christopher_hallam

Matthew Yglesias comments on yesterday’s post about conservatives and race: I think that’s basically true, but in some ways it misses the point. American political behavior is heavily shaped by racial attitudes in ways that are much more fundamental than the race of the candidate. Just look at the extraordinary racial gap in voting behavior […]

Yesterday I tweeted that conservatives were furious about TSA’s pornoscanner/grope down options for going through airport security because they thought only people with Arabic sounding names deserved to be treated that way. The Washington Times editorial board doesn’t disappoint: Allegedly postracial America has been unable to come to grips with the difference between immoral and […]

Here’s an alternate version of the post I just wrote on the policy goals the administration shares with Rep. Buck McKeon:

The General Counsel for the conservative-dominated U.S. Commission on Civil rights, David P. Blackwood, has sent a letter to the Justice Department indicating that its politicized inquiry into the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case has turned into an open-ended investigation. The letter was provided by a source close to the Commission. The letter, […]

Obviously fiscal policy doesn’t really grab my interest as much as the other things I usually write about. But the Deficit Commission’s non-report suggesting that veterans pay for their combat injuries, working people take a payroll tax hike and social security benefits get cut so we can reduce the corporate tax rate is infuriating. There’s […]

There was so much actual news happening in late October that I missed Barack Obama‘s chief rap scold, Thomas Chatterton Williams, making a really late observation about hip-hop music: The biggest, baddest hip-hop rebels — from Cam’Ron to Fabolous to Mobb Deep to the late Biggie Smalls — are remarkably bourgeois at heart, with 1950s-era […]

Dick Cheney‘s former fluffer Stephen F. Hayes is turning his affections toward Florida Senator Marco Rubio, beginning an inevitable trend of fawning post-election coverage preparing conservative audiences for an eventual Rubio run for the Republican nomination for president. Rubio, who is Cuban-American, is quickly displacing Bobby Jindal as the Republicans’ great nonwhite hope. Hayes’ piece […]

It seems MSNBC Host Keith Olbermann has been suspended without pay for donating to three Democratic candiates in violation of MSNBC’s ethics policy. Ironically, FOX News’ parent company’s ethics policy is much more realistic when it comes to these matters. There are basically two separate questions here, whether it’s wrong for media figures to give […]

Mike Riggs has a piece pointing out that Democrats like California Senator Dianne Feinstein take money from the Corrections Corporation of America, which contributed to legislators who helped pass Arizona’s SB 1070. As with that law, the CCA stands to lose money if fewer people are imprisoned for doing drugs, the inevitable consequence of the […]

My colleague Tim Fernholz has been reporting from Bucks County Pennsylvania, where Republicans have been alleging that Democrats have been trying to rig the election through voter fraud. Bucks County — for which Doylestown is the county seat — has seen a surprising increase in the number of absentee ballots, in part because of a […]