Free Republic

Vox Media rooted for the passage of a California gig economy bill that is now forcing Vox to lay off hundreds of its own freelance workers. * Vox Media is laying off hundreds of freelance workers as California’s gig economy rights bill takes effect. * Vox cheered for the gig economy bill on its own news pages. Now it’s letting freelance workers go because of the new law. * This is a painfully ironic, cautionary tale against the broader labor movement represented by politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. California AB-5 takes effect in 2020 after passage by the California state...

Key Points: Hundreds of Vox Media freelancers will lose their jobs in the coming months. Vox Media is preparing for a California law, Assembly Bill 5, which goes into effect in 2020 and forbids nonemployees from submitting more than 35 articles per year. SB Nation said Monday that it will move its California team blogs, which rely on contractors, to a new system run by SB Nation employees. ========================================================================= Hundreds of freelance writers at Vox Media, primarily those covering sports for the SB Nation site, will lose their jobs in the coming months as the company prepares for a California...

In less than three years as president, President Trump has done nearly as much to shape the courts as President Obama did in eight years. Trump hasn’t simply given lots of lifetime appointments to lots of lawyers. He’s filled the bench with some of the smartest, and some of the most ideologically reliable, men and women to be found in the conservative movement. Long after Trump leaves office, these judges will shape American law — pushing it further and further to the right even if the voters soundly reject Trumpism in 2020. Let’s start with some raw numbers. Both Obama...

Former first lady Michelle Obama took to social media to wish Americans a “Happy Thanksgiving” on Wednesday. “From our family to yours, #HappyThanksgiving!” she tweeted. The post also featured a sunny photo of her along with her husband and children. Former President Obama also tweeted a message to his 110 million followers earlier on Wednesday ahead of the holiday. “Before arguing with friends or family around the Thanksgiving table, take a look at the science behind arguing better,” he tweeted. “And it'll never hurt to try this: ‘Listen to people, get them to think about their own experience, and...

<p>In audio first put online by right-wing pundit and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on Saturday, white nationalist Richard Spencer can allegedly be heard ranting about Jewish people and mixed-race people.</p> <p>The audio — purportedly from an emergency meeting that took place on August 13, 2017, the day after the far-right “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, disintegrated into violence, resulting in the murder of a counterprotester named Heather Heyer — features Spencer screaming racist and anti-Semitic slurs he has generally avoided using in public in an effort to more politely argue for “the creation of a White Ethno-State.”</p>

Rep. Elijah Cummings’s funeral Friday, marked by speeches from Barack Obama, the Clintons, and Cummings’s family, was as much a heartfelt celebration of a man who dedicated his life to public service as it was an indictment of President Donald Trump’s character in office. In his last months, Cummings, who chaired the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform — one of the committees carrying out the impeachment inquiry into Trump —became the subject of Trump’s ire. Trump called Cummings a “brutal bully” in July and derided the Congress member’s Baltimore district as the “worst in the USA,” a “rat...

With one proclamation signed late Friday evening last week, President Donald Trump made his adviser Stephen Miller’s dreams of restricting legal immigration a reality. When it goes into effect November 3, the proclamation will make getting into the US much harder for immigrants sponsored by family members, the phenomenon Trump has excoriated as “chain migration.” It will throw up a barrier to those coming through the diversity visa lottery — the subject of Trump’s “shithole countries” rant — which allows the US to accept 55,000 immigrants annually from countries with historically low levels of immigration. Researchers estimate it could keep...

Last week’s second Democratic debate did little to change the race — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren continue to be the top candidates, per new post-debate polls.

In the aftermath of two horrific shootings over the weekend, Vox is quite comfortable calling for what the anti-gun left has wanted in this country since the late 1960’s — full-on gun confiscation. But let’s be clear about precisely what kind of decision is letting events like this recur, most recently in Dayton and El Paso. Congress’s decision not to pass background checks is not what’s keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What’s behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns....

