christopher_hallam

Conor Friedersdorf is disappointed Gary Johnson isn’t getting much press as a Republican candidate: But the press treats celebrity billionaires like viable candidates, all evidence to the contrary, acting as if the American public hasn’t repeatedly expressed this aversion in past races. Look at Donald Trump. Yes, he’s a national joke, but he’s been given […]

Yesterday, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department announced that they are prosecuting a Wichita, Kansas resident Angel Dillard under the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act) for allegedly sending a threatening letter to an abortion doctor: Among other things, Dillard wrote: “Thousands of people are already looking into your background, not […]

Brad Pike writes that Superman and Lex Luthor represent America’s disdain for science: Superman, meanwhile, is ultra masculine, as evidenced by his full head of hair, strong, and belief in relatively abstract concepts like Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Whatever Luthor builds, he destroys. Whatever Luthor wants, he opposes. Like a bully on the […]

Lisa Wade posts a video of a discussion between Chris Rock and John Glass in which Rock argues that what we generally refer to as “racial progress” in America is actually just white people being less crazy: I suspect Rock’s observation may be startling to some people because America has a really strong culture of […]

This article on the Obama administration’s response to the protest movement against Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh makes me question how much the assumptions underpinning U.S. policy has actually changed in the aftermath of the uprisings in the Middle East: Taken together, these developments have raised increasing alarm in the Obama administration, which is in […]

Earlier this week, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, one of the more plausible possible GOP presidential nominees, rebunked birtherism just as Donald Trump and Fox News were eagerly indulging in a crank renaissance. But if you think the birthers, the “creeping sharia” crowd, and the New Black Panther Party cranks are all going to fade […]

The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department filed suit on behalf of a Muslim teacher in Illinois who quit her job after she was not allowed to go on a three-week pilgrimage to Mecca shortly after being hired. The Washington Post rounded up the usual suspects to accuse DoJ of partisanship or ethnic pandering: […]

The African Development Center, the local group the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency partnered with to try and help Muslims become homeowners, put up a statement responding to former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty‘s remarks implying he shut the program down because helping Muslims acquire mortages was somehow bad: ADC had no idea that the NMMP was […]

Jamelle Bouie ably dismembers an argument from Jonathan Chait that white flight from Detroit was the result of cold cost-benefit analysis and had nothing to do with racialized fears: Yes, Chait is right to say that crime rose sharply, whites were afraid of it. But their migration from the cities occurred well before the crime […]

Jamelle Bouie on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour‘s recent remarks acknowledging the Civil War was fought over slavery: I think non-Southerners have a tendency to underestimate the extent to which Confederate sympathy is a real and persistent phenomena in the contemporary South. Haley Barbour is the Republican governor of one of the most racially conservative states […]