politics

Last summer, Risa F. Isard, a research fellow with the Laboratory of Inclusion and Diversity in Sport at the University of Massachusetts, was scrolling through Twitter when a thread by WNBA fan Michael McManus (@getdisdance) caught her eye. The thread was about the media’s centering of 2020 No. 1 overall draft pick Sabrina Ionescu (SI)…

Read More Report: White WNBA players received twice as much coverage as Black players in 2020 season

The Happiness Lab [I took this class on Coursera and loved it. Learned a lot, too.] Truth Be Told 70 Over 70 [from an NYTimes article about talking with our elders] Come Through With Rebecca Carroll Hidden Brain [also program on NPR] Sooo Many White Guys This American Life Black Girl Songbook [So good] Fresh Air Resilient Black Women…

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Supreme Court to issue separate rulings on affirmative action in college admissions Pete Williams, NBC News, July 22, 2022 The court agreed in January to take up the issue by granting two cases — one involving Harvard, a private university, and the other from the University of North Carolina, a public institution. The two cases were…

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The sovereign citizen movement is a loose grouping of primarily American litigants, activists, tax protesters, financial scheme promoters, and conspiracy theorists, who claim to be answerable only to their particular interpretations of the common law and to not be subject to any government statutes or proceedings unless they consent to them. The sovereign citizen movement is one of the main contemporary…

Read More Do You Know What the Sovereign Citizen Movement Is?

Protecting election integrity in 2024 “Ideally, our formal institutions of election protection will work unimpeded and uncorrupted, and the administration of U.S. elections will proceed in a nonpartisan manner. But it is not enough to ask Americans to vote and to hope their votes will be counted,” argues Vanessa Williamson. (More)

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BY SUSAN FREDERICK-GRAY   JUNE 6, 2022 [Are you a UU? Let me know…] The Public Religion Research Institute recently highlighted an important statistic: nearly all Unitarian Universalists (97 percent) support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ people. It’s a similar story for reproductive rights—according to the Pew Research Center, 90 percent of Unitarian Universalists (UUs) support keeping abortion legal in all or…

Read More TRANSPHOBIC AND ANTI-ABORTION POLICIES ARE A DIRECT THREAT TO MY RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Blair Levin  Monday, April 18, 2022 Conventional wisdom holds that last year’s bipartisan passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) reflects the tradition of both parties wanting to deliver better roads and bridges—with nothing new to tell us about making progress elsewhere in our polarized, partisan environment. If anything, infrastructure is the exception that (barely)…

Read More Broadband bipartisanship: How did it happen and will it continue?

Health Care — GOP preps for Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade BY PETER SULLIVAN, NATHANIEL WEIXEL AND JOSEPH CHOI – 04/12/22  Republicans are plotting out their messaging strategy in case the Supreme Court overturns the landmark Roe v. Wade decision authorizing abortion rights.  The GOP strategy is to lead with science-based arguments and portray those in favor of abortion rights as extremists. The…

Read More GOP Preps for Supreme Court Ruling on Roe v. Wade

Alex Henderson  April 04, 2022 But according to researchers David E. Brockman and Joshua L. Kalla, Fox News viewers developed better critical thinking skills when exposed to CNN. Brockman and Kalla, journalist Sravasti Dasgupta reports in The Independent, conducted an experiment in September 2020 and published the results in late March. According to Dasgupta, the experiment, “found…

Read More Fox News viewers experienced ‘changes in attitudes’ after watching CNN for 30 days: study

The changing political geography of COVID-19 over the last two years 

COVID-19 since 2/29/2020 USA CASES 79,305,507 USA DEATHS 959,590  USA fully vaccinated 216,204,455 or 65% In the spring of 2020, the areas recording the greatest numbers of COVID-19 deaths were much more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. But by fall 2020, the pattern had reversed: Counties that voted for former President Donald Trump over President Joe…

The changing political geography of COVID-19 over the last two years " class="entry-more-link">Read More The changing political geography of COVID-19 over the last two years