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As the White House prepares to launch a major economic opportunity effort, record high unemployment among black and Latino youth underscores how essential it is to create job opportunities for young people of color. 

The critical issue here is that the ages of 16 to 24 are make or break years for lifelong earning potential. With one out four blacks and one out of six Latinos under the age of 25 without work, a generation of youth of color risks falling behind.

One line of attack on a minimum wage hike is that it's small potatoes -- and further testament to the intellectual poverty of liberalism. As Marco Rubio said recently, speaking of both the minimum wage and other Obama proposals:

Miles Rapoport, who led Demos through a period of extraordinary growth as President, will step down on March 10th to become the President and CEO of Common Cause, a grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the core values of American democracy.

"Demos has never been a job. It has been a mission, a family, and an organization that has grown to have national reach." 

Staging imaginary competitions between cities and their elected leaders certainly makes for catchy headlines: “Step Aside, New York City. Los Angeles's Populism Is for Real” asserts the title of Nancy L. Cohen’s recent piece in the New Republic.

Today's progressive coalition -- the one that elected Obama twice and just put Bill de Blasio in power -- looks a bit like a barbell: Lots of poorer voters on one side and lots of highly educated professionals on the other. Obama won the high school dropout vote by a landslide and also won post-grads by 13 points -- but lost to Romney among voters with a college degree. Likewise, de Blasio commands strong support among the upper middle class and the poor alike.

Carter adopted an emerging technique in the 1970s, hiding references to whites behind talk of ethnic subpopulations, and he also presented blacks as trying to preserve their own segregated neighborhoods. Notwithstanding these dissimulations, few could fail to understand that Carter was defending white efforts to oppose racial integration, and many liberals criticized Carter for doing so.

During his Senate hearing yesterday, Debo Adegbile, President Obama’s pick for Justice Department Civil Rights Division chief, was asked by Sen. Chuck Grassley if he would block state voter ID laws if confirmed. In his previous capacity, Adegible served as attorney and one-time acting president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which has been in litigation with Texas over its voter ID law for the past three years. Adegbile also twice argued before the U.S.