Politics

Watching the midterm elections last week was like eating dog food. Having to listen to newly elected congressman Rand Paul declare, “There are no rich, there are no middle class, there are no poor,” made me want to throw up all over my health-insurance bills. Florida’s Marco Rubio stole all of President Barack Obama’s youthful…

As he ponders the “shellacking” the Democratic Party took in last Tuesday’s elections, President Obama should begin the second half of his term by overcoming his aversion to dealing with the bad things of the past. Remember, he rejected calls for investigations into possible wrongdoing by Bush administration officials, insisting that, instead, he preferred to…

First Lady Michelle Obama surprised a group of U.S. servicemen and women based in Germany on Thursday, helping to serve them steaks at a special Veterans Day meal. The first lady spent time with some 200 troops during a refueling stopover on the way home from her tour of Asia with President Barack Obama. After…

In his first news conference after his midterm losses, President Obama reminded his audience that the important battle for the U.S. is remaining on top of global competition. If he’s looking for a model, he need look no further than Spelman College in Atlanta — the private, independent, historically black school for women — and…

According to Erica Werner of the Associated Press, President Barack Obama, visiting the world’s most populous Muslim nation, expressed deep concern Tuesday that Israelis and Palestinians aren’t making the “extra effort” to secure a breakthrough for achieving Middle East peace. Obama said he hasn’t seen the kind of progress in negotiations that “could finally create…

Every campaign season brings its own share of frustrations. This one is no different. So now I get to vent. The polls are closed. The outcomes are known (mostly). And the spinmeisters have done what they do. Yet I feel entitled to one final campaign postmortem. In three big ways, I found this campaign season…

When President Obama spoke at a White House press conference the day after the midterm elections, among his most salient points was his statement that our country must embrace civility again. No truer words could have been spoken. We witnessed a veritable slugfest among candidates leading up to Election Day, everything from a plethora of…

Women are almost invisible in civil rights storytelling, and hardly present in the civil rights canon. What they did and who they were in the Southern freedom movement of the 1960s remains barely understood. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a new book by 52 women who worked for the…

1. A Power Shift That Will Last a Decade There’s often too much hype surrounding midterm elections, but there’s never enough hype to cover a midterm election that happens right before state legislatures throughout the country take on the task of redistricting. As the U.S. Census Bureau completes its once-in-a-decade count, state legislatures will pull…