On Monday morning, New Day aired a portion of an interview between CNN Newsroom anchor Poppy Harlow and Google’s CEO Sundar Pinchai. They discussed everything from China to data privacy, but Harlow seemed intent to focus on YouTube’s policies on “hate speech.” After the interview concluded, Harlow then turned attention to the videos conservative YouTube comedian Steven Crowder and host of Louder With Crowder, made about Vox journalist Carlos Maza:

BlazeTV host and conservative comedian, Steven Crowder, published a video Monday responding to YouTube's decision last week to demonetize his videos even after admitting that he had not violated community standards, and he offered his gratitude for the outpouring of support from viewers. "I'm not sorry," Steven said. "I'll tell you what I am though. I am grateful. I am really grateful for the outpouring of support we've seen from people." Catch the rest of what Steven has to say in the video below:

Americans' support for liberal policymaking has reached a 60-year high, according to a new survey. Vox reported that public support for more regulation, higher taxes and more social services reached the highest level on record in the latest edition of Policy Mood, an aggregate overview of American opinion based on a range of polls on a variety of issues. According to Vox, the finding was first reported by James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina who has published numerous books on public opinion research. “The annual estimate for 2018 is the most liberal ever recorded in...

Back in March 2019, an elected government representative shared something personal about her spiritual identity. Not a preferred Bible verse or a conversion story. Rather, progressive New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared her birth-time with a self-described psychic and astrologer, Arthur Lipp-Bonewits, who in turn shared her entire birth chart with what can only be described as Astrology Twitter. Astrology Twitter went wild. So did the mainstream media, with outlets from Vox to The Cut to Allure speculating about what Ocasio-Cortez’s astrological chart could tell us about her fitness for political office. “AOC’s Aries Moon indicates that she’s emotionally fed...

Tim Pool's thoughts on Vox Media's censorship campaign and the latest AdPocalypse.

There’s a well-worn saying on the right: Scratch a progressive, find a fascist. Usually, that’s a bit of hyperbole to point toward the tendency of progressives to embrace top-down, big government solutions to every problem. But in this case, it’s almost literally true, though the real progressive is embracing a fictional fascist from the show Game of Thrones. Vox’s Matt Yglesias published a piece yesterday at Vox arguing that Daenerys was right to burn people alive in the city of King’s Landing because she needed to convince the entire kingdom not to question the dictates of a powerful central government.

Vox recently rated the 22 marvel movies 1 to 22. They put Black Panther as the best (although that is my least favorite). Don't know why they didn't include Xmen. Those would be among my first. https://www.vox.com/2019/4/30/18518196/best-marvel-movies-rankings-avengers-endgame So, what would put as your top and bottom 3?

**SNIP** In my 23 years as a flight attendant and president of our union representing 50,000 others, I know firsthand the threat climate change poses to our safety and our jobs. But flight attendants and airline workers have been told by some pundits that the Green New Deal, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s environmental proposal, will ground all air travel. That’s absurd. It’s not the solutions to climate change that kills jobs. Climate change itself is the job killer. Severe turbulence is becoming more frequent and intense due in part to climate change. Research indicates that rising CO2...

"Paying for a tiny dose of luxury doesn’t make me an irresponsible millennial." I’m in Starbucks right now, drinking what I always get: a venti iced coffee with hazelnut, soy, and caramel drizzle. It’s a case study in dribbly brown, a drink both Elle Woods and Dr. Evil would order, but it tastes great and costs less than $5 in the Twin Cities, unless you’re at the airport. I order it every day, except when the temperature falls below zero, or if I’ve earned a free drink on Starbucks’s rewards app. With a reward, I get the latte version of...

An article about the practice sparked outrage over income inequality. Luxury yachts in St. Tropez. Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images People who own yachts have lots of things to worry about. Is a yacht a good financial investment? (Usually not.) Will a group of class-warfare-waging rascals untie the boat from its dock, causing thousands of dollars in damage? (If you're Betsy DeVos, yes.) And then there's the latest concern plaguing superyacht owners: Is a yacht really a good place to store an art collection, which is worth more than the yacht itself? A growing number of billionaires -- at least...

As the partial government shutdown stretches on with no clear end in sight, it’s affecting US embassy staff around the world — and making it harder for the US to conduct diplomacy abroad. Many of the State Department’s roughly 75,000 employees — 50,000 are employed locally in US embassies abroad — have found trouble progressing with their work and even, in some cases, struggling to put food on the table while they wait for the White House and Congress to strike a deal. That’s a big problem, since the State Department is America’s leading foreign relations agency. It now means...