Politics

As the full impact of the financial crisis was emerging, Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, took to the floor of the House to blame the Community Reinvestment Act for the crisis. “The government was goading these mortgage lenders, saying, ‘You’re redlining. You’re being discriminatory. If you don’t give loans out to marginally credit-worthy people…

Before Rep. Donna Edwards, of Maryland’s Fourth Congressional district, traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories for the first time in May, she hadn’t thought much about minorities in the Jewish state: “As an African-American woman, I really didn’t have a perception of a significant minority population in Israel, and there is,” she told the…

If you’re the author of a book called Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, one would expect that you would be humbly engaged in the task of explaining why you got it all wrong and that you’d lay off the bold predictions for a while. But maybe that’s too much…

The Jews are keeping Rev. Jeremiah Wright from talking to President Obama. At least, that’s what he told reporters this week following Hampton University’s 95th Annual Ministers’ Conference reports BET. Wright said: “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years…

Barack Obama can only be president for eight years (unless he pulls a Mike Bloomberg, and we doubt even he’s got juice like that). So what names will we hear on the political landscape in the coming years?  Over on The Daily Beast is a nice medley of future leaders including Newark’s Cory Booker and…

Michael Eric Dyson is apparently salty with Barack Obama and has taken the time to express that fact. The Black intellectual, known for his well-rehearsed hip-hop double speak that the academy just eats up because it’s so darn edgy and refreshing (despite the fact that the ideas therein aren’t terribly edgy or refreshing. But whatever)…

First, some scary statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services: * 48% of all African-American adults suffer from a chronic disease, compared to 39% of the general population. *Development of diabetes: 18% of American Indians; 15% of African Americans; 14% of Hispanics; 8% of white Americans * African Americans are 15% more likely…

When a Department of Homeland Security report in April predicted a rise in white supremacist violence by white men who feel increasingly marginalized and powerless, Republican leaders were up in arms. The report, they said, was a slur on the U.S. military because it explored the possibility that white supremacist violence might arise from the…

Over on Jack and Jill Politics, Rinku Sen from the Applied Research Center discusses how the president’s economic policies overlook racial inequities and ultimately is not serving the people who it purports to protect. Sen writes: “As one of the last strongholds of union jobs shrinks, we have to confront a brutal truth about work…

Ex-Republican Christopher Buckley writes in his satirical novel, Supreme Courtship, that “nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court.” This has certainly been true in the days since President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the highest legal office in the land. Much of…