It’s going to be relevant quite often in the next four years, so say it with me, media: “Donald Trump lied.” That’s L-I-E-D. As in, knowingly told a falsehood. Today’s edition: Donald Trump lied about keeping Ford from closing a plant in Kentucky and moving it to Mexico. “Just got a call from my friend Bill Ford, Chairman of Ford,” Trump tweeted, continuing that Ford “advised me that he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky—no Mexico.” That is seriously misleading but not yet a lie. This is: 

Ford is keeping its Kentucky plant. But there’s a reason we know Trump had nothing to do with that decision—that’s because Ford never planned to close the plant, and had announced what its real plans were last year:

Ford has never announced plans to move to Mexico either its Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, which produces the Lincoln Navigator, or the Louisville Assembly Plant, which produces the Lincoln MKC and the Ford Escape.

In a statement on Thursday night, following Trump's tweet, the company said it had told Trump it would cancel a plan to shift production of a single model — the MKC — from Kentucky to Mexico. The company last year indicated it would be moving MKC production out of Louisville, though it did not announce where it was going. At the time, union leaders said the shift would not cost any jobs in Kentucky, because Escape production would replace lost MKC production.

So let’s ditch the euphemisms. Once you’ve laid out the facts, established that Trump was wrong about said facts, and established that Trump had every opportunity to know what the facts were, call a lie a lie. A misstatement is when he says that November 28 is Election Day. This is not a misstatement:

A San Francisco high school social studies teacher has written a lesson plan responding to Donald Trump’s election, and her union is circulating it as a resource for other teachers:

"I think a lot of people were lost for words, wondering, 'What do we say? What do we do?' " said [Fakhra] Shah, whose Latino, African American, white, Muslim and LGBTQ students are worried about a surge in hate crimes since the election.

"We're calling him out," she said. "If he's our president, I have the right to hold him accountable and ask him to take a stance that is anti-hate and anti-racist."

The plan encourages teachers to let students express their concerns and to offer them hope and tell students that they can keep fighting. "We can uplift ourselves (and) fight oppression here at school even if we cannot control the rest of the country," she said.

The lesson plan, available here, calls on teachers to “not sidestep the fact that a racist and sexist man has become the president of our country by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base,” and sets objectives of allowing students to express their concerns, gain empowerment and hope, feel safe and respected, and come away with an understanding of both racial and sexist violence and of anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-Islamophobic, and anti-homophobic perspectives.

Donald Trump has pledged a federal hiring freeze, because … uh, corruption. Yeah, that’s it. Reducing federal employment through attrition will reduce corruption, aside from how, as the Washington Post’s Joe Davidson points out:

To the extent there is corruption, it certainly is not the fault of those who have not yet been hired by the government. Yet that’s the main group a freeze would affect.

As Davidson goes on to detail, a hiring freeze also wouldn’t necessarily cut jobs. How could that be? When Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan implemented hiring freezes:

In their drive to fulfill their missions, agencies circumvented the freezes, the GAO found. Some agencies hired part-time and temporary workers. Some used contractors and increased overtime. Some simply hired more people than allowed. Furthermore, with the military, public safety and public health agencies exempted, much of the government would be excluded from Trump’s freeze, meaning that whatever impact he foresees would be sharply restricted. The Defense and Homeland Security departments alone account for almost half of federal civilian employees. There are, of course, thousands of public safety and health staffers in other agencies.

In fact, freezing hiring didn’t just fail to reduce staffing levels and get in the way of the government doing its job, it cost money:

Because the Carter and Reagan freezes led to the loss of 445 IRS revenue agent and auditor staff-years, the amount of tax dollars lost to the government was more than 20 times the amount saved in salary and benefits.

Then again, for today’s Republicans, failing to collect taxes and disrupting government operations are good things. Saying “we won’t hire anyone because corruption and savings” may well be an intentional effort that, if they were being honest, they’d describe as “we don’t want the government to be able to do its job.” 

