As of Wednesday morning, there’s a lot we don’t know about specific election outcomes. But one thing we do know is that the confident predictions of a huge Republican wave were flatly wrong, and there should be a lot of soul-searching among the pundits and reporters and, frankly, Democratic politicians and operatives who made those predictions.
Republicans were ready. This was their year. They were going to sweep to control of Congress and put election deniers in at every level of government to ensure that Democrats couldn’t win—or couldn’t have their wins counted—in 2024 and beyond.
“I got knocked down but I got back up,” Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman tweeted last month, referring to the stroke that took him off the campaign trail for months.
Things are wild over at Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform. The company is laying off up to half of its workforce, which would amount to around 3,700 people. As layoffs started, former Twitter employees wasted no time filing a class action lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court. Meanwhile, Musk continues to troll and whine all over the platform he is rapidly tanking.
Things are wild over at Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform. The company is laying off up to half of its workforce, which would amount to around 3,700 people. As layoffs started, former Twitter employees wasted no time filing a class action lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court. Meanwhile, Musk continues to troll and whine all over the platform he is rapidly tanking.
Emily Oster wants a pandemic amnesty. We should all forgive each other for the mistaken positions we’ve taken about how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, writes the Brown University economist who used her considerable platform to churn out teacher-blaming hot takes funded by the likes of Peter Thiel and the Walton Family Foundation.
Starbucks and Amazon are experimenting with a joint venture: combined Starbucks/Amazon stores. And the workers at the second such store to open are seeking to unionize.
“We’re unionizing at this Starbucks because we are doing Amazon work for Starbucks pay and we’re not given the proper resources to manage a store of this type in such a high volume area,” a worker said in a statement.
UPDATE: Friday, Oct 28, 2022 · 10:19:51 PM +00:00
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Barbara Morrill
Of course.
asked by Greta Van Susteren if he wants a “do over” for his comments callously attacking Nancy Pelosi today, Glenn Youngkin refuses to apologize pic.twitter.
Teachers in Haverhill, Massachusetts, went on strike this week, defying a state law banning teachers and other public sector workers from striking, and incurring significant fines. Union leaders said the school committee had agreed earlier in the week to pay increases, but student safety provisions were a sticking point.
Former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine on Friday morning, months after a jury took less than three hours to find him guilty of two charges of criminal contempt of Congress—Willful Failure to Appear for Testimony, and Willful Failure to Provide Records—for his refusal to comply with subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee. Bannon’s sentence is technically two four-month sentences to be served concurrently.
It’s no surprise to hear someone in the U.S. say they’re living paycheck to paycheck. More than half of Americans do, by some measures. It’s a little more surprising to hear someone who earns well into six figures say they’re living paycheck to paycheck—but get used to hearing that, too.
Amazon seems to be pushing toward a future in which every American has worked for the company … and hated it. According to leaked documents obtained by Engadget, attrition is costing Amazon $8 billion a year. That’s not just warehouse workers—people at every level, up to vice presidents, leave Amazon in staggering numbers.
Owners of restaurants, coffee shops, and the like are often at the front of the line to complain about how Nobody Wants To Work These Days. No doubt coincidentally, they often provide some of the worst examples of why nobody wants to work for them. And this one is spectacular.
Boston-area journalist Deanna Schwartz started to apply to work at her local coffee shop, Phinista.
The passive-aggressive sign about how hard it is to be a business expected to treat workers with basic decency is an increasingly common genre, or at least one getting a new audience thanks to social media. A Sizzler in Murrieta, California, has dived in with an entry that’s drawn well over a thousand comments on Reddit.
“SURCHARGE: In support of the California Minimum Wage increase, a 3.
Republicans and the right-wing media are in full swing with a tactic to powerfully bind their followers to them and to each other through a sense that only they are reasonable and the rest of the world is spinning out of control.
More than two years into the pandemic (still not over, President Biden!), there have been nearly 100 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States. In the early part of the pandemic, some workers benefited from a first-ever federal paid sick leave law, and a growing number of states require paid sick leave for many workers. But many workers have had to face COVID-19 with no paid sick time, and as usual, the burden falls most heavily on the workers who already have the least.
