With the September deadline rapidly approaching, the fate of the Iran deal still hinges on several key remaining votes. And there are only a few more days to reach out to Congress before members head back to Washington, DC. We have one final push planned: A National Day of Action with more than 150 rallies outside local Congressional offices, organized in partnership with our friends at MoveOn, and with numerous … Continue reading →
How Black Reporters Report On Black Death On an unbearably hot August afternoon last summer, I was walking along West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo., notebook in hand, when I ran into two good friends who were also on the clock, Joel Anderson of BuzzFeed and Jamelle Bouie of Slate. A few nights later, we got dinner with a couple of other black journos from D.C. We’d all known each … Continue reading →
Martin O’Malley Unveils His Plan to Expand Social Security In a white paper released early on Friday, Mr. O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, rejects calls to raise the retirement age for Social Security. His plan seeks a big increase in employer-based retirement systems and rejects the idea of privatizing Social Security to keep it solvent. Mr. O’Malley, like Mr. Sanders, also says that benefits should be increased. Hillary Rodham … Continue reading →
August 20, 2015 Dear Advocate, Fifty years ago, hundreds marched from Selma to Montgomery and built momentum for passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Fifty years later, hundreds are marching from Selma to Washington, DC, to demand that Congress repair the gutting of that law by the US Supreme Court. You can join this new, history-making march for a day or a week as it travels through North Carolina from … Continue reading →
Tom Recently, I picked up a copy of Forbes, . On its first page, Steve Forbes, inheritor of that magazine, explodes in rage over the activist Supreme Court’s upholding the Affordable Care Act. Considering that screed I later consulted my dictionary for the words that describe my feeling and conclusion. Here are two such words and a description of a cognitive error. Pettifog: (verb) the practice of legal deception or … Continue reading →
Journalists tend to gravitate toward negative news because we think that’s what sells. Feed the outrage machine, the thinking goes. But it turns out the steady drumbeat of depressing stories about everything from shooting sprees to natural disasters has long-lasting effects. According to Michelle Gielan, who left broadcasting to study media’s impact on the psyche, readers who consume just three minutes of negative news are 27 percent more likely to … Continue reading →
I’ll admit it: After a while, all the GOP presidential candidates start to sound the same to me. One wants to privatize Social Security, another wants to cut benefits … They’re the same bad ideas I hear every day in Congress, only on a bigger stage and pushed by politicians with eyes on the White House. This month, Social Security, our country’s most important social safety net, celebrates its 80th … Continue reading →
Trump grows lead in NC; GOP leads most match ups …A higher than usual 20% of Democratic primary voters in North Carolina identify themselves as conservatives and with that group she only gets 26% which is what keeps her to 55% overall despite being over 60% with both liberals and moderates. The only other group Clinton’s under 50% with is white voters, among whom she leads Sanders 47/25. Clinton trails … Continue reading →
Stand on Student Debt? The race for President is heating up as we near the Democratic and Republican primaries. (Side note: is it just me, or does it feel like we’re in a permanent state of “election mode” here?). Student loan debt is increasingly becoming one of the biggest policy topics at all levels of our society’s political discourse. But where do the presidential candidates stand? Do they support the … Continue reading →
The Petition is to expand Social Security. I was a low wage worker for a long time. This petition will give momentum to a national conversation that will bust the myths surrounding Social Security promulgated by the Koch Brothers Foundation thart morphed into the CATO Institute. I was inspired after reading Social Security Works All Generations Plan becauses it impacts the entire Obama Coalition & is a dynimite GOTV plan. … Continue reading →