March 11, 2023

Saturday, March 11, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Friday was a quiet day.

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Joe is always busy.

The jobs numbers exceeded expectations again.

Joe just keeps winning.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll, sponsored by Goldco, for Thursday shows that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Biden’s job performance. Fourty-Nine (49%) disapprove.

Our President welcomed the President of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen.

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Kamala is always busy.

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As we await a Trump indictment, some Republican criminality is exposed.

Republican hypocrisy is also exposed.

Gay Instagrammer says Tennessee lawmaker shouldn't be embarrassed for liking racy photos.

Instagrammer Franklyn McClure.

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Tennessee’s lieutenant governor apologized for commenting on dozens of racy Instagram photos posted by a young gay man over the last three years. But the 20-year-old aspiring performer said the conservative lawmaker has nothing to be embarrassed about. 

Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, 79, faced criticism Thursday after the Tennessee Holler, a local progressive news outlet, first reported that he had commented on partially nude Instagram photos posted by Franklyn McClure as the state passed bills targeting the LGBTQ community.

Among the photos McNally commented on was a close-up photo of McClure’s backside, where he’s only wearing what appear to be briefs. McNally wrote two comments on the post: “Finn, you can turn a rainy day into rainbows and sunshine!” and another with hearts and fire emojis, to which McClure responded, “You are literally always so nice King,” with a heart emoji. Finn is the nickname of McClure, who is known as Franklyn Superstar on social media.

When NewsChannel 5 asked McNally about his response to that particular photo, he said he tries “to encourage people with posts and try to, you know, help them if I can.”

McNally posted more than 80 comments on McClure’s Instagram account from early June 2020 to as recently as Feb. 26, with his initial comments more like pep talks in response to McClure’s posts about his life and mental health.

More recently, McNally liked a photo McClure posted in December 2022 in which McClure describes himself as a “hoe” and says he performs sex acts for free marijuana.

When News Channel 5 asked if it was appropriate to like the photo, McNally said, “Probably not, probably not.”

McClure said he only found out two days ago that McNally has supported bills targeting the LGBTQ community, including one that restricts where and in front of whom drag performances can take place. “That was sad to hear,” he said.  (NBC).

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Keep remembering the children.

Jeet Heer in the Nation 👇 says the answer to stopping the resurgence of child labor, is to end xenophobia, and give immigrants jobs.

The Horrifying and Shameful Return of Child Labor.

Coming back soon? Children working as miners in Pennsylvania.

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The disorienting fact about the 21st century is that, even as the calendar moves forward, actual social and political reality is in a state of regression. Evils that were once thought long-vanquished are returning with a vengeance.

Instead of Francis Fukuyama’s promised “end of history” leading to an expanding global system of liberal democracy, we’re living through a revival of authoritarianism and Great Power imperial conflict. Thanks to anti-vaxxers, the United States and other countries are experiencing a return of measles, mumps, whooping cough and chicken pox. The health achievements of the past century are threatened by a malfunctioning global health system that is becoming more vulnerable to pandemics. The rollback of social democracy that began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher has led to levels of income inequality surpassing the era of robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie more than a century ago.

Child labor now has to be added to this list of resurgent horrors. “Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country,” writes journalist Hannah Dreier, in an in-depth investigation published by The New York Times last month.

This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.

Dreier’s report follows Carolina Yoc, a 15-year-old migrant from Guatemala who works in a food processing plant in Grand Rapids, Mich. Like many, Carolina fled her home out of desperate poverty, which has been exacerbated since the Covid pandemic.

Carolina’s journey from rural poverty to factory exploitation was made possible by bipartisan policy decisions going back many decades. Against the background of repeated failed attempts at immigration reform, many American companies have become reliant on the cheap labor that migrants provide whether they have legal status or not.

The normal pattern of immigration is for parents to go abroad and send money back to their families. But the United States government, since passage of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in 2008, has created a perverse incentive structure that makes it easier for children to gain entry than for adults. The Trump administration exacerbated this problem with its child separation policy. The Biden administration was unwilling to change the reality of child separation, but didn’t want the bad optics of children in cages. Under Biden, therefore, the Department of Health and Human Services settled for a policy of rapidly and carelessly releasing child migrants to sponsors. This easy-release policy coupled with the current labor shortage (itself partly intensified by the Trump era tightening of immigration) created both the supply and the market for child workers.

