Politics

At President Obama’s news conference Friday, a reporter demanded to know why the Obama administration had not yet caught Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri. “Do you think Americans are going to face another nine years of this terror threat, another generation?” asked CNN’s Ed Henry. The question reinforced what has been oozing…

President Obama has shown the courage to speak often about his hopes of building bridges between Islam and those Americans who are intolerant of that faith. This has occurred in contrast to his relative silence on race relations in America. Yet just because he should be more vocal on race at a time when racial…

On the day before the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Obama’s first major news conference in months resulted in him shifting a lot of blame to obstructionist Republicans — and Republicans immediately firing right back. Beginning just after 11:00 a.m., the president wasted no time in attacking the GOP, saying in his…

The Rev. Al Sharpton unleashed a formal assault on Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. today, accusing it of dredging up old tax debts for his civil rights organization in retaliation for holding his Reclaim the Dream rally the same day as Fox News TV host Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor event, which took place at the foot…

The last book by Martin Luther King Jr. raised the question, “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?” From competing interpretations of that question, the answer currently appears to be: both. Those groups purporting to have some affinity for the message that King delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 do not seem…

Early last month, syndicated radio host Laura Schlessinger caused a stir by saying the word “nigger” several times on her radio program. At the time, I wrote that what she said, while trite, was not racist. Nevertheless, a hail of criticism in the immediate wake of the incident caused Schlessinger to apologize and resign, saying…

by Krissah Thompson The Rev. Al Sharpton’s civil rights organization, National Action Network, said Tuesday that it is putting its deep financial difficulties behind it. The statement came in response to a news report providing details about the organization’s shaky financial footing at the end of 2008. Tax records show it was constantly in debt…

When I arrived at the Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes, the Kingfish and his lawyer, Algonquin J. Calhoun, were huddled in a corner, whispering to each other in conspiratorial tones. “What are those two cooking up?” I asked my friend Buckwheat, the famous Our Gang character. “Here I is, Brother White,” Buckwheat squeaked. “And what…