Today's Liberal News

Minor League Baseball players seek to unionize, this week in the war on workers

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.

Ukraine Update: Can we get a Donbas uprising or surrender?

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Reports continue to stream in of confirmed and rumors Ukrainian advances. In Mark Sumner’s last update, he gave up trying to post an accurate map. There isn’t one that can keep up with Ukraine’s shockingly fast rate of advance. 

Tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll make an effort to collate advances.

Connect! Unite! Act! When does profit become avarice?

Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series encouraging the creation of face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet to socialize, support candidates, get out the vote, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert maximum influence on the powers that be. Visit us every week to see how you can get involved!

Money.

Disney+’s Pinocchio Is a Zombie

Robert Zemeckis has always been a director fascinated by avant-garde technology. His biggest films of the ’80s and ’90s—Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, Forrest Gump—were all revolutionary in their use of visual effects and CGI. In the 2000s, he dove into the nascent field of motion capture to produce the animated movies The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol.

I Wish My Friend Could Have Read Her Own Obituary

I wish my friend Anne Garrels could have lived just a few days longer. She died early last Wednesday, but if she’d held on a few more hours, I like to imagine that she would have been able to enjoy (even while pretending to dismiss) the torrent of admiration from colleagues and listeners for her work as a foreign correspondent with National Public Radio. I wish she’d been able to read the glowing obituary that The New York Times had prepared for her.

The Angels of Lviv

Photographs by Elena SubachAs soon as the first air-raid sirens sounded last winter, Elena Subach, a photographer and curator in Lviv, began to worry. “Lviv is itself an open-air museum,” she told me. “You cannot hide it in a bomb shelter.” All over Ukraine, curators mobilized to try to protect what they could and transfer movable items for safekeeping.

The Right’s Brittney Griner Obsession

Brittney Griner is still detained in Russia. The WNBA star has now been imprisoned for 205 long days.In August, Griner was found guilty of drug possession and smuggling for traveling with less than a gram of cannabis oil, and sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony. During her trial, lawyers argued that she had a medical note for the cannabis oil, but it did no good.

“Attack Philanthropy”: Right-Wing Billionaire Fueled Climate Denial & Conservative Judges, Schools

New revelations about the secretive right-wing billionaire Barre Seid, who donated $1.6 billion to a conservative nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, known as Donald Trump’s “Supreme Court whisperer,” show he has also used his massive fortune to undermine climate science, fight Medicaid expansion and remake the higher education system in a conservative mold.

Famine by October? Somalia & East Africa Face Humanitarian Crisis Amid Climate Change, Ukraine War

We look at the devastating effects of climate change and global inequity in East Africa, and how many countries face drought and a looming famine, with guests in Mogadishu, Somalia, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “The current unprecedented drought, that is a result of four consecutive failed rainy seasons, with the fifth and the sixth projected to also be below average, is causing a huge food insecurity,” says Adam Abdelmoula, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Somalia.

Colorado Republican wants to ‘bring balance to women’s rights.’ Gee, thanks

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.

Video surfaces of Doug Mastriano leading prayer for Congress to disregard 2020 election results

Doug Mastriano’s extreme views and apparent proclivity for Christian nationalism are growing harder for him to deny by the minute. 

On Friday Rolling Stone published an exclusive report and shared for the first time a video of Mastriano—now the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania—from December 2020 where he kicked off a prayer meeting organized by the extreme right-wing, pro-Trump New Apostolic Restoration movement.