Today is Confederate Heroes Day in Texas. If it seems like a strange coincidence that Confederate Heroes Day is placed awkwardly close to the date we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, that’s because it’s not a coincidence.…
Today is Confederate Heroes Day in Texas. If it seems like a strange coincidence that Confederate Heroes Day is placed awkwardly close to the date we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, that’s because it’s not a coincidence.…
The Daily Beast republished an interview with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. done by Alex Haley in 1965 for Playboy magazine. So much of our memory of Dr. King is bound up in his 1963 speech in Washington and the…
Hopefully many of you are enjoying this platform. I’m finding it a lot more enjoyable than I anticipated and I intend to maintain it. That said, it is by necessity very lightly moderated. A few reminders about best practice might…
For two decades, since Steven Hotze pushed Betsy Lake out as chairman of the Harris County GOP, religious activists locally and nationally have pushed the Republican Party into indefensible, bigoted, and ultimately futile stands on a whole series of “culture”…
Religious fundamentalists in the US have a favorite foreign country. They revere Israel, campaign there, and use it as a prop for fundraising. Their reverence for Israel might prove useful if they took the time to actually look at the…
Marijuana has been available for sale legally in Colorado for a couple of weeks now. As predicted by some, legal marijuana is driving people toward some shockingly idiotic public behavior, but so far none of it is coming from the…
Someone may finally have uncovered an explanation for this very “bridge & tunnel” scandal that could actually make sense. The claim that Gov. Christie’s aides arranged a traffic jam to bully a recalcitrant small-time mayor always sounded too petty to…
The Washington Post’s Wonkblog presented a good summary this week of the intersecting factors contributing to steep declines in workforce participation. They identified three different dynamics at work, but unfortunately they left out one really important statistic that helps tie…
Florida Senator Marco Rubio today commemorated the 50th anniversary of Johnson’ War on Poverty with a speech outlining a new approach to the social safety net. What that approach actually is remains to be seen, but his vague comments hint…
What does poverty mean fifty years after the Federal government began systematically measuring it? This piece in The Atlantic points out some of the statistical problems with the way we measure poverty over time, but it misses what I think…