid to rest last week, cracks already were forming in our cohesive platform.While we were basking in the excitement of white, black and brown people marching in lockstep over Floyd’s killing, Trump was busy looking for fractures.He found two very quickly. First, it was the looters. Now it’s the volatile phrase “defund the police.”Bot...

Minutes before he encountered police on a Minneapolis street, George Floyd was just another flawed human being. To some, he was even less than that because he was black.Nothing about him — not the way he looked or the way he carried himself — offered a clue that he could become one of the biggest social justice symbols of our time. Few would have noticed this large black man, wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt and sweatpants, walking toward them and decided that he was worthy of knowing.In fact, some would have crossed the street to get away from him.But his death transcended his faulty life. ...

Donald Trump is not responsible for America’s racial politics, at least not completely. Racial injustice is America’s original sin and you can’t pin that on the current president. That being said, it’s hard to imagine anyone more ill-equipped to handle the current state of unrest. Ill-equipped may not even be the right term to use. He is completely unequipped to deal with the outpouring of anger being expressed on the streets of our cities. He is incapable of listening to anyone besides himself. He cannot sympathize. He cannot empathize. He cannot lead, he doesn’t want to.Instead, he resorts t...

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — Fired whistleblower physician Dr. Ming Lin, backed by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit Thursday against former employer PeaceHealth, one of its top administrators and a national medical staffing firm, seeking damages and reinstatement after his March dismissal from a Bellingham hospital.Lin, 58, was fired from PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center after publicly protesting what he called inadequate workplace measures to protect hospital personnel and patients from the COVID-19 disease. He became a global cause célèbre among health care workers w...

Don’t know what it is about warm weather that seems, more so than other seasons, to pull always-present racial tensions to the fore — probably nothing, probably just a perception — but recent high-profile events are conglomerating in such a way as to portend a long, hot summer. “Hot” being a metaphor. And not just in Minneapolis, but across the nation.Start with the death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Arbery, 25, was jogging in a suburban neighborhood near his home and was shot dead after being pursued, for the purpose of interrogation, by two white men who told police they thought he was a bur...

Florida’s senior U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio should make the most of his talents as “Trump whisperer.” He could help elevate the country’s stature in the eyes of a disappointed world.This week, Republican leaders tapped Rubio to be acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the most powerful committees in Congress.His predecessor, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, is under investigation for recent suspicious stock transactions after being briefed about the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. He has stepped aside.Rubio, the committee’s most influential and knowledgeable member, is th...

There’s a powerful case to be made that the coronavirus crisis — with its mounting evidence that earlier and more aggressive U.S. intervention in March could have saved thousands of lives — isn’t the first or only time that people have died needlessly because of Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency. For more than two years, civilians in Yemen — where a humanitarian crisis caused by a ceaseless Saudi Arabian military campaign has killed tens of thousands and exposed millions to the risk of starvation and disease — have successfully convinced top Americans in both political parties that it...