Politics

In the current political environment, it appears as strange a mismatch of bedfellows as any in recent memory. But something in the water on Capitol Hill is connecting freshman senator and social media maven Cory Booker (D-N.J.) with ranting Tea Party and libertarian idol Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). At first glance, it’s the Odd Couple…

2014 is barely a week old, and yet the year has already given us its first political scandal—one that potentially has ramifications for years to come. A string of emails published Wednesday by the Bergen Country Record suggest that staffers in the office of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie coaxed a Port Authority staffer to…

MSNBC’s foreign policy maven, Andrea Mitchell, calls it a “bombshell,” and Tuesday’s headline, from Robert Gates’ own Wall Street Journal op-ed, touts the former defense secretary’s “quiet fury.” But if excerpts from his new memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, hold true for the rest of his book, then—net-net—Gates’ account of Obama’s White…

An economist influential in the Reagan administration called the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage the “black teenage unemployment act” and claimed it “makes absolutely no sense whatever,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. Arthur Laffer, who is known as the father of “trickle down economics”—the theory that tax breaks for big businesses stimulate the poorer economy—denounced the current…

Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson gave one of the most important State of the Union speeches in American history. Championing the cause of racial and economic equality, he promised, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” A half-century later, it’s time for America to declare a new…

It seems that congressional Republicans—or some, at least—are finally coming to the realization that their constituents are poor and unemployed. On Tuesday the U.S. Senate voted to move forward with the bill that would extend unemployment benefits, which expired three days after Christmas. It provides benefits to roughly 1.3 million eligible workers for three months,…

As a two-year budget conjures up illusions of congressional comity and President Obama is desperate for a legislative recharge, there is much hype about a big immigration deal on the horizon. But, despite the huge political, economic and cultural implications for the country, black folks have little skin in the game. How did that happen?…