the browntable

Juuuust as THE ROOT concluded that the Great Kenyan Sex Strike of 2009 was no good, we’re hearing word that, tomorrow, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) will preside over a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee titled, “Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones.” The session…

British foreign secretary David Milliband spoke to a group of reporters at the New America Foundation this morning. The talk was ostensibly about new media strategies and diplomacy (Milliband blogs—the unthinkably modern equivalent of Hillary Clinton trying out Twitter), but quickly turned to the hot-button geostrategic issues of the day. Moderator Steve Coll, president of…

The Associated Press adds today to a distressingly small body of media-watchdog work on the still unfolding stimulus. AP dug into the transportation dollars, which the White House talked up as a centerpiece of the initiative’s job-creation potential. Turns out shovels full of money are pouring into counties with low unemployment, while the ones struggling…

Teresa Wiltz has written a great review for THE ROOT of the new Star Trek prequel. Having never, ever, seen an episode of Star Trek, I surely annoyed my theater companions, when I would ask, persistently: “Are we supposed to know that person?” But I will say that before long, nothing was lost on me,…

Can we just go ahead and give Tom Toles his next Pulitzer Prize now? If you haven’t been following the veteran cartoonist’s commentary in the WASHINGTON POST this year, you’re missing out. Never mind the millions of words spilled daily trying to sort out the economic disaster unfolding around us. Toles has been making plain…

Comedian Wanda Sykes was killing ’em this weekend at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. The dinner, the first attended by Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, upped the glitz factor significantly in otherwise buttoned-up Washington (hence the nickname folks here employed: “Nerd Prom.”) And it was a strange sight indeed: Administration officials…

THE NATION has convened a great roundtable of legal thinkers, from Dahlia Lithwick to Lani Guinier, musing on the big question on Barack Obama’s mind: Whom to nominate for the Supreme Court? The always-contentious deliberations have taken on even more heightened importance because this is the first Democratic court appointment in 15 years. Will the…

The Root has allowed four women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s riff on just how significant is it is that someone, somewhere, grinned and bore it—literally—pushing a football-sized version of themselves out into the world. Some have even *shudder* done this themselves. They’re all great pieces. I notice that in the younger ages,…

The news of the hour here in Washington is that recently released internal memos from the Central Intelligence Agency show that Nancy Pelosi knew about the “enhanced interrogation” techniques being used by the CIA on suspected terrorist detainees as early as September 2002. Greg Sargent says that the memos are not immediately damning for Pelosi,…

Via Sommer Mathis of DCIST, the, ahem, crackdown on former Washington Mayor Marion Barry for his loudmouthed disapproval of gay marriage continues: Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did a little segment on the D.C. Council’s recent vote to approve legislation that would allow the District to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other…