Word: washington
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...farms in your district?" In Washington, Representative Dennis Moore, a six-term Democrat, fields that question all the time. People see that he's from Kansas and they jump to certain conclusions. But Moore's district is USDA-prime suburbia, more John Updike than L. Frank Baum, mile after mile of trim lawns, Panera Breads, Best Buys and carpooling parents. "What we grow," Moore likes to answer, "is a lot of small business...
...president's deadline is more vague. "By the end of this year," Obama said after Reid's announcement, adding, "I want it done by this fall." But in Washington there is considerable worry that a month-long recess in the company of constituents worried about trillion-dollar deficits could sap whatever momentum remains for sweeping reform. Obama warned legislators not to lose their steel. "Sometimes delays in Washington occur when people just don't want to do anything that they think might be controversial. You know what? That's not how America has made progress in the past...
...Democrats who must worry about party splits. If a health-care compromise isn't reached in August - an increasingly likely possibility - then the first significant setback for the new Administration will have come from the inside, not from the opposition. An age-old truth reasserts itself in Washington: The only thing harder than building a majority is holding one together...
Roosevelt rode back into office in part on a promise to seek a constitutional way of protecting workers; in 1923, the Supreme Court had struck down a Washington, D.C., minimum-wage law, finding it impeded a worker's right to set his own price for his labor. The first federal minimum-wage law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, with a 25-cent-per-hour wage floor and a 44-hour workweek ceiling for most employees. (It also banned child labor.) Outside of Social Security, said Roosevelt, the law was "the most far-sighted program for the benefit...
...minimum wage in real dollar terms has risen and fallen on political tides, peaking in 1968 when an hour's pay bought nearly 5 gal. (19 L) of gas. By 2006, it paid for less than 2 gal. (8 L); meanwhile, some states raised their own standards (Washington mandates $8.55 an hour). Thirty-one states will have to increase their minimum wages as a result of the July 24 increase, while 19 states and Washington, D.C. already had a minimum wage of $7.25 or higher...