turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalBoth sides of climate change debate are valid, argues new U.S. ambassador to Canada
President Trump’s newly appointed ambassador to Canada believes in “both sides” of the debate surrounding climate change.
U.S. ambassador Kelly Craft, who assumed her new duties on Monday, told the CBC that she believes there is merit to both arguments in favor of the existence of climate change and those countering the belief that the phenomenon is fueled by human beings.
“I think that both sides have their own results, from their studies, and I appreciate and I respect both sides of the science,” Craft said, adding that she feels each side has presented “accurate” data. She declined to say whether or not she herself was inclined towards one side or another.
Craft, the first woman to serve in her position, is a businesswoman, philanthropist and major donor to the Republican Party. She is also married to Kentucky coal magnate Joe Craft, who actively criticized the climate policies of the Obama administration. He is the president and CEO of Alliance Resource Partners LP — one of the largest coal producers in the eastern United States.
https://thinkprogress.org/climate-denial-canada-f1c079162a72/
BULLSH*T
Can Labor Still Use the Wagner Act?
Amid the political turmoil of this tumultuous year, a significant historical anniversary passed all but unnoticed. Eighty years ago, on April 12, 1937, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)—the Wagner Act—which had been signed into law in 1935. Before the court delivered its decision in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin, most observers believed that it would overturn the act, as it had other crucial pieces of New Deal legislation, including the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which it consigned to oblivion by unanimous vote. When a 5–4 majority instead validated the Wagner Act, doing so just two months after the successful Flint sit-down strike had won a union contract at General Motors, and just weeks after U.S. Steel voluntarily recognized a steelworkers union, the court confirmed that the United States had entered a new era.
Although time would reveal significant weaknesses in the Wagner Act’s provisions—such as the costly nature of its exclusion of agricultural, domestic, and government workers from its protections—few disputed that it changed the character of the United States. The act helped a resurgent labor movement win a say over working conditions for millions of workers. In the process, it helped democratize the nation. Even the hobbling amendments of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act did not seem to dim the significance of that achievement. After Taft-Hartley’s passage, young Archibald Cox, then a rising star in labor law, believed that collective bargaining, with its “roots in the ideals of self-rule and government according to law,” was “certain to grow, at least as long as there survives the political democracy on whose achievement it has followed.”
-snip-
Nor is there reason to suppose the Supreme Court will help matters as it did eighty years ago. Today’s Court instead seems bent on interring the last legal vestiges of the New Deal labor order. In the case of Janus v. AFSCME, which the Court will decide in the coming term, the right of public-sector unions to collect “agency fees” from the workers they represent is being challenged. Opponents argue that government workers’ unions are merely political vehicles, and therefore granting them the right to collect agency fees infringes on the rights of workers who might not share the politics of the union that represents them. The case threatens to overturn a forty-year-old precedent, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), which recognized the unions’ rights to collect such fees in the interest of orderly workplace governance wherever state law allowed the practice.
If the Janus case overturns Abood, it would freeze the collection of fees from all state and local government workers, devastate union finances, and weaken unions in a sector where they still retain significant influence. Since nearly half of all union members work for government, this would constitute a catastrophic setback to organized labor as a whole. It would also deal a potentially fatal blow to a central principle of the Wagner Act: the idea that unions ought to serve as democratic instruments of workplace governance.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/can-labor-still-use-wagner-act-janus-right-to-work
Christian college requires freshman to take Patriotic Education and Fitness class to honor the fla
On Monday, the College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri announced that it was requiring every freshman to enroll in a “Patriotic Education and Fitness” program, which, according to the Kansas City Star, was created to teach students about modern military customs, American politics, and flag protocol and procedures.
“We should be more intentional about patriotic education, and from our point of view that needs to occur from kindergarten all the way through college,” College of the Ozarks President Jerry Davis told the Springfield News-Leader. “Patriotic education is not inherited. It must be taught, it must be modeled and it must be emphasized.”
Davis added: “It’s the United States of America, not the diversified states of America.”
https://thinkprogress.org/christian-college-mandates-patriotism-77efbb083ff2/
Well I guess it is time to see if this "school" takes federal dollars
Committee Splits As Donald Trump Warrants Scrutiny
Published on Oct 25, 2017
Rachel Maddow reports on how congressional committees are splitting along partisan lines in the Trump Russia investigation even as new revelations show Donald Trump's behavior warrants a closer look by committees like the Senate Judiciary.
