Laura Clawson

Here’s today’s Republican Party in a nutshell: Arizona Republicans censured Cindy McCain for endorsing Joe Biden for president. When Rep. Paul Gosar spoke at a white nationalist conference, the Arizona Republican Party was silent.

Gosar showed up at the America First Political Action Conference on Friday night, serving as its surprise keynote speaker at the same time as the House was debating COVID-19 relief.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem continued setting herself up for a 2024 presidential run with a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday, then headed to another traditional venue for a presidential contender: a Sunday morning political news talk show.

One incredibly important move to help workers that the Biden administration has signaled didn’t necessarily look like a pro-worker move. Even before President Biden was inaugurated, his incoming White House counsel started asking for suggestions for judicial nominees who would be diverse not just on race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, but on professional background.

Since the Senate parliamentarian advised that a minimum wage increase cannot be part of a budget reconciliation bill, Democrats are looking for Plan B, a way to fulfill the promise and the desperate necessity to raise millions of people above the current poverty-level federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

“Grocery workers say they can’t get coronavirus vaccines, even as they help distribute them,” the Washington Post headline reads. But as the story makes clear, grocery workers don’t “say” they can’t get vaccines. They can’t. Unless they are elderly or have comorbidities in addition to being grocery workers—i.e.

Medium is the latest digital media outlet to unionize, with that news coming Thursday after a “strong majority” of 140 workers signed cards to join the Communications Workers of America.

President Biden is making good on another campaign promise, moving to end Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy blocking asylum-seekers from coming into the U.S. while their cases are under consideration. Like so many ways Trump inflicted damage, though, this will take longer to fix than it did to break, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

Union-busters who traveled from other states to fight a union organizing drive at a Maine hospital got an extra-special bonus from hospital management: COVID-19 vaccinations. State officials are calling out MaineHealth over that violation of state vaccination policy and basic decency.

Black workers have been hit so hard during the coronavirus pandemic, and a full accounting of the hits is not yet complete. We know that Black people have been disproportionately likely to get sick, to be hospitalized, and to die from COVID-19. That they’ve been more likely to face job loss during the pandemic (when they aren’t being exposed to the virus at essential but underpaid jobs). That they’ve been less likely to get unemployment benefits.

Thanks to House Republicans circling the wagons around Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her history of truly gross statements and actions, Democrats had to hold a full House vote to strip her of committee assignments. That included an assignment to the education committee despite her claims that the school massacres at Sandy Hook and Parkland were hoaxes.

Donald Trump mostly stopped doing his job in his final month or so in the White House, but when he did do anything, you better believe it was lousy. One of those things was more symbolic than anything, but it was a symbolic statement of powerful evil, and President Biden has reversed it.

With less than a week before Biden’s inauguration, Trump asked Congress to freeze $27.

Six people are dead after a liquid nitrogen leak at a Georgia poultry plant and 11 others were hospitalized, with at least three in critical condition. Two of the people killed were Mexican citizens, and those injured included at least four firefighters.

“When leaked into the air, liquid nitrogen vaporizes into an odorless gas that’s capable of displacing oxygen,” the Associated Press explains.

The threat of violence at the inauguration may have fizzled, without even substantial protests developing, but “the intent to engage in violence has not gone away” on the part of right-wing extremists, intelligence officials are warning.

The threat of violence at the inauguration may have fizzled, without even substantial protests developing, but “the intent to engage in violence has not gone away” on the part of right-wing extremists, intelligence officials are warning.

President Joe Biden will sign an executive order strengthening Buy American policies on Monday. While such provisions, which encourage federal agencies to buy U.S.-made products, already exist, they’re filled with loopholes and haven’t always been followed. 

“Existing Buy American rules establish a domestic content threshold—the amount of a product that must be made in the U.S.

Remember back in April when everyone suddenly realized that food chain workers are essential workers? A group of workers in the Bronx is trying to make good on that realization as they negotiate their next contract—and it’s led to a strike, as the bosses at the Hunts Point Produce Market refuse the workers’ call for a $1 an hour raise and added help with healthcare costs.

It looks like one of Team Trump’s last-minute efforts to destroy the civil service has fizzled. With less than a day to go, the plan to strip protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees hasn’t been put into effect at any federal agency. 

