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n2doc's JournalNurses union vows to continue backing Bernie Sanders
By Matea Gold and John Wagner
A super PAC financed by the country’s largest nurses union has spent more than $610,000 on behalf of Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid, including $41,000 on new billboards touting him in the early caucus states of Iowa and Nevada, according to expenditure reports filed Monday.
Union officials said they plan to continue spending through the political action committee, National Nurses United for Patient Protection -- even though Sanders has repeatedly denounced the influence of super PACs and has insisted that he doesn’t have one flanking his upstart campaign.
“We never considered it a super PAC,” said Jean Ross, co-president of the nurses union. “This isn’t a corporation or an individual who can write out millions of dollars at a time. This is money that nurses put out for things that they believe in.”
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/30/nurses-union-vows-to-continue-backing-bernie-sanders-through-its-super-pac-despite-his-anti-super-pac-stance/
For Clinton, one glaring holdout among female Democratic senators
The tableau surrounding Hillary Clinton on Monday was impressive: Thirteen women Democratic senators endorsing the Democratic 2016 presidential front-runner en masse.
The evening fundraising event on Capitol Hill brought in a chunk of campaign cash ahead of an often difficult fund-raising month in December. But it was also meant to underscore Clinton’s near monopoly among Democratic lawmakers who have declared a preference, and her appeal as the first woman with a strong shot at becoming president.
But one particularly influential female Democratic senator didn’t join her colleagues: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — the anti-Wall Street crusader who was courted to run as the darling of very liberal Democrats — has not endorsed Clinton, nor has she promised she will.
Her absence served as an awkward reminder of Clinton’s enduring struggle to generate support and enthusiasm among an influential segment of her party’s most liberal members. It also illustrates the leverage that Warren holds in an election that Democrats are calculating will be waged on issues of economic advancement and fairness.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/for-clinton-one-glaring-holdout-among-female-democratic-senators/2015/11/30/b37efe86-977e-11e5-b499-76cbec161973_story.html
Scott Walker Bankrupts Wisconsin Food Banks—Just in Time for Christmas!
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
It is becoming increasingly likely that, come Christmas Eve, Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, will be visited by three very angry spirits—the Ghosts of Christmas Past, the Ghost Of Christmas Present, and the Ghost Of Let Me Hit You With This Croquet Mallet.
It is an article of rightwing faith that churches and other private institutions do a better job of charity work than does the government, which encourages "dependency" or some such. Of course, when the state throws up its hands, it causes chaos in the soup kitchens and food pantries as well.
This is stupid. This is cruel. You rig your state's economy so that jobs flee by the thousands and then you tie food stamps to employment and—presto!—you've "cut government spending." Merry Christmas, all ye poor people of Wisconsin. You are nothing but a line item now.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a40091/scott-walker-food-stamp-cuts/
PhDs need real jobs too
Leonard Cassuto
People who study for doctorates in the arts and sciences are typically driven by love — for a particular historical period, author or field of inquiry. But graduate school isn't just a place to dive into 18th century novels, Medieval art or neurobiology. It's also, necessarily, a place to prepare for a career.
Most graduate programs encourage their students to set their sights on jobs teaching or conducting research at a college or university. They also endorse the notion, whether intentionally or not, that taking a position outside of the professoriate is some kind of failure.
That's insanity. It takes nine years on average for students to obtain a doctorate in the humanities, and the sciences are almost as bad. At the end of that long process, students encounter a job market for professors that is a mostly dry well. Only about half of doctoral candidates in the arts and sciences will eventually obtain jobs as college and university instructors. An increasing number of those openings are short-term gigs, many less than a year long, with no promise of future employment.
Even the lucky graduate students who secure a tenure-track position are likely to find a mismatch between their training and their future job requirements. As students, they learn how to become research specialists. But most professors spend most of their time teaching. Only a sliver of the doctorate population gets top-tier, research-first jobs.
We would hardly expect a modern journalism school to have a single-minded focus on print newspapers. Yes, there are still jobs to be had at newspapers, but only a small fraction of the number that there once were. A single-minded focus on professorships — on research-dominated professorships in particular — is just as irrational.
more
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1130-cassuto-academic-job-market-20151130-story.html
Why the Kochs Really Embraced Criminal Justice Reform
It looks like the Koch brothers have scammed us once again.
When news first came out that Charles and David Koch — the Koch brothers — were supporting criminal justice reform efforts in Congress, many of us thought, “Wow, they’re actually doing something good for once.”
And for good reason, too.
Criminal justice reform has, over the past few years, become one of the very few legitimately bipartisan issues in American politics, and given their public statements, it really looked like the Kochs were joining that bipartisan consensus for all the right reasons.
Here, for example, is Charles Koch on a recent episode of Morning Joe talking about why we need to reform drug laws.
Sounds pretty persuasive, right?
Boy were we naïve.
more
http://trofire.com/2015/11/29/koch-brothers-prison/
If the bill passes, white collar criminals could get away with breaking the law if they can simply say that they “didn’t know” they or their business and colleagues were breaking the law when committing the crime in question.
They can’t do this now — it’s that whole “ignorance of the law is no excuse” thing.
Sen. Warren: Low-wage workers deserve predictable schedules
— U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is hoping the holiday season will bring attention to one of her major legislative priorities.
The Massachusetts Democrat says some retail, restaurant and fast food workers are at the mercy of erratic work schedules during the holidays.
Warren says half of low-wage workers say they have little or no say over the hours they are scheduled to work and up to 30 percent say they can be called into work at the last minute.
Warren is pushing a bill aimed at encouraging more dependable employee schedules.
Warren said her bill targets practices like placing workers “on-call” with no guarantee of work hours, scheduling them for “split shifts” of nonconsecutive hours, and sending workers home early without pay when demand is low.
http://wwlp.com/2015/11/28/sen-warren-low-wage-workers-deserve-predictable-schedules/
The Tea Party Is Slowly Dying, But It’s Being Replaced By Fascism
By Manny Schewitz
Remember when the Tea Party was the dumbest thing that the Republican Party had going on? Remember when we had Michele Bachmann and the half-term governor from Alaska as the best examples of how mindless GOP voters had become? Boy, those were the days, weren’t they?
Just a few years ago, the Tea Party was all the rage in the Republican Party. Armed with “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and tri-cornered hats, they held rallies around the country while political grifters warned about Obamacare death panels and promised to “take back America” while peddling their books. Now the Tea Party has hit a new low in support since the last poll in October as the Republican Party enters a new, far more bizarre chapter in its history.
…
Part of the blame can certainly be placed on the conservative media. For a period of time, the Tea Party was considered revolutionary and websites like TPNN.com flourished. Eventually, simply spreading conspiracy stories about gun confiscation and Obamacare death panels wasn’t enough. This explains why Donald Trump has such a “yuuuuugge” lead in GOP polls; he’s willing to say the things that many Tea Party leaders would have considered just a bit too much, and voters are eating it up.
The Republican Party is lurching away from the Tea Party and toward a frightening marriage of religious fanaticism and fascism. Based on history, this cannot end well, at all.
Read more at: http://www.forwardprogressives.com/the-tea-party-is-slowly-dying-being-replaced-by-fascism/
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