The few bright spots of Tuesday’s disastrous elections included minimum wage increases in four states, with two of them passing paid sick leave. Massachusetts voters also turned back a measure that would have gutted public education in many of the state’s cities. There were a couple other wins worth mentioning.

In Georgia, voters said no to state takeovers of “failing” public schools, which would have stripped local control and put the schools under a superintendent who reported to the governor. Gov. Nathan Deal had tried to paint the measure as a civil rights issue, but the effort to claim corporate education policy as done in the interest of civil rights seems to be starting to wear thin with voters after years of experience with such policies.

In Virginia, voters rejected an attempt to enshrine an existing anti-union law in the state constitution. That means there’s at least the possibility that, as the state becomes bluer, the law could someday be repealed. That said, Dave Jamieson paints a troubling picture of what the win says:

With the help of state Republicans, business groups around the country have been pushing laws that restrict collective bargaining and deplete the labor movement. A case in point is Wisconsin, where in 2011, Republicans stripped most public sector workers of their bargaining rights. When these conservative groups succeed, unions lose out. When they fail, unions don’t make any gains.

In the case of Virginia, unions there were able to mobilize and defeat a constitutional amendment that posed a threat to them. But all their victory accomplished was preserving the status quo.

And, We Party Patriots notes, the win was countered by losses in South Dakota and Alabama.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren spoke to the AFL-CIO executive council on Thursday afternoon. Her message, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election: If Trump meant what he said when he claimed he’d stand up for working people, she’s on board. If he didn’t mean it, if he’s going to sell out working people, he’s going to have a fight on his hands.

Tuesday night, Trump “pledged he’d be president for all Americans,” she said, and “I sincerely hope he will fulfill that pledge.” If he doesn’t, “that marks Democrats’ first job in this new era. We will stand up to bigotry. No compromises ever on this one.” But, she continued, bigotry and hate weren’t the only reason people voted for him. Many voted for him “out of frustration and anger and out of hope that he would make real change in this country,” and “we should hear that message loud and clear.” 

Warren gave voice to that anger over issues from dark money in campaigns to wages that have stagnated while living costs have risen. “President-elect Trump spoke to these issues. Republican elites hated him for it, but he didn’t care. He did it anyway. He criticized Wall Street’s big money and their dominance in Washington”—and more, including Social Security, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, and the promise to rebuild the economy for working people.

Let me be 100% clear about this. When President-elect Trump wants to take on these issues, when his goal is to increase the economic security of middle-class families, then count me in. I will push aside our differences and I will work with him to achieve that goal.

That said … 

If Trump and the Republican Party try to turn loose the big banks and financial institutions so they can once again gamble with our economy and bring it all crashing down, then we will fight them every step of the way. Every step. 

And rebuilding our economy does not mean crippling our economy and ripping working families apart by rounding up and deporting millions of our coworkers, our friends, and our neighbors, our mothers and our fathers, our sons and our daughters. If Republicans choose that path, we will fight them every step of the way.

In short, Elizabeth Warren is in this fight for American working families. If Donald Trump wants to live up to his campaign rhetoric about supporting those people and strengthening the middle class, Warren will fight for that alongside him. But if it was just campaign talk … Elizabeth Warren is still in this fight for American working families, and that means she will fight Trump. Every step of the way.

It’s become a regular feature of elections in recent years: Even as the federal minimum wage stays stuck at $7.25 an hour, with congressional Republicans refusing to raise it, voters resoundingly choose to raise state and local minimum wages. Four states voted for minimum wage increases on Tuesday: Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington. Paid sick leave also continued to gain momentum.

In Arizona, $12 by 2020 was passed by nearly 60 percent of voters. The first raise, from $8.05 to $10, will come in January. Tipped workers in one Arizona city are also getting some good news. Flagstaff voted to raise the tipped minimum wage to $15 by 2026. The federal tipped minimum wage has been $2.13 an hour since 1991. In Colorado and Maine, the minimum wage will be going to $12 by 2020 as well, with Maine including tipped workers—they’ll get to the full $12 by 2024, up from a current level of $3.75.

