Politics

John McWhorter is right about one thing. Herman Cain “is evidence of, of all things, progress.” McWhorter — iconoclast, The Root columnist and widely regarded author of the best-sellers Losing the Race and Winning the Race — argued this week in “Herman Cain and the Sadness of Black Folks” that the failure of black observers…

Job growth came nearly to a halt in June, the federal government said Friday with surprisingly grim new data that challenge expectations that the economy is poised to bounce back from its spring lull. The disappointing report comes at a sensitive time, as President Obama and Congress engage in high-stakes negotiations over raising the legal…

Do progressives care about reducing the national debt? Of course they do, no matter what the White House might believe. “We think that obviously there are some Democrats who don’t feel as strongly about deficit reduction as [President Obama] does,” senior adviser David Plouffe said Wednesday at a breakfast with reporters and columnists. But that’s…

Most Americans, if they were aware of Haitian Americans at all, associated them with a long list of negative images — as poor refugees and non-English speakers, or simply as illegal immigrants — long before the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake put Haiti in the international spotlight. There are, of course, Haitian Americans who face many…

Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post is reporting that President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.  At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans…

When the space shuttle Atlantis blasts off on Friday, it will mark the final NASA shuttle mission ever. But the shuttering of the 30-year-old program isn’t the end of American space exploration — in fact, according to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, it makes way for the creation of new designs that will take us deeper…

Let me say at the outset that the death of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony, or the murder of any child, is a tragedy. Am I outraged at the verdict of not guilty of murder or manslaughter for Casey Anthony? No. Was Casey involved in the death and/or cover-up of Caylee? In my opinion, she probably was.…

In an op-ed, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson highlights President Obama’s approach to dealing with the GOP’s bullying tactics over the debt-ceiling debate. Robinson maintains that the president’s “in-your-face attitude” seems to have thrown Republicans off their stride. Their march to default on the nation’s financial obligations came to a screeching halt. The president is not…

Colin Powell said it, Sen. Harry Reid hinted at it about President Barack Obama, and black folks have known it for hundreds of years. There are advantages to being a light-skinned black person in the United States. Research on those advantages isn’t new, but with the release of a recent study by Villanova University, the…