Yesterday, former Stamford, Connecticut, Mayor Dannel Malloy won the Democratic primary for the state’s gubernatorial race, beating cable-television millionaire from nearby Greenwich Ned Lamont. This is the second time Lamont’s lost a big statewide race; though he beat Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary in 2006, he lost in the general election after Lieberman […]
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.
Posted inEducation in America
The Racial Graduation Gap.
Via The Quick and the Ed, the Education Trust releases a report about the racial gap in graduation rates at different universities. The worst offender: Wayne State in Detroit, where about a third of students are black but only 9.5 percent graduate in six years or less, compared with 43.5 percent of white students who […]
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Lagging in Food Safety.
In January, after leaving the post open for a year, President Obama nominated Dr. Elisabeth Hagen to be undersecretary for food safety at the USDA. But Hagen’s nomination hasn’t been confirmed and only recently got through the Agriculture Committee. While it’s possible there are objections to Hagen in the Senate that just haven’t been aired […]
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National Dems and the Local Races.
Conservatives, independents, and especially the Tea Partiers hate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Centrist Democrats fighting for their seats, especially the Blue Dog Democrats, are working really hard in their campaigns to portray themselves as independent from the Democratic leadership personified by that San Francisco liberal, Pelosi, and President Obama. At the same time, their Republican […]
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The House and Food-Stamp Funding.
Members of the House are traveling back to Washington today so that they can vote on the $26 billion aid bill to the states that the Senate passed last week. Annie Lowrey at the Washington Independent tells us, however, that some members, led by Rep. Rose DeLauro of Connecticut, are upset about the source of […]
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Child Nutrition and Food Stamps.
Yesterday, the Senate passed a new childhood nutrition bill that increases spending on food for children, mostly through school lunch, summer- and after-school meal programs, and the Women, Infants and Children program, by $4.5 billion. This is the plan about which Michelle Obama wrote an op-ed in support of this past week, urging the Senate […]
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Employment Report: The More Things Change.
Change in those unemployed for 27 weeks or more from 2001 to 2010. The unemployment numbers for July released this morning show that little has changed since the previous month: 131,000 jobs were lost and only 71,000 jobs were created, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 9.5 percent. The particular numbers for various groups of […]
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Justice Kagan.
Though it was expected, it was good to hear Elena Kagan was confirmed by the Senate this afternoon, 63 to 37. Five Republicans voted for her confirmation, and Sen. Ben Nelson, who apparently is vying to become the most obstructionist member of a majority party ever, voted against it. David Leonhardt, whose column I wrote […]
Posted inArticle
Angle’s Back in the Press.
The latest evidence that Sharron Angle, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s opponent in the Senate race, might not be ready for prime time comes from a heretofore unnoticed April interview in which she said the Democratic administration was trying to make the government our God. Hence, President Obama, Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are violating […]
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Cutting Food Stamps to Pay for Food.
The Senate plans to cut the food-stamp program by ending stimulus-established increases early to help pay for Medicaid assistance for states and aid to save teachers’ jobs, but part of the savings from the food-stamp program will also possibly help pay for the Childhood Nutrition Act championed by Sen. Blanche Lincoln. The Childhood Nutrition Reauthorization […]
