Last week, I misreported that Local S6 would be showing up on the Holy Donut workers’ picket line. It snowed Friday morning, so the union decided not to send anyone to Portland. The Holy Donut is now calling for an NLRB election, claiming only 8 of its employees want the IAM. Management also “strongly disagree[s]” with the union’s allegations. They have condemned the IAM’s “adversarial” approach while subtly accusing the union of only being after dues payments.1 The IAM does not collect dues from new members until they have won a contract. It’s hard to read the Holy Donut’s Facebook post as anything other than an attempt to bust the union.
Truth be told, I did not have a lot of time to work on Fake News Friday last week. I had to rush through it to make a dentist appointment in the early afternoon. I also had to write Thursday off because of Labor Lobby Day. I remembered something Ben Franklin said. “Either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”2 He didn’t say how hard it is to do both.
I regret forgetting to include major news stories like Kristi Noem being fired, but Labor Lobby Day meant doing something worth writing:
As unionized workers rallied, lawmakers passed a bill to lower child care costs and increase access by boosting support for the state’s Child Care Affordability Program, which currently has a waitlist of more than 1,000 families.3
In any case, this feels like a good time to scale back Fake News Friday. My real passion is writing essays, not reporting the news. I’m impressed with myself for maintaining a weekly newsletter for this long on top of academic and stewarding commitments. At this rate, though, Fake News Friday is taking away from my ability to write quality, longform essays. So I am going to transition from writing a weekly newsletter to a monthly one. I will post on the last Friday of the month. This will make the next Fake News Friday March 27.
In Maine News
Elections
- Bangor Daily News: Trump’s election takeover threats are the real election fraud [editorial]
- Bangor Daily News: Unenrolled voters will be prized in Maine’s uncertain primaries
- The Maine Monitor: The big property tax ideas coming from Maine’s candidates for governor
- Maine Morning Star: Maine considers regulation of AI-generated political ads
- Portland Press Herald: In Maine, a Democrat-led crackdown on ‘deepfake’ AI campaign ads
Iran
Beacon: Maine labor groups call for tax fairness to boost child care availability
Portland Press Herald: ‘Buy America’ rule killing Maine affordable housing, developers say
Portland Press Herald: “Long overdue.” Maine lawmakers react to Trump firing Kristi Noem
In National News
Elections
- The Guardian: One simple way to heal American politics. Run more union members
- The House Red: The media’s “pro-worker GOP” fever dream isn’t real
- Jacobin: Union candidates deliver for workers [editorial]
- Politico: Texas Latinos turned out in massive numbers for Democrats
- Wake Up To Politics: There is No MAGA Split on Iran
Immigration
- AP: A $220 million ad blitz and a public split with Trump mark the end of Kristi Noem’s DHS tenure
- The Boston Globe: An ICE operation in Vermont leads to violent clashes between protesters and police
- ProPublica: DHS seeks access to massive employment, salary and family database legally restricted to use in child support cases
Iran
- Al Jazeera: Oil prices swing wildly amid mixed messages over Iran war
- AP: Wealthy nations pledge record release of emergency oil reserves in a bid to calm surging prices
- BBC: Questions mount for Hegseth over possible US involvement in strike on Iranian school
- BBC: US refuelling plane crashes in Iraq, military says
- The Existentialist Republic: The Iran war could collapse the United States in the next six months
- Friendly Atheist: Before you share that story about how troops were told the Iran War is for “Armageddon,” read this
- Mother Jones: Thanks to Trump, petro-imperialism is back
- The New York Times: U.S. at fault in strike on school in Iran, preliminary inquiry says
- The New York Times: Wars often lose public support over time. Trump started this one without much [Peter Baker]
- The New Yorker: The war Trump doesn’t want to talk about [Susan Glasser]
- NPR: Iran names Mojtaba Khamenei as its new supreme leader
- People’s World: Minab’s 165 murdered schoolgirls. The silence that exposes Western moral selectivity
- Reuters: Iran has laid about a dozen mines in Strait of Hormuz, sources say
- Reuters: US energy chief defends waiver on Russian oil sanctions, blames fear for higher gas prices
- The Wall Street Journal: The long-feared Persian Gulf oil squeeze is upon us
Ars Technica: Americans trust Fauci over RFK Jr. and career scientists over Trump officials
Jacobin: Workers can organize outside the NLRB
Madness: The era of killer robots
Variety: Audiences prefer films with diverse casts, UCLA study finds
Did I miss something? Share what you’re reading with me, and I’ll try to include it next time!
- The Holy Donut, “Last week The Holy Donut received a demand from eight teammates to recognize a union,” Facebook (2026, March 12). ↩︎
- “Quote Origin: Either Write Things Worth Reading or Do Things Worth the Writing,” Quote Investigator (2016, April 27). ↩︎
- Kathryn Carley, “Maine labor groups call for tax fairness to boost child care availability,” Beacon (2026, March 6). ↩︎
From The Deckplates 