Over the past week, as he was apparently infected by and developed symptoms of COVID-19, Donald Trump has been unmasked and in close quarters with many important people and people wealthy enough to attend his fundraisers. We have lists of those people. But they’re not the only people his reckless behavior may have endangered.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, have tested negative for COVID-19, his campaign announced Friday. The Bidens had the PCR test, which can detect the presence of an antigen, meaning it can be effective earlier than antibody tests.
Well, that was an unholy mess. Donald Trump came in planning to do nothing but try to drag Joe Biden down to his level and turn everyone watching off of voting at all, and he worked harder at it than he’s probably worked at anything in the last four years.
Moderator Chris Wallace fought to get Trump under control, but couldn’t succeed for more than about two minutes at a time in the face of Trump’s relentless barrage of lies, insults, and petulance.
QAnon is a grotesque conspiracy theory, bizarre and creepy even by the standards of conspiracy theories. Witness this single line from a Georgia woman, who said QAnon is “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out.”
But there’s the thing: That Georgia woman is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is on track to be a member of the House of Representatives.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is the latest top Trump administration official under investigation for violating the Hatch Act, the ethics law that prohibits political activity by federal employees in their official capacity. DeVos used a Fox News appearance to attack former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and the Education Department promoted the appearance on its YouTube channel and via an email list.
Referring to the “very sad news” of Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden honored Ginsburg’s legacy in brief remarks Friday night—and made clear that the Senate should not rush to confirm Donald Trump’s choice of a replacement for her.
Teachers in some areas have said they might go on strike rather than going back to in-person teaching if they felt it would be unsafe—and a majority of Americans would support them, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll found. A third of people said they would strongly support teachers, and another 22% said they would somewhat support teachers.
In 2016, Pennsylvania special education teacher Jane Scilovati voted for Donald Trump, because “I thought he was going to shake up the system.” In 2020, she’s so committed to not voting for Trump that she appears in an American Federation of Teachers ad against Trump.
The AFT is putting six figures into a digital ad campaign featuring the ad.
So, no. This Labor Day weekend will not be the traditional end-of-summer big backyard party. At least, not if you’re trying to keep coronavirus from spreading. But if you’re having a scaled-down picnic or grilling session, put some union-made in the U.S. foods and drinks on your table. And don’t forget the sunscreen and games.
If that’s not your speed, you might want to hold an at-home labor film festival.
“Fires are burning and we have a president who fans the flames rather than fighting the flames,” Joe Biden said in a speech on recent violence, from the police shooting of Jacob Blake and the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, to the protests following it, to counterprotests from armed far-right groups.
As strikes go, there weren’t a large number of workers involved in the most consequential work stoppages of the past week. And professional athletes are often framed as something other than real workers. But make no mistake, when the players on the Milwaukee Bucks said they weren’t playing their playoff game on Wednesday in protest over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, that was a wildcat strike, and it turned into a seriously successful one.
Donald Trump needs white working-class voters. Much of the Republican National Convention (RNC) was aimed at white working-class people who may not have voted in recent elections but are seen as gettable for Trump this November—if he can turn them out. But the white working class isn’t monolithic, either, and there are warning signs for Trump among the younger members of the demographic.
After restricting the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to two hours a night of coverage, the cable news networks already folded and gave the Republican National Convention (RNC) added air time for a typical, lie-filled Donald Trump rant.
As Postmaster General Louis DeJoy slows down mail delivery to help Donald Trump accomplish his goal of undermining mail-in voting and to continue the decades-long Republican war on the U.S. Postal Service, postal workers have sounded the alarm. “You don’t just go and tell management, ‘Hey, I saw that. That’s not allowed,’ ” Scott Adams, an American Postal Workers Union local president in Maine told the Portland Press-Herald’s Bill Nemitz.
What do you do if you really want schools open in person but it’s going to be impossible to keep staffing them if teachers have to quarantine every time they’re exposed to COVID-19? If you’re Donald Trump, you certainly don’t reassess the push to have schools open in person. No, you declare that teachers shouldn’t quarantine after COVID-19 exposure.
Well, folks, this is it. The last night of a 2020 political convention not dedicated to hate and divisiveness, and the moment former Vice President Joe Biden formally accepts the Democratic nomination for president.
The main hour of programming begins at 10 PM ET. You can watch the DNC online here.