More than two years into the pandemic (still not over, President Biden!), there have been nearly 100 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States. In the early part of the pandemic, some workers benefited from a first-ever federal paid sick leave law, and a growing number of states require paid sick leave for many workers. But many workers have had to face COVID-19 with no paid sick time, and as usual, the burden falls most heavily on the workers who already have the least.
Secretaries of state are almost always the top elections administrators in their states, giving them a crucial role in upholding the basic tenets of democracy across the United States. That hasn’t exactly been a secret before this year, and Republicans in those roles have repeatedly made it more difficult to vote or purged voter registrations. Abuse of power has been frequent.
The most common way other Senate Republicans are trying to dodge questions on Sen. Lindsey Graham’s national abortion ban bill is to claim they think abortion is a states’ rights issue. But voters should take those claims as seriously as Graham’s own insistence just last month that he thought abortion was a states’ rights issue.
That Republicans want to endlessly relitigate the decisions made in 2020 and 2021 about in-person schooling is not surprising—they think it’s a culture war issue to their advantage. But it’s not just Republicans.
Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday asked Judge Aileen Cannon to continue blocking the Justice Department from reviewing the classified documents the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s lawyers’ filing is predictably filled with errors of fact and logic and law, but Cannon, a Trump appointee, has already shown that she doesn’t really care about that—she’s going to rule as she wants, regardless of the facts of the matter.
While a few baseball players make headline-grabbing amounts of money, 40% of MLB players make the league minimum of $570,000 during careers that average just four years, and during which many spend significant chunks of time in the minor leagues, Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier reported earlier in the year,L during the MLB’s lockout of players. And in the minor leagues? Most players earn less than $14,000 per season.
Now, minor league players are moving to unionize.
Abortion rights will be on the Michigan ballot in November thanks to hundreds of thousands of voter signatures and a decision from the state Supreme Court … and Republican gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon is desperately trying to turn that into a positive for herself.
Colorado Republican Senate nominee Joe O’Dea hasn’t drawn the attention of some of his counterparts in other states, but he’s still a Republican in the year 2022, and that means he has to answer questions about abortion rights—and Donald Trump. He’s not doing a great job with either, and local TV news reporter Kyle Clark pinned him to the wall on it, despite his best efforts to wriggle away.
The National Labor Relations Board has issued yet another complaint against Starbucks for breaking labor laws as it attempts to break its workers’ will to organize and fight for better working conditions and more respect in the workplace.
This is far from the first NLRB charge against Starbucks, with many focusing on the company’s pattern of obvious retaliatory firings of union activists.
Blake Masters is feeling the heat on abortion. The Arizona Republican Senate nominee is frantically backing away from his very well-documented positions and trying to portray Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly as the extreme one.
Masters has dramatically scrubbed his campaign website’s abortion policy page, as if someone wasn’t going to be right there with screenshots of the stuff he took out. NBC News has the goods.
President Joe Biden finally announced his student debt relief plan on Wednesday, and it exceeds the expectations of recent reports on his thinking. Biden will cancel up to $10,000 in debt for all student borrowers with incomes under $125,000 ($250,000 for married couples). That number had been widely reported. But in addition, Biden is cancelling up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients at the same income levels.
Republicans didn’t even wait for President Joe Biden to announce up to $20,000 in student debt relief before they started screeching about how terrible it would be for people who don’t have student debt and people who already paid off their student debt. The screeching has been going on for as long as debt cancellation has been discussed, but it reached a fever pitch as Biden’s announcement approached.
Teachers have earned less than other workers with the same education levels for decades—but it’s getting worse. “On average, teachers earned just 76.5 cents on the dollar compared with what similar college graduates earned working in other professions—and much less than the relative 93.9 cents on the dollar that teachers earned in 1996,” the Economic Policy Institute reports.
Tucker Carlson was on vacation last week as Republican disinformation about the IRS really took off, but on Monday, he made up for lost time.
To recap, Republicans have been falsely claiming that the Biden administration planned, using funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, to hire 87,000 IRS “agents.