the browntable

Not everyone’s going to be happy to see the first black first family tossing the Frisbee around next week. In the last month, the president’s critics, particularly on the right, have, in their customarily hypocritical, player-hating fashion, been holding him to a higher standard than past presidents: No other president would be expected to cheerfully…

Fresh off Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Angola last week, the television show “The Simpsons” appears to be paying the less-than-democratic, oil-rich southern African nation a visit. Via McClatchy’s always-interesting “Somewhere in Africa” blog: America’s most dysfunctional cartoon family (OK, second most) is coming to TV screens in Angola, via the South African…

Robert Littal of Black Sports Online feels as though Plaxico Burress is catching a raw deal, and outlines ten facts that are germane in the incident and why he feels the two years in jail seems too harsh a penalty. While I think he makes a few fair points, I have to disagree with Mr.…

Few things are as grating as the polite jargon used to describe politicians caving in to corporate interests. “The politics of the possible,” for instance, has suddenly replaced “yes, we can” as Barack Obama has walked back a central plank of his presidential campaign—that he’d create a public insurance plan. If only the problems we…

By now, you’ve probably already seen this clip of Rep. Barney Frank issuing a scathing rebuke to a woman comparing Barack Obama to Hitler at a Dartmouth, Mass., healthcare town hall. But a little refresher won’t hurt: For those of us who have long been yearning for a return to rational political discourse, it was…

On the heels of Jack White’s breast-beating cry for Barack Obama to stop punking out on health care reform, it’s worth reposting “The Daily Show”‘s equally impassioned cry for Obama to do the same: It’s understandable that progressive-minded Americans might want the president to show a little Bush-era salesmanship, and start acting like the party…

No, that’s not a flashback to 1993: Hillary Clinton, current Secretary of State and former president Bill Clinton are meeting separately with president Barack Obama to discuss foreign affairs. Hillary, fresh off a female-focused ten day trip to sub-Saharan Africa, is keeping her standard weekly appointment at the White House, while her husband will have…

Between the beach and the birthers-turned-death panelists, you probably missed this one last week: Income inequality in America became more pronounced at the end of the Bush era than it had been since, well, ever. The closest comparison to the gap between the super rich and everybody else are the years just before the Great…

A chilling Human Rights Watch report adds to a building mound of evidence that death squads are targeting gay men in Baghdad and Sadr City, Iraq—a reality that undermines claims of a democratic and cultural opening in the country since the 2003 U.S. invasion. At minimum, dozens of men who are either openly gay or…

Three years after seeing his presidential dreams dashed by a rash, three-syllable slur, George Allen, who occasionally insists on wearing full cowboy regalia, is reportedly back in the saddle. Perhaps you don’t remember Allen. Despite a decades-long career in public office—first as a congressman, then as the governor of Virginia and then as a senator—you’ll…