Politics

Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian M. Fenty are sometimes mistaken for each other: Both of them have similarly shaven bald heads and are grouped among the new breed of black political leadership. Unlike their predecessors, who rode a wave out of the civil rights movement and into mayoralties of major…

Don’t blame preacher Terry Jones for the last week’s Quran burning debacle. He was the crackpot in that drama — he was just doing his job. Blame former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for Muslim-baiting by stoking the public’s fears about “creeping sharia.” Blame Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf for waiting a month too long to defend…

The Root’s Best Picks of the CBC’s 40th Annual Legislative Weekend in Washington, D.C.: *The Root is a co-sponsor of “Shut Out: Evaluating Madison Avenue for Disparity in Advertising Media and Creative Services”

Just when you thought the false propaganda against Barack Obama couldn’t get any deeper, along comes Newt Gingrich with another trainload of lies. Setting a shameful new standard for cynical manipulation of the paranoid fears of the Tea Party and  so-called Birthers, the Republican former speaker of the House now claims that Obama suffers from…

There’s Washington. And there’s D.C., the District of Columbia, a city long fractured by race, class and its very geography. A park and a river act as natural fault lines between blacks and whites and low-income and wealthy residents. Those divisions and congressional oversight of the city’s legislation and budget have framed the African-American political…

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…