After the first two Starbucks stores unionized in December, something unbelievable has happened: 78 Starbucks stores in 23 states have filed for union elections. It’s spreading like wildfire.
A Rhodes Scholar barista and the fight to unionize Starbucks. It started with one store in December, now it's 78… and counting. https://t.co/HG8NHP2EEX
So let me get this straight: Elon Musk claims to want to save humanity by creating a space colony, but doesn't want workers to join a union and has reportedly created a racist workplace?
“As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him.”
“In conversations with senators and would-be senators, Mr. McConnell is blunt about the damage he believes Mr. Trump has done to the G.O.P., according to those who have spoken to him. Privately, he has declared he won’t let unelectable “goofballs” win Republican primaries.”
I wrote a column about how obscene it is that the NYT is preemptively throwing cold water on investigating Trump after he's caught red-handed, after hyping Hillary's emails as a matter of urgent public concern: https://t.co/IZqqemxGxn
Being a complete idiot would get you fired from most jobs. Republicans elect them.
How about this for a modest proposal: channeling Reagan and the air traffic controllers… Revoke the licenses and permits for any trucker engaged in this illegal stoppage?
Not an original point, but these ppl w trucks are getting a pretty soft reaction to blocking supply chain compared to those protecting land & water/blocking pipelines. And compared to those who've blocked freeways in BLM protests. It's bananas that this is going on:
— christina d'ache is now @inquiline@mastodon.social (@scrivenix) February 11, 2022
Read this whole thread for more on how far right religious organizations are driving a lot of this, not because they actually care about protecting children, but because they want things like LGBTQ+ artwork and sexual health info censored from the Internet https://t.co/uvOafGiIZm
— @team@fightforthefuture.org on Mastodon (@fightfortheftr) February 8, 2022
It's important to understand some of the groups pushing for EARN IT are lying about who they really are. For example, NCOSE, which bills itself as a child protection organization, used to be called "Morality in the Media." They're an anti-LGBTQ hate group https://t.co/wX21YodDfc
— @team@fightforthefuture.org on Mastodon (@fightfortheftr) February 8, 2022
Here's our full story on the arrival of the American Trucker Convoys — who, how, and where they're planning.
It's fake accounts in Romania AND big-money antivaxxers in California.
When I'd still argue with them, conservative Christians would define atheism as a religion, evolution was a religion, even quantum mechanics was a religion, etc. It always struck me as odd that they of all people would use "religion" as an insult.
Oh Klem. Do you not understand the difference between a right and a freedom? The Pettus Bridge marchers were seeking to exercise their voting “rights” as granted in the Constitution. Truckers, or for that matter, anyone operating on public highways, are exercising a privilege that comes with defined conditions and restrictions. They have the freedom to choose whether they want to cross the border, and comply with the conditions, or take local gigs only. And all this over a freakin” vaccine when the truckers have MANDATORY medical exams as conditions for their licenses. Remember the way the Selma to Montgomery marchers disrupted the supply chain and threw thousands of people out of work? Remember the swastika flags? The open expressions of anti-Semtisim? Remember the calls to overthrow the government? Remember? ‘Cause I don’t.
What we are witnessing is PRICE GOUGING, NOT INFLATION.
INFLATION is when business owners raise prices commensurate with higher costs to make ends meet.
But when corporations are reporting record all-time profits, raising prices is NOT INFLATION, it is PRICE GOUGING to capitalize on supply chain disruptions caused by a national emergency.
McDonald’s profits soared 59% in 2021, to $7.5 billion.
ExxonMobil reported a $8.9 billion in profits in the FOURTH QUARTER ALONE, while it was jacking up prices to new records.
Numerous other companies jacked up prices while raking in record profits in 2021.
Donald Trump crashed the economy, destroyed the supply chain, blew up international trade relations by imposing ridiculous tariffs that hurt farmers and consumers, mishandled a pandemic that exploded into a worldwide economic crisis and now as Biden is putting people back, restoring consumer confidence, which stimulates demand, but the devastation wrought by Trump on the supply chain is taking longer to undo, especially as anti-science right wing nut jobs continue to undermine recovery from the Trump plague.
If there were a hurricane, tornado, flood or wildfire and vendors were charging $20 for a bottle of water, they would be arrested. We need to see some of the corporate heads who have tripled their profits on the backs of consumers being frog-marched into the Big House.
Yes as the science changes so does the government advice. Normal and acceptable. Anything else is propaganda by those who deny science and want to promote confusion and dissent.
Right wing cartoon sites I have commented on today.
