Politics

On Thursday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus forcefully denounced Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s controversial comments about slavery. In a statement to CNN, Priebus said, “Bundy’s comments are completely beyond the pale. Both highly offensive and 100 percent wrong on race.” Bundy, who in recent weeks has become a hero on the political right for…

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…

Some of America’s leading public intellectuals, scholars and activists gathered at Tufts University April 16-18 for the fifth annual Barack Obama and American Democracy conference.   Michael Eric Dyson’s exhilarating opening keynote offered a rich intellectual and political framework for principled criticism of the Obama administration’s political and moral failures with a balanced appreciation of…

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…

Days after drawing heavy criticism from Peta over the use of real eggs for the White House Easter egg roll, Michelle Obama is now under fire for a proposed graduation address in Topeka, Kan., the Associated Press reports. Some parents and students are in an uproar over the first lady’s plan to address a combined…