Politics
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Black Voters Are Pragmatic About Gay Marriage
Tuesday’s Washington Post article examining the response by African-American voters to President Barack Obama’s new Defense of Marriage Act policy reveals what many in the black community already know: When it comes to the ballot box, marriage equality is mostly a nonissue. In interviews with black pastors, pollsters, churchgoers and professors, African-American voters explain that…
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The Lingering Questions About Human Medical Experiments
The specter of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study inevitably looms over talk of human subjects in medical research. The well-known case involved the U.S. Public Health Service, which, from 1932 to 1972, studied hundreds of black men in Alabama with syphilis, failing to inform them of their diagnosis or treat their condition. From this striking example…
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The Root Recommends: CNN's 'Race & Rage'
Race & Rage is a new documentary commemorating the 20th anniversary of the vicious beating Rodney King took from Los Angeles police in 1991. The beating and events that followed ultimately sparked a weeklong spree of riots and looting and forced the city to re-examine its racial divides. The documentary, hosted by CNN anchor Don…
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NAACP Calls on District Attorney to Probe Shooting of Black Children
Digtriad is reporting that the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP isn’t giving up its fight for additional charges against a man accused of shouting racial slurs before shooting two children. NAACP leaders met at the Caswell County courthouse Tuesday morning to make their first public call of action under the county’s new district attorney,…
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'Job-Killing' Bills: GOP Spending Cuts Would Cost 700,000 Jobs
Columnist Ezra Klein of the Washington Post is reporting that GOP spending cuts would cost America 700,000 jobs. He calls out the GOP in general and House Minority Leader John Boehner in particular — who label everything from health care to the stimulus bill as “job-killing” measures, yet fail to acknowledge the role that the…
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Crazy Qaddafi Déjà Vu
Paul Delaney is an inveterate diarist. In January 1989 he was the Madrid bureau chief for the New York Times when he was dispatched to Tripoli, Libya. His account of the trip from his diary will be included in a memoir he is completing. Jan. 3: Things heating up in Libya. U.S. President [Ronald] Reagan…
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Republicans Take Up for First Lady
The Wall Street Journal reports that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and likely 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee both defended Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign against conservative criticism on Sunday talk shows yesterday: “What Michelle Obama is proposing is not that the government tells you that you can’t eat dessert,” Mr. Huckabee said. Rather, the…
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Obamas' Trainer Tells His Fitness Secrets
Despite what Rush Limbaugh says, Michelle Obama has an enviable body, and her husband’s not so bad in the fitness department, either. The man who keeps them in shape recently offered some revealing details about the presidential fitness regimen. Cornell McClellan, personal trainer to the first family and a member of the President’s Council on…
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Obama's Trainer Tells His Fitness Secrets
Despite what Rush Limbaugh says, Michelle Obama has an enviable body, and her husband’s not so bad in the fitness department, either. The man who keeps them in shape is now revealing details about the presidential fitness regimen. Cornell McClellan, personal trainer to the first family and a member of the President’s Council on Fitness,…
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Romancing the Dictators
It’s one thing to give a pass to Beyoncé, Usher and Mariah Carey for shaking their booties in exchange for big bucks from the thuggish sons of Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi. As my colleague Jenée Desmond-Harris points out on The Root, they aren’t foreign policy experts, and some never made it through college. They…