The fact is that there is no way any politician can justify Keystone and still say it’s time to take stronger action on global warming. As Bill McKibbon’s 350.org puts it: “President Obama says that he will reject the pipeline if it poses a risk to the climate. That makes his decision simple: building an 800,000 barrel-per-day pipeline of the world’s dirtiest oil will mean more tar sands dug up and burned, and more carbon pollution.”
Their near sweep in the mid-term election has generated a lot of speculation about the impact of a Republican majority in the House and Senate for the first time since 2006. Will Mitch McConnell and John Boehner lead a unified, purposeful GOP and move major legislation smoothly through the legislative process? Could there even be attempts to work with Democrats and demonstrate to the American people that Congress is still functional?
Twenty-three percent of non-voting Latinos who responded to the poll said that Obama’s decision to delay executive action made them more enthusiastic about the president and the Democratic Party, while 60 percent of non-voting Latinos said the delay made them less enthusiastic. This is notable because Latinos have historically backed Democrats by wide margins.
In addition to North Carolina, states where the youth vote could affect the outcome in November’s competitive political races include Alaska, Colorado, and Louisiana, according to an analysis CIRCLE released in August. CIRCLE’s data on African American, Asian American, and Hispanic youth show the complexities at play in ways that may challenge common assumptions about what motivates youth to become civically engaged or affiliate with a political party.
Making sense of high-profile House, Senate and gubernatorial races this tight will mean breaking down every voting bloc into the microscopic bits of data to parse through in the postmortem. And of all the big mysteries that will be closely watched and dissected on Nov. 4, few will be as anxiously anticipated as the exit polling for women voters—since they were 53 percent of the electorate in 2012.
Thus far, with a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate, each side has been able to stop the other one cold. Nearly everything that passes in the House is dead on arrival in the Senate. And just about anything that attracts enough votes to get out of the Senate is dead as a mackerel in the House. As a result, the Congress of the United States has accomplished absolutely nothing of substance.
There are real uncertainties about how rapidly the real-world changing demographic profile of U.S. communities will affect national politics and the extent to which right-wing anti-immigrant politicians in Congress can continue to perpetuate de facto segregation on the basis of immigration status. But in California and in other states (including those in the South and the Midwest), as increasing numbers of U.S.-born children of Latino immigrant parents reach voting age, their votes will very soon tip the balance toward social policies that more fairly and inclusively represent community perspectives.
Translated for a state that was once the Confederate capital, states’ rights nostalgia equals Voter-ID restrictions; Judeo-Christian principles means Bible-thumping; and free market sounds like predatory lending and sticking it to the working and middle class. That’s reason enough that African-American voters in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District should and can try to win that seat back for Democrats.
If these trends are more than a benign anomaly, they would not only ease pressure on the Medicare budget, but would moderate government health spending generally, a development that could vaporize concerns about the growing cost of entitlement programs. As analysts of all political stripes have been saying, America’s government doesn’t have a spending problem; it has a health spending problem.
The number of African Americans who lacked health insurance dropped dramatically in 2014's first quarter compared to 2013's fourth quarter thanks to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which Republicans threaten to repeal if they win control of both houses of Congress in November's national elections. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index reported on Monday that the uninsured rate for African Americans fell from 20.9 percent in 2013's fourth quarter to 17.6 percent in 2014's first quarter, a drop of 3.3 percentage points.
Baltimore is a gritty space with complicated narratives but is also a hotbed for creativity, with an underground arts ecosystem unrivaled by most American cities of its size. This exhibition celebrates the abstract risk-takers who have been a constant in the Baltimore art scene. Together, these artists are shifting preconceived notions of Baltimore to one that centers community, creativity, and celebration.
Vinton caught his next big break when his production studio started making the “California Raisins” commercials, which became a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1980s. The problem is that Vinton Studios never expected the commercials to take off and didn’t have a share of the merchandising. So while the California Raisin Advisory was raking almost half a billion in merchandise sales, Vinton Studios didn’t see a dime of it.
