the browntable

The New England Journal of Medicine has an arresting study that finds blacks under the age of 50 are 20 times more likely to develop heart disease than whites.  Here’s the abstract, for geeks, and an AP digest for everybody else. I’ll repeat what the researchers stress here: the finding is based on a small…

Five months into his tenure, embattled American Insurance Group CEO Edward M. Liddy—who has become a public pinata in the wake of news that multimillion dollar bonuses will be paid to executives of his flailing, bailed-out corporation—had the misfortune of being scheduled to testify before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored…

A friend living in Hamburg, Germany passes on this tasty item from national magazine DER SPIEGEL ONLINE, without comment: TENDER JUICY, OBAMA FINGERS HIT THE SHELVES Many sales executives have drawn the same conclusion: What better poster child for hope than US President Barack Obama? There are Obama dolls, Obama T-shirts, Obama soap-on-a-rope. There is…

Somehow Lou Dobbs managed to turned St. Patrick’s Day into an excuse to make racist Asian jokes. Media Matters’ County Fair blog flagged his rant today against “ethnic holidays” and in favor of “an American day, a we’re all the same kind of day.” But Dobbs gave the lie to his call for unity before he…

Pope Benedict XVI apparently sees grace in ignorance. Today, he used the opening moments of his first trip to Africa to reiterate the Church’s opposition to condom use. Feels crazy just to type that out. Even worse when it’s being trotted around a continent with more than 22 million people already HIV positive, not to…

THE BUZZ points out this piece of news from Darfur, which sets my head shaking: In a speech to thousands of Sudanese security forces on Monday, al-Bashir said he had ordered Sudanese aid groups to take over the distribution of all relief inside the country. “We need to clear our country of any spies,” he…

Today marks the second full week of a very interesting NEW YORK TIMES feature on immigration. The ambitious project, part of the paper’s “Room for Debate” blog, warehouses a lot of really important data including past articles, cool maps that let you toggle back in time to see where different ethnic groups settled (check 1910)…

Michael Steele’s mania gets the airtime, but South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is shaking out as the real Republican nemesis for Barack Obama’s effort to redefine government as hero rather than villain. Both Obama and the Democratic National Committee know this, which is why they’re picking a fight on his home turf. Sanford, who is…

Despite the cringe-inducing title of his last book, “A Bound Man: Why We’re Excited About Barack Obama and Why He Can’t Win” (out in paperback, y’all!), Shelby Steele is still being afforded the “credibility” of expressing himself on the WALL STREET JOURNAL’s opinion page. Here’s Steele’s valiant attempt to explain to the tastemakers why black…

Selection Sunday kicked off the official beginning of March Madness 2009. And that’s your attorney general, Eric Holder, holding a palm-sized basketball as he speaks with an unidentified attendee at the announcement of the White House Council on Women and Girls in the East Room of the White House last Wednesday. Any guesses as to…