Monica Potts

Last week, a New York City Council committee heard testimony from several women on street harassment, including Emily May, executive director of Hollaback, a website that allows women to post stories and pictures of harassment and harassers. The council is considering whether to take measures, including possible legislation, to curb street harassment, especially around school […]

Over at ThinkProgress, George Zornick has a nice roundup of the hypocrisy in John Boehner‘s umbrage at Obama calling on Latino voters to “punish our enemies” at the polls. This comes, of course, from a leader of the party whose members have called Obama un-American and compared him to Hitler. But it doesn’t matter whether […]

Yesterday, Gawker published an anonymous hit-job describing a drunken sexual encounter with Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate from Delaware most famous for being anti-masturbation and not being a witch. I didn’t link to it yesterday because it’s bad taste and sexism was apparent, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone; Gawker is a site that runs […]

I’ve been waiting for this poll from the University of Arkansas, which tells us, like so many other polls, that Blanche Lincoln is a goner this November. This, despite my early sense that it might work out for her in the end. But the poll also touched on some hot-button issues, most notably this: Fifty-six […]

Over at Mother Jones, Keira Butler debunks a pro-life group’s weird ploy to convince greenies that the birth control they take is causing problems for fish and otters, who have to deal with extra estrogen in waterways. Good luck debunking that myth; it’s been around forever, and I hear it from as many self-identified progressives […]

You might have heard about a study discussed this week on The New York Times Economix blog that says the motherhood payment gap is worse for low-income women in low-paying jobs than for women who earn more. In some respects, this is unsurprising: High-paying jobs also come with good benefits, like maternal leave and sick […]

The Navajo nation is experiencing, in microcosm, broader national problems in transitioning to cleaner energy: from confronting the very real health and environmental effects of pollution to the prospect of shifting from a stable, carbon-based economy to a less certain one that relies on nascent solar- and wind-energy industries. The only difference is that the […]

NPR’s ombudswoman, Alicia Shephard, says the firing of news analyst Juan Williams over his anti-Muslim remarks on Fox News was poorly handled but right. He did, after all, break a clear ethics code in stating his opinion on another network and had probably been dancing around violating that ethics code during his Fox appearances for […]

Gawker has a great round-up of tales from employees, mostly former, of Wal-Mart and particular horror stories they have to tell. One of the first highlighted is by a worker whose 75-year-old co-worker was hit on the head, and the store manager ordered the co-worker to first drive the woman to the drug-testing lab before […]