Kamala Harris officially became the Democratic vice presidential nominee on Wednesday night, and stepped up to the occasion with the speech of her life—despite the lack of a live audience and having to follow former President Barack Obama giving perhaps the speech of his life.
Harris emphasized both sides of her family, saying her mother “raised us to be strong, proud Black women and she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage.
Night three of the Democratic National Convention brings some serious star power, with former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (lest we forget, the winner of the popular vote in 2016), and Sen. Kamala Harris, the current vice presidential nominee. At this point we’re also coming to expect some surprises enabled by the remote format.
The main hour of programming begins at 10 PM ET. You can watch the DNC online at this portal.
Night One of the strangest Democratic National Convention ever went off surprisingly well, capped by another memorable Michelle Obama speech. Can Night Two, which is headlined by former President Bill Clinton and former second lady Dr. Jill Biden, repeat Night One’s success? The main hour of programming begins at 10 PM ET. You can watch this, and every other event, online at this portal.
Night two of the Democratic National Convention brought the moment that made former Vice President Joe Biden the official Democratic nominee for president, when the convention delegates cast their votes—3558 votes for Biden and 1151 for Sen. Bernie Sanders. And so there it is: We can drop the “presumptive” language in referring to Biden.
Mississippi has 82 counties. Since the state’s schools started reopening, schools in 71 of those counties have reported cases of the coronavirus even as Gov. Tate Reeves brags about the state’s overall new case count dropping.
In those 71 counties, 245 teachers and 199 students have tested positive, with an additional 589 teachers and 2,035 students being quarantined as a result. As of Aug.
It cannot be emphasized enough that on August 13, nearly three entire months after the House of Representatives passed a major coronavirus stimulus package, the Republican-controlled Senate went on recess until after Labor Day, having done exactly nothing to provide relief to millions people who’ve lost their jobs in the pandemic, or to state and local governments facing major budget shortfalls that could cost millions more jobs, or to schools being forced to deal with unprecedente
The debate over how to educate kids safely during the coronavirus pandemic has been in the headlines and in the minds of parents, teachers, and state and local officials. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, though, has been holed up in Michigan, where her homes include a 22,000 square foot lake house, with occasional forays out to hold small events at charter schools and private schools, especially religious schools.
Ending months of speculation, Joe Biden named Sen. Kamala Harris as his vice presidential nominee.
Harris had been seen as a front-runner for the role since Biden became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Prior to being elected to the U.S. Senate from California in 2016, she served as the state’s attorney general and the district attorney of San Francisco.
One mostly unintended—definitely on the Republican side—aspect of the $600 in added unemployment benefits is that it reduced racial disparities. But that means that one aspect of the $600 expiring is that those same racial disparities have come roaring back. Why? Because, for one thing “Black workers disproportionately live in states with the lowest benefit levels and the highest barriers to receiving them,” The New York Times reports.
House Republicans can’t sue to block the proxy voting system adopted by a full vote of the House (over unanimous Republican opposition) to keep members safe during the coronavirus pandemic, a federal judge ruled Friday. Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the suit, writing that “the House unquestionably has the authority, under the Constitution, to ‘determine the rules of its proceedings.
The pandemic, with its shutdowns and kids home from school, is hitting working mothers hard. When kids are home, the burden falls on women in the vast majority of families, and many women are being forced to scale back at work, leave their jobs, or take on serious new stresses. It’s something that many experts warn could be a generational setback for women in the workforce.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating possible insider trading at Eastman Kodak following a spike in the company’s shares around the announcement of a $765 million government loan to manufacture pharmaceutical ingredients. Sen. Elizabeth Warren had called on the SEC to investigate because shares began rising even before the official announcement of the loan.
Texas is increasingly looking like a battleground state, and the Joe Biden campaign is sending some attention that way. The campaign announced six hires in Texas, including state director Rebecca Acuña and deputy state director Jennifer Longoria.
The campaign is also launching digital ads in English and Spanish, commemorating the anniversary of the mass shooting in El Paso.
When LaShandra Smith-Rayfield saw a picture circulating on social media of a group of white people with a Confederate flag beach towel hanging on a fence behind them at her local beach in Evanston, Illinois, she decided to go check it out. When she found the group, still with their symbol of hate hanging proudly behind them, it turned into a roughly 10-minute standoff that’s gotten more than 143,000 views on Facebook within a day.