Yesterday former DC Mayor and current Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry proposed the world's worst solution to poverty in his ward, which is "encouraging homeownership" by banning new apartment buildings:

"The American dream is to own a home. And black people have not gotten the American dream as much as they need to," Barry says. "Somebody can rent for 20 years, and has no equity in their unit at all."

"I've thought about this," Barry finishes. "It's not a kneejerk reaction."

At National Review, Brian J. Pawlowski summarizes the current Republican consensus on counterterrorism:

I'm finally reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, and I laughed out loud when I read this passage about the vulnerability of Jerry Voorhis, the California Democrat who was the first victim of Richard Nixon's red-baiting:

Voohris possessed an added vulnerability: He had once been a member of the Socialist Party. Not a Communist, but for the upright burghers of Southern California's suburbs, to whom property was as sacred as anything in the Bible, the distinction was sufficiently arcane to be moot.

We've got a new genre of "hypocrisy journalism," courtesy of the Washington Post:

A Washington Post journalist on the scene confirmed the first lady, who’s made a cause out of child nutrition, ordered a ShackBurger, fries, chocolate shake and a Diet Coke while the street and sidewalk in front of the usually-packed Shake Shack were closed by security during her visit.

According to nutritional information on Shake Shack’s Web site, the meal amounted to 1,556 calories.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has emerged as the GOP's preeminent culture war counterterrorist, ascends to heretofore unreached levels of self-parody by arguing that the not guilty verdict for Casey Anthony proves that terrorists shouldn't be tried in federal court:

Jesse Washington has a new piece exploring the uneven impact of the recession on the black middle class, with some really startling information on just how profoundly black homeowners have been impacted, noting that, “In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents.” That's in part because black people were disproportionately likely to have their wealth tied up in their homes, and so were particularly devastated by the foreclosure crisis.