Today's Liberal News

“On the Kill Floors”: Essential Workers in Meatpacking Plants Still Lack Safety & COVID Protections

Amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, we look at the experiences of meatpacking workers during the pandemic and beyond. Dulce Castañeda, a founding member of Children of Smithfield, a Nebraska-based grassroots advocacy group led by the children and family members of meatpacking workers, says conditions in the meatpacking plants during the pandemic remained as usual.

Dirty Work: Eyal Press on Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America

Ahead of Labor Day, we speak with journalist and sociologist Eyal Press about his new book, “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.” Press profiles workers like prison guards and oil workers — people who make their livelihoods by doing “unethical activity that society depends on and tacitly condones but doesn’t want to hear too much” about, he says.

Community Spotlight: Tuning in to Daily Kos’ many metamorphoses

Rescue Rangers have read every story published by Community members every day for the past 15 years. We’ve seen Daily Kos staff come and go, while authors we’ve promoted have become Rangers, Featured Writers, and members of the Community Contributors Team. We’ve worked through six iterations of user interfaces presented by different tech teams, haggled over by Community members, and adopted.

Bogus school would have never conned way onto ESPN if Ohio had any kind of oversight

In case you missed it, the latest entry in the debate over charter schools involves Bishop Sycamore, a supposed charter school in Columbus, Ohio, that wrangled a nationally televised game on ESPN by claiming it had a roster full of Division I recruits. However, questions started cropping up when ESPN’s own announcers revealed that no one from Bishop Sycamore appeared in any national databases.

What’s new at Daily Kos? Highlights and updates from the month of August

August is typically a slower month here, but Daily Kos actually saw a rise in engagement in July and then again in August this year. There was plenty to cover and discuss with the delta variant spiking, Afghanistan and the many issues surrounding the ending of a 20-year war, and Hurricane Ida and its aftermath. We had a lot of stories about deaths of notable anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, which have been occurring at a record pace.

After school orders quarantine, a father and his friends threaten principal, zip ties in hand

Among the many weapons of choice carried by the domestic terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, one of the more common was the ordinary nylon zip tie. In addition to their well-understood industrial uses, these flexible, non-yielding fasteners are also commonly used by law enforcement as restraints.

Since they have a perfectly innocent utility, carrying them can hardly be considered a crime under normal circumstances.