Politics

(The Root) — After all that, there were really no winners in the shutdown fight because there was no appreciable policy outcome. And come early February 2014, we’ll repeat it all over again since Republicans who didn’t get anything are going to want their pound of flesh in the next quarter. But looking over the…

(The Root) — By the time Americans finish eating Christmas turkey, recover from New Year’s Eve hangovers and start looking ahead to Super Bowl Sunday and President Barack Obama’s sixth State of the Union address, the government shutdown of 2013 will already seem like ancient history. Poll numbers will shift, issues will change and members…

(The Root) — Cory Booker’s inevitable election to the U.S. Senate on Wednesday will prove, for large segments of the black community, both historic and bittersweet. Booker’s meteoric rise since being elected mayor of Newark, N.J., in 2006 has been assisted by a well-crafted media persona. Booker first burst onto Newark’s political scene in 2002,…

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a piece at The Atlantic about a recent protest by conservatives in Washington, D.C., explains how he is less interested in the actions of a single radical person and more concerned with how the surrounding crowd, or audience, accepts or rejects the individual’s claims.   It is the wisdom of the crowd…

(The Root) — Last week, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced to 28 years in prison for corruption. Even though Kilpatrick’s name has become synonymous with corrupt politics, most people outside of Detroit don’t know the details of the case that landed Kilpatrick a conviction in March for racketeering conspiracy, fraud, extortion and tax…

A rally on Sunday in Washington, D.C., went from civil to mean-spirited as it made its way from the World War II Memorial to the White House. Hundreds gathered from across the country to protest the closure of the memorial, one of the many national landmarks closed because of the partial government shutdown. Though it…

(The Root) — The conventional wisdom among the Washington, D.C., chattering class had been that the GOP — despite its dangerous display of extremism — was at little risk of losing a majority in the House of Representatives at the 2014 midterm elections. But a host of surveys and polling data suggests that the government…

(The Root) — If William F. Buckley Jr.’s definition of a conservative was someone who “stands athwart history yelling, ‘Stop’,” maybe Dr. Ben Carson’s idea of conservatism is standing athwart the present saying “slavery” as many times as he can. And if so, it’s a good way to grab headlines for himself. But it’s also…

(The Root) — At some point, the federal government will reopen, and the country will go back to a kick-the-can paradigm that runs the budget on a series of back-to-back manufactured crises. This we know, since for the most part most people — left and right — accept the governing construct. But a larger philosophical…