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...
ThinkProgress
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 ...
Health department removes breast cancer and Obamacare info from women’s health website
The Department of Health and Human Service’s (HHS) Office on Women’s Health removed a webpage dedicated to breast cancer and other helpful reproductive health information, including important insurance information for low-income people, according to a new report.
The Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project first reported the missing webpage. The group has been documenting page or link removals from the OWH website and shared its most recent report with ThinkPro...
Report: Trump’s citizenship question in 2020 census could undercount 24 million people
A new 2020 decennial census policy means some 24.3 million people could skip answering the critical form if they believe their names and other personal information could be shared with law enforcement, according to a Brookings Institute analysis released Friday.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced late Monday that it will restore a question about citizenship to the 2020 census questionnaire, at the behest of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The Chief Justice of the United States has no clue how elections work
The Chief Justice of the United States is allergic to political science. He harbors numerous misconceptions about how voters behave and how they think. And these misconceptions often form the basis for his judicial decisions.
With Chief Justice John Roberts poised to become the Supreme Court’s crucial “swing vote” if any of the five justices to his left leave Court, these misconceptions could soon weave themselves into the way the court interprets the Constitution....
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 ...
The 2020 Census citizenship question will affect your health care
Monday’s announcement that the 2020 census will include a question about citizenship was quickly met with uproar. Census data, is in a very big way, the bedrock of our democracy, as it’s used to decide congressional seats and electors in each state and how voting districts are drawn.
But it’s also incredibly important how federal funds are divvied out to state and localities. And that includes health care.
Asking about citizenship on the census dissuades man...
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...
Pence secretly drafted Trump’s latest transgender military ban
When President Trump announced a new ban on transgender people serving in the military late Friday, it was somewhat of a surprise — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had reportedly recommended in February that Trump allow transgender people to serve. It turns out that Vice President Pence and some of the country’s most prominent anti-LGBTQ activists had a role in reversing the outcome, which explains why the report explaining the decision is rife with anti-trans junk science.
Slate...