Editor’s note: State Senator Wendy Davis (pictured) killed a bill in the Texas Senate last night that would have outlawed abortions after 20 weeks, among other prohibitions. She filibustered for more than 12 hours. Geoff Rips was in the Senate gallery. The following is his report. Austin, Texas Democracy broke out in one of the […]

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UPDATE: This article was published at the same time that Texas Senator Wendy Davis (above) was filibustering a bill in Texas that would have placed the most restrictive limitations on abortion in any state in the country. She succeeded. As of midnight this morning, the bill was dead. As I write, Wendy Davis, a state […]

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Google operates its own system of private buses. The coaches zip up and down the San Francisco peninsula five days a week. The buses are sorting mechanisms. They help re-organize the Bay Area geographically, residentially, racially, between the tech industry’s uber-haves, and the rest who have not the luck to be employed by a company […]

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George Orwell’s great dystopian novel, 1984, was published in 1949. The U.K. and the rest of Europe were recovering from years of devastating war. And in eastern Europe, the genocidal dictatorship of the Nazis was being replaced by the rival totalitarian rule of Stalinist USSR. 1984 has become a template of subsequent visions of modern […]

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If you hear somebody talking about the U.S. “jobs problem,” ask which one. Let’s talk about three: First, even as unemployment has inched down, the economy has created barely enough jobs to match population growth. Second, this enormous labor-market “slack” has stifled workers’ bargaining power and kept wages low. Third, even with a “tighter” labor […]

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