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The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”

It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.

Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth.

The American photographer Lewis Hine is perhaps most famous for his compelling images of child labor across the United States in the early 20th century. In 1918, Hine was hired by the American Red Cross to document their work in Europe, as they provided aid to wounded soldiers and refugees affected by World War I. The photographs were also intended to drum up support for the Red Cross, and appeal to an American audience back home who had grown weary of the war, even as it crawled toward a close. Hine traveled across France, photographing refugee families, orphaned children, wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, the nurses and volunteers who cared for them all, the ruined buildings they fled, and the temporary homes they filled. Take a moment to step back in time 100 years, for a visit to France in the final year of World War I, seen through the lens of Mr. Lewis Hine, with original (sometimes dated) captions included when available.

Jeanne Septvents is a beautiful French girl, 10 years old, whose father, for nearly a year a prisoner in Germany, has given his life for France. Jeanne has been adopted by Company 'E,' 6th Battalion of the 20th Engineers. When the American Red Cross photographer found her in the garden of her little stone house at Caen, she was playing with knuckle-bones that she had painted red, white, and blue in honor of her godfathers.

Group of refugee children who have been received by a French organization, aided by the American Red Cross at St. Sulpice, Paris. They are about to start for Grand Val, the country home which has been opened for them on a large estate near Paris, where an outdoor life will build up their health. August, 1918.

Many writers also found a new audience in children, giving rise to work such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and generating later classics such as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and even, it can be argued, the late 20th-century work of J.K. Rowling.

Boris Johnson can change from bonhomie to a dark fury in seconds. His normally joky demeanour flashes into a sarcastic snarl, his skin reddens and blotches, his eyes dart into an intense narrow glare and on the worst occasions his lips curl back to reveal wisps of spittle.

The all-out favourite to be our next prime minister has the fiercest and most uncontrollable anger I have seen. A terrifying mood change can be triggered instantly by the slightest challenge to his entitlement or self-worth.

he was temperamentally unsuitable to be entrusted with any position of power, let alone the highest office of all, in charge of the United Kingdom and its nuclear codes.

After weeks of dithering, Trump all but excused the federal government of much responsibility. Instead, he turned to the only the real power left in the land: America’s brands.

it’s worth focusing on the initial embarrassment — on the sorry fact that in order to provide its citizens tests for a pandemic disease, the wealthiest and most powerful nation had to desperately finagle the services of volunteer coders at Google.

During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled a mighty federal apparatus to rebuild a broken economy. Lyndon Johnson used federal power to bring civil rights to the South. Ours was the sort of government that promised unprecedented achievement, and delivered.

Last March, a crowd gathered in Downtown Brooklyn to celebrate a new name for Gold Street: Ida B. Wells Place. Jacob Morris, the tireless activist behind the renaming effort, addressed the group.

A force behind the renaming of some 40 streets and monuments in New York after prominent Black New Yorkers, including the performer Paul Robeson, the civil rights activist Ella Baker and the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, he likes to talk and he likes to nudge, both of which come in handy when dealing with community boards and city bureaucracies.

For more than 15 years, Mr. Morris has been on a mission to increase Black representation in public spaces. The end result tends to look impressive, but the work itself is tedious, requiring hundreds of hours at local government meetings that few have the patience to attend, much less engage in.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order Sunday expanding voting access in what the White House calls "an initial step" in its efforts to "protect the right to vote and ensure all eligible citizens can freely participate in the electoral process."

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed measures in recent days to increase voting rights, including HR1 -- a sweeping ethics and election package that contains provisions expanding early and mail-in voting, restoring voting rights to former felons, and easing voter registration for eligible Americans.

Ahead of the signing, Biden spoke about the order during virtual remarks at the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast, an annual event commemorating "Bloody Sunday," where African American demonstrators demanding the right to vote were brutally beaten by police while crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

From the passage of the 13th Amendment to the present, racial progress in America has often been prematurely celebrated.

James' "More Than a Vote" campaign of voter education, information and protection is laudatory civic action. But just imagine the kind of investments someone with James's resources and dedication might be able to make in an America with full and fair voting rights access for all. That so many are still spending precious energies, resources and time on something as basic as voting rights underscores the vulnerability of Black citizenship in our own time.

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act is the best legislative antidote against this new campaign of legalized voter suppression. Passed in the House of Representatives in 2019, the legislation restores voter rights protections stripped by the Supreme Court and will ensure nationwide voting rights access.

