Monica Potts

Politico reports that the Associated Press has named its first ever Race/Ethnicity/Demographics editor, Sonya Ross. Ross had been editor for the Washington-based regional reporters, and now she’ll coordinate nationwide coverage that “captures the changing facets of race and ethnicity in the United States and its effects on the experiences of people of various races.” This […]

Dr. Elisabeth Hagen was finally appointed undersecretary of food safety for the USDA yesterday, part of a packet of recess appointments President Obama made, it must be noted, one year and eight months after he was sworn in. Obama’s reluctance to use recess appointments as a way to deal with an increasingly recalcitrant Congress has […]

Voters in Alaska will consider a ballot measure next week that would require a teenage girls’ parents to be notified two days before she gets an abortion, unless she goes to court or brings a notarized letter claiming abuse at home. It is, of course, designed to limit teenage girls’ rights, and there’s nothing new […]

One of the two new drastic anti-abortion laws passed in April in Nebraska won’t take effect. It would have required doctors to screen patients for potential mental-health or physical problems and would have allowed patients to sue later if they experienced post-abortion problems and believed the screenings had been insufficient. The state’s attorney general, Jon […]

Via Gothamist, the video above shows a cop breaking up a party and then threatening to arrest a videographer, Vladimir Teichberg, who documents the event. As Gothamist notes, it’s perfectly legal to record or photograph police activity as long as you’re not interfering with the officer or officers, and when Teichberg asks whether he’s interfering […]

On Larry King last night, Dr. Laura Schlessinger said she was leaving her radio show to regain her First Amendment rights. “I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is […]

Writing for The Daily Dish, Chris Bodenner repeats, through a reader’s response, an argument that’s been around forever: that the problems facing many African Americans can be described by and blamed on their culture. The problem with the reader’s argument, as is the problem with many similar arguments, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the […]

In The New York Times today, Paul Bass writes that few broad lessons can be drawn from Tuesday’s Connecticut primary. On the Democratic side, former Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy closed a big gap in the Democratic gubernatorial primary between him and front-runner Ned Lamont, who ran a self-financed campaign. Malloy ultimately won. While Lamont’s big-name […]

TAP extended-family member Dana Goldstein was on BloggingHeads to answer the question of whether schools can really combat the childhood obesity problem. I’m with Dana, who argues that Michelle Obama’s initiative doesn’t go far enough and that schools could become a good resource for providing the kind of child care and food service lower-income communities […]

David Gumpert at Grist highlights one of the problems with our bifurcated food-regulation system: In the case of an organic egg producer in Massachusetts, FDA regulations are butting up against the USDA’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative, which promotes more interactions between farmers and the public. The company, Country Hen, has regularly allowed […]