It’s the question bound to come up when an unarmed black person gets gunned down, choked or beaten by a power-tripping white cop with a loose trigger: What are black politicians gonna do about it? And, to the consternation of folks asking, the answer is not as black and white as they’d like it. Although…

If there was one person attending this week’s deftly staged U.S-Africa Leaders Summit that wanted the word “Ebola” to dominate every headline, it would probably be Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. Anything to keep Boko Haram out of the discussion. Nigeria’s bad boys have managed to position themselves from little-known band of pseudo-Islamic thugs taking selfies…

As an unconditional 72-hour cease-fire collapses, the New Jersey-sized Middle Eastern powerhouse called Israel is not in a good place. A bloody cage match with Hamas has created a scary, nonstop loop of grief-stricken Palestinian civilians on 60-second, 60-minute blast. As a result, the Jewish state is now faced with an unprecedented barrage of global…

If advocates have their way, voting rights could be a new reality for the nation’s incarcerated. Full voting rights for felons is as hot a topic in Washington as voting rights in reverse pushed by voter-ID-tickled Republicans. But with new legislation moving through the Senate, a spotlight is being placed anew on the plight of…

On the political Richter scale, the Supreme Court’s decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning—ruling President Barack Obama’s recess appointments unconstitutional—is a disaster for his administration. As he muddles through the last two years of his presidency, Thursday’s ruling might be marked as the official beginning of the end of it, with all…

Clichéd World Cup metaphors for a knee-scraping Harlem-primary street scuffle might seem corny, but Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) may have defied the odds like an unfavored team entering the dreaded Group of Death. Maybe he’ll watch a few match hours of soccer to decompress—better than eating his fingers into nubs while election officials slowly sort…

You may often hear the words “Koch brothers” during casual flips through tense cable TV talk shows or when a campaign attack ad invades your television screen. But you might also be among that half of all Americans who don’t really know who they are, according to an April Wall Street Journal-NBC poll.  But when…

All eyes shift again to Iraq … and the sky is falling. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been out grumpily arguing that President Barack Obama’s 2011 withdrawal from Iraq was a “colossal failure of American security policy.” In other words, he’s saying: Blame Barack; dozing at the diplomatic wheel has led to the current Iraqi…

Pundits, prognosticators and backseat-driving know-it-alls are chatting up everything you need to know about House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) karma-driven primary loss Tuesday night, with politicos scrambling to understand David Brat: a once-puckish Tea Party upstart and Cantor twin with only $200,000 in the bank who managed to unseat the second most powerful cat in…