The nature preserve on the US-Mexico border became a target of rightwing ire after it opposed construction of Trump’s wall
Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center: ‘I used to believe much better of people.’ Photograph: John L Mone/AP
In Mission, Texas, on the border between the US and Mexico, sits the National Butterfly Center. A 100-acre nature preserve once exclusively dedicated to the conservation of plants and wildlife, it has now been thrust into the national spotlight and become a focal point of divisions over the country’s immigration policy.
This week, the butterfly center was forced to close its doors indefinitely amid ongoing threats from far-right conspiracists and QAnon followers who falsely claim it is a haven for human-trafficking and illegal migration.
“They’re not conspiracies, they’re just outright lies,” Marianna Treviño-Wright, the executive director of the National Butterfly Center, told the Guardian. “I think that’s a very important point that needs to be made. As long as they’re called ‘conspiracies’, then it seems like there’s some plausibility.”
The North American Butterfly Association (NABA), which runs the center, decided to close it down indefinitely on Wednesday as a precautionary measure, after being warned to “be armed at all times or out of town” during a We Stand America rally in support of a border wall.
The butterfly center first attracted the attention of the far right in 2017. Treviño-Wright and the NABA made headlines for suing the organizations behind the construction of a section of Donald Trump’s border wall after they sought to build straight through the butterfly preserve. Those groups included We Build the Wall, led by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and founder Brian Kolfage, which is now facing corruption and fraud charges.
Conspiracy theories about the butterfly center snowballed after Kolfage posted a series of tweets, claiming it was run by “left wing thugs with a sham butterfly agenda” and asserting without evidence that “rampant sex trade” was taking place on the property. Treviño-Wright said an increase in online and in-person harassment soon followed.
A court date for the case about the section of border wall on the center’s property has not been set yet.
Treviño-Wright said since the lawsuit she has faced personal threats and on one occasion, assault, by the extremist Virginia Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Lowe who visited the butterfly center last month and demanded to see “‘illegals crossing on rafts”. In an audio recording of the visit, Lowe is heard claiming baselessly that Treviño-Wright was “OK with children being sex-trafficked, raped and murdered”.
“It’s utterly ridiculous that instead of Democrats and a pizza joint, it’s immigrants and a butterfly center,” Treviño-Wright said, comparing the situation to the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy that took off in 2016 in an attempt to paint the then presidential candidate Hilary Clinton as a proponent of human trafficking.
The butterfly center’s closure this week did not come as a surprise to Treviño-Wright.
“This has been escalating. Not just the attacks on us, but the agenda in the political landscape. I think it makes sense for the [NABA] board to pump the brakes. If this madness is going to continue until the midterms or, God forbid, beyond that, we need to have personnel and a plan in place to protect ourselves as best as possible to be prepared for this horrible situation.”
Marianna Treviño-Wright stands near a section of the new border wall in Mission, Texas. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP
Treviño-Wright said the construction of sections of the border wall, andthe subsequent vitriol that came from QAnon followers and Trump supporters, had a profound effect on the butterfly center and its staff.
“When you’re targeted by laws that are designed to be destructive, it’s very difficult to continue operations as normal. So it’s been disruptive. It’s been destructive. And it’s made it very difficult for us to focus on our mission, which is environmental conservation and education.”
Choking back tears, Treviño-Wright explained the events of recent years had put a strain on her mental health and personal relationships.
“It really has made me a misanthrope. I used to believe much better of people, but now I’m afraid to even go to the grocery store because I can’t trust that the person with the cart next to me doesn’t believe” the lies, Treviño-Wright said.
On her accidental venture into political activism, Treviño-Wright called herself: “Utterly reluctant, unwilling, and anxious-to-not-be-here-or-be-doing-this-any-more.”
The butterfly center is now sharing strategies for dealing with confrontational conspiracists with the Children’s Museum of Denver, which was forcibly shut down after anti-maskers frequently directed their anger towards staff.
Treviño-Wright said she didn’t know if her center would reopen, but “certainly hope[s] it does.
“It’s a magical place and it’s a place I’ve poured the last 10 years of my life into developing and defending. I hope there’s a wonderful future in store for the National Butterfly Center, but as long as these people get away with these things, I’m not sure of anything. Not just for anything but for our entire country.
“It’s just unbelievable that somehow things have reached this point in American history that a nature center stands at the crossroads of whether our country slides full-on into authoritarianism or our democratic republic survives.”
The financier famed for bankrolling some of Steve Bannon’s best-known ventures, as well as the far-right strategist’s jet-setting lifestyle, is in deep trouble for steering a $28 million yacht—the same boat where federal agents arrested Bannon in 2020—out of American waters.
