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Take women, for example. In 2014, women made up 45.5 percent of all union members, up from 33.6 percent in 1984, according to a new report on women in unions from the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
And being a union member can make a big difference for women, raising wages and shrinking the gender wage gap. Keep reading below to see just how stark these differences can be.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times calls Donald Trump an "ignorant blowhard" and simultaneously cuts through one hunk of Republican bullshit in Monday's column—Trump Is Right on Economics:
So Jeb Bush is finally going after Donald Trump. Over the past couple of weeks the man who was supposed to be the front-runner has made a series of attacks on the man who is. Strange to say, however, Mr. Bush hasn’t focused on what’s truly vicious and absurd — viciously absurd? — about Mr. Trump’s platform, his implicit racism and his insistence that he would somehow round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and remove them from our soil.More pundit excerpts can be found below the orange tangle.Instead, Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong. [...]
I’m not saying that everything is great in the U.S. economy, because it isn’t. There’s good reason to believe that we’re still a substantial distance from full employment, and while the number of jobs has grown a lot, wages haven’t. But the economy has nonetheless done far better than should have been possible if conservative orthodoxy had any truth to it. And now Mr. Trump is being accused of heresy for not accepting that failed orthodoxy?
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—'Chickenhawk' goes mainstream:
Terry Neal's latest piece in the Washington Post examines the whole "chickenhawk" debate, and how the term and the chickenhawk arguments are being aired in mainstream publications.
As Instapundit would say, advantage blogosphere.
For months, liberal Web sites and blogs have been buzzing about "chickenhawks" in the Bush administration and among his supporters in Congress. The term, in this instance anyway, refers to hawkish politicians who push war but never actually served in one.
[...]Relegated to the fringes of the political debate for most of the year, this topic — fueled by escalating talk of war with Iraq — has picked up steam in recent weeks, with Newsweek, among others, examining the fissure within the GOP under the headline, "Hawks, Doves and Dubya."
The issue was not picked up by the mainstream press until some prominent GOP politicos began commenting on it.
But a well-written Esquire magazine article from a couple of years ago is worth revisiting. It reduces these back-from-the grave claims to the usual near-death scenario that skeptics like me have to come to expect, once these wondrous tales are put under scrutiny. Join us below as we review why this experience is probably more akin to proof of life than proof of heaven.
The country is reeling from Vester Lee Flanagan's graphic video recording of the moment he shot and killed two journalists, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, during a live TV segment in Moneta, Virginia, on Wednesday morning. While many outlets opted not share the video (including Mic), publications like the New York Daily News chose to use frames from the video on its front page. CNN announced it would be airing the video, but only once an hour.I asked my friends and followers for their thoughts, and quite a conversation ensued. But there was one message that touched me, because I heard the exasperation in the person's prose. I read between the lines and discerned not only what she was saying, but also what she wasn't sure she wanted to say.But as the debate over using the footage continued, one Twitter user succinctly captured the racist double standard that comes with these kinds of decisions:
I watched #EricGarner DIE on the news. I watched #WalterScott DIE on the news. I watched #TamirRice DIE on the news. TF YOU MEAN TOO GRAPHIC?
Keep reading below.
From the the West German side of the border, we primarily watched the East Germans/Soviets, and what they were up to. On the other side of the border, they did watch us, too. But their primary mission was not to keep people out of East Germany—it was to keep people in.
The inner German border will forever be a part of who I am. Two years of my life were spent in its proximity and the rules that went along with it: No armored vehicles within 50 meters of the border; do not point fully automatic weapons across the border; do not converse with East German/Soviet soldiers on patrol; and report anything unusual that you see on or near the border. Never have I lived in an actual police state, but I was close enough to observe one. And it involved a wall.
Keep reading below to learn about the dangers of history repeating itself.
Presidential campaigns were put on notice on Tuesday that the stakes will be higher in this election cycle as Project Veritas Action, a research team that uses undercover investigators, warned that it was stepping up its stalking.There are several problems in that solitary sentence. For starters, it's difficult to call them a "research" team, since they do almost no meaningful research. Next, "undercover investigations" is a bit much since, as we have discussed, what they do is not investigate so much as fabricate. As one example, recall the time O'Keefe and his team attempted to bring Democratic campaign material into a nonprofit Colorado get-out-the-vote group so that he could release footage of the group supposedly "coordinating" with that campaign. That's not an "investigation," that's faking a story outright. There are no mitigating circumstances there, and if the editors of the New York Times or any other paper still abide attaching the label "researcher" or "investigator" or "journalist" to a group that has been caught in such fabrications repeatedly then perhaps readers should be treating the New York Times' own journalism with more skepticism.
