Monica Potts

The Justice Department has launched a program to help states bolster and repair their legal defense systems for people who cannot afford a lawyer. While all states have a system in place for indigent defense, as it’s known, the design of the programs and their quality vary from state to state. A Harvard constitutional lawyer, […]

E.D. Kain protests the sometimes elitist dismissals of tea-party folks, and — as Jamelle Bouie points out — some of what he says is fair. But Kain sets up an either/or dichotomy. Either you believe the tea partiers have valid concerns, or you think they’re racists. Both ignore the possibility that the tea partiers’ have […]

HUD announced yesterday that it would give grants to nonprofit agencies that help low-income families buy, build, or rehab new homes. In exchange for grants averaging $15,000 per dwelling, each homeowner has to volunteer 100 hours in work on the home. The idea, called sweat equity, is one that Habitat for Humanity, one of the […]

Many view the Credit CARD Act provisions that prohibit those under 21 from getting cards if they don’t have an income or a parent to co-sign as the kind of law they wish they’d had. But that depends upon the idea that college students are only digging big holes for themselves during those four years, […]

Regularly, someone tries to remind women that they can’t have children after a certain age. This week’s effort comes from Carolyn Butler in the Washington Post, who writes about a study published in a journal called PLoS ONE telling us that we have fewer eggs by 30 than previously thought. Women start out with about […]

A JetBlue employee whose harassment case was thrown out in 2007 won an appeal last week that will revive her claim. A judge had thrown out the case, in which Diane Gorzynski provided evidence of gender, racial, and age discrimination from her supervisor and complained about it to the same supervisor she accused. The company […]

In Missouri, yacht owners continue to enjoy a sales tax exemption that costs the state $6 million. The report, from The Kansas City Star, comes my way via Balloon Juice and also tells us that the state Revenue Department refuses to tally the cost of exemptions like these because it would be too burdensome on […]

The Renaissance Learning company, which runs a reading test program called Accelerated Reader, has a list of the top 20 books high school students read, and it’s not pretty for those of us who doubt the educational merits of the Twilight series. Jay Mathews at The Washington Post rightly bemoans the lack of nonfiction on […]

A graduate student named Adam Shriver contributed to our never-ending quest to get rid of our guilt over the industrial agriculture system in a New York Times op-ed, promsing that we could soon have pain-free animals. Removing proteins or genes from some animals could prevent the things that should hurt them from doing so, creating […]