By now, a Monday morning downer on the front page shouldn’t faze me. But when the White House announced that GM and Chrysler had still not come up with meaningful enough restructuring plans to get tax money, I took it personally. That’s because I’m both black and from the Midwest and, thus, I know a…

Interesting piece on THE BEAST this morning regarding President Obama’s curt dismissal of marijuana legalization: [T]he usually long-winded president—who famously admitted to his own youthful inhalations—answered with little more than a dismissive “No”…[saying] he doesn’t think legalization is a good strategy to grow our economy. Why not, Mr. President? Is our current strategy appreciably better?…

Given my recent reaction to police (mis)conduct in the Ryan Moats incident, I found that I enjoyed Ross Douthat’s ‘Conservatives, Crime Policy and the Black Vote’ piece for THE ATLANTIC, particularly his thoughts on prison reform as an example of a shift in policy without a compromise of belief. He states: My preferred approach to…

I was in a taxi, about a mile from the World Trade Center, when the first plane hit on September 11. I remember the streets of New York being filled with smoke, and people wandering around dazed, like something out of a doomsday movie. I remember the free-floating fear, and thinking, “We are at war.”…

Somehow Lou Dobbs managed to turned St. Patrick’s Day into an excuse to make racist Asian jokes. Media Matters’ County Fair blog flagged his rant today against “ethnic holidays” and in favor of “an American day, a we’re all the same kind of day.” But Dobbs gave the lie to his call for unity before he…

Pope Benedict XVI apparently sees grace in ignorance. Today, he used the opening moments of his first trip to Africa to reiterate the Church’s opposition to condom use. Feels crazy just to type that out. Even worse when it’s being trotted around a continent with more than 22 million people already HIV positive, not to…

Newly-elected Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele flew to Los Angeles over the weekend for The Tavis Smiley Festival (better known as the annual “State of the Black Union” conference)—the latest sign he is determined to tout the GOP to every black audience he can. He had pledged this during his campaign for the job,…