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Slow Your Roll, Giuliani. By Your Own Standard, Obama’s More Conservative Than You
I suppose we’re almost to the point where there’s less than nothing to be gained by evaluating Republicans’ now yearslong running narrative about how un-American, unpatriotic and unlike anyone else we’ve ever seen President Barack Obama is. For convenience’s sake, let’s call it “the Othering.” But just in case we’re not quite to that point…
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Yeah, OU’s Prez Shut Down Those Frat Guys’ Racist Chant, but He Has the Wrong Rationale for Kicking Them Out
I won’t deny it. It was sort of refreshing to hear former U.S. senator and current University of Oklahoma President David Boren step to the microphone Monday and denounce members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity after they were caught on video gleefully singing “There will never be a n—ger SAE.” In contrast with the…
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Wrong Again, Ben Carson. Prison Sex Isn’t an Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage
I suppose it’s possible that a different rhetorical approach hasn’t yet occurred to Ben Carson, but I’m here to tell him that it really is conceivable for a politician to express his opposition to same-sex marriage without resorting to spiteful and derisive language about gays and lesbians in the process. And that argument probably goes…
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Moral Mondays’ Barber Says America’s Political System Suffers From a ‘Heart Problem’
Raleigh, N.C., Saturday, Feb. 14: An African-American Muslim imam, Oliver Muhammad, offered the call to prayer; members of black Greek-letter fraternities served as event marshals; and as marchers in North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement began their walk across downtown Raleigh, the state’s capital, Chapel Hill Town Council member Maria Teresa Palmer announced—in Spanish—that “interpreters will…
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Explain It Any Way You Want, but Kanye Acted an Ass After the Grammys
It’s true: Kanye is gonna Kanye. So it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that at Sunday night’s E! Grammy after-party, Kanye West told an interviewer—who just happened to be his sister-in-law Khloe Kardashian—that if the Grammys “want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us. We ain’t gonna play with them…
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I Spent MLK Day With Presidential Hopeful Ben Carson. Here’s What I Learned
If you want a better idea about what Dr. Ben Carson sees as the driving force behind his presidential campaign-in-waiting, perhaps look no further than Carson’s own explanation for his rise in popularity on the conservative political circuit: “It’s not so much me as it is the courage to say what needs to be said.”…
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Come on, Mike Huckabee. Hating on Beyoncé Is Like Hating on Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet
It’s been less than a week since U.S. News & World Report first let us know that recently departed Fox News host and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was singling out Beyoncé, of all people, for criticism as he explores an outsider-ish 2016 presidential run as the socially conservative alternative to the rest of the…
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BuzzFeed’s Plagiarism Report Probably Isn’t the Way Ben Carson Wanted to Kick Off His Campaign
A few months back, I reviewed Ben Carson’s latest book, One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future—and before reading that, I pored over a pretty good chunk of his prior work, America the Beautiful: Remembering What Made This Nation Great. But I confess that I was looking for bread crumbs that…
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The 3 Worst Conservative Rationalizations for What Happened to Eric Garner
Unlike the recent shootings by police of Michael Brown, John Crawford and Tamir Rice, there’s something—the video—about the killing of Eric Garner by New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo that has folks on both sides of the political aisle criticizing the Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict, with conservative mainstays like Washington…
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5 Takeaways for Obama After Tuesday’s ‘Shellacking,’ Part Deux
The day after Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms, President Barack Obama took to the podium in the White House East Room and acknowledged that he and his party had just taken a “shellacking.” So even though he declined to characterize Tuesday’s GOP Senate takeover at his Wednesday postmortem,…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