Technically, there have been federal laws on the books to prevent child labor since 1938. But the decline of labor unions combined with the neoliberal evisceration of the regulatory capacity of the government means these laws often go unenforced.

As a result, the United States is now witnessing scenes reminiscent of the works of Victorian and Gilded Age chroniclers of social degradation such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and Upton Sinclair. As Dreier records, “Underage workers in Grand Rapids said that spicy dust from immense batches of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos made their lungs sting, and that moving heavy pallets of cereal all night made their backs ache. They worried about their hands getting caught in conveyor belts, which federal law classifies as so hazardous that no child Carolina’s age is permitted to work with them.”

When she’s not risking her health to make sure bags of Cheetos get to their destination, Carolina Yoc attends a high school where, Dreier notes, one of her teachers lectures on “the journalist Jacob Riis and the Progressive Era movement that helped create federal child labor laws.” Carolina and her fellow students, many of them also workers on the night shift, are too tired to notice the irony.

The scandalous return of child labor implicates not just the political system but also a wide swath of corporate America. Among the firms named in the New York Times account as relying on child labor, usually with the plausible deniability provided by a contractor, are Ford, General Motors, J. Crew, Ben & Jerry’s, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, and Fruit of the Loom.

As Eric Levitz cogently notes in New York magazine, one simple policy response would be to loosen immigration rules so adults from Central America could enter and in effect take the jobs now done by their children:

If the U.S. expands immigration opportunities for international workers, our labor shortage and Central Americans’ economic woes should ease simultaneously. After all, there is no “skills” mismatch between economically desperate Central Americans and open U.S. positions. The U.S.’s labor shortage is concentrated in fields that do not require an extensive education. The U.S. needs more kitchen staff, construction workers, and delivery drivers. Central America is home to a large number of people with the interest in and capacity to perform those roles. Opportunities for “win-win” policy-making are rarely so clear-cut.

The ACLU has offered a comprehensive program to solve the child labor problem that includes creating a path for citizenship, family reunification, and greater availability of legal counsel for child workers.

Unfortunately, given the GOP’s propensity for xenophobic demagoguery on immigration—and the Democratic Party’s cowardice on this issue—such commonsense solutions aren’t in the cards.

The Biden administration does at least seem properly embarrassed by the New York Times report. The White House is promising a crackdown on child labor through enforcement of existing laws. Senate Democrats, led by Richard Durbin, are pressing for new laws to punish employers of child labor and more carefully vet the sponsors who are given charge of migrant children.

But the labor shortage remains a reality—and there is a countervailing push to make it easier for children to work.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that “Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill into law this week that rolls back a number of child labor protections across the state, including a measure that had required employers to obtain work certificates for children under the age of 16.” Sanders is following in the footsteps of other states.

As The Washington Postreported on February 11,

Legislators in Iowa and Minnesota introduced bills in January to loosen child labor law regulations around age and workplace safety protections in some of the country’s most dangerous workplaces. Minnesota’s bill would permit 16- and 17-year-olds to work construction jobs. The Iowa measure would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants.

The fundamental reality is that American corporations are desperate for immigrant labor, but the political system is unwilling to give many of those immigrants (particularly if they are poor and from Central America) legal status. The tension between the economic need and the political desire has produced a ramshackle system where child labor flourishes. The previous era of child labor came to an end only through a combination of muckraking journalism, political campaigning, and labor organizing. That remains the only remedy. (The Nation).

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Banana Republicans cannot imagine that Jews and Muslims can peacefully coexist.

Ilhan Omar accusations: how her Jewish adviser got ensnared by the right.by Aymann Ismail.

[Jeremy] Slevin, you see, is a senior adviser to Rep. Ilhan Omar. He oversees her communications. The Minnesota Democrat has faced persistent scrutiny for her comments on Israel, 9/11, and more, which Republicans have sought to keep in the news and used to expel her from the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee last month. But Slevin himself has recently become a target. To some, he’s a “self-hating Jew.” He’s like a Jewish guard at a concentration camp. He’s a Judas. He warned me before we got started that he’s turned down pretty much every request to talk to journalists. But this time, he agreed to meet me.

