Today What Unions No Longer Do author Jake Rosenfeld looks back at the power that unions used to have. He points to President Nixon’s appointment of union organizer W. J. Usery Jr. to be an assistant Secretary of Labor — something Rosenfeld says would be “unthinkable” today.
Sarah Jaffe responds, pointing out that today “attacks on labor are not just a small facet of today’s conservative ideology, but central to it.”
We’ll be hosting a live chat (sub. req.) with Rosenfeld and Jaffe as well as with MSNBC’s Ned Resnikoff and labor intellectual Rich Yeselson on Friday at noon.
From the looks of it, this guy has more than one regrettable tattoo. But one in particular (guess which) led to an intense standoff with police in Maine this week. (Photo courtesy of The Waterville Morning Sentinel.)
Cathy Reisenwitz points out that, just by looking at what happened with a hit piece on BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray and how even Tucker Carlson was forced to apologize for tweets of one of his writers at the Daily caller, sexism in journalism is alive and well.
Republican voters in North Carolina get to pick between the guy who claimed he went to the University of Maryland but actually went to an online-only night school or the guy who says Obamacare is part of a liberal Agenda 21 conspiracy to control everyone’s life. Good luck with that.
Sahil Kapur tells you everything you need to know about the birth control cases (including that there are two!) headed to the Supreme Court on Tuesday but were too afraid to ask.
Michigan Rep. Gary Peters (D) is angry that the National Right To Life has said he wants to ensure “abortion is accessible and cheap for his daughters.”
Apparently New Jersey State Police have been taking photographs of protestors at Gov. Chris Christie’s town halls recently. Now the state attorney general, a Christie appointee, has told them to knock it off.
The local news anchor who became an unwitting conservative hero when she said earlier this week that White House reporters give their questions to press secretary Jay Carney in advance has now retracted her claim. She said she didn’t take notes when talking to Carney “off the record,” and it sounds like she was generally confused all around. TPM’s Tom Kludt has the details.
Tucker Carlson finally agrees to say something more about his reporter’s disgusting tweets. Sort of.
Chris Christie likes to brag about how no one at his town halls has even mentioned the BridgeGate scandal since it broke wide open earlier this year. Well, that changed today.