Fast food workers have been organizing across the country for months now, and last week a series of spectacular coordinated strikes generated a deluge of media coverage. As you'd expect, the right-wing media and pundit class came out swinging against the workers with their usual mix of hateful trashing and concern trolling.

Are we ready for the next Citizens United? Can our democracy, and Americans’ faith in government, take another body blow from the Supreme Court?

It had to be orange. Pink is overused, green is for environmentalists, and purple isn’t a Texas kind of color. But orange is Texas, it’s the color of the UT Longhorns, and it’s gender neutral. Months before the special session of the Texas legislature was called, the main organizers of the pro-choice protests had already decided that their t-shirts were going to be orange.

I recently read The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy, the latest in a long line of Century Foundation books on similar topics. The authors of the book argue that placing poor kids in lower-poverty schools substantially improves their educational outcomes. More provocatively, the authors argue that these socioeconomic composition effects improve outcomes at even higher rates than traditional strategies like introducing additional funding, training, teaching strategies, and other special programs into high-poverty schools.

Is the National Security Agency wasting tax dollars by paying Booz Allen to handle routine intelligence tasks, such as the systems administration work that 29-year old Edward Snowden was doing for $122,000 a year? It sure seems that way. 

The Senate confirmation vote on Richard Cordray this week won’t have much to do with Richard Cordray.

As I wrote when the Senate Banking Committee considered the Cordray nomination back in March, nobody disputes the idea that the former Ohio Attorney General, who has led the CFPB since January 2012, is highly competent and supremely qualified to continue in his position. Nor is the impact of the agency itself in doubt: in 2012 alone, 6 million U.S. consumers received refunds from financial services companies as a result of CFPB enforcement actions, according to Americans for Financial Reform, and the agency has handled more than 130,000 consumer complaints since it opened its doors less than two years ago.

Whether it’s protecting consumers from the type of reckless and deceptive mortgage lending that sparked the economic downturn or beginning to oversee the massive credit reporting companies that shape the financial lives of American consumers, the CFPB has proven itself to be a critical consumer watchdog.