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5 Things to Listen for in Obama’s State of the Union
For four years, President Barack Obama has offered his State of the Union address in a time-honored format that follows the trend set by most of his predecessors: with a laundry list of policy plans that he has hoped to rally Congress to pass. This year, though, he’s expected to try a variation on that…
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This ‘Subhuman Mongrel’ Forgives You, Ted Nugent
How can you not feel just a little bit sorry for Ted Nugent? The onetime “Motor City Madman” had an impressive 50-plus-year performing career that brought him fame and fortune, but it’s been a long time since he reached his creative peak with the layered, nuanced mega-hit “Cat Scratch Fever” in 1977—and perhaps it’s been…
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Obama Will Keep Spying Because That's What Presidents Do
Early reviews are in, and the consensus seems pretty clear: President Barack Obama isn’t going to fundamentally alter the NSA’s spying regime. As the National Journal’s James Oliphant wrote following the president’s speech Friday, new reforms “will have little operational effect” on how the National Security Agency operates going forward. And, if you ask me,…
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Bob Gates’ Obama ‘Bombshell’ Doesn’t Tell Us That Much
MSNBC’s foreign policy maven, Andrea Mitchell, calls it a “bombshell,” and Tuesday’s headline, from Robert Gates’ own Wall Street Journal op-ed, touts the former defense secretary’s “quiet fury.” But if excerpts from his new memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, hold true for the rest of his book, then—net-net—Gates’ account of Obama’s White…
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Google’s Eyes Are Watching Zora Neale Hurston
If you thought you saw a familiar face this morning when you went to do your first Internet search of the day, it’s because you did. It was the famous face, framed by her ever-present ’20s-style cloche, of writer, anthropologist and all-around American icon—and iconoclast—Zora Neale Hurston. Google celebrated what would have been her 123rd…
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Obama’s Last Year Wasn’t as Bad as They Say
Unless you opted for your own news blackout during the holiday season, by now you’ve probably read one of the many year-end recaps that described 2013 as President Barack Obama’s worst year. If not, just read here, here, here, here and here. Reviews were bad, with even Chris Matthews—of “thrill going up my leg when…
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Sorry, Duck Dynasty, That’s How Capitalism Works
It’s not exactly a shock that Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson is embracing his inner homophobe. After all, he’s a self-proclaimed “Bible-thumper” who sees his hit reality-TV series as a vehicle for delivering “the good news about Jesus” to folks, “whether they’re homosexuals, drunks, terrorists.” So when he emptied both his barrels in the pages of…
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Why Did Obama Shake Castro’s Hand? Home Training
Anyone who can somehow remember way back to the olden days—May 1, 2011, to be exact—knows that President Barack Obama is quite capable of delivering a stand-up routine, dressed in black tie and smiling in front of a bunch of journalists, while at the same time a team of Navy SEALs crosses the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—on…
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The GOP’s Rosa Parks Tweet Was Lazy Politics
When your party’s presidential candidate can only muster a dismal 6 percent of black votes, 27 percent of Latino votes and 26 percent of Asian-American votes in the most recent election, one thing should be abundantly clear: You can’t expect to solve that problem with a tweet. But in a roundabout way, that’s how the…
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Why I Love Being a Black Man
Whether it’s W.E.B. Du Bois unpacking the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”—as the unspoken query that society has historically put to black America—or the Notorious B.I.G. unapologetically claiming Casanova status, despite being a “heartthrob never, black and ugly as ever,” the issue of black self-image never leaves us. And it’s come…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