Finally, presidential campaigns aren't "on notice" that O'Keefe is stalking them. James O'Keefe's group has an easily looked-up track record: It is funded by conservatives, it is promoted by conservatives, it is staffed by conservatives, and it exclusively targets groups perceived to be election-time enemies of conservatives. There's only one presidential campaign he's stalking, and that's whoever the current Democratic frontrunner is. The Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and-so-on-and-so-on campaigns have not a damn thing to worry about, and you and I and they and the New York Times, I would hope, all know this.
In fact, the word "conservative" does not appear anywhere in the New York Times story. Keep reading for more.
No, that is not a headline from the latest edition of the National Enquirer. Incredibly, that is the title that the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives has selected for a hearing that is scheduled to begin this Wednesday at 10 AM ET. The U.S. Congress can find no fig leaf, no verbiage, nor even any doublespeak to suggest that this hearing is anything other than an opportunity for political grandstanding as they re-open yet another front in the War on Women.
Gee whiz, I wonder what the hearing will find?
Perhaps you need a title like that to distract from the real purpose of the hearing, which is to justify not only defunding Planned Parenthood, but completely gutting Title X and leaving millions of women without access to reproductive health care.
Or perhaps this is just a bone that House Speaker John Boehner has thrown to the rabid forced-birthers and their supporters in the Republican base. He knows that shutting down the government once again—this time over women's health—is not a good idea, but is facing yet another challenge from his troublesome ultra-conservative contingent. So earlier this summer he called for hearings. This means that, in addition to the Judiciary Committee, we can look forward to hearings from the Energy and Commerce, and Oversight and Government Reform committees. Yipee. Sadly, they have not released any bombastic titles yet.
Read on for more.
In an op-ed for The Grio, Theodore R. Johnson wrote about how Labor Day was born:
Labor Day was nationally established after the Pullman Strike of 1894 when President Grover Cleveland sought to win political points by honoring dissatisfied railroad workers. This strike did not include porters or conductors on trains, but for the black porters, racism fueled part of the workers’ dissatisfaction, and was never addressed. Pullman porters were black men who worked in the trains’ cars attending to their mostly white passengers, performing such tasks as shining shoes, carrying bags, and janitorial services. During this period, this profession was the largest employer of blacks in the nation and constituted a significant portion of the Pullman company’s workforce, yet blacks were not allowed to join the railroad worker’s union.Keep reading below for more of the history, and some discussion.Being excluded from the right to even fight for fair work and wages, the Pullman porters formed their own union called the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, the first black union, and A. Philip Randolph was its first president. That name should sound familiar: the first planned March on Washington was Randolph’s brainchild. Set to take place in the 1940s, this demonstration was called off weeks before its kick-off date because President Roosevelt met with Randolph and other civil rights leaders in 1941, and signed an order barring racial discrimination in the federal defense industry. Roosevelt did so to stop the march from happening.
Leonard Pitts on the difference between religious liberty and simple intolerance.
[Kim] Davis... made international headlines for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She had, should it need saying, not a legal leg to stand on, the Supreme Court having ruled in June that states may not bar such couples from marrying. On Thursday, Davis was jailed for contempt. The thrice-divorced clerk had said she was acting upon “God’s authority” and fighting for “religious liberty.”As usual, Pitts does an excellent job of slicing away the weasel words and coming to the core of the issue.The political right has long had a genius for wrapping noxious notions in code that sounds benign and even noble. The “Patriot Act,” “family values,” and “right to work.” are fruits of that genius. “Religious liberty” is poised to become their latest masterpiece, the “states’ rights” of the battle for a more homophobic America. ...
Of course, like all good code, this one hides its true meaning in the banality of its words. ... “religious liberty” as defined by Davis and her supporters is about what happens in the wide world beyond those parameters, about whether there exists a right to deny ordinary, customary service and claim a religious basis for doing so. And there does not.
Who would welcome a future where you couldn’t just enter a place and expect service but, rather, must read the signs to determine if it caters to people of your sexual orientation, marital status, religion or race?The "religious liberty" that Davis and her ilk seek is nothing more than the permission to be be prejudiced – a spiritual "get out of treating people fairly" card. And that's something we must not issue.
Now come on in. I picked up some donuts on the way over, and there's coffee brewing...
This week, President Barack Hussein Obama circumvented (the one true) God's authority by changing the name of Mt. McKinley to Denali—the Kenyan word for "black power."
By renaming the mountain (America's tallest), Obama had, for all intents and purposes, assassinated President McKinley (again).
And then, as if to add insult to injury, he (literally) danced on McKinley's grave.
To understand Obama's motivation, one need look no further than the Koran, and his anti-colonial upbringing.
When viewed in that context, clearly, this move was just the latest in a disturbing pattern of dictatorial actions designed to turn America into an Islamic caliphate.
But I've got news for Obama—this aggression will not stand, man!
