The food-safety bill will wait till after Thanksgiving because Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn inserted an amendment that would ban earmarks and also introduce a less-rigorous substitute bill. In the meantime, the Senate seems to have agreed on a modified version of the Tester amendment that would exempt some small farms, which was a sticking […]
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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Food Insecurity and the Lame-Duck Congress.
It didn’t make a huge news splash, but the USDA released this week the results of its latest survey on hunger in the country, and more Americans spent last year hungry and reliant on private and public assistance. The rates of food insecurity for 2008 and 2009 are the highest since the survey began in […]
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Unfair Loss
TAP talks about the Paycheck Fairness Act’s failure with an advocate from the ACLU.
Posted inEducation in America
Same-Sex Education.
At The Root, Deron Snyder champions the idea of same-sex education for young black men as a way to overcome those dire statistics that have been making the news lately. All of this is based on the success of Chicago’s Urban Prep, an all-male charter school in Chicago that sent all of its 2010 graduates […]
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The Senate and Business.
Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid tabled a vote on a bill to promote natural-gas and electric vehicles today in the hopes that a compromise with Republicans is close. That should give some hint that proceeding with the cloture votes on the Paycheck Fairness Act and the food-safety bill could be a bad sign. The Paycheck […]
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Andy Harris Doesn’t Live in the Real World.
Newly elected Republican Rep. Andy Harris is upset because the health care for his new job in Congress doesn’t kick in until February, which is essentially, a couple of weeks after he starts work. Harris, who has worked as an anesthesiologist, says this is the first job he’s had where it doesn’t start on day […]
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The Republican’s Only Agenda.
Joshua Tucker digs into whether repealing health-care reform will actually be a winning issue for Republicans, an important thing to assess, because it’s the only real thing they ran on in 2010. Tucker looks at data from a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll published by CNN and finds that there’s general support for the idea of […]
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Welfare Reform Squandered
The new Congress jeopardizes a tenuous agreement among liberals on how to reform Bush’s poverty programs.
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Why Doesn’t America Spend More on Child Care?
The above chart, from the Economic Policy Institute, shows how poorly America rates compared to other developed countries when it comes to public spending on child care for children under 3. Only New Zealand does worse, and the Scandinavian countries, where people already have generous maternity and paternity leaves and vacation benefits, spend an order […]
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From Schools to Publishing and From Publishing to Schools.
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced today that he was leaving his post to work on an education project for News Corp., and Mayor Michael Bloomberg named Klein’s replacement, Cathie Black, who now works as the chair of Hearst Magazines. That led the website The Awl to snark, in its post headline about […]
