FDA Official: “Just Eat A Goddamn Vegetable” The USDA released its updated food guidelines today, and Martion Nestle at Food Politics is actually impressed. I’m in shock. I never would have believed they could pull this off. The new guidelines recognize that obesity is the number one public health nutrition problem in America and actually […]
Monica Potts
Monica Potts is a former senior writer at The American Prospect. She is working on a book about low-income women in her rural Arkansas hometown. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York, Vogue.com, The Daily Beast, The Trace, and Democracy.
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The Koch Brothers’ Real Power.
I’m going to disagree with my colleague Jamelle Bouie a bit (don’t tell him, he’s sitting right beside me, and I don’t want things to get awkward!), who argues that the Koch brothers’ efforts to fund conservative campaigns aren’t really such a big deal. This was prompted, of course, by as many as 1,000 protesters […]
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Gov. Kasich Doesn’t Need You, and He Doesn’t Need You, or You!
Over at ThinkProgress, Tanya Somanader tells us that when asked by state Sen. Nina Turner, a Democrat, whether he needed help diversifying his all white, mostly male Cabinet, newly elected Gov. John Kasich replied, “I don’t need your people.” Turner is African American and, out of an abundance of caution, everyone is sure to say […]
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“Objective” Reporting.
Associate Press reporter Stephen Ohlemacher has a dour piece about Social Security. I’ll leave it to AlterNet’s Joshua Holland to describe what’s wrong with the piece, but I just wanted to point out that Ohlemacher is the same reporter who wrote an awful piece in April about how so many Americans don’t pay taxes. That […]
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Target on Planned Parenthood.
Jamilah King at ColorLines highlights the effort of an anti-abortion group called Live Action to “O-Keefe” Planned Parenthood — that is, to try to catch employees on video cooperating with someone posing as a sex worker the way conservative activist James O’Keefe did with ACORN. According to the report, the man has visited several clinics […]
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Winning the Future.
That’s the phrase you’ll probably hear from the White House a lot. Like Matt Yglesias, I went to a bloggers’ roundtable with other progressive journalists today and met with David Axelrod. He repeated this phrase a lot and also said repeatedly, along with an economic adviser, Brian Deese, that the president would not make cuts […]
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States of the Union.
My colleague Jamelle Bouie has a nice take on last night’s State of the Union address. Bouie pointed out what didn’t make it into the address, like the depressingly high unemployment rate and the joblessness that’s continuing despite a slow economic recovery. If we can gauge issue importance by specificity and length, then it’s abundantly […]
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The State of Clean Energy
In his State of the Union address, the president made large-scale commitments to clean energy, but is it all just talk?
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Rep. Michele Bachmann: How to Tell if You Were Chosen.
I don’t know what Phoebe is talking about with her missing-prominent-women post: We had a prominent woman: Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann! Wasn’t she great? If you’re like me, she gave her speech while looking just over your left shoulder, like she’s trying to make sure that confused-looking dude in the fourth row feels extra included. […]
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A Good, Useless Laugh.
Gawker yesterday posted the above picture of two men, taken at an anti-abortion rally on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. As the post’s author, Brian Moylan, snarks: “Grown men dressed as George Washington and Captain America are the last people who should be telling women what to do with their bodies.” I agree with […]
