Fox On SNAP: Quality and Class-Based Shame
“What’s the right mixture of quality and class-based shame poor people should aim for in their meal planning?” the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart asked last night, slamming Fox News’ seeming obsession with...
View ArticleCan America Ever Be Whole?
The Case for Reparations A very sobering account of race relations from Ta-Nehisi Coates, a brilliant writer and a senior editor at The Atlantic. Highly recommended. On a long drive in the last year or...
View ArticleDownwardly Mobile: Is Art Pope Growing His Customer Base?
Low-budget retailing is growing: Dollar Tree, a discount retailer known for selling everything for $1, said Monday it plans to buy Matthews-based Family Dollar for $8.5 billion, weeks after an activist...
View ArticleThe Poor Door
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View ArticleThere’s something happening here
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on what Ferguson, MO is really about. Not race, but class. This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police...
View ArticleFirst they came for the air traffic controllers …
“Nothing makes people more stupid and foolish than money and fear,” the creator of The Wire told the Guardian. David Simon spoke about what drives him, and about his new mini-series, Show Me a Hero....
View ArticleThat Time of Year
People choosing between food and heat? It’s that time of year: This past holiday week, those fortunate enough celebrated with family and friends around their Thanksgiving tables. But for those in our...
View ArticleWhat’s in a racial label?
Esther J. Cepeda’s Washington Post op-ed discusses a study by Emory University researchers, “A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping ‘African-Americans’ from ‘Blacks’”. Specifically,...
View ArticleA zombie faith
It was kind of stunning, actually, to see the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson invoke “the common good” in a national newspaper, as I mentioned yesterday. Speaking of that sort of thing (like “public...
View ArticleThe pigment tax
Reading Charles Blow’s New York Times column this morning, one phrase stopped me cold: a pigment tax. That, essentially, is what the Justice Department’s report charges the Ferguson Police Department...
View ArticleInequality for dummies
Corey Robin considers the irony of how white children learn about Martin Luther King while attending schools that have essentially re-seregated since the Nixon years. He casts a jaundiced eye on the...
View ArticleBehold, the relativist wasteland
A number of people have taken shots at David Brooks this week for his essential cluelessness about people who are not David Brooks. Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi calls Brooks’ “The Cost of...
View ArticleThe Poors: Leaded and unleaded
Once again, our vigilant T-party politicians are on the alert for the theoretical possibility of crimes by the Poors. Courtesy of Charlie Pierce comes the next wave of imaginary dirty tricks...
View ArticleList of demands
How far down the rabbit hole have we gone that Republican candidates for president think they are entitled to a list of demands from networks hosting debates (and I use that term reservedly) that would...
View Article‘People on Medicaid don’t vote.’
At an event Saturday night in eastern Tennessee, an organizer brought up the meme that poor people tend to “vote against their best interests,” for Republicans who vote to slash safety net programs...
View ArticleBut for the grace of God
Lauren Scott, a single mother and homeless, goes for a job interview: Sixty-nine stops on a bus; a nine-minute train ride; an additional 49 stops on a bus; a quarter-mile walk. Scott carries a spiral...
View ArticleDying from despair
Michael Cooper, Jr. sends a message from Donald Trump’s America, meaning, the last places and people in America the casino and real estate magnate would care to visit. You know, “losers”: I live in...
View ArticleThe quality of mercy
David Atkins comments on a piece from the National Review that displays the nihilist greed of the Midas Cult in the ghastliest terms I have yet seen. Atkins writes: The establishment Republican...
View ArticleWhat’s fair is fair
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) of Milwaukee plans to introduce a bill this week requiring drug testing for anyone claiming large tax deductions in a given year. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants to require...
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