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By Mahmoud Darwish
$12.00
By Beverly Gage
$18.45
$35
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By Eugene Robinson — Not even three months have passed since Obama’s historic inauguration, and already it tends to slip the nation’s collective mind that the first black president is, in fact, black. There may be hope for us after all.
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The Onion takes America’s prejudiced justice system to its logical, if absurd, extreme.
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AP photo / Kevin Wolf
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By Chris Hedges — The facts surrounding the trial and imprisonment of Dr. Sami Al-Arian have severely tarnished the integrity of the American judicial system and made the government’s vaunted campaign against terrorism look capricious, inept and overtly racist.
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AP photo / Eraldo Peres
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During a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Brasilia on Thursday, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made the startling assertion that the current worldwide economic catastrophe was caused by “white people with blue eyes.” Perhaps that last detail was thrown in to graciously let brown-eyed Brown off the hook.
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Flickr / billjacobus1
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Black and Latino communities have long suffered significantly higher unemployment rates than those of whites, but the economic collapse is taking labor inequity to new and alarming places. Jobs data shows that blacks and Latinos aren’t just more unemployed overall, but they’re losing jobs faster than their white colleagues.
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By Ellen Goodman — Amid the talk of generational conflict in these depressed times, there’s a chance for the boomer generation to make a virtue—or a revolution—out of the necessity of working longer.
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businessweek.com
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Google on Wednesday officially announced its entry into the fray of contextualized advertising—serving up advertisements in accordance with a user’s prior Web-surfing habits. The move, which has raised alarm in the privacy community, carries an unprecedented privacy twist: Google users will now be able to see and edit the information the company collects about them.
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telegraph.co.uk
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The New York Post is no stranger to controversy, but the rag’s latest goes beyond its typically low standards: A cartoon shows two cops, one of whom points his smoking gun at a bullet-riddled, bloody chimp. His partner says: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
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change.gov
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Speaking at a Justice Department event in honor of Black History Month, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president, acknowledged that America has made progress but warned that “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” His full remarks, after the jump.
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Two recent books show how a man of reason and conservative temperament and a man of passion and radical disposition joined together, even before either knew it, to end slavery.
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By David Sirota — Though presidential festivities and media superlatives tried to numb any feeling other than happiness, it’s only natural to experience a twinge of anxiety while celebrating at the edge of an abyss.
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By Amy Goodman — Barack Obama rode to Washington, D.C., for his presidential inauguration on a whistle-stop tour, which was compared to the train ride taken by Abraham Lincoln in 1861. The train holds a deeper symbolism, though, that undergirds Obama’s historic ascension to the White House.
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By Eugene Robinson — Rarely has a new presidency been greeted with such a consensus of good will—and rarely has a new president so needed it.
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Maan Images / Wissam Nassar
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As the death toll of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip moves past 1,000, tensions between Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis are growing. Some of the country’s Arab population is increasingly vocal in denouncing the bombings, while some Israeli politicians are trying to ban the re-election of Arabs to parliament on the grounds of alleged national disloyalty.
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Fox News mixed New Year revelry with the racially questionable salutations of “Jen and John C.,” which scrolled along the bottom of the screen during its telecast early Thursday morning. Good times!
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cdc.gov
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While heart disease remains the No. 1 killer of people in the U.S., researchers have found that we can help explain a large part of these cases through one’s genetic makeup. In fact, one in five white people are believed to have the “blood pressure gene,” where the genetic variance that controls salt in the kidneys changes to affect individuals’ blood pressure.
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AP photo / Khalil Hamra
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By Chris Hedges — We fool ourselves into believing we are immune to the savagery and chaos of failed states. Take away the rigid social structure, let society continue to break down, and we become, like anyone else, brutes.
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By Marie Cocco — As Congress and the White House lurch toward possible approval of a loan package for the crippled auto industry, we are undoubtedly in store for more union-bashing.
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An unabashed triumph, Morrison’s new novel is a gloriously poetic and incantatory retelling of America’s tragic and redemptive story.
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By Eugene Robinson — Barack Obama’s election victory may have been good for the country, but it’s been awful for comedians. Just ask poor Don Rickles.
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By Ellen Goodman — Have you ever seen a transformation this fast? Think of it as evolution on steroids. But don’t think Sarah Palin will go quietly into that good Arctic night.
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By Amy Goodman — The first African-American elected president of the United States recently visited his soon-to-be residence, a house built by slaves. Alice Walker told me: “Even when they were building it, you know, in chains or in desperation and in sadness, they were building it for him.”
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Archive / White House Press Office / Cecil Stoughton
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By Stanley Kutler — The 36th president of the United States seems strangely absent in the current celebrations. Perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson is not fondly remembered, but his triumphs paved the long road to Barack Obama’s historic presidency.