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management had rushed to list many of their jobs in the new Schedule F, a new classification for jobs involving policymaking.

With three House Democrats having tested positive for COVID-19 since being stuck in a safe room for hours with Republicans who refused to wear masks, QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—one of the people who directly refused the offer of a mask—is, in a typical Republican move, rejecting any responsibility. 

“It is absolutely ridiculous and insane to blame us,” Greene told Fox News. “[We] did not have COVID or any symptoms.

Evidence on how safe in-person schooling is and how it contributes to the spread of COVID-19 has been mixed—a lot more mixed than the headlines would tell you (read to the 11th paragraph in that piece, for instance), though not as dire as many of us feared over the summer. But the safety question may now be irrelevant, Elliot Haspel argues in The Atlantic.

Evidence on how safe in-person schooling is and how it contributes to the spread of COVID-19 has been mixed—a lot more mixed than the headlines would tell you (read to the 11th paragraph in that piece, for instance), though not as dire as many of us feared over the summer. But the safety question may now be irrelevant, Elliot Haspel argues in The Atlantic.

When workers start to organize, one of the first things many companies do is hire an anti-union consultant. Those consultants provide game plans for intimidating or cajoling workers away from solidarity with their coworkers, talking points for managers, and more. A recent report from Motherboard’s Lauren Kaori Gurley shows some of the creepy things these union-busters do, like keeping dossiers on workers.

When workers start to organize, one of the first things many companies do is hire an anti-union consultant. Those consultants provide game plans for intimidating or cajoling workers away from solidarity with their coworkers, talking points for managers, and more. A recent report from Motherboard’s Lauren Kaori Gurley shows some of the creepy things these union-busters do, like keeping dossiers on workers.

In the wake of a Trumpist mob storming the Capitol even as some congressional Republicans tried to overturn the results of the elections in several states from within the Capitol, some had hoped that enough of those Republicans would back down and allow the counting of electoral votes to conclude quickly. That is supposed to be a routine task, after all.

It was supposed to be a joint session of Congress for what was supposed to be the fairly perfunctory task of counting the electoral votes as certified by the states. The complication was supposed to be that some House and Senate Republicans were objecting to counting electoral votes from states Donald Trump wishes he hadn’t lost, which was supposed to take two hours of debate per state. 

That was bad enough.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock is now Senator-elect Raphael Warnock. He is projected to defeat Sen. Kelly Loeffler in one of Georgia’s two runoff elections.

Warnock, the pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, will become Georgia’s first Black senator. He kicked off the runoff campaign with one of the more memorable and effective ads in recent election cycles, and then followed it up with another one using the same themes, just as effective.

The tech industry’s overwhelmingly non-unionized status took a small but significant hit on Monday, with the announcement of the Alphabet Workers Union, a minority union at Google (the parent company of which is Alphabet). Their goal—at least in the short term—isn’t to win a union representation election and get the company to the bargaining table. It’s to create a platform to pressure the company on a range of issues as a group rather than as individuals.

If you’re white, it can be all too easy to normalize your whiteness. The powers that be put whiteness at the dead center of our politics and culture—think about how often white people are framed as the real Americans or the most meaningful voters in our politics—and you, a white person, could go through your life thinking that’s an accurate reflection of the world around you. It’s not.

The children’s book author and former NFL star Martellus Bennett recently offered his very strong take on Black characters in children’s books and shows to The Atlantic, explaining the motivation behind the books he has written and illustrated about a character named after his daughter: He wants Black kids to see themselves and their possibilities in fiction as much as white kids do.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has spoken movingly of her family in India—from her memories of walking on the beach with her grandfather during visits to Chennai to her statement, in her Democratic National Convention speech, that “Family is my uncles, my aunts and my chittis.” It’s a reminder of her immigrant parents—in particular of her mother’s courage in coming to the U.S.

Recycling is a good thing … as long as it’s done right. Done wrong, you’re contaminating what your local trash system is trying to send for recycling and potentially getting a lot more than your stuff rejected. Christmas is a big time for some recycling problems, since gift wrap can generate a lot that we want to recycle, a lot of which, it turns out, we just need to throw out.

You cannot recycle glittery, metallic, or flocked wrapping paper. Do not do it.