Record-setting inflation is causing high demand at food pantries

Jaden Amos | Paste BN

Happy Tuesday! Here's what we have today:

By Rex Huppke

Chadana Myatt feels the bite of inflation more acutely than some who read the headlines and see rising prices as an abstraction.

For Myatt and millions of other Americans living on budgets with zero wiggle room, inflation is painfully real.

She’s a single mother of two, a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. When she had a job as a systems engineer for a railway company, they walked the line between getting by, sometimes turning to a food pantry for help.

“At the end of the day, we were comfortable and we were really blessed, but if I got one bill increase, I had to make some decisions,” Myatt said. “Just making sure my kids never went hungry.”

I went to an anti-abortion event to steel my will to fight for women

By Connie Schultz

As a columnist, it is not uncommon to receive event invitations from people who hold values they know to be in direct opposition to your own. An attempt to goad, perhaps, as if to say: Attend if you dare.

In my experience, this outreach comes most frequently from groups committed to denying women access to legal and safe abortions. Sometimes, their preprinted postcards fill USPS bins deposited on the front of porch of our home with handwritten postscripts from self-declared Christians who hope for our eternal damnation in the bowels of hell. In their world, God is a bully.

This past week, I heard from Mark Harrington, founder of Created Equal, an anti-abortion group headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. This is a small but vocal group of extremists who oppose abortion even in cases of rape or incest, or when the woman’s life is threatened. For context, as The New York Times reported in 2019, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that "strong majorities supported the rape and incest exception, including more than 30 percent of those who describe themselves as pro-life."

Polarization in Congress doesn't reflect Americans' common ground

By Steven Kull and James Fishkin

Americans are deeply frustrated with the government in Washington. They see many problems need addressing, but partisan polarization has created persistent gridlock.

Polling from Pew Research Center shows that polarization in Congress has reached a new zenith. Experts are concerned that public frustration has gotten so severe that democracy is at risk.

It is easy to assume that the polarization in Congress is a mirror of the American people – after all, Congress is elected by the people.

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This newsletter was compiled by Jaden Amos.

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