Monica Potts

The White House released today the list of 19 finalists — 18 states plus D.C. — for $3.4 billion in Race to the Top funds. Thirty-five states applied, and many have already adopted the national learning benchmarks in an attempt to get a leg up on the competition, as The New York Times reported a […]

Despite Paul’s jokey headline below, used to make a good point, a new poll shows that voters don’t miss Bush on economic matters. Nearly half of Americans think Obama’s policies are better for the economy than Bush’s were. For progressives, that’s a blindingly obvious conclusion reached by an alarmingly small number of people. As Congress […]

Nearly every time conservatives talk about abortion, conservatives like Janice Crouse from Concerned Women for America do their best to portray abortion as a problem stemming from women in their 30s who have access to birth control but act irresponsibly. They should, the narrative goes, know better, and when they spend their floozy time having […]

There’s a way to care about and address poverty in every community where it manifests itself without positing that poor whites in America suffer with no help while poor blacks, Latinos, and new immigrants benefit from a slew of government programs. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of writing Sen. Jim Webb did last week, or […]

In 2004, a woman in Missouri danced in a bar where the producers of the “Girls Gone Wild” videos were filming. She danced with her friends and danced in front of the camera, but when asked to take her shirt off she said no, her attorneys later said. Then, another woman pulled down her top, […]

Last Thursday, the chance of passing any type of comprehensive climate legislation was pronounced dead-on-arrival in the Senate, but it’s worth noting that this isn’t the end of climate-change regulation. The Environmental Protection Agency announced its standards for regulating greenhouse gases in May. And while there are many pluses to a market-based cap-and-trade system over […]

Via the Women’s Rights blog at Change.org, a manager of a Johnny Rockets’ restaurant tried to make a woman who was breastfeeding do it outside on a bench or in the bathroom. As the writer, Sarah Menkedick, pointed out, this is just the most recent in a series of incidents in which breastfeeding women were […]

Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York, was charged with ethics violations ranging from allegations that he held four rent-subsidized apartments in New York City at once to allegations that he failed to report substantial income on financial-disclosure forms, and more. Hearings will begin next week. Via the Huffington Post comes this exchange with Luke Russert, […]

It’s hard to remember now that the BP disaster has taken such precedence, but it was only in April that an explosion in West Virginia killed 29 people at Massey Energy Company’s Upper Big Branch Mine. In light of that story, NPR investigated mine safety violations and reported yesterday that they found violations have increased […]

In the above video, Ken Buck — who is competing for the Republican nomination in Colorado’s Senate race against Jane Norton, the state’s former lieutenant governor who ran an ad with this video of Buck at a rally — jokes that the audience should vote for him because he doesn’t wear high heels. Not only […]