‘Normalizing Delcy Rodríguez won’t fix Venezuela’
Juan Pablo Spinetto at Bloomberg
“Given that nobody elected” Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez to the “job she’s performing, and that the constitutional rules governing Venezuela’s presidential vacuum have long been ignored, dictator sounds about right,” says Juan Pablo Spinetto. But “dictators tend to do as they please,” while “Delcy, by contrast, appears to be taking all her cues from Trump.” And “no amount of hard-power realpolitik, oil thirst, business ambition and perverse public relations can turn a dictator-puppet-regent into a legitimate leader.”
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‘Despite fewer deaths, the US is actually seeing more overdoses’
Madeline Hilliard and Jim Crotty at The Hill
An “abrupt, substantial decline in overdose deaths is an extraordinary public health achievement,” say Madeline Hilliard and Jim Crotty. But the “drop in deaths only tells part of the story.” As “overdose deaths have declined, nonfatal overdoses — when someone survives the emergency of too much substance shutting their body down — have actually increased.” Even “when survived, overdoses are often life-altering events with lasting impacts.” Preventing “these outcomes starts long before someone experiences an overdose.”
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‘We need to protect college sports from Ted Cruz’
Elie Mystal at The Nation
Sen. Ted Cruz’s Protect College Sports Act is “being sold mainly as a response to upheaval caused, more or less, by colleges and universities finally being forced to pay student-athletes some portion of the billions of dollars they generate,” says Elie Mystal. You “don’t need to follow or care about college football to know that anything Ted Cruz is a champion of is probably a very bad thing.” The legislation is “one of the most anti-labor bills proposed by this Congress.”
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‘If you want to win working-class votes, run on working-class issues’
Mindy Isser at In These Times
If liberals are “serious about winning elections across the country, working-class voters must be at the center of this project,” says Mindy Isser. But “too many campaigns don’t make these voters’ priorities their focus.” For people “concerned about climate change, abortion rights, immigrants’ rights and protecting democracy, our most important task is to learn to talk across the diploma divide, or else we may have very little hope of making progress on our goals.”
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