Slevin has been with Omar since she got to Congress. For a brief moment, as excitement over “the Squad” and new progressive members took hold, things were different. But not for long. “I remember saying, that first week—because we were getting really positive coverage and everyone was friendly—I was like, ‘This is the honeymoon period. It will last about three weeks,’ ” he recalled. “Just knowing all of the identities she carries, Trump being in the White House, the gigantic propaganda machine of the right—it was muted in those first couple weeks, but you knew they were waiting to fire at full blast. And I also know, from my time working with Keith, that it’s too often the mainstream press will take the bait.”

He was referring to the only other major job he’s had in Congress—working for the first Muslim congressman in U.S. history, Keith Ellison. He joined Ellison in 2011 after interning and doing fellowships elsewhere in the Washington orbit. Ellison faced longtime scrutiny over his connections to antisemitic figures, even before he made headlines when Nancy Pelosi swore him in over a Quran. In other words, Slevin had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

But even he has been taken aback at times. A turning point came last month, when Republicans staged the vote to oust Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. “Individuals who hold such hateful views should rightly be barred from that type of committee,” Republican Rep. Mike Lawler said at the time. To continue reading the Slate interview, click here.
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Gender lessens in importance in Berlin.

Female and nonbinary swimmers can go topless in public pools, Berlin says.

Berlin’s authorities want to make it very clear: Women are free to swim topless in municipal pools, as are those who identify as nonbinary, if that’s what they want.


Topless swimming in public pools wasn’t forbidden in the German capital anyway, but a woman recently lodged a complaint alleging discrimination after a pool prevented her from swimming without covering her chest, a restriction that wasn’t applied to the male swimmers.


The city and its public pools operator will now ensure that men and women are treated equally when it comes to swimming topless, the Berlin state government said in a press release Thursday.



The statement noted that pools did not have “gender-specific rules” and instead simply specified that standard swimwear should be worn. While the rules do mention swimming shorts, bikinis, swimsuits and burkinis as acceptable attire, they do not specify who must wear what.


Germans “are generally quite relaxed about” nudity, Keon West, a professor of social psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, who has conducted studies into nakedness and body image, previously told The Washington Post. Nudity, also known as “free body culture,” is not seen as sexual. (The Washington Post).
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People can surprise and delight.

An Unlikely Fiddler’s Dream.

Michael Cleveland was born blind and mostly deaf. That was only the beginning of his journey to become one of modern bluegrass’s most compelling musicians.

Michael Cleveland had been 13 for five days the first time he picked with the bluegrass demigod Doc Watson— in a backstage bathroom, no less, at an awards show in Kentucky.

It was September 1993. Peter Wernick, the first president of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), had assembled a band of young hotshots to provide a pointed rebuttal to a Washington Post feature that argued kids didn’t care about antiquated mountain music. The teenage quintet electrified its audience, sprinting through a Bill Monroe standard with verve that suggested these sounds were vital to fresh generations.

After the triumphant ceremony, John Cleveland ushered his son — born blind, with one eye; almost deaf in his left ear and partly deaf in his right — to the bathroom. They found Watson, Wernick and a cadre of other genre giants laughing and jamming there, as though the lavatory were a back porch, and the teenage Michael joined for an hour.

“I had no shame, no fear, nothing,” Cleveland, 42, remembered with a hoot by phone from the Indiana home he shares with his father. “I thought, ‘This may be the only opportunity I ever have to hear this person play, to be near them.’ That was pretty much all I wanted to do — raw, high-energy bluegrass.”

In the three decades since, Cleveland has become a bluegrass star himself, winning 29 IBMA awards and becoming the organization’s most decorated fiddler. He is one of the world’s most in-demand and distinctive players, with collaborators that include Béla Fleck, Billy Strings and Vince Gill. “He plays with such ferocity,” Gill said by phone. “But the amount of emotion he pulls out of that instrument is way more appealing than the amount of notes.” (New York Times).

If you would like to hear Michael Cleveland play, watch below.👇

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Sunday is the day. Spring is sprung.

More sunshine starts at 2 am on Sunday - early, early morning - just as tomorrow’s Roundup arrives in your inbox.

Standard time giving way to daylight saving in most of US.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Standard time comes to an end in most parts of the United States this weekend.

You’ll lose an hour of sleep for one night but gain more daylight in the evening in the months ahead.

The transition to daylight saving time is official at 2 a.m. local time Sunday across much of the country. Then on March 20, winter sunsets and spring is sprung. (Associated Press).
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