June Shannon, better known as Mama June and mother of Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, knows exactly how much everything costs. Couponing is a “serious obsession” and “like crack.” One episode shows Shannon pitching 14 Nesquick packets into her shopping cart in the Piggly-Wiggly, then doing some “quick math” on a mustard—89 cents per […]

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(Steven Beshear | Source: NBC) The biggest Obamacare-related media scandal of the moment is, of course, the fact that some people who buy individual insurance policies have been receiving cancellation letters. The implication is that when Obama assured people that they could keep their policies if they liked them, he wasn’t telling the truth. The […]

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  In A Dream Foreclosed, journalist and activist Laura Gottesdiener highlights four people threatened by the loss of their homes; discusses racism and predatory lending; and challenges old ideas about property and private housing. In the orgy of subprime lending that created the great recession, and the subsequent foreclosures and evictions that followed, African Americans […]

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Since the late 90s, political pundits have debated how to define the working class and how to explain their voting patterns. Prior to the 2000 presidential election, a standard definition of the working class combined income, occupation, and education. Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers made the case for using education in part because exit polls […]

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(Brian Williams | Source: NBC News) The government shutdown is, in some ways, a really easy story to understand—if the press wants to report it that way. The Republican House passes a spending bill that would fund the federal government—and defund or delay certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Senate, with its Democratic […]

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