AUTHOR’S NOTE: This will be the final blog post for The Progressive Midwesterner on Medium, as, starting January 1, new blog posts on The Progressive Midwesterner will be at a new website.
In the small community of Auxvasse, Missouri (population: 983), located about 35 miles north-northeast of the state capital of Jefferson City, workers at the community’s Dollar General store voted to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 655:
While the upcoming right-to-work vote looms over Missouri, employees at the Auxvasse Dollar General store have agreed to unionize.
Late last week, a majority of Auxvasse store…
Unlikely to actually happen, but some in the political media are reporting that there are rumors that the U.S. House Speaker may step down
HuffPost reported yesterday that there are rumors swirling within the House Republican Conference that U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) may step down from at least the speakership, if not resign from the House altogether:
As Republicans finish their long-sought rewrite of the tax code, some lawmakers are beginning to wonder just how much longer Rep. Paul Ryan intends to remain speaker.
[…]
The Wisconsin Republican has made no indication he’s quitting any time soon, but the possibility that Ryan finishes the tax bill and decides he no longer wants to continue in Congress has begun to loom over internal…
College Football Playoff selection committee could award Alabama a playoff spot despite failing to qualify for their conference’s championship game
For the fourth consecutive year, a four-team College Football Playoff (CFP) will decide which four teams will play for the unofficial national championship in NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football. The NCAA does not organize a tournament to determine an official national championship in FBS football, so the winner of the CFP is generally recognized as the national champion in FBS football, but is not an official NCAA national champion in FBS football.
The Clemson University Tigers and the University of Oklahoma Sooners went into their respective conferences’ championship games (Clemson is a member of the Atlantic Coast…
Nessel promises Michiganders that she won’t sexually harass anyone and that she won’t tolerate sexual harassers
Ladies and gentlemen, we may have already seen the best campaign ad of the 2018 elections in the United States, and it’s still 2017. This is an actual campaign ad, in the form of a nearly two-minute long YouTube video, from Dana Nessel, who is running in a contested Democratic primary for Attorney General of Michigan:
As far as I know, the ad is not being aired in the form of a television commercial in Michigan.
My favorite part of the web video is where Nessel criticizes political pundits for saying that Michigan Democrats shouldn’t have an all-female statewide…
Deputy White House Press Secretary implies Trump travel ban was about discriminating against Muslims
Raj Shah, the White House Deputy Press Secretary, responded to a question about whether or not President Donald Trump views Muslim people as a threat to the United States by saying that “the president has addressed these issues with the travel order”, referring to Trump’s discriminatory travel ban:
Earlier today, Trump retweeted a series of Islamophobic videos that Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the ultra-fascist British political party Britain First, posted to her Twitter page. …
While the Rohingya people of Myanmar face an ongoing genocide, Aung San Suu Kyi uses anti-Rohingya dogwhistles in a speech
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The United States federal government recognizes Myanmar as a sovereign country under the name Burma, but the author has chosen to refer to Myanmar as Myanmar, the short form of the country’s full English-language name (Republic of the Union of Myanmar), and the adjective form of Myanmar used in this article is Myanma.
I do not believe that the United States should be the world’s police force, but it’s indisputably clear that Aung San Suu Kyi (henceforth referred to in this article by the initials ASSK), the State Counsellor and Foreign Affairs Minister of the Southeast Asian country…
Newman is progressive Democratic primary challenger to anti-abortion U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski
The Marie Newman campaign in the 3rd Congressional District of Illinois just got a huge boost!
You read that correctly: U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)’s Off the Sidelines organization is backing Marie Newman in the 3rd Congressional District of Illinois. Marie is a pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ rights Democrat who, if nominated and elected, will support human rights. Gillibrand has been a powerful voice in calling for the Democratic Party to become an unquestionably pro-choice political party, and her organization is now backing up her word by endorsing Newman’s candidacy.
Dan Lipinski is one of the most right-wing Democrats in Congress…
Disturbing image shows Franken groping woman who was asleep at a USO event in 2006
I’m not going to post the image in question on here, but there is an image circulating on social media showing Al Franken, who, at the time, was a comedian and is now the junior Democratic-Farmer-Labor U.S. Senator from Minnesota, groping Leeann Tweeden, who, at the time, was a correspondent for the now-cancelled Fox Sports Net program The Best (expletive) Sports Show Period (the show’s actual title contained profanity) and is now a morning radio host for KABC-AM in Los Angeles, while Tweeden was asleep aboard a U.S. military helicopter that was leaving a USO event in Afghanistan in 2006…
In case you didn’t or weren’t able to watch Biss’s interview on WCIA-TV’s Capitol Connection, the interview was just plain awful
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author of this blog post is an election judge in Vermilion County, Illinois who may be called to serve as a poll worker in the March 2018 primaries in Illinois. This blog post merely reflects the opinions of the author and is not, in any way, connected to election judge duties.
I watched Daniel Biss’s interview on Capitol Connection, a local political television show that airs in my area of Illinois on Champaign, Illinois-based CBS affiliate WCIA-TV, but, as far as I know, is not aired statewide in Illinois. …
Last night’s elections in Virginia and other U.S. states featured victories by a diverse group of Democrats and progressives
Last night, Democrats and progressives in the dozens of states that held elections yesterday scored major victories in states like Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, among others.
The biggest winner last night was indisputably the Democratic Party of Virginia. Democrats retained all three directly-elected state executive offices in Virginia, with Dr. Ralph Northam winning the open-seat gubernatorial election against Republican candidate Ed Gillespie, who ran one of the most racist campaigns in modern Virginia history. …
