Politics

I am writing to follow up on some of the concerns I am hearing about my colleague Elena Kagan’s civil rights record and whether she would be a fit candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court.  While it is certainly up to the President to find the ideal person and to look at a number of…

President Barack Obama needed only to look across his dinner table each evening or in the bed next to him each night to see a well-educated and well-qualified black female attorney who could have made a great U.S. Supreme Court nominee. For reasons surpassing my understanding, however, the president apparently did not include a black…

Miracle at Tripoli: 103 Dead as Jet Crashes in Libya; Child Survives Crashhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37100560/ns/world_news-africa 103 people were killed when a plane crashed in Libya, while trying to land at Tripoli airport. The Afriqiyah Airways plane was flying from Johannesburg to Tripoli, when it crashed killing the crew and all but one passenger. Amazingly, a child survived…

Please permit a final few words about Dr. Dorothy I. Height before she’s assigned a slot in the Black History Month index. Here are some frank thoughts about her role as a woman of the movement versus a man of the movement. Although she was a legendary figure, I reject a lot of the phony…

Chris Flaherty, an American documentary film producer who’s married to a woman from Ethiopia, started a hunger strike early last week in front of the White House to convince President Obama to push for democracy in Ethiopia. Occasionally, someone would wander over to Flaherty to look at his homemade poster boards with photos of Birtukan…

Roland Martin defends his fashion choices (after a brief word from TV One sponsors).

Today, as expected, President Barack Obama nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. Kagan, the first female solicitor general (and also the first female dean of Harvard Law School), is by all accounts brilliant and extremely qualified. And to hear President Obama and some of his supporters tell it, Kagan…

Going to the Brink in Europe After behaving like an unruly bunch of Third World nations, Europeans got their act together in the nick of time this weekend to come up with a financial rescue plan for that will prevent another financial meltdown—or worse—a second global recession. The 750 million euro ($1 trillion) plan to…

President Barack Obama’s pick of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to fill the seat vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens is widely regarded as the safest choice the president could make. She was just confirmed to her seat as the government’s counsel to the Supreme Court by a 61-31 vote last year. Seven Republicans voted in…