Jamelle Bouie

On Friday, the Obama administration released its annual mid-session budget review, which contains its short-term and long-term predictions for economic growth. The media has focused most of its attention on the White House’s deficit projections — $1.4 trillion deficits for 2010 and 2011 — but on the whole, deficits are the least worrisome thing about […]

At Balloon Juice, blogger Dennis G. links to a 2007 letter written by the Southern Poverty Law Center asking the FBI to investigate the unsolved murders of dozens of African Americans killed during Jim Crow. For each of the 74 unsolved murders, the SPLC offers a brief summary of the case. Here are a few: […]

Jonathan Chait makes a very good point about Newt Gingrich‘s insistence that building a mosque near Ground Zero constitutes a “double standard” that allows “Islamists to behave aggressively towards us.” Here’s the full quote: There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in […]

(flickr/jbouie) This has gone a little under the radar, but a new poll from SurveyUSA shows freshman Democrat Tom Perriello trailing his opponent, Virginia state Sen. Robert Hurt, by a whopping 23 percentage points. Perriello represents the 5th Congressional District, which covers most of central Virginia and reaches down into southern parts of the state. […]

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’ve seen a steady drumbeat of racial “incidents” over the last week or so. It began when NAACP delegates passed a resolution condemning extremist elements within the Tea Party and calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate the “racist elements” in their movement. The initial reaction […]

In a recent Bloggingheads episode, John McWhorter and Richard Thompson Ford spend a few minutes discussing the “acting white” charge as described in Stuart Buck‘s book and their respective reviews: I’ve written on the “acting white” phenomenon before, but it’s worth commenting on this exchange, since it sums up my main problem with the discussion […]

Expected gains in November have Republicans feeling pretty confident about their position vis-à-vis voters, but if I were a Republican, I’d try to remember that most voters aren’t particularly thrilled about my party. According to the most recent data from Public Policy Polling, only 20 percent of voters approve of the job congressional Republicans are […]

Jonathan Chait has a great post up about the GOP’s tactical radicalism, and what it means for the party’s traditional establishment. In short, Republican voters and some activists believe that ideological purity comes at no cost whatsoever, and as such the party can nominate right-wing extremists without suffering any electoral harm. Here’s Chait with more: […]

(flickr/kainet) I missed this on Friday, but it’s worth mentioning: Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin predicts a government shutdown if Republicans win the House of Representatives in November. That is, if today’s Republicans are more extreme, more disciplined, and more disdainful of the president than their Gingrich-era forebears, then by Quiggin’s lights, there’s no reason for […]

House Minority Leader John Boehner did a nice job last week of reminding us that his party has an inviolate commitment to enriching the privileged: They’re not campaigning on it in earnest — at least not yet — but Republican leaders say that, given the power, they would like to do away with Wall Street […]