Politics

There’s a young, multiracial Harvard lawyer running for Congress in Illinois. But it’s not 2000, and she’s not Barack Obama. And while former Miss America Erika Harold would almost surely resist the comparison—particularly a week out from primary election day—it’s hard not to notice the biographical similarities between her and the president, even though she’s…

Debo Adegbile’s contentious confirmation hearings and failure to be confirmed as assistant attorney general for civil rights led one senior Democratic Senate aide to say that racial bias has cast a permanent pall over the confirmation process for black Obama nominees. But the treatment Adegbile faced, which the aide called a “smear campaign” and President…

Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon and professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, on Saturday pushed back at liberal criticism of his views during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., bringing the crowd to its feet, the Baltimore Sun reports. “I hate PC [political correctness], and I will…

Give this much, at least, to the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee: At the Conservative Political Action Conference this year, they went all out for their “candidate.” Carson addressed the crowd on the final day of this year’s CPAC—before Sarah Palin’s late-Saturday keynote—and autographed copies of his new book at a preferred-access signing…

Put me down as a skeptic when it comes to Condoleezza Rice. Although she’s generally applauded for her barrier-breaking career in public service, as the first African-American woman to serve as secretary of state and national security adviser, “her signature ‘achievement’ in public life,” as I wrote a couple of years ago, “was co-signing Bush’s…

The FBI has opened an investigation into one of the largest private-prison operators over its management of an Idaho prison with a reputation for violence, which inmates call “gladiator school,” according the Associated Press. Corrections Corporation of America, based in Nashville, Tenn., which has operated Idaho’s largest private prison for more than a decade, has…