Politics

Alain Dolium is almost an oxymoron: He’s a black French politician. A businessman and candidate for France’s National Assembly in 2012, Dolium is indeed a rare breed. Despite the country’s rich mix of whites, blacks from Africa and the Caribbean, and an Arab-Muslim population of more than 5 million, the French political establishment is almost…

In the month since political analyst Donna Brazile took the helm as interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, she’s been focused on matters relating to the 2012 election, including a push by Republican-controlled state legislatures to require photo identification at the polls. Republicans say that the laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but…

I will never forget a conversation I had with two Muslim Americans in the wake of 9/11 — one black and one a second-generation immigrant. A quiet but insistent theme was that bin Laden’s action was not completely unreasonable. A quiet theme, mind you — both often contributed that what bin Laden had done was…

When I was growing up in Cleveland, some of the most respected people in my neighborhood were the folks who worked for the city, county or state. My father was a city bus driver who took great pride in getting people safely to and from their jobs every day. My mother was a community college…

A few minutes into his monologue at Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers did an Osama bin Laden joke that had President Barack Obama laughing and smiling, seated on the dais in black tie and revealing nothing as U.S. special forces prepared an assault that left bin Laden dead…

As Americans took to the streets from the White House to Times Square and Ground Zero in New York City to numerous places across the country, President Barack Obama addressed the nation late Sunday evening to announce the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces. Read the transcript of his speech below.…

Osama bin Laden is dead. President Barack Obama went on television late Sunday night to declare that the Saudi Arabian mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon has been killed in Pakistan. “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States…

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is doing some damage control for the controversial comments he made against the president on Friday. While speaking at a dinner hosted by Americans for Prosperity, Romney said:  “Reagan came up with this great thing about the ‘misery index,’ and he hung that around Jimmy Carter’s neck, and that had…

Given all that yakkety-yak about the emergence of a new era of postracial politics, you might have hoped that by now, even the looniest of ultraconservatives might have figured out a way to criticize Barack Obama without sounding like howling race-baiters. Keep hoping. Conservative dependency on racial resentments is so deeply ingrained that even phony…

Members of the NAACP, Color of Change and Amnesty International are rallying together one last time to gain support for Georgia inmate Troy Davis, who is soon expected to face his fourth execution date. Davis has been on death row for the past 20 years for the 1989 murder of Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail,…