And so Grassley and Nunes ...........................are unAmerican and should be classified as accomplices to obstruct and creating a cover-up to protect this crime
Committee Splits As Donald Trump Warrants Scrutiny
This is BS and it is time to call Grassley and demand some answers, and has for Nunes, they do have recall power in the State of California. Grassley and this Nunes character are trying to force a DOJ to open another investigation and then throw Muellers investigation out...................this is just amazing to create a cover-up to protect a TRAITOR
Capitol Switchboard, (202) 224-3121
Graham: I Wont Be Constant Critic Of Trump Because I Want Tax Cuts
Source: Talking Points Memo
By NICOLE LAFOND Published OCTOBER 26, 2017 7:41 AM
The newly forged friendship may have something to do with Graham’s lukewarm reaction to Sens. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Bob Corker’s (R-TN) highly critical and public condemnation of Trump, his behavior and his policies in recent days.
Saying he likes Flake “a lot” and his impending retirement will be a “loss to the Senate,” Graham admitted he does share Flake’s “concerns about what the President said, about the way he behaves,” according to Vanity Fair’s Hive.
“The election is over. I’m focused on results, and that’s why I’m here. I’d rather not be a constant critic. I’ll stand up when I need to, but I’m trying to get taxes cut,” he said.
Graham also said repealing Obamacare and “win(ning) a war we can’t afford to lose” are why he won’t take Flake’s advice on standing up to Trump.
Earlier this week, Graham told The Washington Post that it’s important to “keep talking” to Trump and “keep him close.”
Flake announced his retirement during a scathing speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, saying his party needs to stop “pretending” like Trump’s behavior is normal. Corker has been highly critical of Trump for weeks now — ever since announcing his
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/graham-stand-up-trump-but-trying-get-taxes-cut
Hey Graham, your job is to protect and defend the Constitution, and you, Flake, Corker, Grassley, McConnell, and all of your other republican lackey's keep forgetting that point. Look at how you voted when it came to protecting the Seventh Amendment, so that people had a right to address there grievance in court to sue, you fucked everyone--------------and said nope, to hell with the Seventh Amendment.
And now your running around saying this mouthful of right wing shit, but its still right wing shit---------your all words. Trump should be in front the open hearing Judiciary Committee that you and Grassley operate and should be asking this asshole TRAITOR questions, not tax cuts, or going out golfing, its called national security................
New Documentary Remembers Standing Rock in Beauty and Catastrophe
n October of 2016, I wrote a piece called "How to Talk About #NoDAPL: A Native Perspective." I had visited the Standing Rock camps twice at that point, at the request of local youth who coordinated skill shares for Water Protectors, and I had written extensively about the movement. About a year later, I was asked to share my thoughts on the documentary, Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock.
But how does one critique a dream? A dream isn't bound by timelines or historical nuance. It's as much feeling as fact, and the lines between the two often blur.
As the name implies, Awake, A Dream of Standing Rock, is a series of images and reflections, unbound by the conventions of documentary storytelling. The film's dream-weaving approach at times works masterfully, capturing sounds and images that should be preserved in crisp, heartbreaking detail. In other moments, the film veers between the poetic and the historic with such ease that I was left wondering whether some viewers would know the difference.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/42363-new-documentary-remembers-standing-rock-in-beauty-and-catastrophe
Wado------------thank you
Trump Diehard and Former Milo Yiannopoulos Intern Stabs Father to Death for Calling Him a Nazi: Repo
A prolific online troll and former intern of Milo Yiannopoulos has been charged with first-degree murder after allegedly stabbing his father to death in his Washington home. According to audio of the incident obtained by the Daily Beast, 33-year-old Lane Davis set upon his father after the latter called him a Nazi. "He’s chasing us around the house,” Davis' mother told a police dispatcher. “He’s mad about something on the internet about leftist pedophiles and he thinks we’re leftist and he’s calling us pedophiles, and I don’t know what-all.”
Davis has entered a plea of not guilty, and his trial is scheduled for January.
The Samish Island native fits a disturbing if increasingly familiar profile. After dropping out of Washington State University in 2004, he developed a following on YouTube peddling conspiracy theories that ran the gamut from 9/11 being an inside job to vaccines causing autism. By 2014, he had become a fixture in Gamergate, a campaign of online harassment of women in the video game industry that included doxxing and death threats. Davis would ultimately renounce his fellow travelers in the movement, but that did not stop him from targeting Joshua Idehen, whose manager, agent and charity he contacted accusing the London musician of pedophilia.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-diehard-and-former-milo-yiannopoulos-intern-stabs-father-death-calling-him
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