Late last month, Rick Brattin, a Republican state representative in Missouri, introduced a bill that would require that intelligent design and ‘destiny’ get the same educational treatment and textbook space in Missouri schools as the theory of evolution. Brattin insists that his bill has nothing to do with religion-it’s all in the name of science.

‘I’m a science enthusiast…I’m a huge science buff,’ Brattin tells The Riverfront Times. ‘This [bill] is about testable data in today’s world.’ But Eric Meikle, education project director at the National Center for Science Education, disagrees. ‘This bill is very idiosyncratic and strange,’ he tells Mother Jones. ‘And there is simply not scientific evidence for intelligence design.’

HB 291, the ‘Missouri Standard Science Act,’ redefines a few things you thought you already knew about science. For example, a ‘hypothesis’ is redefined as something that reflects a ‘minority of scientific opinion and is ‘philosophically unpopular.’ A scientific theory is ‘an inferred explanation…whose components are data, logic and faith-based philosophy.’ And ‘destiny’ is not something that $5 fortune tellers believe in; Instead, it’s ‘the events and processes that define the future of the universe, galaxies, stars, our solar system, earth, plant life, animal life, and the human race.’

The bill […]

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PRINCETON, NJ — Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 89% of Republican self-identifiers nationwide in 2012, while accounting for 70% of independents and 60% of Democrats. Over one-fifth of Democrats (22%) were black, while 16% of independents were Hispanic.

These results are based on more than 338,000 interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking in 2012, and clearly underscore the distinct racial profiles of partisan groups in today’s political landscape.

Republicans are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white, at a level that is significantly higher than the self-identified white percentage of the national adult population. Just 2% of Republicans are black, and 6% are Hispanic.

Seventy percent of Americans who identify as independents are white, but independents have the highest representation of Hispanics (16%) of the three groups. Eight percent of independents are blacks.
Democrats remain a majority white party, but four in 10 Democrats are something other than non-Hispanic white. More than one in five Democrats are black, roughly twice the black representation in the adult population.

Racial and Ethnic Groups Gravitate Toward Different Parties

Looked at differently, these party composition patterns reflect major differences in the way Americans in various racial and ethnic groups identify […]

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Bill Moyers sat down with Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Obama in science, technology and innovation and the author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, to discuss internet inequality – and how internet providers grossly overcharge for subpar internet service.

Crawford says that a lack of competition and tacit government approval has fostered the current environment: ‘What’s happened is that these enormous telecommunications companies, Comcast and Time Warner on the wired side, Verizon and AT&T on the wireless side, have divided up markets, put themselves in the position where they’re subject to no competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority. And they’re charging us a lot for internet access and giving us second class access.

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Despite signs of an economic recovery, the Great Recession’s scope and impact was so widespread and corrosive that it has left millions of Americans permanently damaged financially, a new study finds.

The research from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University found that five years after the country’s economic downturn started, 60 percent of U.S. residents think the nation’s economy has undergone a permanent change.

More than half of those surveyed think it will take at least six years for the economy to fully recover from the Great Recession, with 29 percent believing it will never hit the levels it reached before the recession.

‘After suffering through the worst economic disaster American workers have ever experienced, they are deeply pessimistic,’ said Rutgers professor Carl Van Horn. ‘Five years of economic misery have profoundly diminished Americans’ confidence in the economy and their outlook for the next generation.’

The study revealed just how impactful the economic recession was on American families. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed either lost a job themselves, or had a member of their household, close relative or friend lose a job at some point in the past four years.

Among those who did find themselves out of work, more […]

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Epic water battles are the stuff of history and legend, especially in the West. And as a severe drought drags on in the Midwest, a water war is being waged over a river that irrigates agriculture in Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.

It’s that last border crossing where this water war is under way. Kansas has gone to the Supreme Court to argue that Nebraska uses too much water from the Republican River, and that there’s not enough left for Kansas farmers.

In Clifton, Kan., on the short end of the river, farmer Mark Taddiken is worried about having a short supply of water. He wears heavy canvas overalls on a cold, gray morning as he stands in his field with black cattle chewing yellow cornstalks. He’s measuring the charge of the electric fence that keeps the cattle from roaming away.

Like the nearby Republican River, the fence isn’t worth much if there’s no current.

Three-quarters of Taddiken’s farmland in north-central Kansas is irrigated with center pivots – tall sprinkler systems that irrigate in circles in fields of corn and soybeans. If the river stays low, like it is now, Kansas law limits Taddiken to a third of his normal irrigation plan, limiting what he […]

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