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Satire Can't Top the Real Republicans
Candidates in the 26-debate GOP marathon seem already to have hit the wall. With the 12th debate last Saturday and the 13th this coming Saturday, alternate front-runners in the Republican primary such as Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain have fallen back, drained and giddy, and now it appears that Newt Gingrich,…
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Pat Buchanan's White-Power Obsession
Not only is Patrick Buchanan predicting the death of America as a superpower, but he is blaming it singularly on a “[President Barack] Obama rainbow coalition of peoples of color.” The ascendance of the First Black Family to the White House has driven race-crazed Buchanan over the edge. It was not much of a trip.…
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The Root's GOP-Debate Recap
All that missionary field service paid off for Mitt Romney in the GOP debate Tuesday when the Texas governor confronted him like a heathen in a barroom hankering for a brawl. “Mitt,” said Rick Perry, squaring off as he called him out, “you lose all of your standing, from my perspective, because you hired illegals…
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The Professor Who Schooled Tavis Smiley
Bristling in the face of the calm scholar, Tavis Smiley was having none of the lesson that Randall Kennedy was teaching on Smiley’s TV show in early September. So the Harvard law professor contented himself with taking PBS viewers to school on the complex relationship between the first black U.S. president and his African-American constituency.…
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The President's Summit With Black Journalists
Horseback-riding Teddy Roosevelt might have done a double take were he allowed to gaze from his “Rough Rider” portrait in the White House at the 44th president of the United States, fielding a range of questions about his executive policies from 10 black newspaper columnists sitting around an oblong table. This uniquely nonwhite all-American scene…
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Can Obama Stop the Afghanistan War?
When radio host Earl Caldwell put on-air questions to me on New York’s WBAI-FM Friday about the upcoming trial of five U.S. soldiers charged with the wanton killing of three Afghan civilians, I measured them against the horrors of the My Lai massacre and the widespread — and unreported — killing of hundreds, if not…
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President Obama Narrows Racial Gap in Drug Sentencing
When he signed into law the bill that reduces the disparity in penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses, President Barack Obama narrowed the “racial” gap in drug sentencing Tuesday by some 82 percent. Yet he did not close it. Civil rights leaders that struggled mightily for parity under this unjust federal policy, which filled…
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New York's Useless Stop-and-Harass Policy
.0005! That’s the batting average of the mayor of New York City and his police commissioner in patrolling New York City the week George Steinbrenner died. The Yankees owner would have fired them both a thousand times over for weak hitting. New Yorkers, to their credit, tried to fire their mayor by twice voting to…
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Rush Limbaugh's Lies About Steinbrenner
George Steinbrenner was saluted in death by a recovering drug addict, Rush Limbaugh, as a ”cracker” who made black players rich while firing ”a bunch of white guys as managers left and right.” The Limbaugh eulogy is a sure sign that the illicit OxyContin addiction that likely made him deaf has clearly numbed his shame.…
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Say It Ain't So, Bill!
As the dirt settles on Robert Byrd’s grave, let us reflect on the wisdom of a former U.S. president offering a post-mortem alibi for the man who began his public service as the Exalted Cyclops of the murderous Ku Klux Klan. ”They mention that he once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan,…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
