Monica Potts

Last night, Politico reported that President Obama’s energy and environment adviser, Carol Browner, is leaving. While reporters Mike Allen and Darren Samuelsohn call her one of the few White House figures to come out of the BP oil disaster looking competent, an NPR story notes that Browner had recently been criticized for “politicizing” the Gulf […]

Last night, during Sunday night football, one of my friends retweeted a comment from a Twitter user called Lolo813 (she has protected her tweets) that said: “Um, being suspended for sexual assault isn’t adversity. It would be great if the announcers would stop calling it that.” She was referring to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback Ben […]

As Jamelle Bouie said below, the Republicans’ proposed budget cuts amount to small savings that would do little to solve our long-term fiscal problems and have the added disadvantage of cutting investment at a time when we still need government spending to promote growth. But David Roberts at Grist notices another thing about the cuts: […]

When I reported last month that states taken over by Republican legislatures in the South were likely to cut critical anti-poverty programs, I imagined that they would instead divert federal anti-poverty funds to programs conservatives like, i.e., marriage promotion, counseling for pregnant women that encourages them not to choose abortions, and other faith-based programs. I […]

I finally caught up with Monday’s episode of House last night (sorry, advertisers, I watch shows for free online) and the story line involved a patient who had jumped onto the subway tracks to save a seizing woman from an oncoming train. That act of heroism didn’t have anything to do with his illness, but […]

Kevin Drum is annoyed at the way polling on the health-care law is presented. He calls out The Washington Post on a story that is factually correct in the technical sense — it notes that 50 percent of Americans oppose the law — but misleading in a more full sense — 13 percent of those […]

Sen. Joseph Lieberman played a central role in rallying votes for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but his advisers likely realized that this was too little, too late to entirely redeem him. Connecticutters on the right and left are less than charmed by Lieberman these days, and his health-care stance didn’t help. It’s not […]

Over the weekend, Sarah Palin defended her use of the term “blood libel” last week in an online statement about the Arizona shooting. She spent several minutes arguing that she’d been unfairly accused by her favorite bogeyman, the media, of having had something to do with the shooting because she put out a map before […]

Women’s E-news has a good round-up of the anti-choice action several state legislators are geared up to take now that they have majorities in the assemblies and governorships in states where they didn’t before. Expect to see pushes for pre-abortion counseling, a renewed debate over viability, and louder claims that early abortion-rights advocates were racist. […]