the browntable

The murder of Dr. George Tiller—an abortion rights advocate who practiced medicine and performed abortions in Kansas—as he attended church services Sunday morning, has prompted this statement from President Barack Obama: I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning.  However profound our differences as…

Here we go again. Last night, an off-duty, black NYPD cop, 25-year-old Omar Edwards, was shot and killed by his white colleague, Officer Andrew Dunton. Edwards, a rookie who worked in a Housing Unit in Harlem, left work and walked up to his car to find a robber breaking in. Edwards tried to grab the…

Yesterday’s California Supreme Court ruling upholding the voter-initiated ban on same-sex marriage was no surprise. But as I’ve written before, this is more of a political than a legal fight, so I was heartened to see tens of thousands of gay right supporters—of all races, by the way—flood the streets in protest. Out in Cali,…

Via TIME’s Karen Tumulty, Atul Gawande looks hard at why health care costs so much more in McAllen Texas, and, writes Tumulty, “why more health care isn’t the same as better health care.” When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen—and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care—you come to…

President Barack Obama has nominated Second Circuit Federal Appeals Court justice Sonia Sotomayor as his pick for the Supreme Court. Swapping out his previous formulation, that a potential justice ought to embrace “empathy,” Obama stressed “experience” in his assessment of what was needed on the Court: It is experience that can give a person a…

President Barack Obama addressed the nation from the National Archives this morning in a speech that had been billed as “a comprehensive overview” of United States national security, according to Ben Rhodes, a policy adviser who is also a speechwriter for the president. The speech, delivered in the wake of the Senate’s vote not to…

The White House Flickr feed is really something to behold. Here’s the president getting his caesar ‘do inspected by a tiny hair afficionado. The caption? “The youngster wanted to see if the President’s haircut felt like his own.” Sho’ does! Be sure to check out our take on Five Obama Hair Dont’s, and THE ROOT’s…

If the Washington, D.C. commentariat was a prison gang, they’d have already passed RNC Chair Michael Steele around, turned him out, and tossed his salad. Under those circumstances, I’d say it’s a break for Steele and the GOP that Steele found his game Sunday on “Meet the Press.” Recall that Steele tagged Rush Limbaugh an…

Given his seeming reluctance to explicitly draw attention to the historic nature of his election as the first black president of the United States, Barack Obama’s Sunday commencement address at Notre Dame was notable for his mention not only his presidency as a racial milestone, but also for his acknowledgment of the 55th anniversary of…

In recent weeks, I have been as troubled by the conservative revival around nullification as I have disturbed by the progressive bloggers who have dismissed the modern-day nullifiers as “nutty.” Over at the HUFFINGTON POST, Chris Weigant recently called nullification “nutty.” Jay Bookman blogged similarly over at the ATLANTA JOURNAL- CONSTITUTION, and the tone of…