And then there’s Washington state, which before the minimum wage-raising movement of the past few years had the highest minimum wage of any state in the country but has gotten left behind even as two of its cities—Seattle and SeaTac—passed $15 minimum wages. On Tuesday, Washington voters said yes to $13.50 by 2020. Their minimum wage was slated to go from $9.47 to $9.53 on January 1, but instead it’ll go to $11.

That’s not all. The same measures that raised the minimum wage in Washington and Arizona also included paid sick leave. They will become the fifth and sixth states—after Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, and Oregon—to require paid sick leave.

This is all good news for millions of workers. And workers will need any good news they can get under President Trump.

In the search for bright spots in Tuesday’s horrible elections, we can look to Massachusetts, where voters resoundingly rejected the attempt to gut the state’s public schools. Though—or even because—Massachusetts has the best public schools in the nation, massive amounts of money flowed into the state from the likes of the Walmart Waltons, pushing a ballot measure that would have lifted an existing cap on the number of new charter schools allowed to open in the state in a year. That would have siphoned millions of dollars from public schools, even threatening bond ratings for Boston and three other cities. Voters were not having it.

Make that: Voters were really not having it. Question 2 was defeated by a 24-point margin, 62 percent to 38 percent. And the map shows just how widespread that opposition was:

Of course, charter backers and their unlimited bank accounts are not necessarily deterred by a loss—Washington state voters rejected charter schools three times before the big money finally won out. But the size of their loss in Massachusetts should give the privatizers pause. And the fight to defeat this measure should be an example for future fights elsewhere.

With Donald Trump having vowed to, on his very first day in office, repeal every executive order President Obama has signed, let’s take a look at some of what that means. Obviously, Obama’s immigration actions are on the chopping block. But Obama has also made a number of moves to make workers’ lives better, which we can also wave good-bye to. 

The orders apply to workers at companies with federal contracts—if a company wants federal money, it might have to live up to a slightly higher standard than otherwise. Obama signed a $10.10 minimum wage for federal contract workers. And an order against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. And an expansion of equal pay protections. And paid sick leave. And a ban on labor law violators getting federal contracts—because, come on, if a company actually breaks the law, it really shouldn’t get federal money. These actions affect—or affected, or would have affected—hundreds of thousands of workers.

Additionally, a rule expanding overtime pay eligibility would give millions of workers either more pay or more time to live their lives.

These are concrete ways Obama bypassed Congress to make workers’ lives better. And they are concrete ways Donald Trump can act to make workers’ lives worse.

This election cycle has offered plenty of chances to watch the New York Times take Republican leaks or opposition research and run them straight, as news. Usually it’s about Hillary Clinton’s email or the Clinton Foundation, but now the Times has committed an act of blatant stenography of talking points from the pro-charter expansion side of the big ballot fight in Massachusetts. We’re talking about actual falsehoods: 

The measure would affect nine communities that have either reached their caps on charter enrollment or have room for only one more charter school: Boston, Chelsea, Everett, Fall River, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, Springfield and Worcester. All have long waiting lists.

It would not affect 96 percent of the state’s school districts ...

That’s … not what the law says, actually. The law allows for up to 12 new charter schools to be opened each year and says that, if there are more than 12 applications for new charter schools, applications to open charters in those nine communities get preference. But if there are 12 or fewer applications per year—which is likely—then new charter schools could open elsewhere. That’s why more than 200 school committees across the state have opposed Question 2. It could affect them. This isn’t an innocent mistake. It’s a sign that the article’s authors, Katharine Q. Seelye and Jess Bidgood, didn’t research the claims they heard from Question 2 backers, and that the rest of the article should be read with that understanding.

Then there’s this: 

Still, one thing is indisputable: The charter schools here [...] have performed well. The urban charter schools, in particular, have produced better academic results than the district schools have.

Better academic results? Indisputable? Oh, really?