christopher_hallam

Remember the kindly Sheriff Harry Lee in Bobby Jindal‘s anecdote last night? Glenn Thrush gives some background: In the wake of Katrina, Lee grabbed national headlines by suggesting his deputies could randomly stop blacks to combat a rise in drug crimes caused by the displacement of low-income New Orleans residents. He later abandoned the idea […]

Yesterday, Pat Buchanan and Michael Eric Dyson clashed over Eric Holder‘s race speech. Somewhat ironically, guest host Mike Barnicle proved Eric Holder’s point when he said to Buchanan, “What do you think happens with white guys like you and me when we talk about race in — honestly, at least from our perspective? What happens?” […]

Kevin Drum points to a Pakistani newspaper that uses Google Earth to definitively prove that drone attacks on militants are being launched from inside Pakistan, as Diane Feinstein claimed to some uproar last week before backtracking. Pakistan previously denied the U.S. was using bases within Pakistan to target Taliban militants because the arrangement is politically […]

Daniel Larison cautions against mocking Michael Steele: All that said, let’s give Steele a break for a moment. This is not necessarily that different from Howard Dean’s famous “guys with Confederate flags in their trucks” line, which was tone-deaf in its own way but at least demonstrated some awareness that his party consistently failed to […]

Like Ta-Nehisi, I found Eric Holder‘s statements on race not really worth remarking on. Jonah Goldberg is whining about Holder’s statement that we are “a nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race, a statement whose truth rivals it’s banality. In fact, it’s so banal that Goldberg wrote an entire column making a […]

When conservatives lost the policy argument over the stimulus, they went back to simply complaining about spending. In an odd example of self-serving bias, their resistance to Obama’s agenda was proof that the GOP was “back” and had found a winning strategy. Gallup’s surveys of public opinion have shown something else entirely. Obama weathered the […]

There seems to be a consensus forming that Obama wasted his time reaching out to Republicans. A couple of weeks ago I might have agreed, but I’m coming around to atypical liberal Tim Fernholz‘s view. It’s hard to imagine that Obama would have gotten more out of the Republican moderates who decided to support the […]

I think that the conversation John Judis has started is an important one.  But I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals […]

This video of an MSNBC anchor interviewing NAACP President Ben Jealous and referring to black people as “colored” is a bit painful to watch. I feel for the dude, obviously he didn’t mean anything by it. It is a little strange to think that there are still white folks out there who run into this […]

Dayo Olopade delivers a retrospective of the black press, particularly the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, which was once both an incredible outlet for news and literary content, edited by the brilliant W.E.B DuBois and featuring writers like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. I’d like to suggest imagining a black, activist version of The […]