Democrats' Impeachment Divide Tests Pelosi
Updated at 4:19 p.m. ET House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will convene a meeting Wednesday morning to hear from Democrats on whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Pelosi, a public skeptic of impeachment, is confronting a rising tide of support for it among rank-and-file House Democrats and members of her own leadership team. Democrats are outraged by the Trump administration's ongoing effort to stymie congressional oversight into the president, his...
JPR Live Sessions Presented By Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Frances Cone
Timing matters. With or without you the train is departing; the second hand doesn’t really stop when you won’t wind your watch; inspiration strikes in an instant but its reckoning can take an eternity. In the world of music, the concept of time doesn’t just pertain to cues to come in or a 4/4 beat - it is also equally about patience and the space an artist must allow themselves to create.
What Broke PERS, And What Might Fix It
The name is only four letters long, but the issues with it can take volumes to explain. PERS, Oregon's Public Employee Retirement System , has billions of dollars on hand to pay to retired public workers. The trouble is that there's a gap between what it will need to pay workers in the future, and the projections for its income. The gap is more than $26 Billion, and closing the gap requires ever-larger payments into the system by state and local governments. Former Oregon AFL-CIO president Tim Nesbitt and his former boss, Governor Ted Kulongoski, have proposed a pair of ballot measures to bring PERS into line. Their organization is PERS Solutions for Public Services .
Oregon Considers Changing The Way Mentally Ill People Are Committed
Last year, Don Bagliens 19-year-old son experienced a psychotic break. It was a Sunday afternoon. He picked up the family picnic and threw it over the fence. Then he started turning on every faucet in the house, dragging furniture outside and howling. By the time the evening rolled around, he was convinced that his air conditioner unit had some kind of poison in it and was releasing some kind of toxic chemical that was going to kill him. So he unplugged it and he was going to roll it down the...
California Teachers Pay For Their Own Substitutes During Extended Sick Leave
A 40-year-old California law requiring public school teachers on extended sick leave to pay for their own substitute teachers is under scrutiny by some state lawmakers after NPR member station KQED reported on the practice. KQED found that a San Francisco Unified elementary school teacher had to pay the cost of her own substitute — amounting to nearly half of her paycheck — while she underwent extended cancer treatment. Since the story published, more public school teachers have reached out...
