In this bizarre presidential election season, will the Democrats allow petty infighting and lack of vision to successfully put Donald Trump in the White House? Some labor union leaders are doing their best to fuck things up already.

Is there room in the labor movement for racist, Trump-supporting cops?

Move over, other prominent and respected cartoonists whose names I can’t quite recall at this moment, because there’s a new top dog in town: Iain MacIntyre, a 10-year-old from Flint who traveled to Washington, D.C. to watch his governor Rick Snyder testify before Congress today.

The AFL-CIO, one of America’s most powerful labor groups, is trying to make it harder for Wall Streeters to jump directly into government jobs. This is one of those “ideological litmus test” things we hear so much about!

Earlier this month we told you about Unionmade, the upscale San Francisco menswear store that sells expensive clothes that are not, in fact, union made. The cherry on top of that particular style-over-substance outrage was the fact that Unionmade's logo bears a suspicious resemblance to the logo of the AFL-CIO. And now, the AFL-CIO's lawyers have sent them an angry letter demanding they change their name and logo.

Unions are not doing well. Their membership has been plummeting for years. Their political influence is at an all time low. They're a convenient scapegoat for just about any social or economic problem plaguing America. At least they deserve some good ads.

The relationship between "Big Labor," especially the AFL-CIO, and the Democratic party over the last few years has been painfully one-sided. Unions raise large sums of cash for Democrats in federal elections, help them whip up support for major votes, and get nothing in return. Is labor finally ready to reconsider this terrible deal? Perhaps!

Massachusetts, the liberal hellhole run by a Democratic governor and two Democratic legislative chambers, is the latest, most surprising state to pick a fight with public employees' unions over collective bargaining rights.

Wisconsin's new Republican governor, Scott Walker, wants to get his austerity budget rammed through the state's new Republican legislature, and he just supposedly doesn't have the time to deal with public employee unions. So he's introduced a proposal to eliminate workers' collective bargaining rights for wages, pensions, and other benefits while sharply raising their required contributions. And if these employees respond by striking? The proposal allows allows state authorities to fire workers who "participate in an organized action to stop or slow work" or who "are absent for three days without approval of the employer."

The new chairman of the New York Fed is not a banker or financier! It is Denis Hughes, the president of the New York State AFL-CIO. And the deputy chairman is Columbia University President Lee Bollinger! Crazy! [WP]