A new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press out yesterday shows that ‘progressive
Last month, Maine voters delivered a major rebuke to Gov. Paul LePage (R) and the Republican-held legislature when they approved a referendum restoring election day voting registration rights in the state. Earlier this year, state legislators passed a bill repealing the state’s 38 year-old law allowing citizens to register at the polls on election day.
Tens of thousands of Mainers responded by petitioning for the matter come to a referendum. Issue 1 was one of the most-anticipated votes on election day this year, with pundits watching closely to see how citizens would react to the Republican-led war on voting, which ramped up in states across the country this year.
Recognizing the referendum’s importance, voting rights opponents poured money into the campaign to repeal election day registration. In fact, just two days after the state’s campaign finance reporting deadline, a secret conservative donor funneled $250,000 into the race, allowing the No On 1 campaign to make significant TV ad buys in an inexpensive media market.
Per state law, however, the identity of donors must be revealed within 45 days after the election. In fact, the entire $250,000 worth of late money came from a single source: the American Justice Partnership.
The AJP is a conservative […]
One of the most exciting products of a ten year study, commended for its originality and innovation, is a set of five practical principles, to enhance community development and project management. These principles might make development practitioners’ work clearer. The application of the principles in a series of diverse case studies reveals wider reaching implications for future research and practice.
One of these is the generation of ‘inhabit-ability’, a state of being which allows a particular place to be better inhabited, following an intervention. By intervention, we mean the act that modify (or hinder) a place, event or set of social circumstances. The concepts offer the potential to move beyond the cynicism and sense of dilution evoked by the word ‘sustainable’.
The overarching aim is simple; to assist the design of efforts to make living in a particular place better for those who are actually there. How can we deeply consider the impact on human and non-human stakeholders, and acknowledge the voices in the community of people and species affected, especially those at the margins?
The principles are a set of five short statements. Grounded in an extensive theoretical analysis, the principles have been analyzed in four differing contexts; community health, […]
How long do working mothers stay home after having their first child? If you guessed the answer might be 12 weeks (not an unreasonable assumption, since that’s the amount of time allotted by our national family leave law), you’d be sadly mistaken. According to recently released census numbers, a majority of mothers who worked during pregnancy go back before that, some way before. More than a quarter are at work within two months of giving birth and one in 10-more than half a million women each year-go back to their jobs in four weeks or less.
Let’s take a moment to think about what’s going on just four weeks after birth. Babies haven’t even cracked their first real smiles yet. Mothers are still physically recovering from birth, particularly if they’ve had C-sections. They’re both probably getting up several times during the night to nurse. In fact, they’ve barely begun what’s supposed to be half a year of exclusive breast-feeding, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Yet going back to work in such a short amount of time isn’t just tiring or unpleasant, new research demonstrates that it’s bad for both women and children. We now have enough evidence to blame the […]
Just in time for the holidays, as many among us prepare to sit down to turkey or ham at the dinner table, FDA has taken a big step backwards on the public health threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria in our meat and in our everyday lives. The agency has chosen to go back on its nearly 35-year-old promise to stop the use of certain antibiotics in animal feed. Today, it essentially announced to the American citizens it is supposed to protect that they are on their own when it comes to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
As I’ve written before, leading medical and health experts agree that the widespread and unnecessary practice of giving healthy animals low doses of antibiotics endangers public health-by increasing antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Rising resistance renders antibiotics less effective for treatment of human diseases and makes treatment riskier and more prone to side effects. In some cases, treatment is no longer possible. In the US, 80 percent of all antibiotics sold are for use in livestock. Public health advocates have repeatedly asked FDA to address the looming crisis of untreatable infections, but FDA has repeatedly evaded the issue.
In November, I wrote about FDA punting on its obligations to […]
