Jamelle Bouie

Apparently, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn loves two things in this world: needless obstruction and salmonella: Coburn’s office confirmed to POLITICO on Tuesday that the Republican is objecting to moving forward with the bill on the grounds that it will add to the burgeoning federal budget. Coburn has become the GOP champion for demanding that legislation […]

(Source) By now, most of you probably know of Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell‘s surprising win over longtime Congressman Mike Castle for the GOP Senate nomination in Delaware. Unsurprisingly, Democrats are ecstatic about the result; Mike Castle is one of the most popular politicians in Delaware and would have easily carried the general election had […]

These two pictures come courtesy of Fitsnews.com and the National Federation of Republican Women’s annual Board of Director’s meeting in Charleston, South Carolina: Remember, the Republican Party doesn’t have a problem with racism. — Jamelle Bouie

For more evidence that prospective Republican gains have nothing to do with the popularity of their policies (or lack thereof), you should look to the latest data from National Journal‘s Congressional Connection poll. According to the poll, Americans are sour on nearly every element of the GOP’s domestic agenda; aside from Social Security private accounts […]

From the National Bureau of Economic Research is a new paper from Harvard University’s Christopher Avery, which reports the results of a pilot study on the effects of college counseling for “high-achieving, low-income students.” The short of it is that for those students, college counseling significantly influenced student outcomes through application choice rather than application […]

Democratic leaders are hoping to scare Democratic voters into action with their new John Boehner bogeyman: A new ad to begin running on cable television beginning Tuesday takes on Mr. Boehner over his opposition to a measure that provided money to preserve jobs of teachers and emergency workers and was partly paid for by closing […]

I don’t spend enough time on libertarian blogs, so I can’t tell if Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh is joking or not when he cites Cuba’s massive lay-off of government employees as evidence that the failed worker’s paradise is “more capitalist than [the] USA”: While the United States, under local, state and federal leadership that could collectively […]

(Ackerman/Gruber Images) Today’s Washington Post has a fascinating article on the problem Virginia has with its growing population of elderly inmates: Deerfield, Virginia’s only geriatric prison, is where the state’s inmates are sent to grow old. They’re transferred to this facility in Capron, near the North Carolina border, when they’re too weak to stand or […]

This recession has been extremely low on good news, so it’s worth noting that crime has been on the decrease since the recession began in 2007. With a 5.3 percent decline in 2009, violent crime was down for the third consecutive year, according to a new FBI report. This drop was accompanied by a 4.6 […]

(Source) If this new Public Policy Polling survey is any indication, Rep. Mike Castle — longtime congressman and fixture of the Delaware GOP — might be the latest Republican pol to lose his bid for his party’s Senate nomination. Over the last month, Castle’s popularity with Delaware Republicans has taken a sharp turn; in early […]