Israel’s coalition government of right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is on the verge of collapse, which is unsurprising. Israeli politics, after all, is among the most fractious in the world, and this particular coalition was born out of the obsessive desire to dethrone Israel’s former leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Netanyahu was successfully ousted in June 2021, Bennett’s coalition has been left to contend with the painful reality that its odd political components have very little in common. 

On April 6, Israeli lawmaker Ildit Salman defected from the coalition, leaving Bennett and his temporary allies wrangling with the fact that their Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) coalition no longer has a majority. Now that the Knesset count stands at 60-60, a single defection could potentially send Israelis back to the voting booth, which has been quite habitual recently. 

In early March, employees of the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University came together to form Wex Workers United in an effort to collectively establish a union at their workplace. These employees are advocating for a fair and equitable workplace, the right to negotiate for wages and benefits and to have a voice in important workplace issues such as safety. They are demanding dignity and respect on the job.

While having received the Wexner employees’ petition, with signatures from an overwhelming majority of employees, the Co Interim Directors Megan Cavanaugh and Kelly Stevelt, as well as OSU President Kristina M. Johnson, PhD, and Melissa L. Gilliam, MD, MPH Executive Vice President and Provost, have remained unmoved and disinterested in addressing employee concerns. Wex Workers United is demanding that the Ohio State University and its leadership respect the employees who are organizing by either voluntarily recognizing the employee union or by putting forward a consent agreement calling for a free and fair union election.

Please sign and share this petition to support AFSCME Council 8 and the brave Wex workers organizing for a union.

Three years ago, we helped write a report for RootsAction.org targeting 15 corporate Democrats in Congress who deserved to be “primaried.” We called the report “Bad Blues.” A common reaction back then was that those establishment pols were too strong and entrenched to be defeated.

On Tuesday, yet another “Bad Blue” apparently went down to defeat – with seven-term Congressman Kurt Schrader of Oregon running way behind community activist Jamie McLeod-Skinner in the slowly tallied Democratic primary.

Schrader is not the first “Bad Blue” on our list to face defeat by a progressive challenger. And he’s unlikely to be the last.

The incumbent heavily outspent McLeod-Skinner – thanks to lavish funding from big pharma and other corporate PACs – but Schrader was out-organized on the ground. McLeod-Skinner called him “the Joe Manchin of the House.”

Over half of young trans people have contemplated suicide. Now up to a third of us could lose the care that’s been proven to prevent it.

In states across the country, small-minded lawmakers are pushing cruel, vicious new bills targeting transgender children.

These bills threaten to ban everything from medical care to even acknowledging the existence of trans people in the classroom. Many threaten parents and medical providers with prosecution. And all of them put the lives of young trans people at risk.

If these laws had been passed when I was transitioning, I might not be alive today.

As a trans student in middle school, I was dehumanized. I endured harassment, abuse, and physical violence for which I was the one punished. Even worse, my school responded to my coming out with harmful new policies.

For example, I was banned from the bathrooms. Instead of using the girls’ room near my classrooms, I had to go down two flights of stairs, across an open courtyard, into another school building, and all the way to the end of another building to use the nurse’s office bathroom.

They’re coming for me!

Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have? It’s called, among other things, “white replacement theory” — but my sense is that the fear itself (fear of God-knows-what) comes first. When it finds a name, what a sense of relief that must be: knowing who the enemy is, where the enemy lives. Now you can go to war.

Killing ten people at a grocery store — killing fifty people at two mosques—isn’t murder. It’s healing.

I take a deep breath. Violence is situation normal, not just in the United States but across much of the planet. Often the violence is simply an abstraction, a.k.a., war, which is always, always necessary when we’re the ones who wage it, and the people we kill, including the children, are simply collateral damage. But war always comes home, where the victims are fully human . . . if they actually make the news.