Last week, the Commerce Department announced that a citizenship question would be added to the upcoming decennial Census for the first time in 70 years. The implications are stark for the entire country, but results could be dire for one state in particular: Texas.
The Census is a constitutionally mandated project, one that meets a number of crucial national needs. But years of funding shortages, stalled efforts to upgrade its technology, and general leadership issues within the Cen...
politics
McDonald’s stiffs employees on promised pay raise
Fast food giant McDonald’s received a deluge of good press in 2015 when the company announced their plans to pay employees at least one dollar above the local minimum wage.
Now, almost three years to the day of that announcement, the few McDonald’s workers who are employed at corporate-owned restaurants have seen no action from the company and are still being paid just barely above minimum wage in their cities.
In a 2015 statement announcing the change, Chief Exec...
An obscure court order should terrify anyone who depends on Obamacare
Last month, Texas federal Judge Amos Mazzant handed down an order in Nevada v. the United States Department of Labor. Everything about this order is bizarre.
The order concerns a pair of lawsuits asking whether an Obama administration rule expanding the class of workers that are entitled to receive overtime pay. It also concerns Judge Mazzant’s apparent belief that he should be allowed to impose his view of this question on federal district judges throughout the count...
Trump spokesman twists himself into a pretzel on immigration reform
After Donald Trump spent the weekend abandoning his pretense that he wants to make a deal to restore protections to the hundreds of thousands of immigrant kids whose Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections he unilaterally stripped, his spokesman Hogan Gidley went on Fox News on Monday to blame his decision on congressional Democrats and Barack Obama.
Asked about Trump’s announcement that there would be “no DACA deal,” the White House deputy press ...
Republicans now want to the balance the federal budget after passing $1 trillion tax cut
Congressional Republicans are planning to push a balanced budget amendment when they return from recess in April, Politico reported on Wednesday. The vote comes directly after many of those same Republicans voted to pass two massively expensive measures, a $1.3 trillion dollar spending bill and a $1 trillion dollar tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthiest Americans.
The attempt at a balanced budget amendment is mostly a shiny gimmick meant to gin up support for Republicans as ...
Justice John Paul Stevens isn’t helping the gun debate
Retired Justice John Paul Stevens argues in a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday morning that “a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”
It’s a provocative claim, but it also raises serious questions about what planet Justice Stevens is living on. As University of Texas...
Kellyanne Conway on opioids: ‘Eat the ice cream, eat the french fry, don’t do the street drug’
Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway offered her advice to a group of millennials Thursday, encouraging them to just eat more junk food instead of turning to opioids.
“On our college campuses, your folks are reading the labels, they won’t put any sugar in their body, they don’t eat carbs anymore, and they’re very, very fastidious about what goes into their body,” Conway said at a meeting with young people at the White House. “And then you b...
20,000 Republicans just voted for an actual Nazi
The former head of the American Nazi Party ran for the Republican nomination of Congress in Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District. No Republican stepped up to oppose him.
On Tuesday, despite his vocal Holocaust denial, his anti-Semitic rhetoric, and his white supremacist views, 20,339 Illinois Republicans, according to preliminary totals, cast their ballots for Arthur Jones on Tuesday.
Jones’ Nazi-sympathies were not a secret going into election day. His campaign ...
Puerto Ricans protest at FEMA on six month anniversary of Hurricane Maria
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A crowd of energized Puerto Ricans rallied in the U.S. capital on Tuesday, demanding equal treatment from the Trump administration and decrying the island’s ongoing woes on the sixth month anniversary of Hurricane Maria making landfall.
“We are here today for our families in Puerto Rico,” said Julio López-Varona, an organizer with the Center for Popular Democracy. “On the six month anniversary of Hurricane Maria, things are not better...
The Note: Democrats’ ‘big tent’ gets big test in Illinois
The TAKE with Rick Klein In this year of political turmoil — one that figures to be defined by the opposition to President Donald Trump — the first congressional incumbent to go down could well be a Democrat. Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., is in real danger of losing the nomination for his own seat in Tuesday’s Illinois primary. Lipinski is a self-described “big tent party” Democrat who opposes abortion rights and didn’t support Obamacare or even President B...