This week on CounterSpin: Former Vice President Mike Pence recently said with a straight face that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was “the most dangerous person in the world." "It’s not a close call," he said, "if you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids." More evidence, were it needed, that the current struggle for pay and dignity by teaching assistants and adjuncts and researchers at the University of California is really part of a bigger fight about whether educators, at whatever level, are actual workers—and who's looking out for their rights. We hear from labor historian and UC Santa Barbara professor Nelson Lichtenstein about what's happening at the University of California.
Also on the show: Some elite media are expressing concern that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito may have leaked the Court's Hobby Lobby ruling ahead of time to evangelicals looking to make hay from it. But as Sarah Posner put it at MSNBC.com: While figuring that out matters, it won't necessarily address the deeper problem, that the court's conservative majority itself "was deliberately cultivated to expand religious freedom for conservative Christians at the expense of the rights of those deemed less worthy of protection." We talk with legal expert and author Marjorie Cohn about that.
