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Joe Rogan isnt really a Democrat or a Republican. He did support Bernie Sanders in the 2020 nomination race. That endorsement, though, was met with outrage by Sanders supporters who considered Rogan to be racist and anti-LGBTQ.

The popular podcast host is more of a Libertarian that anything else. And that way of seeing things has become clear in how Rogan has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. After being diagnosed with the disease, the host said he was taking multiple medications including Ivermectin, a horse de-wormer.

During his how today, Rogan ranted about the way his treatment was covered by the media. He was especially angry with Jim Acosta and CNN.

The podcaster began, Theyre making shit up! They keep saying Im taking horse dewormer. I literally got it from a doctor. Its an American company. They won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for use in human beings and CNN is saying Im taking horse dewormer. They must know thats a lie.

Rogan continued, CNN was saying I am a distributor of misinformation. I dont know whats going on, man. You know, there is a lot of speculation. One of the speculations involves the emergency use authorization for the vaccines. That, in order for there to be an emergency use authorization, there has to be no treatment for a disease.

The host closed his comments, The grand conspiracy is that the pharmaceutical companies are in cahoots to try and make anybody who takes this stuff look crazy. But whats crazy is look how better I got [sic]! I got better pretty quick, bitch.

In addition to taken Ivermectin, Rogan also took drugs that are proven to work against COVID-19 including monoclonal antibodies.

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WATCH: Enraged Ivermectin Taking Joe Rogan Threatens to Sue Jim Acosta, CNN - HillReporter.com

With campaigning for next years elections underway, the countys redistricting commission will soon start drawing maps proposing new County Council districts.

The commission met last week and expects to have final data compiled from the U.S. census by Monday, allowing members to begin drawing maps.

Nicholas Holdzkom, a research planner for the county, said he and colleagues are working to collect and import the data, so the process can begin next week.

By the meeting of [Sept. 23], our big hope is that people will be able to show up with maps, Holdzkom said.

Pamela Dunn, a senior legislative analyst for the County Council who is assisting the commission, said a map-drawing tool should be available to the public by Sept. 16.

The commission is tasked with drawing a map dividing the county into seven County Council districts. Last November, voters approved a charter amendment that increased the number of council members from nine to 11.

Seven members will represent districts, up from the current five. Four at-large members will continue to represent the entire county.

For the proposed districts, the commissioners will focus on:

Their draft maps will be finalized and available for public comment in October.

The commission will submit its report with one or more recommended maps, and present them to the County Council by Nov. 15. The council decides what the final map will be.

Commission members agreed that it would be beneficial to split into smaller groups of about four or five people, preferably of differing party affiliations, to start drawing maps. They then would reconvene to compare maps and eventually agree on a final map to present to the County Council, but also provide back-up maps, in case a full consensus cant be reached.

Commissioner Valerie Ervin, a former County Council member, told her colleagues last week that the commissions work is important, but reminded them they have limited time before the final Nov. 15 deadline.

The calendar is not our friend right now, Ervin said.

Ervin predicted that the County Council public hearing on the final proposal will be well attended, and that the community will be heard then.

It will be important to give council members one preferred map, but also provide alternatives, so the council has a choice, commissioners said.

Commissioner Sam Statland said he hopes the County Council follows the commissions recommendations in its final report. He added that it would be smart to do so, because the commission consists of Democrats, Republicans, a Libertarian and registered independents.

I think that gives us a lot of firm ground to stand on, in what our selections are, Statland said.

Steve Bohnel can be reached at steve.bohnel@bethesdamagazine.com

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Montgomery County redistricting commission will soon begin map drawings - BethesdaMagazine.com

Progressives lawmakers, including Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have urged President Joe Biden to revive the federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits that will expire Monday for millions of jobless American workers amid the ongoing pandemic.

About 7.5 million unemployed workers will lose all their unemployment benefits and an additional 3 million will no longer receive a $300 weekly boost provided by their state when three federally funded jobless aid programs lapse Monday, according to estimates from the Century Foundation.

"We need to extend the expanded UI for millions of unemployed workers because this crisis isn't over. People are not only dealing with COVID surges; they're dealing with impacts of climate change, from extreme flooding in my district to heat waves and fires in the West," Bowman, a New York Democrat, said in a statement to Newsweek.

A spokesperson for Representative Ayanna Pressley told Newsweek that she has been "pressing to extend unemployment benefits and has been in active conversation with both the White House and Congressional leadership for months about an extension and the need for additional layers of protection for workers and families impacted by the pandemic."

