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 Don't assume that every strike happening in America is being cheered as workers trying to gets their voices heard and fighting to be paid for their worth.  Going by these headlines, some feel either inconvenienced or threatened : Now that the teacher strike in Newton, Massachusetts, is over, students are back in school, but the cost of the strike is still being calculated, and not only is the city seeking damages, a family is too. Lital Asher-Dotan has three children in Newton Public Schools, and while she is thrilled they are back in class, she said is not happy about the financial toll the two-week strike took on her and other families.  “People had thousands of dollars paid to drive their kids around, paying for day care, for camps and for babysitting,” Asher-Dotan said. After hearing a judge talk about the impact to students during a hearing about the strike on Friday, Asher-Dotan filed a motion this week arguing families should be able to seek damages just like the...

  Via this tweet post.

 As noted in this Washington Post story about a fraud lawsuit against the DNC: Bruce Spiva, representing the DNC, made the argument that would eventually carry the day: that it was impossible to determine who would have standing to claim they had been defrauded. But as he explained how the DNC worked, Spiva made a hypothetical argument that the party wasn’t really bound by the votes cast in primaries or caucuses. “ The party has the freedom of association to decide how it’s gonna select its representatives to the convention and to the state party ,” said Spiva. “ Even to define what constitutes evenhandedness and impartiality really would already drag the court well into a political question and a question of how the party runs its own affairs. The party could have favored a candidate. I’ll put it that way .” In the corners of the media where the lawsuit was covered most, that answer became infamous — proof that the defeated Democrats did not respect the will of the voters. “ Th...

 

  And not a moment too soon : Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history. U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.” In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility...