Kate Sheppard

Activists and actors will take part in a National Day of Panhandling for Reparations for the fourth year in a row today, a piece of performance art meant to draw attention to an issue that once resided only at the fringes of Civil Rights movement, but has recently made its way into more mainstream policy […]

SEIU announced yesterday that they have decided against backing one candidate, and will instead let chapters decide on a state-by-state basis who they want to endorse. While the majority of the board supports Edwards, the union first delayed the decision, and has now come to the conclusion that the organization’s efforts would best be spent […]

David Roberts and Brian Beutler have much more on the energy plan Obama released yesterday, but here are the basics: He supports a cap-and-trade system that would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 80 percent by 2050, and he wants 100 percent of those carbon credits to be auctioned off. He wants the up to $50 billion-a-year generated […]

Fred Thompson has decided that what his campaign needs is Dick Cheney‘s daughter Liz and brown-people-hating former Sen. George Allen running the show. I still haven’t figured out whether this will hurt him or help him, but for some reason I’m inclined to go with the latter. Liz Cheney has name recognition, family ties, and […]

Rather than just sitting back and twiddling their thumbs while they wait for the folks over in Oslo to announce the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the media have been busy prognosticating about what will go down on Friday. Many are positing that Al Gore and Inuit climate change activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who […]

Not to be missed: Ron Rosenbaum‘s excellent piece on Slate calling for the revival of the write-around: If more magazines and magazine editors were unafraid to do a write-around, the balance of power might shift a bit. Powerful figures who now think they can avoid thoroughgoing scrutiny by journalists just by withholding their participation might […]

This is from a few days ago, but I just saw this Boston Globe piece via Jack and Jill Politics, which highlights the fact that rich, well-connected white kids are much more likely to push more-qualified students aside for seats at the country’s most prestigious schools than black or Latino students, despite all the chatter […]

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of a court ruling that found that Allen Ginsberg‘s “Howl” had “redeeming social importance” and was not in violation of obscenity laws. Customs officials had seized 520 copies of the poem that had been imported from a printer in London, claiming the drugs, sex, and four letter words made it […]

Via Andrew Sullivan, we find Sam Harris telling atheists not to consider themselves atheists at the annual atheist conference, and suggests that there is a need for more specificity in meting out criticism of religion: The problem is that the concept of atheism imposes upon us a false burden of remaining fixated on people’s beliefs […]