After Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement, President George H.W. Bush announced on July 1, 1991, his pick for Marshall's successor: Clarence Thomas, a 43-year-old US Court of Appeals judge. The nomination was political from the start — Thomas's record was decidedly more conservative than that of the civil rights icon he'd be replacing.

But Thomas's road to the Supreme Court would become much more dramatic after the public learned about a woman named Anita Hill, a 35-year-old black attorney whose allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas — her former boss at the Department of Education and later the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — were leaked to the public just days before his confirmation hearing.

The ensuing three-day hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a monumental moment of political theater and is now the basis of HBO's new film Confirmation, starring Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce, premiering April 16.

But as the film shows, this wasn't just partisan drama — its themes of racism, sexism, and the intersection of the two resonate 25 years later. And although allegations of racism against Thomas derailed the conversation about Hill's accusations in the moment, the hearing irrevocably changed the way Americans view sexual harassment in the workplace.

Let me set the record straight about my publication Daily News Bin

Hi, I’m Bill Palmer. I’m the creator, publisher and owner of Daily News Bin. I’ve been an indie journalist for about thirteen years, covering various other fields. I started this site last year and decided to try my hand at political reporting because I couldn’t stand one more day of the false and misleading narratives I kept hearing on cable news, and I decided to fight back. I’ve had the good fortune to find a rather large audience, and a number of people I respect have told me (publicly and privately) that they appreciate my willingness to aim straight for the truth. But it’s also brought some bizarre false claims out of the woodwork by those who don’t care for the truth. So I want to clear up every bit of malarkey that’s been put into circulation about me and Daily News Bin over the past nine months.

I’ve quickly learned that the trouble with reporting on an election from a factual place is that those whose preferred candidates aren’t doing well are going to blame the messenger. In the instance of some of these individuals, they’ll spread the most ridiculous coordinated lies about you and your publication in the hopes of scaring people away from reading it. When you’re a new publication, the bystanders who hear these crazy claims are left unsure what to think. I would prefer to ignore this kind of nonsense, but I tried that approach early on and found that when up against this level of false noise, I have no choice but to persistently fight back. So if you’re here for that reason, let’s shoot down the nonsense point by point:

No, we’re not a “satire” or “fake news” site

For the first few months of our existence, when cable news was routinely reporting state polls as if they were national polls to try to make certain races look more close than they were, we focused on pushing the real poll numbers out there daily. This offended the fans of a certain losing candidate so thoroughly that they took to social media and told everyone who would listen that we were “satire” or “fake news.” They felt that if they could trick enough people into believing it, anything we put in a headline would be ignored. Before long I made a point of publicly pushing back against this lie, so they moved onto the next one.

We are not “owned” or “funded” by anyone

Last fall, these same rather dedicated individuals moved on to their new coordinated lie about us: that we’re secretly being operated or funded by a candidate, campaign, party, or SuperPAC in this election. Anyone who’s taken a look at our rather scrappy looking site can figure out that we’re not “funded” by anyone – and anyone familiar with how indie news sites operate knows that they don’t need external support to begin with. Still, this has become the de facto false claim about us on the part of anyone who resents that we’re reporting on how poorly their preferred candidate is doing.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a law that will gradually raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 and also establishes paid family leave for New York workers.

Cuomo and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton marked the occasion Monday at a victory rally at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan with labor leaders and workers.

PHOTOS: $15 Minimum Wage Rally In NYC

Cuomo said the law will grow the state’s economy and improve New Yorkers’ lives.

“At $9 an hour you can’t afford to raise a family in New York and that’s why we’re going to raise it to $15 an hour to restore fairness and decency,” Cuomo said.

With the presidential election now in full swing, the Ms. Blog is excited to bring you a series presented in conjunction with Presidential Gender Watch 2016, a project of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation and the Center for American Women and Politics. They’ll be tracking, analyzing and illuminating gender dynamics during election season—so check back with us regularly!

Hillary Clinton is an emotional and political lightning rod. Of this there is absolutely no doubt. If you do a Google search for why people dislike Hillary Clinton, you get over a million entries with titles such as, ”Our Love/Hate Relationship with Hillary Clinton Will Never End,” “The Jarring Reasons People Don’t Want Hillary Clinton to Be President” and “Why Do Young People Have Such Visceral Dislike for Hillary?” Her own advocates are willing to stipulate that liking her is not even necessary to vote for her.

Clearly, there is more to this question of likability that needs to be interrogated. Likability is not gender neutral. Neither are most of the decisions we make, despite our desire to be prejudice-free. The 2016 presidential election is awash in explicit expressions of racism, sexism and xenophobia, leaving me wondering about the ways in which race and gender are implicitly shaping ordinary citizens’ views of the campaign.

Implicit messages are more insidious because they are consumed and deployed beyond the realm of consciousness. We need not think deeply to identify the racism in Donald Trump’s depiction of Mexican immigrants as rapists or the sexism of his asking if Megyn Kelly’s tough questions were due to her being on her period. Identifying subtler racist and sexist cues is more challenging, however, because no one is immune to these subtleties, engaged in personal and public anti-racist and anti-sexist work

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2016/03/17/3-ways-to-tell-if-your-distaste-for-hillary-clinton-is-sexist/

You know, the world would be a happier place if a girl would just smile more.

Just ask the guys on Twitter.

Now, by "girl," I mean a former U.S. senator and secretary of state who is likely to be the first female president of these allegedly united states.

