Some Republican platform committee members want to soften the party's official position on gay marriage, and may even win concessions from some of the party's "staunch social conservatives." But BFD, not just because no Republican should be trusted to actually "moderate" on hot-button issues after George W. Bush presented himself as a moderate and governed as a far-rightist, but because you know there'll never be any Republican "softening" on the issue of ensuring all income gets redistributed from workers to executives.
Contra what right-wing jerks want you to believe, Officers Down Memorial Page tells us that while police officer deaths from shooting may have gone up, police officer murders overall are down rather dramatically from the Reagan years. And assaults on police officers are also down. But, of course, that's just part of Mr. Obama's nefarious plan to lull us into a false sense of security -- to ultimately increase cop-killing by decreasing cop-killing! No, really, someone's brother or uncle is saying it, and meaning it, right now.
Bernie Sanders supporters fret that since the Democrats didn't put actual anti-Trans-Pacific "Partnership" plank in the platform, Donald Trump could attack Hillary Clinton as insufficiently anti-"free" trade. They could be right -- certainly there'll be no use explaining to the people that the Sanders camp got the best anti-"free" trade plank they could into the platform -- but the Clinton campaign might neutralize that threat by reminding voters that Mr. Trump himself has flip-flopped on "free" trade, once saying explicitly that he'd approve a "free" trade deal if it was a good deal for us. And, you know, you can't really trust a salesman. And Donald Trump thinks he can sell anything.
Some 200 supporters of the South Carolina Secessionist Party spend their Sunday raising the Confederate flag at the statehouse. None were arrested, as Bree Newsome was when she took the flag down for the first time last June, which helped catalyze the legislature's permanent removal of the flag last year. Then the Party actually called that removal the "greatest treason" in South Carolina history on their Facebook page -- even greater, apparently, than that time South Carolina joined other Southern states to wage war against the United States so they could keep their slaves.
Finally, Jane Slaughter at Labor Notes describes three recent victories won by workers -- Verizon workers' contract after a 45-day strike, Chrysler workers ending that corporation's two-tier wage system, and retired Teamsters' work against their pension fund's plan to slash their benefits. Every time folks ask me how they can possibly have hope that we can fight and defeat the corruption and decadence that plagues our society, I tell them I know it can happen because I've seen it happen. And now you've seen it happen, three more times.
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