Where does Dr. Ben Carson go next? On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, he told David Gregory that he still doesn’t have plans for a White House run—but only after he edged in ever so slightly last week, suggesting to the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes that he’s “starting to feel it.” It’s the sort of careful…

Nowadays, we get treated to someone’s half-baked revisionist take on slavery so regularly that it’s hard to get worked up anymore when, let’s say, Arizona Republican congressional candidate Jim Brown writes on his Facebook page that “Basically slave owners took pretty good care of their slaves,” or when potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson…

Above the Law’s Elie Mystal doesn’t think that affirmative action supporters need to hyperventilate over Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action—which upheld Michigan’s ban on race-conscious admissions policies at state colleges—because, he writes, the justices, in fact, “didn’t rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional.” And indeed, they didn’t—not this…

All along the way of Sen. Cory Booker’s political rise, in one way or another he’s been cast in—and played—the good-guy role. He rose to prominence as the upstart Newark, N.J., city councilman depicted in the documentary Street Fight. As Newark’s mayor, he built a national profile by cultivating almost a million and a half…

The tenuousness of making comparisons between President Lyndon B. Johnson’s vaunted vote-wrangling prowess and the allegedly ineffectual legislative skills of President Barack Obama was nicely summed up on Wednesday with this tweet: Although it’s meant to get a laugh—and it’s hard to imagine a future where Obama’s remembered as a Tea Partier—the upshot—that perceptions change…

For a guy who says that running for president is “not something that I really want to do,” Dr. Ben Carson—world-renowned neurosurgeon, philanthropist and author—sure is making a lot of moves in that direction. Last month he made his second headline appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the largest annual gathering of…

Right off the bat, let’s be clear: Insults don’t elevate the dialogue. So there’s no way to condone it when a black Republican gets called a “sellout” or an “Uncle Tom.” And by that same standard, it’s equally uncool when left-leaning African Americans are referred to as “low information voters” stranded on the Democrats’ “plantation.”…

There’s a young, multiracial Harvard lawyer running for Congress in Illinois. But it’s not 2000, and she’s not Barack Obama. And while former Miss America Erika Harold would almost surely resist the comparison—particularly a week out from primary election day—it’s hard not to notice the biographical similarities between her and the president, even though she’s…