Tag Archives: Sarah Huckabee Sanders

McDonald’s Fined 0.0002% of 2022 Profits for Child Labor Violations

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“Less than $1,000 per child,” said one critic. “For one of the biggest franchises on Earth.”

By Julia Conley. Published 11-28-2023 by Common Dreams

Photo: _skynet/flickr/CC

McDonald’s, one of the largest employers in the world, was fined just $26,000—a tiny fraction of its profits—on Monday for violating child labor laws in Pennsylvania, with two franchisees found to be violating numerous rules in five stores.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division found that Paul and Meghan Sweeney, owners of a company called Endor, which runs five McDonald’s locations, employed 34 children who were 14 and 15 years old.

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Arkansas Schools Will Teach AP African American Studies, Defying GOP Law

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Educators will teach the course despite the fact that the law also weakens rules protecting them against unjust dismissals.

By Julia Conley. Published 8-17-2023 by Common Dreams

Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA. Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/CC

Despite a threat this week by the Arkansas Department of Education that it would not allow students to receive credit for Advanced Placement African American Studies, every public high school in Arkansas that previously offered the course announced that it will remain on their schedules for the coming school year.

The Arkansas Education Association, which represents unionized teachers across the state, applauded the Little Rock School District’s decision on Wednesday to continue offering the AP course in defiance of Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ signature law banning so-called “indoctrination” in public schools.

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Federal Judge Blocks Arkansas Law Criminalizing Librarians

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“Do Arkansans still legally have access to reading materials? Luckily, the judicial system has once again defended our highly valued liberties,” said the head of the state ACLU.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 7-30-2023 by Common Dreams

Photo: Fayetteville Public Library/Facebook

A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked the implementation of an Arkansas law criminalizing librarians and booksellers who provide access to materials deemed “harmful to minors.”

U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks—an appointee of former President Barack Obama—issued a preliminary injunction against two sections of Act 372 (also known as S.B. 81), a censorship bill introduced by Arkansas state Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-20), passed by the Republican-controlled state Legislature, and signed into law by GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in March.

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‘Enormous Policy Failure’: States Throw Hundreds of Thousands—Including Many Children—Off Medicaid

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“We knew this was coming,” wrote one policy expert. “But we still treat these burdens like they’re unavoidable natural disasters.”

By Jake Johnson. Published 5-27-2023 by Common Dreams

Photo: Ted Eytan/CC

With a green light from the federal government, states across the U.S. have thrown hundreds of thousands of low-income people off Medicaid in recent weeks—and many have lost coverage because they failed to navigate bureaucratic mazes, not because they were no longer eligible.

More than a dozen states, including Florida and other Republican-led states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, have begun removing people from Medicaid as part of the “unwinding” of a pandemic-era federal policy that temporarily barred governments from kicking people off the program.

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As Trump DOJ Argues ‘No Journalist Has First Amendment Right to Enter White House,’ News Orgs Rally Behind CNN Lawsuit

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“It is imperative that independent journalists have access to the President and his activities, and that journalists are not barred for arbitrary reasons,” over a dozen news organizations state

By Andrea Germanos, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 11-14-2018

President Donald Trump gets into an exchange with Jim Acosta of CNN after giving remarks a day after the midterm elections on November 7, 2018 in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. Screenshot: CNN

The ACLU fired off a reminder Wednesday that the “White House belongs to the people, not the president” after the Trump administration asserted in a legal filing that the president has “broad discretion” to bar reporters from press briefings.

“No journalist has a First Amendment right to enter the White House,” Justice Department lawyers argued in a 28-page filing in response to CNN’s lawsuit against the administration for revoking the “hard pass” of the network’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, last week. Continue reading →

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330,000+ Sign Petition Calling on White House Press Corps to ‘Stand Up and Fight Back’ After Acosta Blacklisted

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“The rest of the White House Press Corps will line up in solidarity—and either refuse to participate in White House press events or only ask questions on behalf of the banned reporter/outlet until the ban is lifted.”

