Author: TheGuardian

Martin Luther King Jr. is useful to just about everyone nowadays. For President Donald Trump, celebrating King is a chance to tell everyone that he shares “his dream of equality, freedom, justice, and peace.” For Ram trucks, it’s a chance to, well, sell trucks. This was not always the case. In 1983, 15 years after King’s death, 22 senators voted against an official holiday honoring him on the third Monday in January. The North Carolina senator Jesse Helms undertook a 16-day filibuster of the bill, claiming that King’s “action-oriented Marxism” was “not compatible with the concepts of this country.”...

The Milwaukee pastor Greg Lewis spent weeks before the November midterms working to get out the vote. Through the Souls to the Polls program, Lewis and other Milwaukee church officials educated members of the community about their voting rights, ensured they were registered and had proper documentation, and got them to polling places to cast their votes – sometimes encouraging them directly from the pews to the polls. Through the Souls to the Polls program, Lewis and other Milwaukee church officials educated members of the community about their voting rights, ensured they were registered and had proper documentation, and...

Penny Marshall, the trailblazing director of smash-hit big-screen comedies such as “Big” and “A League of Their Own” who first indelibly starred in the top-rated sitcom “Laverne & Shirley,” has died. She was 75. Michelle Bega, a spokeswoman for the Marshall family, said Tuesday that Marshall died in her Los Angeles home on Monday night due to complications from diabetes. “Our family is heartbroken,” the Marshall family said in a statement. In “Laverne & Shirley,” among television’s biggest hits for much of its eight-season run between 1976-1983, the nasal-voiced, Bronx-born Marshall starred as Laverne DeFazio alongside Cindy Williams as...

Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina suffered stinging losses in November, but the parties aren’t transferring power quietly, or at all in some cases. On the way out the door, “lame-duck” state legislatures are bringing in last-minute laws that will strip power from incoming Democrats, gut voter-approved ballot initiatives, or otherwise undermine the election results. But some legal experts say the most alarming legislation the Republicans have passed is unconstitutional and unlikely to survive outraged legal challenges by Democrats. Among other issues, they contend many of the Republican laws blur the constitutionally mandated separation of powers among the...

What Republican legislators just did in Wisconsin – passing bills to strip key powers from the governor-elect, Tony Evers, and other newly elected Democratic officials, is a total betrayal of the people of Wisconsin and our nation’s democratic ideals. Michigan is passing a similar set of bills and North Carolina Republicans are accused of paying someone to steal absentee ballots and commit election fraud for a U.S. House candidate. In Ohio, other undemocratic efforts are under way. It seems that Republicans officials nationwide from Donald Trump to Mitch McConnell and right down the line don’t have a problem assaulting...

When the Green Bay Packers lost to the Arizona Cardinals 20-17 on the afternoon of December 2, a consensus began to form that the upset could mark the end of Mike McCarthy’s tenure at head coach. What few suspected was that the change would happen so quickly. Mere hours later, the Packers announced that McCarthy was out and that offensive coordinator Joe Philbin would act as interim head coach. With that shock announcement, McCarthy’s 13-year stint in Green Bay came to a rather abrupt and ignoble end. “The 2018 season has not lived up to the expectations and standards...