Politics

The Obama administration’s deafness to the growing chorus of opposition to the senseless war on drugs has become so appalling that you almost start thinking Cornel West was right. About Obama’s supposed lack of interest in black concerns, that is. I know that’s not actually the problem: the president has to prioritize. With the economy…

Back on May 6, Fox News and the South Carolina Republican Party had particularly bad timing — they hosted the first 2012 presidential debate just four days after President Barack Obama announced to the nation that Navy SEALs had hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden. With news coverage almost completely devoted to the demise…

MSNBC is reporting that President Barack Obama is pushing for more private-sector hiring while seeking to protect his own job during a two-day domestic trip that aims to raise his political profile in two key states and with an important Hispanic constituency. In North Carolina on Monday, the president will press for more jobs in…

When I heard the historic announcement from Times Square the other day, that America’s top newspaper had named a woman as executive editor, my thoughts drifted back to the 1972-1981 decade at the paper, and the words of Dickens — almost cliché nowadays — seemed apt: “It was the best of times, it was the…

Advocates of drug and juvenile-justice reform have launched a campaign against what they contend are the New York Police Department’s illegal “stop and frisks” and the disproportionate number of arrests of black and brown young men for possessing allowable amounts of marijuana. The “Know Your Rights, Build Your Future” workshops, aiming to inform teens and…

It’s a pity that the 19th-century Austrian novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach was not still around this week to witness a spectacular vindication of her most famous aphorism: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. That old adage applies to Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing-media hit man previously best known for manufacturing a charge of…

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS in the United States, an occasion that has prompted reflection on advances made in fighting the epidemic. Antiretroviral drug treatments have transformed the virus in this country from a fatal disease to a manageable chronic condition. HIV transmission to newborns has been…

Eighteen-year-old Aleshia Napier didn’t have to die the way that she did. The troubled young African-American woman hanged herself with a bed sheet five years ago in solitary confinement while incarcerated at Broward Correctional Institution in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., her family’s lawyer, Randall Berg Jr., executive director of the Florida Justice Institute, told The Root.…

Summertime, and the living won’t be easy. From electricity to groceries to clothing, the cost of everything you need, and of most things you want, has increased. But there are few places where Americans have felt the sting of higher prices more profoundly than at the gas pump. And you don’t have to own a…