👎🏻😡“Workers at two Mercedes-Benz factories near Tuscaloosa, #Alabama, voted on Friday against joining the United Automobile Workers, a stunning blow to the union’s campaign to gain ground in the South, where it has traditionally been weak.” #UAW
Senator #JDVance, Eric Trump, Boris Ephsteyn, his legal adviser; Alina Habba, one of the lawyers from his civil fraud trial; US House Rep #NicoleMalliotakis; Senator #TommyTuberville; & the #Iowa & #Alabama attorneys general.
This is the biggest entourage we’ve seen him with so far.
He must be scared.
BREAKING: Civil rights groups sue over #Alabama's new Republican-backed voter suppression law that, among its restrictions, makes it a felony for most people to help a voter request, complete and return an absentee ballot.
The groups allege the law severely burdens the work of civic engagement groups and voters who rely on assistance, particularly elderly voters, voters with disabilities, incarcerated voters and low-literacy voters.
Today in Labor History March 25, 1931: The authorities arrested the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and charged them with rape. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American youths, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused of raping two white women. A lynch mob tried to murder them before they had even been indicted. All-white juries convicted each of them. Several judges gave death sentences, a common practice in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women. The Communist Party and the NAACP fought to get the cases appealed and retried. Finally, after numerous retrials and years in harsh prisons, four of the Scottsboro Boys were acquitted and released. The other five were got sentences ranging from 75 years to death. All were released or escaped by 1946. Poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote it in his work Scottsboro Limited. And Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son was influenced by the case.
“Because here is real danger in what Katie Britt did. And I want to take a moment and sit in the danger and talk about the fact that she weaponized someone's story, not to actually get something done, not to make someone's life better, but to score political points. It's just about the ugliest thing you can do in American politics.” — Alicia Menendez, on MSNBC’s The Weekend.
So Katie Britt is a liar—you can say it, New York Times.
The Alabama senator used a story about sex trafficking to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies. But the events appear to have occurred in Mexico years ago.
Heather Cox Richardson on the Republican rebuttal to Biden last night, delivered by Alabama’s Katie Britt:
“The fact that the Republicans had a female senator give what could be the most important speech of her life in a kitchen seemed to tell its own, more powerful, story.”
Alabama governor signs IVF bill giving immunity to patients and providers.
@NPR reports: "Many clinics paused IVF services last month after the procedure was thrown into uncertain legal territory by the state Supreme Court's ruling that frozen embryos are 'children' with a constitutional right to life."
Doesn’t address personhood—“#Alabama lawmakers pass bill aimed at resuming #IVF treatment, but experts say it will take more to protect fertility services”
In his newsletter today, Robert P. Jones provides an eye-popping rundown of the race to theocracy that we're seeing now with the Republican party — if our eyes are open.
As he notes, on February 16, the Alabama supreme theocrats delivered their IVF ruling. He notes that chief justice Parker cited the King James bible, bible commentaries, and theologians as he stated that Alabamians live by a "theologically based" understanding of this issue.
Jones also notes that on the day the Alabama theocrats released their ruling, Parker appeared on QAnon conspiracist and Christian nationalist Johnny Enlow’s program stating that “God created government” and endorsing Christian dominionism.
Then on February 20, Politico highlighted the work of Russell Vought, who is close to Trump and has founded The Center for Renewing America laying out a theocratic agenda if Trump is elected.
"Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Tom Parker was downright gleeful.
He quoted Genesis in his sermon — I’m sorry, his concurring opinion — in the Alabama ruling that turned in vitro fertilization on its head by defining frozen embryos as children.
He quoted 17th century Dutch theologian Petrus Van Mastricht."
"Ya know, good ole Van Mastricht. He quoted a 16th century Bible – because older is closer to God, maybe – and quoted the Sixth Commandment, thou shalt not kill.
He quoted Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin and one of Roy Moore’s old pals at the Foundation for Moral Law in Montgomery. He wrote of the 'wrath of God.' …
Make no mistake about it. Alabama is a theocracy."
And you, too, can be Alabama, the rest of America. Just keep voting Republican. Theocracy waits!
Long Division, by Kiese Laymon.
You are one, or maybe two, Black teens named City, living with your Grandma in Alabama, when you find a book (or maybe two) with no author, called Long Division, which when you read it is sort of about your life but not the one you thought you were living.
4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈. @bookstodon#bookstodon#reading#books#alabama
Good afternoon. It's 12PM, Saturday, 24th February. The headlines: #Ukraine marks two years since #Russia's incursion as the conflict persists, with global figures showing support in Kyiv. #England's junior doctors stage their tenth strike over pay. A WWII explosive discovered in Plymouth is detonated offshore. The #Odysseus lander gears up for #moon tests after a bumpy landing. An #Alabama court decision on embryos stirs debate. #BBC#News
Most #Republicans in Congress have already signed on to a #christofascist bill that claims life begins at conception -- and contains no exemptions for #IVF. It would effectively take #Alabama's recent state supreme court decision nationwide.