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Shortly after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama’s campaign bigwigs sat down with “60 Minutes.” Asked how they dealt with the candidate’s race, David Plouffe and gang said they just didn’t.
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Not entirely sure how to unpack what exactly is going on in this startling exchange between Fox News’ Shep Smith and third-party avenger Ralph Nader, but here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.
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We never thought we’d see it. Incredible! The usually robotronic Condoleezza Rice really is capable of showing emotion. Who knew?
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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By Bill Boyarsky — This is a day to think about how far we’ve come, to think about our experiences in past times and how we are now ready to begin forging a country where all of life is no longer defined by race.
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Neoconservative white-guy Bill Bennett uttered a frightening example of what many fear will be a knock-back for minority rights in the U.S. Asked about how an Obama victory would affect perceptions of race, Bennett suggested that because one black man has been elected president, claims about institutionalized racism are no longer viable.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — With Obama’s victory, it’s time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between “values voters” and those without a moral compass.
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Regardless of whether or not Obama’s your man on Tuesday, this message from his campaign serves as a useful—and humorous—reminder that this election isn’t over until it’s over.
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By Marie Cocco — The line for early voting wound up one side of a corridor in the Loudoun County voter registration office and down the other. Those in line were, collectively, the face of change in Virginia that could tip the state into the Democratic column for the first time since the LBJ landslide of 1964.
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electoral-vote.com
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Both campaigns predicted the polls would tighten up on the approach to Tuesday’s election, but many of the states where the race is closest were won by George W. Bush in 2004. Those include North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Georgia, Montana and Florida.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — A good politician triumphs by adapting to the times and taking advantage of opportunities as they come. A great politician anticipates openings others don’t see and creates possibilities that were not there before.
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Amanda Jone’s father encouraged her to vote. That wasn’t always an easy feat in Texas, but she did her best, paying poll taxes to vote for FDR and others. Now the 109-year-old daughter of a former slave has voted for the man who could become the first black president and she says, “I feel good about [it].”
Posted on Oct 30, 2008
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By Ellen Goodman — Have you noticed that the spookiest colors of the season are not orange and black but red and blue? As Halloween slips into Election Day, the race for the White House has scared more grown-ups than any trip to the haunted house.
Posted on Oct 30, 2008
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Authorities suspect two young white supremacists of planning to travel the country in white tuxedos and top hats murdering and beheading black people. The two Southerners allegedly included Barack Obama among their targets.
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AP photo / Carolyn Kaster
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Fresh off a trip to small-town Ohio, Truthdig’s political reporter weighs in on the week’s news, from the Colin Powell endorsement to the battle for Pennsylvania.
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groundspeak.com
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By Bill Boyarsky — What struck me during my week in Appalachian Ohio was how different this was from the America of the McCain-Palin campaign, a divided place where the Republicans pit one part of the country against another with vicious robocalls at the dinner hour.
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No more presidential debates (at least for a couple months or so)! Who won the last one, Barack Obama or John McCain? Tony Blankley, Matt Miller and Truthdig’s own Robert Scheer size up the candidates and their campaigns and discuss the latest developments in the economic arena on this week’s “Left, Right & Center.”
Posted on Oct 17, 2008
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Here’s what one McCain-Palin supporter had to say about Barack Obama: “I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash, because we’re not.” No, the people who think that may not be trash, but they are full of nonsense, as are those in this clip who declare that Obama is a terrorist.
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AP photo / Rick Bowmer
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By Bill Boyarsky — From the Southern California suburbs to Ohio’s Appalachia, places that have not been especially friendly to African-American candidates, Sen. Barack Obama seems to be convincing a substantial number of whites that their votes should be determined by their economic troubles rather than race.
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America has come a long way, says Democratic strategist and CNN personality Donna Brazile, so if Americans don’t vote for Barack Obama, it had better be because of his policies.
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By Marie Cocco — To understand where the presidential campaign is heading in the four weeks still ahead of us, look back 20 years. The remarkable transformation John McCain has undergone since 2000 is itself an unsettling tribute to the lasting poison Lee Atwater poured into the political waters.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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Truthdig’s chief political correspondent weighs in on the week in politics. From “pallin’ around with terrorists” to Tuesday’s debate, Team McCain is “going for the gut,” but will it work?
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Flickr / buddhakiwi
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“Americans need to ask themselves if they’ve ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist,” says McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. The AP called similar remarks by running mate Sarah Palin “racially tinged” and Time said the claim was “simply wrong,” but the McCain campaign shows no signs of backing down from its new strategy.
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By Amy Goodman — Troy Anthony Davis was scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday. Two hours before the state of Georgia was to execute him, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay until Monday. It had earlier agreed to hear Davis’ case on Sept. 29, but Georgia set his execution date six days before the hearing.
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