Politics

Fresh from our “Is she still talking?” file, MSNBC is reporting that Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota blamed President Barack Obama’s stand on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks for the uprisings against autocratic governments across the Arab world. At a fundraiser Thursday in North Carolina, the Republican lawmaker and candidate for president traced the mass protests that…

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post is reporting that President Barack Obama and the U.S. Justice Department have asked the Supreme Court to review the president’s controversial 2010 health care law. The administration said it was confident that the Affordable Care Act would be upheld as a valid exercise of federal power, just as Social…

Lately, Barack Obama has become the target upon which a slew of heat-seeking black critics have set their sights. Many of the president’s foes chide him for the nation’s lagging economy and high unemployment in the black community. BET founder Bob Johnson is among them and has been quite outspoken about his opposition toward Obama…

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said during an interview that aired on CNN’s The Situation Room on Wednesday evening that some members of the African-American community “have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view.” He went on to say: “I have received some of that same vitriol simply…

Score one for President Barack Obama in this rancorous political season. At a time when poverty is at its highest rate in recent history, a new Washington Post-Pew Center poll indicates that nearly half of all Americans say that the president treats society’s rich and poor just about the same. Despite Republican claims that he…

It’s been four days since President Obama delivered remarks at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner, just one of 10 speeches that he’s given within that time. But the debate over what he said before that mostly African-American audience — and how he chose to say it — is still going strong.…

“Give us the ballot!” Martin Luther King Jr.’s words still resonate with many of us today. From the marches and protests in Selma, Ala., to the hundreds of voting-rights lawsuits to the on-the-ground slogan “One Man, One Vote,” the road to equal voting rights has not been easy, particularly for communities of color. This year…

Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy recently penned an opinion piece for CNN entitled “Why Obama’s Black Critics Are Wrong.” He contends that President Obama’s African-American critics have focused on his “racial bona fides” and that “throughout President Barack Obama’s political career, he has been dogged by … accusations that he is not ‘black enough.’…

In the introduction to The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, Randall Kennedy, the noted professor of law at Harvard and racial commentator, makes the following assessment of Barack Obama’s unprecedented predicament: “He is a politician seeking to lead and govern a massive, complex, dysfunctional democracy that has long suppressed the racial…