Former Sen. Kassebaum-Baker made one brief statement about the changing Republican and political climate when she retired; that’s pretty much what she said: that it was changing. She retired, as did Bob Dole, with the first wave of Tea Partiers (though a couple of years apart.) Since then, she’s been even more discreet, mostly concentrating on land and habitat conservation. This endorsement is a Big Deal. (I’ll copy it in here so you don’t have to take your computer to the carwash to get the stupid off.)
EXCLUSIVE:Three more Republicans are crossing the aisle to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House.
Former U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, R-Kan., former Kansas state senator and Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger and Deanell Reece Tacha, a retired federal judge, condemned the current state of the GOP in a statement shared with Fox News Digital Thursday.
“This election presents a stark choice that is not easy for any of us. The Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bob Dole, Frank Carlson, Jan Meyers, and generations of Kansas leaders does not exist within the current Republican Party,” the former officials wrote.
“But, it requires Republicans speaking out and putting country over party when those values are at stake.”
They added that the race between Harris and former President Trump presented a “stark choice,” but not an easy one.
“No candidate is perfect, and we do not pretend that we subscribe to all the policy positions taken either by the national parties or any individual candidates,” they wrote.
“However, we fervently believe that we must do our part to try to build a brighter future, which is why we will be voting for Kamala Harris and [Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz] in this election. We believe they most closely align with the aspirations of Kansans and reflect our rich history of working together ‘to the stars through difficulty.’”
All three have backed Democrats in recent elections, however.
Kassebaum, who now goes by Nancy Kassebaum Baker, served in the U.S. Senate from December 1978 through January 1997.
She was the first woman elected to represent Kansas in the chamber, and her career included a stint as chair of the Senate Labor Committee.
Tacha was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit by former President Reagan in 1985 and served as chief judge from 2001 until 2008.
Praeger served as the Kansas Insurance commissioner from 2003 to 2015.
Harris’ campaign has made a point of courting Republicans in a bid to widen her appeal and cast Trump as an extreme and polarizing choice.
A majority of Republicans, particularly those still in elected office, do support Trump.
The vice president has scored support from several notable GOP figures, however. Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Trump administration aides Stephanie Grisham and Olivia Troye have all publicly stated support for Harris.
Troye is one of several people who headlined a Republicans for Harris event Thursday alongside former representatives Barbara Comstock, R-Va., and Denver Riggleman, R-Va.
A new Marist College poll found Harris and Trump neck and neck in three critical states.
(Snip-skipping blah-blah race tied crap to the final graf, which is satisfying:)
The Trump campaign said of the Harris endorsement, “Nobody knows who these people are, and nobody cares.”
Over 10,000 books have been banned across the entire United States over the past school year. The trend has seen a particularly strong increase in states with a strong Republican presence, according to the free-speech nonprofit PEN America.
This is a major increase compared to the 2022-2023 year, which saw a total of 3,362 books banned across the country.
The books were accused of having “obscene” material. One of them was a children’s picture book about gay penguins.
Florida and Iowa are leading in the total number of bans, with over 8,000 recorded between the two states. This number is largely due to the increasingly strict laws on book bans.
The banned books include Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie; the famous work on anti-Black racism Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois; Alex Haley’s book about the lived experience of slaves, Roots: The Saga of an American Family; and James Baldwin’s autobiography Go Tell It On the Mountain.
Iowa’s bans stem from Senate File 496, a law restricting LGBTQ+ books from grade seven and below along with total bans on books deemed to contain sexual content. Florida’s House Bill 1069, backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), resulted in a similar ban, albeit a much more strict one.
PEN America cites other laws from Utah, Tennessee, and South Carolina as contributing to these increase in banned books as well.
Individual school districts have also had a hand in banning many books. The Elkhorn Area School District in Wisconsin, for example, banned over 300 books over a several month period.
PEN America says that the types of books banned “includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of color.”
The organization also emphasizes that these numbers are an undercount of the actual amount of banned books since many book bans go unreported. Additionally, the organization says schools have also implemented “soft” book bans, including policies that cause greater hesitancy to check out books from libraries, restrictions on who can check out restricted books out, book fair cancellations, and the removal of classroom collections.
Six major book publishers are currently suing the Floridian government after hundreds of their books were pulled from libraries, cutting severely into their profits and discriminating against their authors.
A Florida school district recently agreed to re-shelve 36 books to settle a lawsuit concerning multiple banned books, including And Tango Makes Three, an often banned children’s book about a gay penguin couple raising a chick.
Iowa’s book ban was recently brought back into law when a permanent injunction against the ban was overturned by an appeals court.