By Jon Queally, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 11-8-2018

Jim Acosta at a campaign rally. Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr

An online petition is surging towards its goal of 350,000 signatures on Thursday as it called on members of the White House Press Association to stand in solidarity against the Trump adminstration’s decision to strip credentials from CNN report Jim Acosta.

Posted on MoveOn.org’s platform, but coordinated by the watchdog group Media Matters for America, the petition reads:

If Trump blacklists or bans one of you, the rest of you need to stand up. Instead of ignoring Trump’s bad behavior and going about your business, close ranks and stand up for journalism. Don’t keep talking about what Trump wants to talk about. Stand up and fight back. Amplify your colleague’s inquiry or refuse to engage until he removes that person/outlet from the blacklist.

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‘We Fully Support a Free Press, But…’: White House Suggests Reporter Harassed by Trump Rally-Goers Probably Had It Coming

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“Increasingly, Trump supporters are demonstrating just how aligned they are with his view that the political press is the enemy of the people.”

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 8-1-2018

A crowd of Trump supporters heckled CNN reporter Jim Acosta at a rally in Tampa, Florida on Tuesday night. (Photo: @emilylgoodin/Twitter)

At a press briefing on Wednesday, the White House offered a defense of President Donald Trump’s implicit endorsement of anti-press vitriol that was on display at his rally in Tampa, Florida the previous evening, when several Trump supporters heckled CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

When asked whether or not it is wrong for the president’s “most vocal supporters to be menacing towards journalists,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders assured reporters that the president supports a free press, while appearing to suggest that Acosta and other journalists may be deserving of mistreatment. Continue reading →

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Standing With ESPN Journalist Against Trump’s White Supremacy, #NaziBucketChallenge Goes Viral

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Calling out Trump’s racist views, critics stand in solidarity with ESPN anchor

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9-15-2017

Protest rally in Boston vs ‘white supremacy’. Photo: YouTube

In a display of a solidarity with the black female ESPN sportscaster under attack by the White House for calling out President Donald Trump as a “white supremacist” earlier this week, the hashtag #NaziBucketChallenge was going viral on Friday as people from all walks of life waited to see if they would receive the same kind of harsh treatment for criticizing the president publicly.

It all started on Monday, when ESPN anchor Jemele Hill called Trump a white supremacist on her Twitter account.

Jemele Hill Tweet

The controversy intensifed, however, after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders publicly called for Hill’s firing during a White House press briefing on Wednesday.

But Hill’s criticism, which is widely shared among private citizens and public figures, hardly came out of nowhere.

Her tweet followed, among other examples, the firestorm surrounding Trump’s response to last month’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, in which he failed to denounce the neo-Nazis who organized the gathering and insisted that counter-protesters were equally to blame for the violence that erupted.

The comments also came two weeks after Trump’s pardon of his longtime supporter Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who detained Latinos with no evidence of any wrongdoing and established a detention center that he compared favorably to a Nazi concentration camp.

The president’s former top strategist, Steve Bannon, also has well-established ties to white supremacists, having served as the executive director of Breitbart News both before and after his work with Trump.

Hill later deleted the tweet and clarified that the views she had expressed were her own and not her employer’s; ESPN said Thursday it had accepted her apology. But that didn’t stop Trump from wading into the controversy and demanding an apology from ESPN in an early-morning missive on Friday.

A number of well-known Trump critics spoke out in solidarity with Hill—and challenged the White House to call for their dismissal as well.

The campaign picked up speed following Trump’s statement on Thursday in which he repeated his views on the violence in Charlottesville, saying that there were “some pretty bad dudes” among the anti-racism counter-protesters. Everyday Americans began using the #NaziBucketChallenge hashtag, making it clear that Trump’s white supremacist views have been noticed by people of all races, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, and genders.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

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