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Is the USDA Still the Last Plantation?
That man who sits atop the federal government organizational chart is clear evidence of the enormous progress the country has made in regard to its troubled history with race relations. But it has very quickly become a dominant meme of the Obama age to debate the extent to which the stupendous changes at the top…
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Don't Believe the GOP Hype
The text message from my Democratic operative friend popped up on my BlackBerry at exactly 10:19 p.m., just as it was becoming clear that Jon Corzine was not going to be re-elected governor of New Jersey. Bloodbath! That’s all the message said. Later, said operative noted with deepening despair that Democrats were even losing in…
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Afghanistan Doesn’t Have To Be Vietnam
Afghanistan is not that complicated, even if you’re a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The president has made a point recently of letting us see him and his war council at work on Afghanistan, which, according to the generals on the ground, is deteriorating fast and in need of urgent attention. But the truth is that…
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John Edwards: He Was Always the One To Watch
I thought John Edwards would be president one day. I was wrong. The once-promising political career has all but disintegrated. Edwards appears on the verge of admitting he is the father of a child he once denied. Raleigh’s WRAL first reported that Edwards was inching toward reversing his denials about the paternity of the child…
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The GOP Follies
There’s been an awful lot of talk lately about how Barack Obama’s Democratic Party is increasingly on shaky political ground and how Republicans are set to take great advantage of that setback this fall in gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey—not to mention the 2010 congressional midterm elections. Democrats, as usual, are conflicted about…
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Yes, Barack Is Busy. And?
Despite all increasingly alarmed concern over his approval numbers, President Barack Obama is still flying high with the American people—even as we watch to see if his presidency runs aground as a result of his efforts to reform the nation’s health care system. The doom and gloom story of August was that health care was…
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"An Overwhelming Portion of the Animosity Toward Pres. Obama is Based on the Fact That He is a Black Man."
The important thing about former President Jimmy Carter’s declaration that the blowback against President Barack Obama has to do with the fact that “he’s a black man” is not how true it is, but how sad it is. Black people have been saying this all along, but when an old Southern governor who understands the…
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Mr. President, While You Were Out
President Barack Obama and his family are on vacation and, for a while anyway, the angry, disfigured faces of the health care town halls have faded from the news. But we know what’s waiting for him when he gets back—more of the same—and so far he hasn’t been handling it well. Supporters are urging him…
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Buying Time on the Economy
Barack Obama has been president for exactly six months, and we’ll have to wait a while to find out whether all the frenetic activity in these opening rounds of his presidency will amount to anything over the long haul. There is no argument that the administration and the president have both been busy and ambitious;…
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A Race Czar for Black Farmers
One hundred and forty-seven years ago this week, with the Civil War raging around him, President Lincoln signed into law a bill that created the United States Department of Agriculture. He called it the “People’s Department,” in a tribute to the wide-ranging ambitions he held for it. Almost a century and a half later, the…