Politics

JUBA, SUDAN — Just as important legal precedents often result from cases involving inconspicuous individuals, sometimes big human events happen in obscure places. This week, much of the world is learning a lesson about the drive for self-determination from watching events in a town called Juba, a dusty boomtown full of paradoxes, home to the…

They have returned to this part of Africa from all over the continent and abroad, traveling via every type of transport or simply on foot. After decades in exile in foreign lands or displaced internally from their own homelands, Southern Sudanese have begun to claim their own future. Their stories are familiar — tales of…

I started carrying around a pocket version of the U.S. Constitution in my purse in 1998 after I visited South Africa for the first time. It was only four years after the first full democratic election in that country. When the ANC was voted the ruling party in 1994 and Nelson Mandela was elected president,…

On his Friday radio show, Rush Limbaugh dives into yet another race conversation. In this snippet, he goes back to the meme that President Barack Obama isn’t qualified to be president. “[For] the media, the Democrat adults and the establishment, the Clinton years were their Nirvana. And if Obama had not been African American, he…

KHARTOUM, SUDAN — The run-up before Sunday’s referendum on whether Southern Sudan should secede from the North has prompted widespread speculation over whether the outcome will cause renewed bloodshed and dissolution or herald the founding of Africa’s 55th nation. Not since the United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine in 1947 has so much…

This Sunday, about 4 million Sudanese in the war-torn Southern part of the country will go to the polls to cast their ballots in a referendum to decide if they should remain a part of Africa’s largest country or become the continent’s newest nation. The debate over maintaining Sudan as a unitary state or separating…

When the Republican-led Congress took to the House floor to read the entire U.S. Constitution, it omitted several provisions in the document, including two that allude to slavery: the “three-fifths compromise” and the fugitive-slave clause. While leaders like Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) objected to such redactions that ignore the “long history of improving the…

Yesterday morning during the much heralded reading of the Constitution (minus the awkward bits) on the House floor, the situation got a little, well, awkard, when a Birther interrupted the proceedings. It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Birthers in such a public forum, so I guess it’s high time one of them reared…

In 2008, Democrats were winning in every possible way. They won the presidency, the House and the Senate! In 2010, “winning” might not be the best word to describe the left. As the party’s leader, Barack Obama, notably said, the Dems got “shellacked” during November’s midterm elections. And now this: A recent Gallup Poll shows…