Monica Potts

Among the many bills passed by the House and stuck in the Senate is a bill that would require the secretary of Health and Human Services to track America’s forgotten diseases, which mostly still affect isolated and poor communities, and recommend funding for eradicating them. The diseases include parasitic and viral diseases that can cause […]

Jesse Washington, an Associated Press reporter, finally gave No Wedding, No Womb, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, the AP treatment. That means, of course, the story says something like this: Here is this problem, here’s what some people say, and here’s what some people say against it. I’m not going to […]

In my piece for the Prospect‘s December issue, posted online today, I write about how all the green-jobs training programs the stimulus helped fund are a little ahead of the curve: We’re training workers for green jobs, but we haven’t passed the nationwide policies that would stablize green industries, especially renewable energy. I wrote: The […]

A few days ago, the San Francisco board of supervisors voted to prohibit companies from offering free toys in unhealthy meals for kids, and set up guidelines for what makes a meal healthy enough to add a free toy to it. That’s led, unsurprisingly, to cries that the city is creating a nanny state, and […]

Over the past few years, the “I’m not a racist!” defense has been used by those engaging in a host of deplorable activities: From a congressman who claimed he didn’t know the racially charged undertones of calling the Obamas “uppity,” to officials who insist that forwarding e-mails of the White House lawn as a watermelon […]

With the House now in Republican hands and major losses for candidates backed by environmental groups, the only way forward in the fight to curb carbon emissions lies with the regulatory powers held by federal agencies. But as Grist notes, Obama seems pretty lukewarm on that idea. A cap-and-trade bill passed the House in 2009, […]

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid is probably among the least popular politicians in the country, at least among the electorate that came out to vote yesterday. He is part of the trifecta of politicians Tea Party people love to shout out as those responsible for ruining the country — along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi […]

Republicans won at least 58 seats in the House yesterday, more than expected and a bigger victory, by six seats, than the sweep in 1994. I watched the results at a Tea Party Patriots election-night party last night and, more than anyone, the party’s attendees hated Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. In fact, the […]

In California today, voters will decide on a measure that would effectively kill the state’s aggressive climate-change legislation signed into law in 2005, which would require the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels over the next 10 years. Texas-based oil companies used the bad economy to try to chip away support for […]