Monica Potts

As if it wasn’t clear enough that racism was playing a roll in the rejection of a big, ambitious effort to spread health insurance coverage to more Americans, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia made it more explicit when he said the following: If Obamacare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is going […]

An Ohio judge has ordered teenage sexual-assault victims in four separate cases to undergo polygraph tests, along with the teenage boys who were convicted, before the scheduled sentencing, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This has the potential to be some old-school victim blaming, and though the judge, Alison Floyd, declined to comment, I can’t […]

One of the most annoying things about the way the health-care battle has played out in the press is the way arguments of fact are presented as arguments of politics. That happened today, when, in a roundabout way of reporting on the CBO’s score of the latest iteration of the reform bill, The New York […]

For the first time in 40 years, the number of prisoners in state prison systems has dropped, according to a new report from the Pew Center on the States. During the past four decades, the number of prisoners rose precipitously — by more than 700 percent — as more people were sent to prison and […]

Yesterday, Michelle Obama gave a speech to the Grocery Manufacturers of America, as part of her campaign against childhood obesity. She told the assembled group — executives responsible for products from Coca-Cola to ConAgra to McDonald’s — to stop hiding unhealthy ingredients behind health-claim labels and to start marketing healthy foods as effectively as unhealthy […]

A rising number of states are asserting their authority over that of the federal government, making states’ rights or nullification arguments in anticipation of policies like increased gun control from the Obama administration, even though there’s no evidence stricter gun policies are coming. There’s also anticipated resistance to health-care reform, though the legislation will likely […]

In light of a recent study that shows how little wealth black and Latina women have, we should be rushing to fix pay and wealth disparities. That’s especially true given how devastating the recession is for families when underpaid women become the sole breadwinner. As Latoya Peterson notes for TAP, addressing the pay gap doesn’t […]

More and more doctors are dropping Medicaid; more and more patients are unable to continue to see their doctors. The cuts come as states anticipate losing federal aid and try to close budget gaps, reports The New York Times. These kind of low-reimbursement rates are what many fear with a single-payer system. And, to some […]

Tomorrow, the Federal Communications Commission will reveal it’s plan for increasing Internet access, but some of the highlights were revealed today. The goals include getting fast broadband access to 100 million households by 2020, and getting television stations to give up their unused frequencies for wireless Internet service providers. The last part is likely to […]