Gabriel Arana

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) Police block the street in front of the headquarters of the Discovery Channel network right outside of Washington, D.C. Police say a gunman has taken at least one person hostage in the building.

(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt and the former presidential candidate. Today, Schmidt told Sam Stein of the Huffington Post that gay marriage was on its way to becoming a conservative cause.

(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) Hurricane Katrina as seen from space. From Aug. 25 to Aug. 29 in 2005, Katrina ripped through cities across the Gulf Coast, causing over $150 billion in damage.

(AP/Carolyn Kaster) President Barack Obama on a family bike ride with his family on Martha’s Vineyard. Happy Friday.

Both Alaska and Washington alike have been trying to figure out why popular Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski failed to soundly defeat Joe Miller, a previously unknown Tea Party candidate, in Tuesday’s primary. Even though Murkowski has had consistently high approval ratings in the state, Miller leads the senator by about 1,600 votes in a race […]

(Flickr/megwhitman2010) California’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. The most recent Rasmussen Reports poll finds that Whitman has pulled ahead of Democratic challenger Jerry Brown, whom she had been trailing. She now leads by 8 points.

On this week’s podcast from The American Prospect, Ann Friedman, Jamelle Bouie, and Gabriel Arana discuss the phenomenon of “extended adolescence” for those in their 20s, the oil-drilling moratorium’s impact on jobs, and new restrictions being placed on abortion in Alaska. Listen Now: Articles referred to: “What is it About 20-Somethings?” The New York Times […]

On one hand it’s a good thing that former RNC Chair and Bush’s 2004 campaign manager Ken Mehlman came out of the closet, the most prominent Republican to do so thus far. I of course applaud anyone who comes out, even if they’ve been comfortable with their sexual orientation personally for some time. Some people […]

To chime in on Jamelle‘s post about the DEA’s effort to hire Ebonics speakers, I’d like to point out that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) — like all languages and dialects — doesn’t just refer to vocabulary differences. For some background: Linguistic differences tend to arise when groups are socially isolated. Over time, these difference […]

(Flickr/ISAF) U.S. Army 1st Lt. Alexander Johnson, an incoming platoon leader with Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, takes notes while visiting with Afghan farmers and community leaders near Combat Outpost Monti, Afghanistan.