A New York judge slapped Guo Wengui, who also uses the aliases Kwok Ho Wan and Miles Guo, with $134 million in contempt of court fines on Wednesday for violating multiple restraining orders barring him from selling or relocating the boat or any other property he controls.
The high price tag results from nearly a year of the fugitive Chinese national defying the court’s order that he return the craft to a U.S. port—an order that carried a daily forfeiture of $500,000.
The yacht is being sought as an asset to cover unpaid loans allegedly owed to a Hong Kong investment firm.
Wengui is also the chief financial backer of the social media platform GETTR.
Several years ago he and Bannon flew banner planes around Manhattan which declared them to be the Chinese government in exile.
Wengui presently lives in a $68 million Manhattan penthouse.
A New York judge slapped Guo Wengui with $134 million in contempt of court fines on Wednesday for violating multiple restraining orders barring him from selling or relocating the boat or any other property he controls. https://t.co/yBwR1f7ZgS
There is a maga group trying to finish destroying a very important preserve that tRump against court rulings just started destroying for his vanity wall. They want the preserve gone, revoked , or just ruined beyond ability to function so they can get their wall section that wont make a bit of difference.
Yes that would cause kid real distress. Funny thing about those who think that teaching history about slavery causes white kids discomfort forget is black kids experience racism long before they start school.
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Misleading right wing media cartoons / memes
I find the misleading right wing media’s obsession with a civil servant weird. Dr Fauci is accomplished yes, but he only a bureaucrat. He has no power or authority to make rules and regulations. His only task is to advise based on his skill and education, like others in the government. Yet the right has developed an almost cult like mythology around this person. I wonder why? Could it be he is an intelligent well skill person who knows what he is talking about? Could it be he refutes and shoots down all the right wing nonsense over Covid and public health measures? Or could it be he disagreed with the cult leader tRump and the followers of the dear leader must now attack him with everything they have to protect the snowflake that claimed Covid would just disappear like magic called tRump? I wonder?
Silly cartoon. China doesn’t allow protests and has ever person allowed to enter the stadium vetted. No one would dare protest.
I know no leftist will ever concede this truth, but if we hadn’t had the mandates and lockdowns and monetary incentives we’d actually be better off now and would’ve lost less people, regardless of any vaccines existing.
Right wing cartoon comment sections I commented on
The Oklahoma Legislature started its 2022 session this week with a slew of anti-abortion bills, which isn’t uncommon. “This is my 12th year in the legislature now, and it feels like every year we go through this,” said Oklahoma House Minority Leader Emily Virgin (D).
But this year’s anti-abortion bills ― 11 were pre-filed before the legislative session even began ― bring fresh menace. The state’s Republican governor has already promised that he would sign any abortion restriction the Oklahoma Legislature sends his way. Moreover, some bills, which clearly go beyond what’s allowed by Roe v. Wade and normally would immediately get bogged down in the court system, could actually become law given the looming U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which could upend five decades of abortion rights.
And the bills coming to the floor range from extreme to downright dystopian, including one that would create a state-run database of some pregnant people in the state.
“[W]e have absolutely seen the bills get more and more extreme,” said Virgin. “That’s due to the national landscape and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. I think the anti-abortion movement has been strengthened and emboldened by that. And with our current governor, it’s pretty likely that he’ll sign any anti-abortion bill that makes it to his desk.”
Last year alone, Oklahoma passed a six-week abortion ban, a “trigger” ban if the high court rules against Roe v. Wade, a total ban and restrictions on medication abortion and other measures restricting reproductive rights (almost all have been blocked in lower courts).
The 2022 pre-filed bills include two six-week abortion bans and a total ban with similar enforcement mechanisms to Texas’ draconian restriction that deputizes private citizens to sue to enforce the law. Other proposed measures give personhood status to fetuses, ban abortion at 30 days and add a constitutional amendment declaring Oklahoma does not protect the right to abortion.
The most radical of the bunch is Senate Bill 1167, filed by state Sen. George Burns (R). Titled the Every Mother Matters Act, or EMMA, it would establish a government database for pregnant people looking to get abortions in Oklahoma. Each pregnant person will call a hotline and be connected with a “pre-abortion resource” assistant, but that person is legally not allowed to refer a patient to an abortion provider. The pregnant person would then be assigned a “unique identifying number” in the database, and abortion providers would be mandated to keep the information for seven years.
As part of the program, the woman will “be connected with a care agent who will provide, at no cost to her, an assessment of eligibility and offer assistance in obtaining support services, other than abortion, for her or the unborn child’s biological father,” according to a press statement from Burns’ office. The services include information on adoption, housing, employment, child care and more, but not on abortion care. It is unclear if the hotline assistants will have any medical expertise in reproductive care, but the legislation does bar anyone who’s worked for an abortion clinic in the past from signing up to be a resource agent.
