Want a peek into the dirty tricks of the right-wing activists who stitch together phony “exposés” and doctored videos like the one the late Andrew Brietbart used to attack former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod? Michael Powell offers “an anatomy of a political sting” at an East Harlem community organizing group that included an elaborate website and fake Facebook page with a detailed, but phony, biography.

Surprising as it may sound, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney earlier this year said something that all of us in the progressive world—and in most worlds—agree with: It's time to raise the minimum wage and protect its value by indexing it against inflation. But....

There’s a cacophony of misinformation from Fox News, right-wing think tanks and extreme conservative politicians about Social Security. “Privatize it,” they yell. “It’s going broke,” they scream. “Raise the retirement age,” they bellow.

Opportunity can strike at the strangest of times and places. For AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, who believes in getting the union movement’s message out to audiences that normally don’t hear it, that opportunity came on a recent flight from Washington, D.C., to Detroit when Republican pollster/strategist and Fox News regular Frank Luntz sat right down in the middle seat next to her.

There were some burning trousers at Fox News this morning.

In a segment of “Fox & Friends,” the faux news network apparently didn’t like the results of a USA Today/Gallup poll that showed that 61 percent of Americans oppose measures like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) that eliminate the right of public workers to bargaining for good jobs. The poll found just 31 percent agreed with Walker.

The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this morning in a speech outlining a working families’ vision for the nation.