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These companies are bankrolling a multi-million dollar effort to elect Mark Robinson governor of North Carolina by Judd Legum
Maybe we here don’t patronize any of these entities anyway, but it’sworth tossing the info out whenever a discussion comes up, if it’s peaceful enough to do so. The entire piece is not much longer than this, but I wanted to put the details here rather than stuff we’ve seen already, in case everyone else is as busy as I am. Not complaining. Anyway, here’s the tea:
None of this prevented the Republican Governors Association (RGA) from throwing its support behind Robinson. In a post on X on March 5, the day Robinson won the Republican nomination, RGA chairman Governor Bill Lee (R-TN) congratulated Robinson and said the organization “look[s] forward to supporting him in the general election.”
The RGA has followed through. Data from AdImpact, a company that monitors political ad spending, obtained by Popular Information, reveals that the RGA, an affiliated PAC, and an affiliated non-profit have spent more than $17.3 million since June 11, 2024 on ads in support of Robinson. The money has financed over 20,000 ads across North Carolina supporting Robinson’s candidacy. The actual expenditure by the RGA is far higher, as the $17.3 million does not include the cost of producing the ads, polling, or any other activities taken on behalf of Robinson. (snip)
During this election cycle, for example, DoorDash has donated $625,000 to the RGA. This money has been used to support Robinson and other Republican gubernatorial candidates. DoorDash’s support of Robinson, who has repeatedly maligned LGBTQ people with crude rhetoric, through the RGA, is not consistent with the company’s carefully crafted public image.
The company regularly features LGBTQ-owned restaurants that deliver using DoorDash. On June 1, 2024, the company posted a blog post celebrating Pride Month. DoorDash said that it would spend the month “celebrating the diversity and vibrancy within the LGBTQ+ community by emphasizing how race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other aspects intersect to form unique individual identities.” The blog post claimed that DoorDash, “will continue to prioritize investing in and advancing opportunities for historically underrepresented people.”
On June 4, 2024, the RGA received a $250,000 contribution from DoorDash. These funds, along with other large corporate contributions, helped finance the RGA’s ad blitz in support of Robinson that started later in June. (snip)
Top corporate contributors to the RGA this cycle include Google ($585,000), Walmart ($570,000), CVS ($550,000), Microsoft ($550,000), Travelers Insurance ($460,000), Amazon ($450,000), Deloitte ($400,000), Charter Communications ($385,000), Oracle ($325,000), Pfizer ($300,000), Coca-Cola ($250,000), The Motion Picture Association ($250,000), and Wells Fargo ($250,000).
Popular Information contacted each of these companies and asked if they had any concerns that their contributions to the RGA were being used to support a candidate like Robinson.
Wells Fargo declined to comment. The other companies did not respond. (snip)
September 22, 1966 Eight hundred Puerto Rican men pledged in Lares to refuse U.S. Vietnam draft. They saw compliance as “part of the colonial subjugation of our country.”
September 22, 1980 The Solidarity union under leadership of Lech Walesa was allowed to organize by the Communist-led Polish government. The previous month the group had occupied the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk and had inspired a national general strike.
September 22, 1985 The first Farm Aid concert, organized principally by Willie Nelson, was held with more than 50 musicians raising $9 million for debt-ridden U.S. farmers. Farm Aid home
I don’t know how many remember the Internet Archive; we heard more about them during the pandemic, but also when books began to be banned and removed from libraries that were accessible to young people. Meanwhile, Big Profit was fighting the Archive even during the pandemic, but now there is some sad news.
Yesterday, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien announced that the union would not be endorsing either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris for president of the United States, the first time the union has not endorsed a presidential candidate since 1996.
Now, in 1996, the union refused to endorse Bill Clinton because of NAFTA, which (sorry) was entirely reasonable. This time is a little different and a whole lot less reasonable. You have one candidate that will be continuing the policies of an administration that — with the unfortunately glaring exception of blocking the rail workers’ strike, which was bad — has been one of the best for labor in decades, and then you have another candidate who previously appointed union-busting lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board, refused to recognize a union at his Las Vegas hotel, and loves to have a good giggle with his union-busting friend Elon Musk about what a fabulous time it is to fire workers for striking.
Naturally, O’Brien stopped by Fox News to explain his reasoning to Neil Cavuto, who was extremely pressed about the fact that the Teamsters did not endorse Trump, even though Trump had invited him to speak at the RNC (and because Democrats told him to pound sand for having done that), and because the polling of rank-and-file members showed that they lean heavily towards Trump. He suggested O’Brien might just be being petty because of the whole “being friends with Elon Musk and having a good laugh about how fun it is to fire striking workers!” thing.
