Politics

A week from today, Barack Obama will take the oath of office as the 44th president of the United States, but I remain in awe of the election results of Nov. 4. I hadn’t seen its outcome coming, but maybe I should have, based on the events of one Friday in October nearly 50 years…

The day after the presidential election, I went to work at a small inner-city public high school to find people walking the halls with contented smiles. Even the students who generally find it easier to scowl than breathe were beaming. As their principal, I reprimanded them, half-heartedly, numerous times for suggesting that we all should’ve…

“Hey, dark ‘n lovely!” Gotta love the brothers who show their affection for the dark-skinned girls, even if they are hollering out the window of a passing car. Gotta love it even more when the brother is the president, and the object of his affection is front and center for the world to see. It’s…

Don’t call it reparations. Call it a belated bailout of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, chartered by Congress in 1865 as a financial haven for freed slaves, and failed in 1874 after its white board lost all the money after a spree of wild speculation. It was like black people’s version of Bernie Madoff (but the…

OK, so it’s Inauguration Day and you’re standing back 10 rows deep along the parade route. You’ve lost your family members who stopped somewhere a block or so away. You’re supposed to meet up with friends afterward for a celebratory toast, but you haven’t spotted them anywhere. And you’ve managed to grab some cool pictures…

In the end, Roland Burris will likely be the next senator from Illinois. The law and cynical race politics are on his side. That simple fact was largely obscured in yesterday’s political theatrics. In a damp, cold rain, Burris showed up on Capitol Hill and was met at the perimeter by the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, Terry…

In November 1969, the great Nina Simone released what would be her entrée to mainstream popular culture, one of her biggest selling records ever, and an anthem of a movement that, robbed of its messenger 19 months earlier in Memphis, still carried forth his message: To be young, gifted and blackIs where it’s at. The…

Being a Republican on Capitol Hill may be a little lonelier over the next two years than it has been over the past two. In the U.S. Senate, Republicans can look back just two short election cycles and be wistful about what they’ve lost: a Republican president, a GOP-controlled Congress and, more broadly, the country’s…

A few weeks ago I received a phone call from two semi-drunken friends who were at a bar on the East Coast. They demanded I write about the idiot formerly known as Gov. Rod Blagojevich. I promised to do so, but deep down I probably wanted the whole shameful situation to go away. As an…