Politics

On Unemployed Friends 2.0, a message board for people who have been out of work long enough to exhaust all emergency unemployment insurance — “99ers,” as some have taken to calling themselves — users let off steam in the Venting Forum. I am sooo tired of calling temp agencies week after week with no callbacks…

The Associated Press is reporting that President Barack Obama is turning his attention to the nation’s crushing debt and trying to counter a Republican anti-deficit plan with a framework of his own that tackles politically sensitive health care programs while also increasing taxes. The president is set to reveal his spending plan on Wednesday, outlining…

“Obaaaaammmmma!” That was Oprah in 2007. She was effusive and unrestrained in her excitement as the man soon to be president sauntered onto her soundstage. He spoke. She listened. He enthralled. She endorsed. They seemed like best friends. Even better, play cousins. Their mutual admiration was palpable and sometimes even difficult to watch. During his…

Sunday’s heated set-to between the Rev. Al Sharpton and Dr. Cornel West wasn’t just an intramural pissing contest — although it was that, too — between two of the biggest names in black America. Their MSNBC exchange stood in for the larger debate within the Obama coalition between the “professional left” — unhappy with Obama’s…

In late January, Oprah Winfrey gushed about San Luis Obispo, which is on the central-California coast. The billionaire television host called the city “the happiest place in America” during a show broadcast from the historic mission town halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Since then the nearby village of Arroyo Grande has basked in…

The war on the elderly and poor may be moving forward. The Associated Press is reporting that the House and Senate are expected to vote on a budget for the remainder of this fiscal year midweek. President Obama will reveal his plan to reduce the deficit, in part by scaling back the government’s chief health…

It has been a tough week for President Obama. After averting a government shutdown, new polling shows that his approval ratings among blacks have slipped to an all-time low since his inauguration. Only 85 percent of blacks now approve of the work he is doing, a drop of 7 percent from March. While this number…

As federal, state and local governments across the nation slash their budgets to close looming shortfalls, there is one clear winner in the budget battles: correctional systems, which cost the nation nearly $70 billion annually. During the last two decades, funding for prisons eclipsed spending for higher education sixfold. The NAACP is looking to reverse…

During the Cold War, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation is said to have subsidized the Communist Party so that agents could keep track of its activities. Without a centralized organization luring Marxist sympathizers like moths to a flame, they might have scattered in all directions, making it more difficult for G-men to monitor…