Don’t Do Today’s Wordle

Over one thousand New York Times employees have embarked on a 24-hour walkout, the first protest of its kind at the nation’s paper of record in more than four decades.

Members of the NewsGuild of New York had been negotiating with management for nearly two years. Finally, the union reached a tipping point, announcing last week that more than 1,100 union members would walk out at 12:01 a.m. Thursday morning, unless a deal was made. As can be seen, no agreement was reached.

While there has been no updated contract since March 2021, staff also have not received raises in more than two years. This, while inflation and rent have both rocketed.

Negotiations had been ongoing this week, with 12 hours of bargaining on Tuesday. On Wednesday, The New York Times union guild said management “backed off its attempt to kill our pension and agreed to expand fertility benefits,” but they still were short on other priorities, including pay increases and health care contributions.

The union has said some major desks will be short 90 percent of their workforce on Thursday, with some departments being essentially empty. Consequently, numerous desks will be run by managers—if at all—as employees picket outside the New York Times building.

Meanwhile, the company has directed members to work in advance of the strike in order to complete assignments.

Further, employees who walk out will not be paid. CNN retrieved an internal memo sent to employees by the Times’ human resources department, reading that striking employees “will not be paid by the company for the duration of the strike” and that they “cannot use vacation or personal days to account for this time” unless it was approved before last Friday. The union has  argued that this is a walkout, not a strike, since it is for limited duration.

New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told the Associated Press that the Times had “solid plans in place” to continue business, including relying on international reporters and other nonunion journalists.

Thursday will reveal what a hollower New York Times looks like—and whether it really can continue business as usual, even for 24 hours.

WNBA star Brittney Griner has been released by the Russian government and is coming home.

She was released Thursday in a one-for-one prisoner swap with Viktor Bout, a former Russian military officer who was serving a 25-year sentence in the United States for conspiring to kill Americans, exporting missiles, and conspiring to help a terrorist organization. The Russian government has sought his release for a decade, since his 2012 sentencing in New York.

Griner was arrested at a Moscow airport in February on drug-smuggling charges. She testified that she inadvertently packed cannabis oil in her luggage and in August was sentenced to nine years in prison.

President Biden spoke Thursday morning shortly after 8:30 a.m. from the White House in the company of Griner’s wife, Cherelle. From NBC’s Peter Alexander:

Cherelle said, “The most important emotion I have right now is sincere gratitude for President Biden and his entire administration.” Biden said: “Britney is an incomparable athlete. She endured mistreatment and a show trial in Russia with characteristic grit and integrity.” Biden said he’d been working for her release since July and mentioned Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine still detained in Russia on espionage charges. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported Thursday morning that the Biden administration pushed hard for Whelan’s release after four years in prison, but Russia wouldn’t budge.

Biden will surely take some heat from the right wing for releasing Bout, who had a long record of arms dealing and supporting terrorist groups like Colombia’s FARC before he was convicted. Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Bout, said at the time of his sentencing: “Viktor Bout has been international arms-trafficking enemy number one for many years, arming some of the most violent conflicts around the globe.”

But make no mistake. This is a great day—obviously for Brittney and Cherelle, for the Biden team, for the United States, and for justice.

The final text of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, was released Tuesday, and absent was Senator Joe Manchin’s so-called “Dirty Deal,” a set of provisions he was promised in exchange for his support for the Inflation Reduction Act (a bill he massively watered down).

Now Manchin is trying yet again to include his provisions, this time as an amendment to the annual defense spending bill. Manchin released his amendment Wednesday, with various concessions to try to appeal to Republican support instead of members of his own party. Nevertheless, he seems unlikely to garner enough support.

The bill would weaken environmental review processes and fast-track the permitting process for energy projects, including pipelines and fossil fuel infrastructure.

Manchin’s bill seeks to clear the path for the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline, a West Virginia project opposed by several community and environmental groups, facing lawsuits in state and federal courts, and even invalidated by an appeals court.

Federal agencies would be called to proceed in issuing permits and leases, superseding citizen challenges and clearing the path for the legally and communally opposed fossil fuel project.

But the effort failed for a second time Tuesday, after Manchin previously attempted to attach the bill to the September continuing resolution that avoided a government shutdown.

Manchin’s provisions were not all inherently bad. They sought to promote construction of new electrical transmission lines, which are urgently needed in order to reach net-zero emissions. And to be fair, opposition to energy infrastructure projects can be rooted in Nimby-esque rationales; expedited permitting can help push forward the construction of urgently needed green infrastructure.

But Manchin’s approach, foregrounded by his thirst for a natural gas pipeline, did not capture  those potential benefits. Democrats don’t have to trash the entire bill, but they also ought not leave the fight for permitting reform to the most conservative Democrat in Congress.

After Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s loss in Georgia Tuesday night, some Republicans are conceding that maybe attacking methods of voting isn’t a good way to, well, get votes.

On his program Tuesday night, Fox News host Sean Hannity looked to Republicans including House leader Kevin McCarthy and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich for insight as to why “Republicans have been unwilling, for whatever reason … to vot[e] early and vot[e] by mail.”

“Republicans in the past, we had an advantage because we would vote early, we would vote by mail, and we put that away,” McCarthy said.

Gingrich, an election denialist who had previously suggested arresting election workers after the 2020 election, told Hannity that “you have to play the game by the rules that are existing,” encouraging Republicans to vote early and by mail.

On Wednesday, Senators Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott also suggested that their party could improve on its early and mail-in voting stances. Fomenting distrust in such practices “has to change because we need to bank votes like they do,” said Graham.

The reason Republicans haven’t been voting early or by mail is because Donald Trump—and his followers—all discouraged it. From January to September 2020, Trump attacked mail-in voting over 100 times, according to The Washington Post. And Republican politicians, officials, and media followed suit, leading to 18 states passing legislation that made mail-in voting harder this year.

Georgia Republicans themselves sought to block early voting from beginning on November 26.

Hannity too has shared Project Veritas videos peddling mail-voting conspiracies to his millions of followers on Twitter and has hosted segments attacking mail-in and early voting practices, sowing doubt in the integrity of such methods.

Unfortunately, Republicans still can’t outright say, “It’s good to make voting easier for people,” in the same way they can’t outright denounce Trump.

“There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early,’” said RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel Tuesday on Fox News. “And we have to stop that and understand that if Democrats are getting ballots in for a month, we can’t expect to get it all done in one day.”

An RNC spokesperson later said that McDaniel apparently wasn’t talking about Trump, who has been the loudest voice on the matter and called to ban early voting when he announced his 2024 candidacy last month.

Republican Representative Paul Gosar on Wednesday endorsed Donald Trump’s call to terminate the U.S. Constitution and overturn the 2020 election—and then deleted the post an hour later.

In his latest effort to reverse his loss, Trump demanded over the weekend to terminate the Constitution, baselessly citing “WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION” on Truth Social. Republicans have been horrifically slow to condemn him, and Gosar went a step further and publicly agreed with him on Twitter.

A few Republicans have spoken out against Trump’s demand, but they are mostly all moderates or already vocal critics of the former president. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the only Republicans on the House January 6 investigative committee, were explicit and forceful with their condemnations, but they are both outgoing members of Congress.

Although the Republican Party at large seems to be turning on Trump, he still holds significant sway in Congress and among the American public. Anyone seen as going against him risks losing the support—and provoking the wrath—of his rabid fan base.

The list of his outrageous behavior in just the past few months continues to grow, and yet Republicans are loath to criticize him lest they lose his favor.