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.

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.

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.

Philosophically, President Obama would give us all four free years of a college education if he could.

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.

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,…

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…

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…

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 last thing any sane or seasoned political observer expected from a president who just underwent a midterm-election root canal are two major deals with China on climate change and trade. Within days of a new Republican majority in the Senate and Tea Party sweetening in the House, he’s also got a sudden burst of…

More than a week later, we’re still trying to figure this one out: How much of an impact did voting restrictions have on the 2014 midterm elections?

The next two years will be twisted in knots—for Democrats, for Republicans and for the “black electorate.” University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald estimates that a little less than 37 percent of the voter-eligible population voted in this week’s election. That prompted President Obama to mic-drop…

Making sense of high-profile House, Senate and gubernatorial races this tight will mean breaking down every voting bloc into microscopic bits of data to parse in the postmortem. And of all the big mysteries that will be closely watched and dissected on Nov. 4, few will be as anxiously anticipated as the exit polling…

Is it a recovering economy or not? That’s one of the great, persistent mysteries stumping modern economists and pundits. Most obviously don’t think so—a recent Politico poll tells the story of a national mood in perpetual funk. The answer is not that simple, and it’s hidden in pockets of partisan quackery obfuscating…

What we do know is this year’s midterm Senate races will be tight—what we don’t know is just how tight. Despite constant spinning in the news cycle, most Americans either don’t know a big election is coming up or don’t care. In the last major midterm of 2010, only 41 percent of voters turned out or 91 million ballots…

Ebola had been on blast since the spring, but despite the thousands of West Africans dying from it, few in the U.S. thought seriously that it would ever hit American shores.

Let the appointment games begin. It may not be the kitchen-table topic of choice, but President Barack Obama’s replacement choice for outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder will be one of the more significant decisions of his presidency. The list is long, but the politics are just getting started for what could be a…

The 2016 presidential race hasn’t officially started yet, but we all know the presumptive contenders for party nominee. One political brand name stands above the rest: Hillary Clinton. It can’t get any better once they make TV dramas that are a spin-off of your life.

The News: Republican lawmakers are jockeying to succeed Rep. Eric Cantor as House majority leader following his embarrassing primary defeat Tuesday, with a vote scheduled for June 19 that could push the GOP further to the ideological right.

Alabama Plays Both Sides of Voting Rights, With Blacks in the Middle