Politics

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Rahm Emanuel was supposed to receive a hero’s welcome in the black community when he announced his candidacy for mayor of Chicago. After all, he was chief of staff for the first black president of the United States, who happened to be the cool former congressman from Illinois! Plus,…

Horseback-riding Teddy Roosevelt might have done a double take were he allowed to gaze from his “Rough Rider” portrait in the White House at the 44th president of the United States, fielding a range of questions about his executive policies from 10 black newspaper columnists sitting around an oblong table. This uniquely nonwhite all-American scene…

Is it conservative to criticize hip-hop? Recently I wrote an Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal in which I expressed a feeling of deep disappointment and frustration that Barack Obama would show appreciation — without qualification — for rappers such as Lil Wayne and Jay-Z. I argued that the president can and should listen to…

The NAACP and the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) today fired the second official salvo in the battle between civil rights groups and the Tea Party movement. In a report released this morning, “Tea Party Nationalism,” IREHR researchers Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind detail the origins of the Tea Party and…

Intellectual libertarians and conservatives ignore the reality of their Tea Party shock troops at their peril. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is only the latest conservative unwilling to believe his lying eyes.  Inconveniently for him, the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and the NAACP just released the most comprehensive report to…

If this isn’t a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Ancestry.com has examined President Obama’s family tree and found that he has a common matriarchal ancestor to conservative pundit Sarah Palin named John Smith, a 17th-century pastor in Massachusetts who opposed the persecution of Quakers. Apparently Obama is also a 10th cousin once…

A new expansive biography of Barack Obama and his family raises questions about the death of the president’s father in Kenya in 1982. Although the official cause of Barack Obama Sr.’s death was a drunk-driving accident, some family members interviewed in Peter Firstbrook’s The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family believe that he…

Less than one in 10 respondents in a recent New York Times poll were aware that their taxes had been cut by the Obama administration. Even worse: A third of the people polled thought their taxes had gone up. In truth, taxes were cut for 95 percent of working Americans — and a conscious decision…

I haven’t yet read Condoleezza Rice’s memoir about her parents, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family. But already I’m annoyed. I’ll admit that I’m discomfited by all of the figures from the Bush administration who have managed to emerge unrepentant, their records unexamined by independent prosecutors, some hawking books and all displaying a kind…