The benefits have previously been renewed after lapsing, but the Biden administration said it will allow them to expire on Labor Day.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said that it's "appropriate" to let the expanded $300 weekly unemployment boost expire on September 6 as scheduled in a letter sent to lawmakers in August. And while the Biden administration has encouraged states to reallocate existing federal funds to continue aid to the jobless, none have moved to do so.

Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush, three members of the "Squad," have already called for extending the benefits. Ocasio-Cortez told Insider the benefits expiration is a "major concern," Omar said a revival of the benefits was "necessary," and a spokesperson for Bush confirmed she supports an extension.

But other prominent progressive lawmakersincluding Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and Representatives Maxine Waters and Pramila Jayapalwho are otherwise outspoken on wealth inequality have remained noticeably quiet on the expiration of the federal jobless aid. According to Insider, the 96-member Congressional Progressives Caucus are still in discussion on whether to press Biden for a revival of the benefits.

Any push to revive benefits will hit a roadblock in the Senate. With a slim majority, all 50 Senate Democrats must vote to pass an extension and moderate Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has said he won't support it. House leaders have also shifted focus to advancing a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill to push Biden's infrastructure plan through Congress.

In renewing the benefits in March, the Biden administration and policymakers had expected that the economy would largely recover from the pandemic by September with an aggressive vaccine rollout. But the unforeseen surge of the highly contagious Delta variant, which now accounts for nearly 95 percent of U.S. coronavirus cases, has impeded the plan.

According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, 235,000 jobs were created in August, a drastic decline from the 1.1 million jobs created in July and well below economists' projections of 733,000 jobs.

"We're still in a pandemic, and the latest jobs numbers prove that. Doing our part to support Americans right now includes extending expanded [unemployment insurance benefits] and passing the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package to invest in our people and economy," said Bowman.

Newsweek has reached out to representatives for Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for comment. This story will be updated with any response.

This story has been updated with comment from Ayanna Pressley.

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'Crisis Isn't Over': Progressives Push Biden to Revive Unemployment Benefits Amid Pandemic - Newsweek

Why do we have building codes if we arent going to enforce them? Mayor de Blasio styles himself a progressive. But a century ago, the original progressiveswanted everyone to have a safe place to live, regardless of income. In turning a blind eye to tens of thousands of people living in illegal and dangerous apartments, Hizzoner ironically subscribes to a type of pre-progressive caveat-emptor philosophy.

In 1890, muckraker Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives chronicledthe shocking fate of tens of thousands of New Yorkers, mostly poor immigrants and their children, crammed into the inhuman dens of disease-ridden tenements. Even back then, though, New York had a law against this, enacted in 1867, giving people a legal claim to air and sunlight, as Riis wrote. The city just didnt enforce it.

Similarly, 146 people died at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory downtown in 1911 not because New York didnt have laws against locking exit doors, but because the owners didnt follow them.

Both the laws and their enforcement improved, part of New Yorks century-long public-health triumph. Now, were going backward. Eleven people, including 2-year-old Lobsang Lama, drowned in their basement apartments during last weeksflash floods.

Five of the six apartments in which they drowned were illegal. The city had complaints about at least three of these illegal apartments and didnt do much to investigate them.

Most basement apartments are illegal for a good reason: You cant easily escape from them. But Gotham has long ignored illegal dwellings: Last year, three people died in fires in illegal units.

DAs should prosecute owners who endanger their tenants; the owners of these buildings should face manslaughter charges.

But what about the citys culpability? Last week, de Blasio acknowledged that at least 100,000 people, mostly illegal immigrants,live in illegal apartments.

Illegal crowding has helped spread COVID, too, just as it spread infection disease in Riis day. Its a reason why the citys death toll from coronavirus is 403 per 100,000, by far the highest in the country.

But the mayor doesnt plan to do anything about it.

Sure, he made an empty gestures, saying that next time we have a flash flood, the city will tell people to evacuate such apartments temporarily. How? A flash flood, by definition, comes quickly.

One answer to this humanitarian crisis is to build more housing.

Yet property owners already have the option of upgrading their basement apartments. They dont do it, because such upgrades would make the apartments too expensive for their tenants. Trying to make an illegal basement apartment up to code is very difficult physically, very costly, the mayor said last week.

Why cant the tenants afford legal, safe housing? Because they supply New Yorks illegally cheap labor. Black-market workers earn below the minimum wage, and often toil in unsafe working conditions.

