the take

With the pop-verse watching, Whitney Houston’s 21-year-old daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, is on life support in a suburban Atlanta hospital. Multiple questions loom about everything from her current medical condition to why, exactly, her family doesn’t want “husband/boyfriend” Nick Gordon by her side. While acknowledging that her niece is still on a respirator, Bobbi Kristina’s…

A lot of smart people have accumulated quite a bit of data showing how many people, and who specifically, have benefited from the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. But new questions abound about how many people could be hurt if the law were suddenly stripped away. That’s the biggest of…

You’d think that, as stressed out as parents are over child care, the exorbitant cost might be one of those things Congress jumps all over. But even after an encouraging head nod from President Obama in his State of the Union two weeks ago, legislators are back to business as usual, tripping over campaign donor…

Philosophically, President Obama would give us all four free years of a college education if he could. Politically, however, he can only come up with two. And while it’s not the whole-nine-yard four, two free years of community college is not a half-bad proposition. Looking at a cost of more than $60 billion over 10…

It’s not only a brand-new year; it’s also a brand-spanking-new 114th Congress: Fasten your seat belts, fam, because the legislative ride could get very rough. Republicans not only grew their majority in the House of Representatives—perhaps solidifying it for another decade or more—but also managed to grab back control of the Senate with a comfortable…

It’s that time of the year to start making sense of the next: predictions. And there is no subject about which this timeworn tradition is as corny but necessary as politics. As one year of agendas, elections and narratives closes, another year dogs us with uncertainty and nervousness. In the end-of-year reflections, we force ourselves…

Should we just get rid of grand juries altogether? That’s a big question many folks are rightly asking, from average citizens marching through streets for justice on freezing days to thought leaders and activists searching for next steps as frustrations boil over. The question isn’t new, either, especially in discussions of police brutality, misconduct and excessive force.…

It’s not as if state-sanctioned torture is anything new. Include the last 400-odd years of black victimization and you just created a library exclusively devoted to the subject. So when the Senate Intelligence Committee recently dropped its findings on brutal CIA “interrogation techniques,” watching the outrage from pundits and politicians was like struggling through a badly…

Justifiable outrage and protests are sweeping through major cities like a Hunger Games brush fire. Traffic jams and sit-ins are holiday du jour while politicians anxiously switch up on their talking points. Black parents find themselves in tear-filled horror when the kids are out and don’t answer the cellphone. The tipping point of the civil…