O’Brien said that the primary reason he did not endorse either candidate was because he “couldn’t get a commitment” from either one about Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. This actually would have been entirely understandable, except for the fact that Harris has repeatedly, specifically endorsed the PRO Act and said she would sign it if it got to her desk. Also except for the fact that Tim Walz, who has an incredible record on labor, actually signed into law something of a mini-PRO Act for the state of Minnesota.
Whoops!
Meanwhile, when Trump was in office, his administration literally put out a statement promising to veto the PRO Act.
“H.R. 2474 would also restrict workers’ freedom of association. It abolishes State right-to-work laws, and would thereby make union dues compulsory nationwide,” it read.
Whoops again!
Unsurprisingly (and despite that polling), Teamsters Joint Councils across the US (and particularly in battleground states) are issuing their own endorsements for Harris.
“The Harris-Walz ticket offers a comprehensive vision for America — one that not only prioritizes economic fairness but also stands steadfastly by our nation’s workers,” said Kevin Moore, President of Michigan Teamsters Joint Council 43, which represents 250,000 workers. “Their record and future plans are exactly what our country needs to continue growing and prospering. I urge all my Teamster members and fellow citizens to lend their support to this outstanding campaign.”
Teamsters Joint Councils 7 and Joint Council 42, which combined represent 300,000 Teamster members from 39 Local Unions across California, Nevada, Hawaii, and Guam issued a joint statement on Facebook announcing their endorsement.
“Winning fair wages, bargaining quality affordable healthcare, securing strong pensions, protecting good jobs, and growing the middle class through organizing, is at the heart of what we do as Teamsters” the statement read. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have demonstrated a commitment to standing with working people through action, such as supporting the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, and in the state of Minnesota, Governor Walz signed a bill that would ban forced captive audience meetings. Under a Harris-Walz administration we are confident that we will continue to have proworker appointees to the National Labor Relations Board and the Supreme Court, which directly impacts our ability to organize and win contract fights that benefit all workers.”
“Kamala Harris has long been a champion of working people and Labor Unions. As a Senator, she cast the tie-breaking vote that helped pass the Butch Lewis Act, which saved the pensions of thousands of Teamsters and millions of other hard working Americans,” read the endorsement from Joint Council 396, representing workers in southern California. “This crucial legislation preserved the financial security and dignity that our members earned over decades of dedicated work.”
“As Vice President of the most pro-union administration ever, Kamala Harris worked with the Teamsters and other union workers to pass the historic Butch Lewis Act which has saved the pensions of over a million retirees to date.” said Bill Carroll, President of Teamsters Joint Council 39, which represents roughly 15,000 workers in Wisconsin. “As President, Kamala Harris will build on those efforts and work with Congress to pass the PRO Act, ending some of the most egregious union busting tactics once and for all. In contrast, Donald Trump tried to gut workers’ rights as President by appointing union busters to the NLRB and advocating for national right-to-work. Trump’s Project 2025 would go even further, attacking the ability for unions to even have the ability to organize. This November we will work with millions of union workers across the country to defeat Donald Trump once again, and send Vice President Harris and Governor Walz to the White House. We are proud to endorse Harris-Walz for President and Vice President.”
So far, it does not look like any joint councils are endorsing Trump, and those who do lean that way would probably have a difficult time finding any actual labor-related reasons to support him. What would they even say? That keeping trans people from going to the bathroom or banning books will help workers somehow? That they want the famously anti-union, anti-worker corporate attorney Eugene Scalia back as Secretary of Labor?
(I clicked on a Springfield New-Sun article the other day; they let you read everything if you start an account or register or whatever; email address, user name, and a password. Anyway, it’s a very polite paper, and the work, so far as I’ve seen, is exemplary. If you click through to the page, take a look at their headlines to see how things are going in Springfield, thanks to the Republican ticket. Some of it is good news for residents; there is balance.)
Clark State is investigating after officials found a suspicious package this morning on the College’s Springfield campus.
The college’s security found the package around 8 a.m. on the Leffel Lane campus and immediately contacted police, according to a statement on the college’s website.
“Police responded quickly and determined that the package was not of concern and no threat exists,” the statement said.
Administrators and police searched the buildings and campus before the Springfield Police Division said the campus was safe at 11:12 a.m.
Clark State closed all of its campuses this week and moved to remote classes through Friday as a result of two email threats of a potential bombing and shooting from last weekend.
Photo: Shutterstock
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