These are the people who die in preventable construction disasters, paid by the day, with no workplace-safety protections, as well as the people who struggle through floodwaters to bring restaurant customers their hot food in a historic storm, for cheap.

Legalizing long-term immigrants they arent going anywhere, after all would give them some leverage over exploitative landlords and employers.

Except it wouldnt solve the problem. We would quickly import a new cohort of undocumented immigrants, unprotected from wage, housing and workplace laws, because the city depends on cheap labor.

De Blasio loves to be virtuous about the citys $15 minimum wage, as well as mandated sick leave, but the only reason any of this works is that hundreds of thousands of people toil in the second-tier, basement-dwelling economy.

New York City is full of failure to enforce the law. Vending licenses, for example, enable lawful workers to earn a decent living, but they dont work if the city has tens of thousands of illegal street vendors competing against them.

New Yorks progressives want their apartments cleaned and renovated, their children watched and their food delivered hot and fast, and they love to romanticize the churro lady but they dont want to think about the people drowning in the basement.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor of City Journal.

Twitter: @NicoleGelinas

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Flooding of illegal units belies NYC progressives' self-righteous claims - New York Post

Sep 7, 20216:17 AMEDT

Labor Day didn't go by without progressives renewing calls for the Senate to pass the PRO Act.

By Kaitlyn Kennedy

Washington DC Squad members and other progressive politicians rang in Labor Day by urging the Senate to do away with the filibuster and pass the PRO Act.

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act was passed in the House in March along mostly party lines, but it has since stalled in the Senate.

Advocates have called the legislation the most consequential revamping of labor laws since the New Deal in the 1930s.

The bill outlines a host of provisions intended to provide workers greater security when organizing for better wages, benefits, and safety in the workplace.

Concretely, the bill would end mandatory anti-union meetings. As things stand now, employers can require workers to attend sessions that detail all the alleged disadvantages of unions, as occurred during the high-profile unionization vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama earlier this year.

The bill would also end "right to work" laws currently in place in 27 states, which allow people who don't pay union dues to receive union benefits. This weakens unions by depriving them of funds and membership, stripping them of their bargaining power.

Employers would be required to negotiate with unions until a first contract is reached and would not be able to delay union elections, fixing two of the biggest obstacles to organizing.

Workers would also receive additional protections, including a ban on employers permanently replacing striking employees.

Secondary strike limitations would also be removed, allowing unions to encourage workers in connected jobs to participate in boycotts and so amplify the strikers' negotiating power.

The PRO Act would prevent employers from misclassifying employees as "independent contractors" as a means of limiting access to full workers' rights and restricting unionization efforts.

Members of the Squad and other progressive politicians used Labor Day as an opportunity to remind fellow lawmakers about the importance of passing the PRO Act.

"So much of what we take for granted in this country is due to the tireless work of the labor movement. We need to protect and grow the power of working people everywhere. To start: let's turn the PRO Act into law," said New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar agreed: "The Senate must pass the PRO Act to put power back in the hands of workers."

New York Rep. Mondaire Jones simply tweeted, "Happy Labor Day.Abolish the filibuster and pass the PRO Act."

Passing the PRO Act is the best way Congress can honor and strengthen the labor movement, they argue.

But doing so seems to require some big structural changes within the legislative branch.

The PRO Act is currently experiencing a similar fate as much of the most consequential Democratic-sponsored legislation aimed at expanding political and economic enfranchisement.

Senate Democrats with their narrow majority are unable to get the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster, and even within their own camp, there is a familiar holdout Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

Unless the filibuster is removed or significantly reformed, or Sinema and 10 Republican colleagues suddenly see the light, the PRO Act doesn't stand much of a chance of passing.

That's why some Democrats and labor advocates are working to get parts of PRO Act included in $3.5-trillion Democratic reconciliation bill, including empowering the NLRB to penalize employers if they violate workers' rights.

Still, the usual suspects Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin have expressed doubts over passing the reconciliation bill with its current price tag, making it unclear whether Democrats will be able to advance many of their boldest reforms.

Nevertheless, the brain behind the budget, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, remains confident he can get the 50 votes necessary to send the reconciliation bill to Biden's desk.

Cover photo: IMAGO / ZUMA Wire

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"Power to the workers": Progressives commemorate Labor Day by renewing calls to pass the PRO Act - TAG24 NEWS