As Republican lawmakers across the country advance state bills that would limit how public school teachers can discuss race in their classrooms, educators say the efforts are already having a chilling effect on their lessons.

In recent weeks, Republican legislatures in roughly half a dozen states have either adopted or advanced bills purporting to take aim at the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in law and society.

Conservatives have made the teaching of critical race theory a rallying cry in the culture wars, calling it divisive and unpatriotic for forcing students to consider the influence of racism in situations where they might not see it otherwise.

Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to her role with a list of demands. She wanted to be a generalist, in large part to learn the political rhythms of a president she was still getting to know. In the first few months of her tenure, some of her portfolio assignments were just that: assignments.

Back in Washington, the president’s announcement has not clearly illuminated a path forward for Ms. Harris, whose involvement in the issue stands to become her most politically delicate engagement yet. Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the farthest-reaching elections overhaul in a generation, including a landmark expansion of voting rights that is faltering in the Senate.

“The work of voting rights has implications for not just one year down the road or four years down the road but 50 years from now,” Symone Sanders, the vice president’s senior adviser and press secretary, said in an interview on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON – The fight over Texas Republican lawmakers' attempts to rewrite election laws reached a fever pitch over the Memorial Day weekend. 

In response, Abbott announced the bill will be added to a special session agenda. "Election Integrity & Bail Reform were emergency items for this legislative session. They STILL must pass," he wrote on Twitter. "Legislators will be expected to have worked out the details when they arrive at the Capitol for the special session."

During debate Sunday night, Democrats singled out language not previously included in the bill that would allow a court to void an election if there were enough fraudulent votes to change the outcome.  "The implications of this are unthinkable," said state Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Farmers Branch. 

Photographs from 1914 preserve a period appearance ever more archaic:

steam power, steel, machine-made textiles, and rail communications

electricity, telegraphy and telephony, radio and television, subatomic physics, oil and petrochemicals, plastics, jet engines, computers, telematics, and bioengineering

In 2015, after a failed attempt to shutter almost every polling location in a county three times the area of Atlanta, the Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration tried to remove 174 voters, almost all of them African American, ahead of a Sparta city election. The board even sent deputies to homes, summonsing voters to prove eligibility.

The city's roll at the time included only 988 voters, so it meant about one in five potential ballots.

many county residents could have been disenfranchised, he said last month.

after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed. “We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,”

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.

defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”

Last year, in his eulogy for Representative John Lewis, President Barack Obama urged Congress to pass a new voting rights act to continue the work of the lifelong civil rights activist.

Obama asked Democrats to kill the filibuster and pass a voting rights bill because it was the right thing to do. But there’s a stronger argument: that if Democrats don’t do this, they’ll be at the mercy of a Trumpified Republican Party that has radicalized against democracy itself.

Manchin, who has been winning elections in West Virginia for the last 20 years, is safe in his seat for as long as he wants it. Sinema, on the other hand, is much more vulnerable. Not the least because Arizona’s Republican state Legislature, to say nothing of its Republican Party, is all-in on “stop the steal” and Donald Trump’s war on mail-in voting. Arizona Republicans have already introduced bills to limit voter registration drives, require notarized signatures for mailed ballots and forbid voters from actually mailing-in completed ballots.

Mace defeated Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham, becoming one of a record number of women who will serve in the 117th Congress — and a record number of Republican women who will serve in the House.

With races still to be called, at least 141 women will serve in Congress next year, breaking the record of 127 set in 2019, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

That includes at least 116 women in the House — smashing the record of 102 also set in 2019 — and 25 in the Senate, although that number could shrink with California Sen. Kamala Harris' ascendancy to the vice presidency.

Much of the public anxiety about Amy Coney Barrett — judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Notre Dame law professor and Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court — has focused on the question of abortion, and whether as a believer in originalism and a practicing Catholic she would be likely to vote to reverse Roe v. Wade.

Although we don’t usually think of it this way, the decisions of the Supreme Court have the power to affect the quality of the air we breathe, the pay we receive and the conditions under which we work, by determining what kinds of business and industry regulations are constitutional.

With a 6-3 conservative court, the country is at risk of having the few remaining tools that permit some limits on the power of business — like labor unions and environmental legislation — weakened still further.

Historian Tracy Campbell was not expecting his book on the American home front in 1942 to be as relevant to 2020 as it has become. “After the searing heat of a crisis passes, often the original feelings of impending doom can be almost forgotten,” he writes in the epilogue of The Year of Peril: America in 1942.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms.

On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion “very nearly destroy[ed] the republic.”

By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark, most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the “Great Emigration.”