Jamelle Bouie

This doesn’t come as much of a surprise: The birthers, far from chastised, found themselves newly energized and freshly suspicious. “It raises far more questions than it answers,” said Joseph Farah, editor in chief of WorldNetDaily and birther extraordinaire, almost breathless between media interviews. […] Orly Taitz, a prominent Obama critic who has questioned his […]

President Obama has finally released proof that he is, indeed, an American: I should say, at the outset, that President Obama will not, as he said he intended, quell the “birther” conspiracy by releasing his long-form birth certificate to the public. As Brendan Nyhan — a political scientist at the University of Michigan who studies […]

David Brooks is clueless: Over the past months, we’ve seen a fascinating phenomenon. The public mood has detached from the economic cycle. In normal times, economic recoveries produce psychological recoveries. At least at the moment, that seems not to be happening. The U.S. has experienced nine straight months of slow economic growth. The unemployment rate […]

Here are two things worth reading together: On his blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about growing up surrounded by the specter of violence, and in The New York Times Joe Nocera writes about the limits of education reform. Here’s Nocera: Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and […]

Over at Outside the Beltway, Doug Mataconis flags a 2006 poll (by way of **Ben Smith) showing widespread 9/11 “trutherism” among Democrats during the Bush administration: I’ve been looking for a good analogue to the willingness of Republicans to believe, or say they believe, that Obama was born abroad, and one relevant number is the […]

For the last few weeks, Public Policy Polling has been questioning GOP voters in the South on a variety of issues, from their thoughts on Republican presidential candidates, to their views on interracial marriage. The latest poll asks these voters about the Civil War, and the results are far from surprising: In Georgia 47% of […]

This Washington Post analysis of the Obama administration’s failure to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay is a fascinating read, and I recommend taking the time to check it out. By and large, it’s an account of the administration’s political failings, and it serves to illustrate the limitations of presidential power, even in areas where […]

The Washington Post‘s Dan Balz presents Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels as the debt crusader’s debt crusader: No prospective Republican presidential candidate has done more to highlight the issue of debt and deficits than Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. He calls it the “new red menace,” an ocean of red ink that he says is every bit […]