As for "the world," let's narrow it down. We're talking mean men who apparently spend much of their day breathing into paper bags because they're not even allowed to ask a secretary to grab them a cuppa joe anymore without someone from HR signing them up for diversity training.

What? No more office wife? Evidence of hell in a handbasket right there. Just ask them.

So now we've got this Hillary woman going all presidential on us. She's everywhere. Giving speeches. Declaring victories. Starring in one town hall after another. How much suffering must a good ol' boy endure?

"God," they pray, "pick another name."

On Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton did what even Hillary Clinton thought she wouldn't do: She swept the primaries. Missouri (barely), Illinois, North Carolina, Florida — she won them and my home state of Ohio, which is in the Eastern time zone, people. Boy am I tired of that question.

Clinton strolled her conquering self across the stage in Florida as results poured in, and she delivered a victory speech while some of the white guys in TV-land offered their critiques via Twitter.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made the case for a broader progressive push in an interview with MSNBC host Ed Schultz on Friday, saying his recent sojourn into southern states showed him there was still a Democratic base in a region usually known for supporting Republicans.

“I’ve been meeting with unionists, independents, progressive Democrats,” Sanders explained via satellite from Columbia, South Carolina. “And they are tired of being abandoned by the national Democratic party. They want some help, and they believe that with some help they can start winning in these conservative states.”

One cause for concern, Sanders explained to Schultz, was seeing many white, working-class voters in “low-income states” like Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina voting against their own best interest.

“These are guys getting hung up on gay marriage issues,” Sanders told Schultz. “They’re getting hung up on abortion issues. And it is time we started focusing on the economic issues that bring us together: Defending Social Security, defending Medicare, making sure that Medicaid is not cut, that veterans’ programs are not cut.”

Hillary Clinton is receiving the endorsement of the United Farm Workers, the largest farmworkers union in the country.

The union, active in 10 states, has a largely Latino membership, a key voting bloc for Clinton in both the primary and general elections. She received their endorsement over then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 primary.

United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez says the group spent a year discussing the race and recently interviewed Clinton for an hour on her positions.

Clinton, says Rodriguez in a statement, is "the strong, most respectful leader our country needs now."

"Hillary Clinton has the strong resolve needed to make change happen," he says. "And she is the best equipped to defeat the nativist, hateful forces of the current Republican front-runner."

The Latino vote has split between Clinton and rival Bernie Sanders in recent primary contests. Her team sees galvanizing Latino support as a key part of their strategy to defeat GOP front-runner Donald Trump.


Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article63753972.html#storylink=cpy

Bernie Sanders appears poised for a runaway victory in the Vermont presidential primary on Tuesday, an extraordinary outcome in an extraordinary year during which he has mounted a serious and substantive challenge to the front-runner, Hillary Clinton. This paper, nevertheless, endorses Clinton for president.

This endorsement rests on Clinton’s breadth of experience and her proven commitment to those many issues where she shares a progressive outlook with Sanders. The very notion of political experience has taken on a negative connotation in this surprising year because voters associate it with compromise and corruption. But outsider status, which Sanders has always enjoyed, does not automatically confer wisdom or ability. Clinton’s experience as a hard-working, policy-oriented senator and a secretary of state who restored the good name of the United States weighs heavily in her favor.

The contest between Clinton and Sanders has been framed as a choice between pragmatism and idealism, between incrementalism and boldness. Framing it that way oversells what Sanders offers. Fighting for health care reform, as Clinton has done for a quarter century, has been an exercise in idealism. It has been a long, difficult fight against powerful entrenched interests. The Clinton administration didn’t succeed in the 1990s. The Obama administration has made significant progress, and Clinton is right to underscore the importance of that victory.

It’s easy to hold out the promise of grand solutions. On Sanders’ part these would include a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system and free college for everybody. These are lofty and worthy goals; Medicare-for-all was Ted Kennedy’s idea. But Clinton is willing to be square with the American people in acknowledging that getting to those goals would be a step-by-step process, requiring the kind of painstaking work she did as a senator.

If it is Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the General Election, Latinos will play a decisive role and Trump will lose


Before I get into the crux of this article, I want to provide some background that I think will make a lot of things clear about why Trump has done some of the things he has done. After his comments back in the 2004-2005 time-frame that the Iraq war was a disaster, I thought he might run for President as a Democrat. Back then, Trump was a moderate who, in my opinion, could have chosen to run for either party.

The first mistake Trump made in trying to run for President was to decide to run as a Republican. I can imagine some of the reasons why and discussions had by his team as that decision was made, but that's mostly supposition on my part and immaterial. The result of deciding to run as a Republican meant that he had to try to appeal to Republican grassroots.

That would have posed a serious problem for any political team trying to solve the obstacles in his way to getting the nomination. As Trump's GOP primary opponents have said, he had expressed support for many Liberal positions in the past. If he reversed positions on those things he would immediately be seen as non-genuine and a hypocrite. Those perceptions are the exact opposite of those that team Trump was trying to create. His teams goals were to develop positions that Trump could adopt that would both signal to Conservative grass roots that he was one of them and deserved their support and would also not conflict with anything he had said previously.

It was clear to me with the birther position Trump took back during the run-up to the 2012 primary that this was a first attempt to reintroduce himself to Conservative grassroots as someone they should consider supporting. See my article on that here: TRUMP'S BIRTHER STRATEGY MAKES SENSE IF YOU UNDERSTAND ITS PURPOSE

The second position that Trump's team had him adopt was that of being radically against undocumented immigrants having a path to citizenship, and the creation of the wall on the border with Mexico.