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Condi Will Even Spin a 4th Grader
This is just sad. It wasn’t enough for Condi spin her torture-is-legal mess for Stanford students last week. Now she’s lying to grade-schoolers, too. Last week, as Cenk Uygur reported on his The Young Turks show and HUFFPO, Rice told a group of Stanford students that waterboarding wasn’t illegal “by definition” because the president signed…
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We Pick Our Health Battles—Unfortunately
The hubbub around the swine flu is entirely appropriate: It’s a fast moving, unknown virus that is proving to be deadly when untreated. That said, it also reinforces a frustrating truth: A whole lot of other public health problems persist only because we don’t care enough to stop them. So far, the swine flu has…
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Where's the Bully in the Pulpit?
Never mind 100 days, the Obama era thus far can be summed up in the 10 days since Congress returned from Easter recess—remarkable, smartly articulated policy goals on one hand and, on the other, a paralyzing reluctance to engage the bare-knuckled brawls that those goals demand. Obama came roaring into last week eager to talk…
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College-Educated Blacks Lose More Jobs than Peers
Our college degrees aren’t saving us, after all. Here’s a whopper from March unemployment data: College educated blacks have lost jobs at twice the rate of their white counterparts during the recession. According to the Economic Policy Institute, joblessness among the black educated class shot up 4.5 percent in the past two years, reaching 7.2…
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The New Four Rs: Reduce Reuse, Recycle—Recession
Reduce, reuse, recycle. That’s the phrase. But what most of us forget is that it’s an ordered list. In fact, most of us do it in exactly the wrong order. We gobble up our plastic water bottles and toss them into the recycle bin and call it green. But why are we buying packaged water…
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Beyond Environmental Justice
The green movement has always had an Achilles’ heel. Environmental issues are typically not like, say, racial profiling or gender-based pay inequity, where the injustice is demonstrable and plain. You’ve got to walk a would-be environmentalist through a few, often complex steps to connect seemingly benign action A with huge catastrophe B. And it often…
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Fantasy and Fact Still at War on Pirates
Time for some pirating darts and laurels. TIME gets out in front of mainstream American media (and catches up with the Brits) by reporting the full context of the purportedly sudden pirating menace. High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and…
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American Violet
Conservatives have this much right: It’s remarkable how much havoc poorly made public policy can wreak. Way back in 1986, when a Democratic Congress hastily and overwhelmingly passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act—the first step in stacking judicial power in the hands of prosecutors rather than judges and juries—members likely never imagined it would set in…
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The US Drug War Jails Fewer Blacks—But Rages On
The Sentencing Project has crunched Bureau of Prisons numbers and found some relatively good news, finally: a significant drop in the number of blacks locked up for drug offenses. Between 1999 and 2005, the number of black drug offenders in state prisons plunged 21.6 percent, by about 30,000 people. In a countering, negative trend, white…
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Let’s Cuff the Western Pirates, Too
Let’s be clear: Thugs hijacking relief supplies meant for communities starved by a genocidal despot is an awful, ugly thing. But I’ve watched with some amusement as Western shipping companies and the navies that support them have grown frustrated with Somali pirates in recent years. Pirates! But there’s more to the story than Johnny Depp…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
