Berry Craig is a professor emeritus of history at West KY Community College, and an author of seven books and co-author of two more. (Read the rest on the Contributors page.)
Bill Londrigan remembers AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka as "a great friend and supporter of the Kentucky labor movement" who "visited Kentucky on many occasions to support our work." Trumka, AFL-CIO president since 2009, died unexpectedly yesterday, reportedly [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/business/richard-trumka-dead.
“Richard Trumka lived and breathed union,” said Steve Earle, a UMWA veteran who knew the AFL-CIO president for more than 40 years. Trumka, UMWA president from 1982 to 1995, died unexpectedly today. He had just turned 72. “It’s a shock and a tremendous loss for the labor movement and
"Not all whites in the Jackson Purchase and elsewhere are racist; there are many concerned conservative Republicans who don’t like what they are seeing. Progressives need to look past labels and past disagreements and link up with them to make sure that our democratic experiment does not fail."
Today's Trumplican party is a throwback to the 1860s, with Rand Paul as example. Can Charles Booker overcome both Trumpism and Paul to win in 2022?
The covidiot pack in Congress includes Congressman Louie Gohmert and Sen. Marsha Blackburn. But the top dog in the covidiot pack is our own Senator Rand Paul, as he proved in his latest set-to with Dr. Fauci. (It didn’t go well for Rand.)
> “The labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the AFL-CIO convention in 1961. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is more proof, as if it were needed, that King’s
“The country’s been well served by elections run by state and local officials who could respond to state and local problems,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo), explaining his vote to block debate over the For the People Act. The legislation is designed to keep “state and local officers” from
I’ve yet to meet a Kentucky Democrat who won’t admit privately that Gov. Matt Bevin mostly beat himself going on two Novembers ago. Okay, I haven’t asked Gov. Andy Beshear. He probably has a different take on how Bevin ended up a one-term governor. “You catch more
“Those who apparently do not know history are doomed to make basic mistakes,” the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler recently wrote [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/29/greenes-ahistorical-claim-that-nazis-were-socialists/] of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. Greene had just called the Democrats Nazis. Kessler quoted [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/
“It’s wrong to pretend that GOP history can be divided cleanly between the pre- and post-Trump eras,” E.J. Dionne recentlywrote [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-past-election-lies-led-to-trumps-big-one/2021/05/12/83ff231e-b359-11eb-9059-d8176b9e3798_story.html] in theWashington Post. “Before Trump’s emergence, Republicans laid the groundwork for much of what Trump
Murray State University historian Brian Clardy says the right-wing wig-out over Critical Race Theory reminds him of the castor oil he took as a kid. “It tasted awful but you knew it was good for you.” A slew of conservatives, almost all of them white, gag at CRT. “But it’
“[President Ronald] Reagan turned old populism on its head by persuading folks that the real problem was big government,” syndicated columnist Richard Reeves wrote [https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/20070812/NEWS/308129911] going on 14 years ago. The original Populists argued exactly the opposite: poor farmers and workers desperately needed
“Elections have consequences,” warns Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan. He’s right. How many times have we heard this baloney? “It doesn’t matter who gets elected – politicians are all the same.” (I can think of a stronger word than “baloney,” but this is a family-friendly website.) Want proof,
No political organization in Kentucky, where I’ve lived all my 71 years, needs more renovation than the once-dominant Democratic party, which is entreating the faithful to get involved at the grassroots. The KDP is in the process of filling local committees in all 120 counties. No political organization in
Will the GOP supermajority Kentucky legislature finally outlaw the barbaric and widely-discredited practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity? Beyond Louisville and Lexington, most of my home state is Bible-belt Trump conservative. Yet a recent poll revealed that 57 percent of Kentuckians favor barring
Some Trump true believers in Congress called [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/politics/republicans-capitol-riot.html] January 6th a “1776 moment” in Washington. A “Munich Moment” is more like it. On Nov. 8-9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and hundreds of his armed Nazi stormtroopers tried to overthrow the democratically-elected