“Many women facing unexpected pregnancies turn to abortion because they feel like they have no choice. We want to make sure they have an opportunity to connect with medical, financial and other resources that they may not know about,” Burns said in the press statement. “This legislation will do that as well as provide screening to identify those who’ve been victims of crime so that, with the woman’s consent, a report can be made to the appropriate law enforcement agency.”
Burns added that his “ultimate goal is ending abortion.” He did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
But, like so many of Oklahoma’s pre-filed abortion restrictions, S.B. 1167 is redundant. Oklahoma already has informed-consent laws that require pregnant people be told about parenting and adoption as abortion alternatives.
The proposed legislation is “truly off the deep end,” said Kristin Ford, vice president of communications and research at NARAL Pro-Choice America. “This bill is just so beyond the bounds of what any rational person would consider an appropriate role for politicians to play in people’s personal lives and family decisions.”
“Despite the framing that this is about helping folks, it’s pretty obvious that this is about expanding the state’s surveillance apparatus over pregnant people. People who aren’t even seeking abortion are going to fall under the surveillance apparatus, too.”
– Grace Howard, author of “The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood”
Tracking pregnant people who are seeking abortions is a slippery slope, added Grace Howard, an assistant professor of justice studies at San Jose State University who is writing a book, “The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood.”
“Despite the framing that this is about helping folks, it’s pretty obvious that this is about expanding the state’s surveillance apparatus over pregnant people. People who aren’t even seeking abortion are going to fall under the surveillance apparatus, too,” Howard said.
“The resources that are spent on this redundant, unhelpful and burdensome abortion legislation could be better utilized,” said Dr. Joshua Yap, an abortion provider for Planned Parenthood Great Plains’ Tulsa clinic.
If any of these restrictions pass ― but especially something like a 30-day or six-week abortion ban ― they won’t only affect Oklahomans. For five months now, Texans have been coming to Oklahoma to receive abortion care due to the Lone Star State’s extreme six-week abortion ban. Yap told HuffPost in November that his clinic staff had to double- or even triple-book their schedule to accommodate patients, 75% of which were from Texas.
Oklahoma abortion clinics were already booking weeks out when the Texas ban went into effect, delaying care and pushing people farther and farther into pregnancy. Those ripple effects will be even greater if Oklahoma’s access to abortion is further limited.
Yap believes Oklahoma and Texas patients who can travel will head to Kansas, a neighboring state that only has four clinics left. “Barely six months ago, we were trying to prepare ourselves emotionally for the Texas law going into effect, and now we’re having to re-brace ourselves going into this legislative session,” he said. “It feels like we’re really powerless from preventing these measures from going through.”
The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involving a Mississippi bill, is expected sometime this spring. Most advocates and pro-abortion rights lawmakers are not very optimistic given the court’s conservative majority.
When asked how Virgin, the Oklahoma House Democratic leader, is feeling about the pending decision, she responded that she’s scared.
“It’s scary to think about not having all of the health care options available to folks who find themselves in that situation. I’ve talked to people who run the gamut of reasons why they seek abortion care, and I think of all of them when I think about Roe potentially being overturned,” she said.
“We know that across the country, people do believe that there should be a right to access this kind of care. Whether it gets overturned or not, I think that we still have to fight for those options to be available.”
Scottie's Playtime 
What we are witnessing is PRICE GOUGING, NOT INFLATION.
INFLATION is when business owners raise prices commensurate with higher costs to make ends meet.
But when corporations are reporting record all-time profits, raising prices is NOT INFLATION, it is PRICE GOUGING to capitalize on supply chain disruptions caused by a national emergency.
McDonald’s profits soared 59% in 2021, to $7.5 billion.
ExxonMobil reported a $8.9 billion in profits in the FOURTH QUARTER ALONE, while it was jacking up prices to new records.
Numerous other companies jacked up prices while raking in record profits in 2021.
Donald Trump crashed the economy, destroyed the supply chain, blew up international trade relations by imposing ridiculous tariffs that hurt farmers and consumers, mishandled a pandemic that exploded into a worldwide economic crisis and now as Biden is putting people back, restoring consumer confidence, which stimulates demand, but the devastation wrought by Trump on the supply chain is taking longer to undo, especially as anti-science right wing nut jobs continue to undermine recovery from the Trump plague.
If there were a hurricane, tornado, flood or wildfire and vendors were charging $20 for a bottle of water, they would be arrested. We need to see some of the corporate heads who have tripled their profits on the backs of consumers being frog-marched into the Big House.